Sheldon Brown, R.I.P.

Oh, my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways,
And deep ways and steep ways and high ways and low,
I'm at home and at ease on a track that I know not,
And restless and lost on a road that I know.

Apart from being a great bicycling guru who's educating articles strongly influenced my bicycling habits, he was a great advocate of mobile lifestyle, doing many thousand miles on the road with nothing else than biped power and HP Jornada. What a man. Rest in peace, Sheldon 

Sheldon's website seems to intermittently go down under heavy traffic, but I hope that it outlives its creator. Here are some cool links to his wisdom:

Bicycle humor

Bicycling and pain

Planning Your Own European Bicycle Tour

Black Nokia N82.

I was waiting for this one to come out. Looks like it will ship after 3GSM.

 

HTC Magnum, WTF?

via Gottabemobile.com

A mindblowing PocketPC experience for any PocketPC fan. Is it real?

Opera Mobile 9.5

Whoa! Opera Mobile 9.5, the successor to the 8.65 which was my browser of choice on both Nokia and Windows Mobile devices. Much more useful than any other mobile browser out there. It promises improved Ajax support and faster rendering (two features that it's got better than others already it its previous incarnation). If it delivers, then it will finally bring ability to view 99% of internet content on a smartphone screen. Yes, it will play Youtube (if you have Flash Lite 3 installed on your handset).

I will loose sleep waiting for its release (I never got so excited even when iPhone came out :) Can't wait to test it on ajax heavy gMail and gReader.

Official info ->

Oslo, Norway and Barcelona, Spain - 5 February 2008 - Opera Software, the only company that puts the Web on any device, today announced the commercial release of Opera Mobile 9.5 - the latest version of its award-winning Web browser for sophisticated feature phones and smartphones. Participants at the Mobile World Congress 2008 will be the first to experience the improved functionality of Opera Mobile 9.5.

- Intuitive user interface
- Tabbed browsing
- Improved text wrap
- Page overview, zooming and panning
- Landscape mode
- Save Web page for future offline access
- Call phone number from Web page
- Send link as SMS/MMS
- Send image as SMS/MMS
- Small Screen Rendering
- Password manager
- Web-address input auto-completion
- History and bookmarks
- Copy text
- Opera Widgets

http://www.opera.com/b2b/solutions/mobile/video

METAPLACE the future of online RPG ?

... every Metaplace world process is also a web server.  It can issue both outgoing web requests of arbitrary type, and handle incoming web requests as well.
This means that any Metaplace world is capable of creating a web request from script, and then issuing that request to an arbitrary outside web service.  The game server provides useful API methods to easily parse the responses from these web service, including REST-like XML parsing and RSS.  You can also pull entire web pages and regex parse (string match) the response manually for more granular control if you wish.  Examples of this include issuing queries to outside SQL databases from an object in-game, pulling external real-time stock quotes into your world, getting the latest RSS news from CNN and feeding it to a town crier NPC chat bot, slurping real-time sports scores into your in-game sports bar, pulling YouTube videos into a wall in your apartment, etc.  This also means that objects and scripts in your world can transmit outgoing data such as badges, in-game events, or game scores to an external database or web service.  This allows for a nearly limitless extension of game functionality out across the internet.
Additionally, because every Metaplace world is also an embedded web server, external services can make requests of the game process through a simple CGI-like interface.  This means that an external webpage could call into the server process and access real-time data on individual objects currently in the world.  It is also possible to issue events through the game simulation using this interface, meaning that you could spawn a monster in-game when someone clicks on a webpage link, for example...

Wi-Fi speed analysis of Nokia smartphones

http://www.telexy.com/Support/Publications.aspx?PublicationId=6

... Nokia phones tested in this research (E60, N91 and N91 8G) operate in a close to "B" mode in terms of Wi-Fi technology. "Maximal" speed of B-mode is 11 Mbps which is ~ 1.35 M/s. It is valid to expect that this conclusion holds with other phones of E- and N-series. Factual speed shown by Nokia phones in ideal conditions is ~ 450 K/s ...

QTTabBar adds tabs to File Explorer in Vista and XP

QTTabBar from QuizoApps is the best little software surprise this year for me. It adds tabs to Vista and (!) XP folders. It adds customized buttons to the toolbar. It is a huge usability boost to file management. And it is free. recommend it for everybody.

But wait, it is not over, QTAddressBar adds Vista style Folder path navigation to XP machines. Since I still have XP on my UMPC and corporate laptop, this is a very welcome extra too.

Here are some screen shots of other useful features that it adds.

1) Folder preview tip in file pane and 2) on tab bar and 3) the highlighted gridlines in details view.

 

Air vs Eee

 

RegHardware pits MacBook Air vs. Asus Eee

This is one nice review, and I do share conclusions of the author. This is a fight is between an elephant (Air) and crowd of ants (you can buy 5-8 Eee's for the price of a single McAir) and I think that ants will prevail.

UMPC cannot replace my laptop yet.

The key limitation of course still being the physical display size and keyboard for fast typing.

Some time ago I said bye-bye to my POCKET PC, because my smartphone took over most things I would usually use PPC for. Back then, purchasing the UMPC (Raon Everun with 4.8" display and builtin keyboard), I thought that I might be able to get rid of laptop as well. I was wrong. While UMPC indeed runs any software I need, and if perfect for email on the road and relaxed reading, and browsing at home and while travelling, it just cannot replace the "typewriter" function of my laptop. Here is how my gadget usage patterns evolved since the UMPC came into my toolbox.

I still use phone for most of my communications, (GSM, Skype, Gtalk/Gmail, ICQ), PIM, RSS and GPS navigation. I keep several cartoons on memory card for the kids for the moments when I want to distract them.

Desktop is my multimedia and backup server. Torrented movies and Crysis on 1080p 40" screen.

Laptop is a typewriter for office and blogging.

UMPC is my computer on the go. Surprisingly, I came to the conclusion that it is size is not as imporant as weight. Most of the time that I am on the road, I still carry around a bag that fits A4 paper documents, and has no problem accomodating even a 12" Thinkpad X60. However, I do not like the added weight that Thinkpad brings, since papers are already heavy enough. Therefore, I would keep UMPC in this role in future as well, but I might upgrade to some 6-7" machine in future, when I see a model that goes for 8 hours and weighs around 600g.

I still use Pocket PC for book reading (excellent scrolling mode in Alreader2) and occasional Fring chat or skype call. It is mostly switched off these days.

Techbubble

I liked that one. Funny and strangely cute video from http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071204/here-comes-another-bubble/

or just watch it here