Somewhere out there!

We’ve been using the latest OO2 beta (97, now 104) in the office. For some reason my brother’s installation was producing corrupted files that couldn’t be reopened. So I tried the simple approach to trying to fix it. Unzip, ran content.xml though firefox and found this error: “XML Parsing Error: duplicate attribute. Location: file:///home/nic/tmp/pp/content.xml Line Number 2, Column 10155:”.

A quick with hack with emacs and then a repack the document with the perl script from: Unpacking and Packing OpenOffice.org files.

It worked! My brother was soon back in business.

Microsoft Office and corrupted files usually means “Don’t pass go”. OASIS is a great file format.

Symphony Operating System is an interesting looking desktop project based on Knoppix. You can read this review. It’s interesting point is the way it “organizes the desktop environment.”

This is a clever use of Rails+DHTML: Num Sum, for example.

I’m quite interested in this as I need to write some internal data analysis programs that I think would work well with data presentation similar to this.

Rather than setting up wordpress asides, I’ve recent been posting quite a few links to my del.icio.us account: del.icio.us/stateless. For example, some links to OSX and Openoffice particularily OO2 betas for OSX.

At some point when I have some time I look around and see if there is a way I can mix the del.icio.us feed into the blog.

After getting back from Paris on Sunday evening I had a used eBookMan EB-901 from France waiting for me. The new morning a reconditioned Palm Tungsten E from Ireland turned up. Both had been bought via eBay, the first for 50Euro (new these are 120GBP) and the second for 73GBP, (new these are around 140GBP) both including shipping.

I immediate set both units up with Mobipocket and copied over one of the eBooks I’d been reading on the Eurostar. I noted while using the 901 in bed that it had a nice interface, although it was quite difficult to read in low light. I didn’t really like Windows sync software. The screen on the 901 was quite large with a lower resolution than the Palm, which has a much smaller screen.

Since Monday afternoon I’ve been using the Palm to since completed a couple new space opera eBooks. I’ve found with the clean clear colour screen on the Palm that its much easy to read even at the lowest font size than both my Psion 5mx and the eBookman EB-901.

The other issue I noted is the 901 seem to lose its OS when the battery was removed. I’ve read that this is caused by a fault in the capacitors, which needs to be replaced by Franklin. Obviously this makes the 901 a bit useless. I’ll have to see how difficult it is to get the unit fixed.

I’ve been attempting to recondition the battery a little, but it seems that just reading an eBook gets about 4-5 hours of battery life. Today I went down to Maplin and after a couple tried managed to find someone to help me put together a 4xAA external battery pack to charge the Palm. I’ll see how things go with this charge over the next couple weeks.

How i’ve used the Palm I can see by Paul G. comment as he did about the screen on the hx4700. I’m quite keen to try this out now, especially with its external battery options. Its pretty hard to find one of these second hand on eBay, so I’ll probably get a new unit when I get back to NZ.

With regards to the PDA options of the Palm. I’m finding Graffiti 2 much easier to use than the older Palms I tried at various times. I’ve used the Tasks list a little today, and it seems nice. We’ll see how it goes, Its quite possible I might start using the Palm Tungsten E in its PDA role.

It’s also time to replace my P800, and I might consider a Treo 650. Everyone seems to rave about these. I’ll need to reconvince myself about a PDA+Phone choice though. As I didn’t really like the P800. Basically the interface wasn’t that great and I found it was too bulky, quite often slipping out of my pocket.