b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Friday, April 16, 2004
Bypassing the Toll Booth
I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Decatur, GA. bypassing the overpriced T-Mobile hotspot in favor of a somewhat weaker, but free, access point named "linksys". Gotta love the neighbors around here.I'm here with my friend Bryant Hodgson. Bryant has his old Win98 laptop and a T-Mobile daypass and I'm helping him with his first mobile WiFi experience. But I got to the Starbucks a little before Bryant and sat down next to the only electrical outlet in the building, booted up my laptop and surveyed the available access points. Lucky for me some kindhearted neighbor of the Starbucks is running a LinkSys router in default mode, offering a friendly bypass to the T-Mobile toll bridge.
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Where Do Squirrels Go When They Die?
Have you ever seen a dead squirrel, I mean one that wasn't road-kill? I looked outside today and the little buggers were crawling all over the place -- digging in the ground, climbing trees, and generally having a great time. I realized I've never seen a dead squirrel except on the road.What happens when they die. With that many live ones there must be remains somewhere. Do they go off to some hidden squirrel burial ground and just fade away?
Wednesday, March 3, 2004
Cell Phone, PDA, WiFi
My cell phone and PDA are both kaput. Is it time to move up to one of the fancy combo units, maybe one with a camera?I bounced my old Samsung N200 cell phone off the driveway tonight -- busted the fliptop so that I can't hear out of it anymore. The whole problem was that a couple of months ago the BodyGlove phone cover I bought when I purchased the phone 2-3 years ago broke and I had to throw it away. The phone is so old I couldn't find a new cover to fit it, so I wound up with a "universal" (meaning "doesn't fit anything") cover that was really just a holster.
I have to take the phone completely out of the holster to make or answer a call, which means handling the slick little plastic thing dozens of times a day -- a disaster waiting to happen. And tonight it did.
Add to that my old Handspring Visor Prism bit the dust a few weeks ago. The battery died. I got a new one from Laptops for Less for $50, but ever since I swapped batteries and reloaded the software it keeps corrupting the calendar database. And it has Fatal Errors every time an alarm goes off.
I could probably painstakingly fix the PDA by doing some sort of manual rebuild of the software one app at a time or something, but I don't want to do that. I don't have a day to spend futzing around with a "productivity" device just to get back to where I was. But I can't fix the cell phone. It's done. I have to get a new one.
I think I want a combo device, but for that kind of money I want WiFi capability. Bluetooth would be good, too. But definitely WiFi. The Treo 600 looks promising -- I like PalmOS -- but no Wifi. Supposedly SanDisk will have a WiFi SD/MMC card for PalmOS in Q2. But I've read that SanDisk has been promising such a card "any day now" since fall 2003 and keeps pushing the release date back.
Treo 600 supporters like Rick Klau and Jenny Levine seem very pleased. I'm just concerned that $600 is a lot of cash to drop on something that only connects to our questionable cell phone networks.
I'm open to suggestions. Drop me an e-mail if you have experience or recommendations for any of the cell phone/PDA combos.
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This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:06:57 GMT
