Jon Curnow's Digital Home
Nokia’s new messaging phone comes complete with QWERTY keyboard but doesn’t have the treo-style annoying aerial.
Dear Palm
Please take note:
Nokia Announces Eseries for Business (Phone Scoop): E6 -: A slim (0.55 inches) messaging phone to compete with the Motorola Q. Features a landscape 24-bit QVGA display, QWERTY keyboard, and a miniSD slot. Supports quad-band GSM/EDGE and WCDMA 2100.
With no annoying sticky-up aerial to jab you when it’s in your pocket.
Thanks in advance
Me
I think too much about some things, especially, about useful pds gadgets which aren’t important.
If you hadn’t worked out that I like my pda gadgets by now where have you been? I suggest you take a crash course: Phones & PDAs, Another PDA, Personal Information Management and Why Do We Love Our Mobile Phones?
So I decided that my Treo 600 was a pain. I mentioned before that it’s OK at many things but it isn’t great at any of them. As a regular Palm it’s good but as a ‘phone it’s just OK (by which I mean poor). As a camera it is very poor. So I started to become obsessed by finding a solution to my problem/desire to get it all in one. Then, because I vacillate so much, I decided that my Treo 600 on Orange is actually pretty good and I want to keep it. A few hours later a whole Nokia fetish kicked in before I decided that, yet again, Treo wins. I don’t like the idea of not having my contact and diary synchronised properly. I thought, for a moment, that WAP could be a solution but it’s not the same. Then I saw the new Palm Tungsten E2 and thought well …
Now, please tell me why I become so engrossed in this subject. Why can’t I, just like a normal person, have a ‘phone that is a ‘phone?
Why are we always looking for the next new ‘phone? I know I’ve been looking.
Occasionally I have noted my use of a Palm powered Treo on Orange in the UK. It’s an OK ‘phone and an OK organiser (and an OK MP3 player and a poor camera) but as one, pocket-sized device it more-or-less rocks. Sometimes I wish it was smaller and sometimes I wish it was bigger. Sometimes I wish I’d spent the cash on the keyboard accessory and then, sometimes, I don’t.
Last month Engadget carried what they said were ‘actual pics of the new Treo Ace/Treo 650‘ which is the next version of the device and – of course – carries some neat improvements. At the start of next year I will be 12 months into the contract for the ‘phone and able to change it. The thing is – although I love all the features and I love the whole Palm experience – I can’t help thinking that I need to get a simpler machine that is just a telephone.
Ah, the dilemmas of the gadget obsessed.
A little rant about data synchronisation is brewing. This isn’t it.
I have such a long post ‘brewing’ about data that we all need to transport around with us regularly. I have Microsoft Outlook at work; a palm-powered Treo ‘phone and a Palm desktop/Mozilla combination at home. I occasionally back all my data up to Yahoo’s organiser (calendar, address, memo). There is no reliable synchronisation tool which can handle everything well for me and this is one of the things that truly frustrates people who are trying to utilise all this technology. It was one of the reasons I switched to a Palm-powered Treo rather than my old Nokia favourites (at least a good part of the synchronisation works). There are some immovables in the equation: Outlook is in use in my office and I can’t change that and I am attached to Windows-based computers. Although I have heard some reports that Apple’s i-sync isn’t as great as it’s claimed it is – at least – an option for Mac users. I notice another satisfied user today: Jase and his Sony Ericsson T610. Maybe that post will eventually see the light of day!
The GlobalTuner InTune200 is a small portable radio that connects to a computer wirelessly, providing access to any music on the PC or to thousands of internet radio stations.
I am quite excited by this new radio. It’s a wireless one (so, what, I hear you ask). But it’s a wireless radio that you link to your computer. Internet radio around the house on a proper tranny (the radios, not the tall people in stilettoes).
The GlobalTuner InTune200 is a small portable radio that connects to a computer wirelessly, providing access to any music on the PC or to thousands of internet radio stations. [BBC News]
My trusted Palm Vx – from which sprang the this blog (why just write stuff for my own reading when I can bore everybody else?) – contains many useful freeware/shareware and fully-paid up pieces of software that didn’t come pre-installed. The most useful is DateMate. Datemate is a simple little program that stores birthdays, anniversaries and events and is able to populate the Palm Date Book with update information so that I can always recall how old somebody is and how many years they have been married. If you own a Palm I would wholeheartedly recommend you look at it.
Sadly, however, I have done two silly things in the past months:
Ah well, maybe it would be easier to maintain a paper diary but it wouldn’t be as much fun, would it?
The Ministry Of Defence is interested in the technology that allows us all to be monitored by our mobile phones.
Well, according to a report in this weekend’s Observer newspaper, the Ministry Of Defence is interested in the technology that allows us all to be monitored by our mobile phones. Apparently, there are many positive uses of this ‘spy’ technology – following people on the move (walking or driving) and monitoring areas (nuclear power stations, roads etc.) when visibility is bad. Nobody seems to ask what happened if you loan you mobile ‘phone to somebody or (gasp) switch it off. Observer: How mobile phones let spies see our every move
Security on the Internet is a big concern for many people. Keeping information that identifies you personally from falling into the wrong hands is important. Check for secure sites when submitting credit card information, be careful about who you give your email to and read privacy policies. This is all worthy advice.
If you are concerned about sending information (or you want to verify information came from where it says it came from) I would recommend you investigate Pretty Good Privacy. A useful piece of freeware to digitally sign and/or encrypt files (including emails).
PGP uses a system known as public key encryption. As a PGP user you would generate a “key pair” which is made up of both a public and private key. The private key should only be accessible by its owner but in order to share files etc. you need to share your public key (and you would need a copy of another user’s to send files). For mote information see PGP or PGP International.
Occasionally, I use PGP to sign emails or encrypt files. If you wish to email me using PGP my public key is given here.
Visit PGP and read this message (at PGPI) from Phil Zimmermann who invented PGP.
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Health Warning
Most of this content is now out-of-date. I like to think it was written in simpler times, but actually, technology has made site maintenance much easier. However, I think it’s worth keeping this around, and snippets are still valid. And who uses the word colophon anymore? Web 1.o, huh?
When some of this content was in beta form Mosaic had arrived and, I guess, the graphical web browser was about to change my life. At the time I was working the night shift in a small office just off Euston Road in London and learning HTML and using the Internet seemed like a good way to pass the night.
With one browser it was easy. HTML seemed logical (if limited) yet within months all that had changed. I used to be one of Netscape’s biggest fans; they pushed the boundaries and tested the standards. Several years, and the development of many web sites, later my attitudes have changed.
Graphical web browsers were created to help you, the user, control the way the documents you are reading look. Commercialisation of the web, particularly the insistence by content creators that they controlled every pixel on the page, meant the user was given less control. Add to that the fact that many users don’t understand that fundamental of the web, and you’re left with an industry that is moving away from that guiding principal. It’s a shame, but this kind of development has reinforced my belief that content creators and software vendors (including those that code the browsers) should adhere to standards.
I have always been in favour of standards and, for the basics of the web to survive, I believe those standards are even more important today. My site has been tested against the major browsers and also against Opera – which is a browser that I would whole-heartedly recommend if you are looking for a compact, compliant and fast browser. My current browser of choice is Mozilla which gets better with every release. If your site does not render using Mozilla, and I don’t need to read it, I’ll go elsewhere.
Originally, my personal site was written using Allaire’s HomeSite web-authoring tool. I had an email suggesting this went against my belief in the fundamentals of the web but unlike almost any other HTML coding tool I have tested over the years, HomeSite does not necessarily add unnecessary HTML or re-format HTML you have written. These days, however, I employ Moveable Type across all the web sites I run. Using style sheets it does a fine job of separating content from design as well as making sites easy to update. If I was the purist I wanted to be I would argue for hand written code every time but none of us has the time and Moveable Type twinned with HomeSite makes a nice, easy-to-use, alternative. HomeSite’s HTML validator is also useful if you want to try and keep some coding standards on your site (and before anybody else emails me, I know this site isn’t perfect).
Conforming to a standard does not mean you can’t implement many of the latest mark-up developments though. My site is built using style sheets and I make use of the JavaScript SRC command so I can control my scripts better. As such, you will need a CSS complaint browser and JavaScript enabled to see it the way I hope you would. I don’t require a certain screen resolution, colours or window size as I don’t like sites that try to tell you how you should view them. However, I don’t think it is a bad rule to make sure you are always using the latest version of your chosen browser.
You may also care you read my PGP public key page which contains some information on why I occasionally use PGP.
As I am not a graphic designer, Paint Shop Pro is my image editor of choice. It does all I need it to. I try to keep the image sizes down to speed your loading time and there should always be an ALT tag in my code so you can, if you wish, switch them off.
Like many other website I make use of the Georgia and Verdana fonts (available from Microsoft) which were designed for reading on the screen. However, if you don’t like the you can always set your browser to override them.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, I’ve made the move to Windows XP at home (although I have fallen for Windows 2000 in my office). I actually write a lot of my content on my Palm Vx (which replaced my trust Palm Pilot Pro in February 2000). I use the QED file editor and pull them in after a backup. If you know a good Palm HTML editor, send me an email. My web pages are hosted with Instant Web and I recommend them if you don’t want a hosting company who bombards you with emails and offers and who let you get on with building your pages.
And finally a word about Copyright. When I produced the UK Radio Information Pages, other people passed off much of that content as their own (more about UKRIP, here). So, please ask before taking anything. All the images on this site are either mine or have been publicly available in newsgroups. If you own the copyright to anything, let me know and it will be removed. If, however, you want to link to this site, please feel free. Linking content together is what the web is all about – and I do get frustrated when companies try to sue over a few links.
Ratings
As you can probably tell I am a great believer in the use of the web for free speech. As such, curnow.org is voluntarily rated with the internet content rating association (icra).
Useful Resources
If you want to read more about web standards W3C is not only a standards creator but a useful starting point; try browser.com for more information on browsers and try JavaScript.com for some JavaScript starting points and a ton of links. For a useful style sheet resource try builder.com. The UK Copyright Licensing Agency is a useful resource and there is a good discussion about web copyright here. If you’re not familiar with the term colophon then you should read this or this.