Monthly Archives: April 2005

Little Dreams Coming True

At last, one of my longest standing tech dreams has been realised. I can finally sync my phone with Outlook. I know you’ve been able to do this for years but up until today I’ve never had the means to. Two weeks ago I got a great new Nokia 6230 so I purchased a connector cable off Ebay which arrived today. I could have used Bluetooth for my connection but this chews through battery life (more of which shortly) and a cable was cheaper than an IR usb adaptor. Now I have all my contacts and calendar information for the next 12 months wherever I go.

“But surely you had all this in your Ipaq?” I hear you ask. I did, but in an effor to simplify my life and reduce the bulge in my left pocket I am increasingly leaving it home in favour of my Hipster PDA. Another reason for relying less on the iPaq is the Pocket PC version of Microsoft Money never really synched with my desktop version and tracking finances on the go was one of the major reasons I wanted a PDA. Now I simply keep my receipts in my wallet until I get home.

While I love my new phone, I’ve even set it up so I can email photos from it direct to Flickr (see my test shot), I am not impressed with the battery. It advertises 300 hours of standby – I get 48. I’ve tried to get it replaced but am having nightmare time as Optus and Nokia shuffle responsibility. All I want is a new battery and they will never hear from me again.

iSkin

My iPod is back, and I decided to get a case for it. ‘Cos what with carrying it about, and the kids playing with it, I figured it could do with some protection, as well as a belt clip.

After looking about at the various products, and with Tony’s recommendation, I looked at the iSkin. They appear to have gone all out to design something that’s both practical and fairly visually appealing (though to be fair, nothing beats the look of the iPod itself — even down to the normally fugly things like the power supply, Apple have created something that is utterly beautiful).

iSkins are not cheap, at least not to those of us trading in the Australian Peso. A little shopping around showed a price of between A$49 and $59. Unfortunately the $49 price was at Streetwise, whom I have had recommended to me, but are not particularly conveniently located, and even if they were, have been closed this past weekend for moving. And I wanted my iSkin straight away. Likewise, Streetwise’s or Apple’s online shop could have sold me the product, but online shopping for physical items doesn’t give you instant gratification.

So I coughed up the $59 at the AppleCentre on Flinders Street. Took the skin back to my iPod, and then wrestled with it for about half an hour, trying to figure out how it opened.

See, in looking at the adverts and catalogues, I’d got it into my head that the iSkin was made of some kind of rigid plastic. It isn’t. It’s flexible, and you’re meant to get the iPod (and the instructions and other items in the packet) in and out by way of the gap for the screen.

When I figured this out, I found the instructions inside telling me so. WhyTF they couldn’t put a hint on the outside of the package, I don’t know. Would have saved me a bit of fiddling about.

Oh well, the iSkin is lovely, though I don’t think much of (and am not using) the “free bonus” click-wheel cover they included. The other downer: it can plug into its USB/firewire connection while in the skin, but it’ll have to come out to fit into the dock.

But hopefully it will keep my iPod safe from the ravages of the world.

Unix flowers

I was digging about in the Unix system directories on MacOS X today (actually, searching for ‘joe’ which I thought I had installed, but is nowhere to be found) and stumbled upon the directory /usr/share/misc. Within this folder is the file flowers which is a listing of flowers and their meanings. I don’t know if it is actually referenced by any command; my guess is that a Berkeley programmer got bored and decided to put in an interesting, if not entirely useful in an OS environment, text file.


# Flower : Meaning
# @(#)flowers 8.1 (Berkeley) 6/8/93
#
# Upside down reverses the meaning.
African violet:Such worth is rare.
Apple blossom:Preference.
Bachelor's button:Celibacy.
Bay leaf:I change but in death.
Camelia:Reflected loveliness.
Chrysanthemum, other color:Slighted love.
Chrysanthemum, red:I love.
Chrysanthemum, white:Truth.
Clover:Be mine.
and so on