Category: Gadgets

If I’m a bit slow this morning, it’s with good reason: I was up half the night updating my cell phone. Bletch!

It all started when I received an email advising me that a new firmware update was available for my Treo 650. I’ve ignored the last few updates, but this one promised to fix several annoying issues, so I decided to bite. The instructions advised me to set aside 20 minutes for the exercise. Hah!

I don’t normally hotsync my Treo (I just back it up to an SD card), and as I started the upgrade process I remembered why: my USB cable is duff. Apparently this is a common problem with Treos – but how hard is it to make reliable cables? Never mind: I was able to set up hotsync to use BlueTooth instead. The only problem is that BT is much slower than USB, so everything dragged. On top of that, the sync process decided to back up several large cache files; it looks as if the Treo mail application doesn’t compact folders properly, and the hotsync was blindly backing up uncollected garbage. I interrupted it (why does Cancel take “up to 2 minutes”?), hard reset the Treo, configured it for BT hotsync, uploaded the firmware update (taking nearly an hour), hard reset again, configured for BT (again!), and started to restore my data. Lo and behold, it started to restore the cached garbage! I interrupted it, opened the Palm desktop, exported the address book, created a new, clean user profile, and imported the address book. After hard-resetting the Treo and setting it up for BT (for the 4th time) I synced this new profile and recovered my address book. Whew!

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that all of this has deliberately been made harder than necessary, either to provide (billable!) work for providers or to prevent inadvertent error. Palm certainly has a history of this: see, for example, this description of how to “zero out” a Treo:

1. Read through these instructions before attempting the reset. We made this method of zero out reset extremely awkward to perform, so that it would not happen by accident. You may need the help of a dextrous friend if you find it too difficult to do by yourself.
2. Connect your device to its HotSync cable or cradle. The HotSync cable does not need to be connected to your PC, and it does not need to be connected to power.
3. Press and hold the Power button and UP on the 5-way navigator.
4. While continuing to hold Power and UP, press and hold the HotSync button on the HotSync cable or cradle. As you press HotSync, make sure your other finger doesn't slide to LEFT or RIGHT on the 5-way navigator; it needs to be exactly on UP during the entire process. Although you are pressing the HotSync button, a HotSync operation should not begin.
5. While continuing to hold Power, UP and HotSync, press and release the RESET button on the back panel of your device (where's the reset hole?). This is very difficult to do with only one person; you may wish to hold the stylus in your mouth and use your hands to press Power, UP and HotSync.
6. Release Power, UP and HotSync.

Got that?

Although I’m primarily a Mac user, I’ve always had a WinTel PC at home, mostly for playing games. (I prefer turn-based games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri, as well as city-building simulations like Rome. However I occasionally fire up something in the Doom/Quake genre.) My current PC is an eMachines tower with an aftermarket video card and an extra hard disk so I can dual-boot WinXP and Solaris.

This morning I checked my Gmail on the PC and then hurriedly shut it down before going to work. I think that rather than choosing “Shutdown” I might have clicked on “Suspend”. In any case, when I arrive home I turn on the monitor and hit the power button. Nothing. The monitor status light is yellow, meaning no signal. Hold in power button for 5 seconds, then try powering up again. Nothing. Power supply and chip fans come on, maybe a flicker on the disk light, but no video. Repeat, holding down DEL to try to get into the BIOS. Replace USB keyboard with PS/2, repeat. Try booting off a Knoppix LiveCD, then off a floppy. Lug into the next room to plug into another monitor. Open case, remove graphics card, plug monitor into on-board video. Re-install graphics card. Re-seat everything. All totally, completely ineffectual. My PC is pining for the fjords. She’s dead, Jim. (Unless some blog reader can suggest something else to try.)

Now what? I’m tempted to declare victory, to forswear the works of Redmond and simply junk the PC. Of course there’s stuff on the disks that I want, which means I should probably get a FireWire enclosure to read them on my PowerBook. On the other hand, am I really ready to give up on PC games? I was just getting into Civ4. And there are one or two apps that I use that only run under Windows, like Family Tree Maker. How about Virtual PC? Well, if I were prepared to spend $240 on VPC, plus $60 each for a couple of disk enclosures, I’m starting to approach the price of a new PC. (Presumably I can re-use the graphics card, disks, and RAM.) And VPC may be OK for simple apps, but it’s hardly appropriate for a graphics-intensive game….

Sigh.

Before heading out on my last trip to Colorado, I (finally!) replaced our old LinkSys 802.11b router with a Belkin Wireless G Plus. Both laptops (my PB and Merry’s iBook) were G-capable, so I only had one desktop PC (USB) adapter to replace. I futzed around with WPA but couldn’t get it just the way I wanted it, so I stuck with WEP. The bottom line: things are much more stable, and we can now use the cordless phone or the microwave oven without disrupting the WiFi.

One of the things that made my trip to India and England so successful was seamless wireless connectivity. I thought I’d go into some detail about this, because it might be useful for future travellers.

As I’ve described before, my phone is a Palm Treo 650 *, with service from Cingular. It’s a quad-band GSM phone, and supports GPRS (IP over PPP) Internet access. (This is critical: if you plan to travel to most parts of the world, you must get a GSM phone. It’s the standard; just get over it.) The Treo includes a basic but adequate email client called Versamail, which can handle POP, IMAP, and SMTP with and without SSL. This means that I can access both my Sun email (Edgemail via secure IMAP) and my personal ISP account (via POP). There’s also a web browser called Blazer which does a reasonable job of rendering complex web sites on the 320×320 screen. And since it’s a PalmOS device it also supports a wide range of applications; the one that I used most often was World Clock, without which it would have been really hard to keep track of the 101/2 hour time difference between Boston and Bangalore. (I also installed Bejeweled 2 as a superior time-waster to solitaire.)

As I noted earlier, I called Cingular to enable international roaming before leaving the US. Everywhere I went – in India and in the UK – I established a usable roaming connection when I turned on the phone. However the automatic choice was not always the best one. Several of the providers didn’t support GPRS (or didn’t allow GPRS roaming), which meant that I couldn’t get my email. After manually selecting each of the available providers, I eventually determined that the best choices were Airtel in India and Orange in the UK.

Looking back on this trip, I cannot emphasize too strongly how important it was to have a working cellphone (with web and email) while travelling in India. It’s not cheap, but roaming calls back to the US and UK were certainly less expensive than hotel phone rates. The normal way of getting around in India is to book a driver and car for the day; your driver will expect you to contact him by cell phone whenever you need him. When the power goes out (rarely, but inevitably), or when that WiFi hotspot turns out to require the use of a prepaid coupon that can only be purchased somewhere else, you can still use email. And most important, the successful resolution of my Mumbai connection situation depended heavily on the use of voice, email, and web; first in Bangalore airport, then on the shuttle bus to Mumbai’s international terminal, and finally as I stalked the corridors of Mumbai airport at 3am.

One final thought. I packed my iSight camera in the hope of using iChatAV to videoconference with friends and family rather than using the phone. Well, it didn’t work out. The main reason was that most of the hotels used firewalls that blocked several of the TCP ports needed by iChatAV. Maybe a simple VoIP system would have been better….

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*One point worth noting is that the Treo 650 includes a camera, albeit a fairly basic one. Photography is forbidden in many places in India, and you will frequently be required to check any cameras or camera-equipped phones. If I were buying now, I’d be tempted by the Siemens SX66, which doesn’t have a camera but does include WiFi – and it’s only 2.1 ounces!

1. Rather than relying on phones while travelling, I hope to be using iChat AV a fair amount. I picked up an iSight camera for Merry to use with her iBook. Then yesterday and today I spent some time debugging video chat with Merry, Kate, and a colleague of mine who just happened to be in Singapore this weekend. Looks promising.

   (There was only one dumb ease-of-use issue: in order to video chat, it’s necessary to open up five ports in the OS X firewall, and for some reason there’s no preset configuration that you can simply check off. Instead you need to define a new profile associated with TCP ports 5060, 5190, 5297, 5298 and 5678. That didn’t feel very Mac-like.)

2. On Friday I was talking with Jim Waldo (of Jini fame) and I mentioned an iTunes playlist of mine called Music to blow your speakers out. He dragged me back to his office and introduced me to Tool. I was blown away, in more senses than one: I’ve only known Jim as a jazz enthusiast, and Tool’s Ænima was unexpected, to say the least. But I was intrigued, and this lunchtime, while running to the drug store to pick up a few items, I made a detour to Newbury Comics and picked up a copy of the CD. (Oddly it’s not available through ITMS.) I’ve ripped it into iTunes and added it to my iPod; I’ll listen to more of it over the Atlantic tonight.

3. Checking in. Well, trying to. I logged on to the British Airways website (after finally realizing which of the four or five ticket numbers and record locators to use), changed my seat on the BOM-LHR leg (no more 53J!), and then tried to check in. And tried. And waited, and tried again. After receiving a number of different error messages, I finally received a vaguely catatonic “Unfortunately our systems are not responding at this time.” Oops.

4. In spite of my earlier intentions, I decided not to get up to watch the Chinese GP. I didn’t even record it. (No, I don’t have a TiVo.) A pity – it would have been interesting to see Montoya’s car being ripped apart by a manhole cover (or grating, whatever), not to mention the delicious schadenfreude of watching Schumacher making a fool of himself twice in a single race (the first time before the race had even started!).

I just called Cingular to turn on International Roaming for my Treo 650. I hadn’t realized that there were so many wireless carriers in India! I went through the lists of roaming partners and coverage maps at GSM World to see if I could work out where I’d have service, but the coverage descriptions were confusing and the map resolution was so poor that I gave up. A colleague assures me that I’ll be OK in Pune, but I have no idea about Hyderabad and Bangalore. (The UK is easy: Cingular partners with O2, Orange and Vodaphone….)

Yes, I did get a Mighty Mouse. I love it. The scroll ball feels absolutely natural, and the touch-sensitive shell works well. The only thing I need to work on is that, when mousing left-handed*, my ring finger sometimes brushes the left side of the shell just as I’m right-clicking. Since the logic seems to be “it’s a left-click unless it’s unambiguously something else”, I’ll have to fix this. As for the side buttons, I haven’t use them much so far. The default setting is to bring up Expose to switch windows, but I prefer to task-switch by using scroll-ball-click to bring up the application list, horizontally scrolling with the scroll ball, and selecting via left-click. Very easy, better than repeated cmd-tabs.

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* Even though I’m right-handed, I’ve taken to mousing left-handed about 80% of the time. Good for incipient carpal issues.

OK, this is an essential add-on for PSPs: the Akihabara News reports on “a new wallpaper for the PSP”. Sounds innocent enough…. But on further examination, there doesn’t seem to be a download link. Hopefully this will be rectified soon. I did a quick search trying to find other images of this kind – it seems like a natural theme – but I only came across one modest effort (registration required). Odd.

Yesterday I installed the vanity plates (custom license plates) on my new Subaru. Obviously my main purpose in choosing “DARWIN” was to honour one of the greatest scientists of all time, especially at a time when science in general, and evolution in particular, is under attack. Coincidentally it also lets me pay tribute to the open source project associated with the kernel of Apple’s OS X.

The space under the word SUBARU will shortly be occupied by a silver plastic fish with feet, bearing the legend “EVOLVE”. (Not that anyone or anything has any choice in the matter, of course! Evolution is what imperfectly replicating systems do, pretty much.)

The Independent has now published an enthusiastic, and thoroughly sexist, review of my new car, the Subaru Legacy. Highlights:

The current über dad brand is Subaru, which makes chunky, reasonably priced and practical intercontinental ballistic missiles. Though they might look the epitome of sensible family motoring… Subaru make some of the fastest cars, point-to-point, in the world right now….

I plumped for the good, old-fashioned, four-door saloon – a car so wilfully nondescript [love that phrase] no wife could ever suspect that a fire-breathing rally car lurks beneath…. Drive one, though, and you are left in no doubt that this is an extremely capable sports saloon with immense traction and grip capable of hauling itself to 60 quicker than an Audi TT. I reckon it’s got the hen-pecked dad’s vote sewn up.

Of course the one that they tested was the 3 litre normally aspirated Legacy; mine is a GT with a 2.5L turbo. A quick look at Subaru UK‘s web site suggests that they don’t offer this model over there. (And as for the reviewer’s sexist views about car purchasing, I should note that my wife’s choice in the new car stakes was a BMW 325Xi – hardly a vote for moderation.)