Somewhere out there!

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.

I realised that given that I’m in the UK at the moment, I have the access to everything that’s avaliable on eBay UK. I figured that my Psion 5mx got damaged recently and I need a replacement unit for (only) reading ebooks. I’m not that interested in PDA features and I expect I’ll get a Sharp C3000 at some point. However the C3000 doesn’t seem like a good ebook reader. They is no native Linux readers for any of the common commerical ebook formats.

The main features I’ve been considering are:

* Battery Life
* SD or CF expansion port
* Min 320×320 screen
* Ability to be powered by the common AA or AAA batteries

Battery life is important, as I would hate for my reading device to be tied a charging station. I like to be able to pull out the book in whatever odd situation I’m in and being able to use AA batteries makes this easy.

My P800 mobile phone has a 208×320 screen. Using Mobipocket I find this resolution much too small. The Psion with a screen size of 640×240 is very easy to read. Although the form factor is sometimes I little difficult to hold with one hand.

Being able to use either SD or CF expansion cards is vital as reload

After a little research I figured the ebookman looked like the optimal option. However, production of this has stopped, new units are around 150GBP and its difficult to find them on eBay.

After a little research I discovered this thread about Tungsten E battery life and a post by Robert L. Smith, Jr. were he built a PDA charger with a AA Battery Holder . This opens up a whole new set of PDA based eBook reader options.

Even though the new Palms don’t have removable batteries, then seem to have the best general software support. This post suggested a very clever idea. The Palm Tungsten W (1500 mAh) design as a mobile phone has a very large battery. If you turn off the phone features and use it purely as a Palm with a 320×320 screen it gives you a very good base platform. The Palm Tungsten C (1500 mAh) also has had good battery life reports.

Of course the final decision is a balance of avaliablilty on eBay, cost and the specs. The best options now seem to be:

* Palm Zire 71/72
* Palm Tungsten W
* Palm Tungsten C
* Palm Tungsten T3 or T5 – huge 480×320 sized screen
* Palm Tungsten E – Seems to be a popular option for this situation.
* Sony TH55 – battery life reports are good, but it is now EOL and only takes Sony’s MS cards.

One last option is the eBookwise 1150 a rebranded Rocket eBook reader. Unfortunately only avaliable in the USA.

Backpack from 37signals is nearing release. Jason has posted a final preview of its features called Backpack The Backpack Manifesto.

Looking at the feature list is seems like a good solution to my blog enter Organising your mail. Particularly the focus on email interfaces. I look forward to trying it out when it gets released generally and seeing how well it mets my personal and business needs.

Upgrade to Tiger by buying a Mini. I’ve been thinking that this is the best option as well. Helps that I want a second mini for desktop use when I shift to the UK.

However I’ll probably hold off, and not buy into the hype. Let some other people beta test Tiger.

As I’m going to be travelling next week I decided it was finally time to give Skype a shot. With that idea I order two Logitech Stereo USB Headsets 200 from TP. Today I took the two headsets into the office and installed Skype on a couple of the Win2K workstations and my Ubuntu Thinkpad.

It was too easy. Plug and play, just like that. Reasonable clear sound quality. The headphones seemed to work very well with their noise cancellation. Was getting hardly any background sound.

All and all, I think Skype is a very useful product. I’m still going to setup my own VoIP based stuff with Asterisk. However, I’ll probably use them in combination.

The only problem system I had is my current Debian/Sid desktop. Custom kernel and I need to fiddle around with the USB Discover stuff. I’ll probably just install Kubuntu.

As I just post I’ve been working on installing a new R51 laptop. While working on this I discover that IBM have an option where you set the level were is starts charging the battery. It also has an auto-adjust feature. Thinking about this I realised that:

* Li-Ion batteries discharge very slowly when not under load and have no memory.
* When plugged into the wall, the batteries are not under load.
* IBM is clever and don’t charge the batteries when the TPs are plugged into the wall. Unless the charge level fails below the configured %.

This probably why their batteries do so well, and actually age very well. The R40 isn’t as clever, but after 2 years of use after some discharge/recharge reconditioning the primary battery still holds 90% of its original charge and the UltraBay battery about 85%, or about 6-9 hours total life. The R50 has a large screen, but a better processor. It will be interesting to see how well that performs.

I’ve had this problem with an old install of samba, after upgrading a while back it keep expiring the password for users. I could find anything in the docs or howtos for Samba. Today I managed to figure the right google search and discovered this single page: [Samba] Password expires.

This was fixed in eitehr beta3 or rc1. You need to stop smbd, remove the account_policy.tdb, and restart smbd. The new default is to set the must change password field to something like NT_TIME_MAX (0x7fff ffff IIRC).

Update (08/04/05): Also you can tweak account policy numbers with pdbedit. [ See passdb. ]