Rants of a nerd
gadgets
Design Update
2I have done a design refresh on the blog moving from the nice Night City theme to the new Mystique theme. This is a professional flexible theme and I really like it. Tell me if you like it also. Comments welcome below.
Blogging on the road
1Let’s see how the N900 handles blogging. I downloaded MaStory, a blogging software for maemo and it supports wordpress. Or I will know that it does if this post comes up on the site. Surprisingly the keyboard is not too bad for writing so much text. The placement of he space bar is fantastic. Only word completion is a problem since to accept the suggestion one has to press the right arrow which is not very accessible. Anyhow today is 8 days since I got it and so far the experience has been very nice indeed.
PS is it just me or does the phone think “-ing” is a good ending for every word?
A question of time
0There is a fascinating article in the Economic Times today on the battle for setting what would eventually become Indian Standard Time. It is written in the context of two stock exchanges opening earlier starting today. And even though it is a sadly paginated article, I would encourage you to read it.
Well, I won’t be stealing any punchlines if I reveal that there was a tussle between cities in whose local time would be Indian Mean Time. The choice of Greenwich Mean Time + 5 h 30 has always seemed arbitrary and bizarre to me. I guess that was before people realized the difficulties of working with half-hour differences. In India, we have the BBC news on the half-hour, every hour. An interesting effect of this time zone is that if you hold your watch (analog please, not for those with dinky Japanese digital) upside down, it reads GMT. Go on, try it. I’ll wait for you…
Synchronizing time became important as trade developed, people travelled by train and telegraphs were being sent. Soon time was being broadcast – initially by telegraph and then by radio – remnants of which can still be heard today as Short Wave Listeners are bound to know.
I am filing this under gadgets because I mentioned watches, okay?
A-tisket a-tasket a glorious gadget
0I finally got myself a gadget I’ve been salivating over since it was announced back in August of 2009: the Nokia N900. What’s the N900? It is a mobile computer with a phone tacked on. This is what Nokia should have done at the time of the N810 and stopped so many others running away with the smartphone / touchphone honours.
The operating system is Maemo, a Debian derivative. So far, I have found it very intuitive and user-friendly, while being the powerful system underneath. There are many (generally very positive) reviews out there and I am quite sure I will do one myself, but suffice to say that it has met all my expectations so far – except for the irritating problem with syncing with gmail!
What’s good?
- Eye Candy – lots of it
- Speed – this thing is quick and responsive always
- Bounce Evolution – ’nuff said
- Dashboard – four virtual desktops, just like the way I like it
- Skype Integration – when a Skype IM lands in the conversation window, it is a moment of Zen
- 32 GB of space
What’s Bad?
- The aforementioned lack of google sync.
That’s all for now. Pictures and more later.
A 13-year old tries the Walkman for a week
0When the Sony Walkman was launched, 30 years ago this week, it started a revolution in portable music. But how does it compare with its digital successors? The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Giving up my iPod for a Walkman
I owned a few “other” brand Walkmen during the 90′s and it really is so easy to forget what life was like without MP3s. Now, the real portable music player award goes to my dad’s “portable” record player. That could play 16 to 78 RPM records through its in-built speaker. And it would fold up into a suitcase for portability!!
