Croeso

Windows Mobile 6

What gets me is with all the thousands of employees and squillions in the bank why is it the actual changes from windows Mobile 5 to 6 seem to have so few atual improvements it would have taken a couple of geeks a week each to code it. Thank crikey for Opera mobile et al

happy as a Welsh rugby fan on the last day of the six nations

I know an academic who always told me she was very well connected to Microsoft and the tech companies, now she emailed me Tuesday saying she was doing a study with Microsoft sponsored also by Acer on how people who live in another country and use web 2.0 tools not in the countries language, i.e a Welshman, working and writing in English living in the Netherlands.

The study was about blogging social bookmarking tagging, IM ing etc and as a reward for doing the 12 month project you get a free PC (you can keep) running Vista, a 250G external USB hard drive and Norton Save & Restore, all they do is install some software which monitors all my Internet habits and uploads that to them every day.

So I rang her and said your going to give me a new PC etc for just doing what I already do - Yes she said, fine I'm in,  I said.
So 1 day later the PC arrived (can you believe that- shipped from Acer Switzerland) and now I'm playing on it with Vista etc.
Now a Mac mate of mine said ah it's only eye candy, but so are Macs I said, but so far it seems cool fast and without any problems.

I'll be realy interested to see my year end results (we will get a personalised anaylysis, and a copy of the overall anaylysis of all 1000 people on the study (anonymised)

Now this seems a free lunch to me but let's see.

New Toys

Carrrying a locked down work PC I cannot load iTunes nor access the files on my iPod, so at Schipol I bought  a new toy, a sort of doughnut shaped JBL On Stage II speaker for my iPod so I can listen in comfort in my hotel room.

A big plus is that  it can be powered by my PC power supply - saves carting round another one.

The sound quality is excellent, pity you cannot here it here, you'll have to make do with a crap photo from my ageing XDA II

Portable Applications

I'm quite into Portable Applications such as Portable Firefox, etc at the moment, and was wondering if there was a portable application (works on a USB stick which I can plug into any of my PCs and phone, which is an offline blog editor? Any suggestions

Update I've just been pointed to http://www.qumana.com/help.htm thanks Jimmy

An now www.Zoundry.com which works a treat - thanks oh lazy web

Googling has not turned up much thus far

My current portable application set looks like this
        Firefox (with the following extensions)
                Spellbound
                Bloglines
                CoComment
                FasterFox
                Yahoo Mail notifier
                Googlepedia
                Tab Mix plus
    Great News RSS Reader
    Mac 7.0 Operating System (Just for nostalgia)
    VLC Media Player
Portable Open Office

This all sits very easilly on my 2.0 G SD card

Tickled me pink

This one from Hugh got the old chuckle muscles going this morning:

Especially as we are playing with MS SharePoint 3 beta at the moment

GPS It runs in the family

GPS has been in my family since the 60's.
My father was in the RAF and he worked on Radar systems, he spend 2 years working with the Americans in the US and on Ascension Island in the 60's when they were mapping the world for the GPS system. They were pinging signals via Echo 1 (and later to Echo 2 also) to trucks (moving slowly round the world) to the receiving stations - such as Ascension Island.

Little did he know that some 40 years later his son would have (like many of us) a GPS receiver in the car.
Now what has prompted this - well I've just I loaded some new TomTom voices into my Pocket PC, Joanna Lumley, Jean Luc Picard, Michael Caine, John Cleese, Homer Simpson and Ozzy Ozbourne  (Only to be used when the kids are not in the car!)
I chuckled all the way to and from the supermarket - it's the little things of life

Open Wifi Network initiatve

A rather nice push to open an open wifi across Europe and the US from Fon

You can even buy a router from them for 5€ (Plus 18€ p&p)

I wonder how far they will go with this, certainly cheap enough to get attention, and they already have 884 people joined up in NL alone.

Another question a PC based RSS reader

I'm a long term Bloglines fan but I was wondering if anyone can recommend a cool stand a lone RSS reader I can install on my PC, just playing with these things to keep up with developments but there seems so many - just wondering if anyone has any tips

extend my home wifi network

As another blogger I read often calls it

Oh lazy web, I'm looking for a bit of kit to extend my home wifi network, It does not reach all of my house nor the workshop (more importantly) Is there a bit of kit I can buy that when placed in a part of the house that can receive the wifi network, then re-sends that (repeats)  that signal and hence giving it further coverage.

Ideally I'd like a box I just plug in and it works, as cheap as possible - any hints anyone I've been searching but all this network malachy is a bit too much for this Physicist to understand. I think I need an access point but I'm not sure.

Microsoft blues

It always happens every year the same, trying to print out the Christmas card labels from my Microsoft Outlook pst contacts file.

You see I live in Holland but run my Microsoft office suite in British English, so it refuses to print UK as the country and adds Nederland to all Dutch addresses - aagh

As I cannot print from my work PC at home I take a copy of pst file to my home PC and run the Avery label wizard from there. Then it always sets all the defailt mail addresses to business  and not the home one, so I have to set them all back one by one. aagh

Then I have to do 3 print runs, one for UK format addresses one for Dutch format and one for the rest - aagh

I always hate this software at this time of the year. Something tells me the mac we've just bought will not be any better

Grid Computing 2

Inspired by Piers, I hooked my second home PC up to a Grid Network.

My first PC is helping my old Oxford lab analyse some quantum optics results, and as it requires the analyser to also verify the results (the model is only 63% accurate) so it's only open to learned ex alumni.

This new one is also for Oxford and helps a cancer research project, but is open to all as it takes no effort from the human only our silicon based machines

So if you have spare computing power do join and help out, you can even see the molecular/genetic structure your analysing on the screen saver (not that the spinning coloured blobs mean much to this ageing physicist!)

So that was my good deed for yesterday

Skype

Being prompted by the planning of a trip to visit Siemens in Switzerland to discuss Dynamic Capability work of Cetim (Siemens do Voice over IP) I've just loaded up Skype and made my first call to the only person I could find - Lilia.

The sound quality is amazing - mind you I have a 512K line.

So if you'd like to call me - click here

Wireless networking

Well after a number of frustrating attempts to build a peer to peer wireless network at home, I've now managed it with a lot of help from Jaap my local computer guy.

I first tried, prior to SP2 for XP. to hook one PC directly to another - very possible according to all the literature, but we were frustrated all the way.

Now we abandoned the idea of a peer to peer network and built a routed network (what ever that is called) so I forked out a whole 99€ on a ADSL Modem Router from SMC, and hey presto we managed it within an hour. I can even VPN through the router and log onto the work network at high speed, a real real bonus I must admit.

Now all I need to do it to figure out how to be nice and open up my Internet connection to anyone in the neighbourhood, without compromising my security. ???

Having said that without Jaap I think I still would have failed on the configuring the modem router to get data from my ISP, the wireless connections to the router was a doddle.

Now maybe I can wifi my PDA to my home network - now that will be great. Hmm

The joys of a Pocket PC

I just found myself chatting to Hanneke Lambrets (KM @ KPMG ex Pink Roccade) on the phone, listening to an Acid Jazz MP3 and mid blogging (last post), having previuosly just checked my email. Now all I need is a little rubber band to hold my device in it's holder that supports the IR keyborad (has a nifty little mirror at the top to reflect the IR signal) when the headphones are connected. Or figure out how my bluetoot headset works with the Windows Media Player, as it only seems to work with the phone?.

Hmm this wired world, or at least mine is comin together nicely!..

More on Google

Rogier Brussee has pointed out to me in his Blog that Google misses database based data (hmm awful phrasing Andy!) on the Internet too, but we just don't notice, as there are so many interlinked pages to make the output useful. He says wait and see as Google people are smart and this could be a big market for then. I for one am not holding my breath but I have strong empathy for Rogier's (as usual) well though through arguments.

The decision has been made

Well we are going to try mobile blogging and mobile CoP membership as I've just ordered an XDA II . We deliberated a bit about it, it's good to do that, but it will be intriguing to see if we can get some KM business use of of these things rather than just utilising them as a toy.

Should be here in 6 days so then I should be able to post (only thing is I'm sure ieSpell won't work on it's browser so it will be back to poorly spelt blogging - oh how embarrassing!) to Croeso from the bath - now there's a thought!

Excited about Techology

With the break down of my current mobile phone I'm considering moving up to a new PDA/Phone combination, and explore remote blogging and remote CoP membership.

Gee these up and coming new devices are packed with useful features, usually I don't get too excited about IT technology with relationship to KM, but every now and then one catches my eye and there's no stopping me. I'm keen to give it a go as it's always been nigh on impossible to get people who are rarely infront of their PC to engage in Knowledge Sharing activities - let's see if this is an opening for these people, at least they cannot say 'I hardly ever get to log in'.

I always get excited about new wood working tools (antique ones as well actually) see my Croeso photo album, but when it comes to electonic gadgets I have too many of them gathering dust in a cupboard at home, all of which were flavours of the month, but all failed to capture my continued attention. Will the XPA II join them or survive. I guess it will survive (should it be purchase of course) as you always need your phone in your pocket right, and the thought of being able to instantly get on the web mid converstion in the climbing hall to check out a possible climbing holiday venue is very appealing, if bit flashy! Join a CoP whilst on the train to Enschede, and blog to my hearts content from anywhere (well at least as long as the batteries hold out)

Hmm.......