October 20, 2004

Will the Sox do it?

I'm watching the 9th inning of the ALCS (American League Championship Series) this evening. Unbelievably, the Sox are one out away from being in the World Series.

I became a fan last year because of my friend Adrian, who is a Boston native and a die-hard fanatic. I've never really liked baseball until last year and even now I only watch in the play-offs (the rest of the year is just a waste of time, IMHO).

Anyway, first time since 1986, first team to ever come back from a 0-3 start. A team of destiny, perhaps.

The World Series will almost be an anti-climax.

Posted by artandscience at 08:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 07, 2004

Hotmail ain't working for me..

I've been using Hotmail for a year or two as one of my email accounts and when I shifted to using OS X as my primary platform about a year ago I had to find a hack to let me download email to my laptop using Apple's Mail client (rather than forcing me to go to the Hotmail site and wait through the loading of interminable advertisements).

Unfortunately, Hotmail has just turned off the WebDAV functionality that allowed me to do this. So I think I've finally reached the point where it is not worth using Hotmail anymore. (The 2Mb limit on mail stored online already had me reaching for the keyboard).

I guess Gmail has just become my primary online service. Maybe its time to co-locate my own server again somewere and just avoid all this crap.

Posted by artandscience at 10:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 06, 2004

Apps for my Tungsten T3

Well, I'm on the lookout for apps for my new Tungsten T3. I have yet to buy any SD cards for it (I'll be getting a 1Gb memory card and a WiFi card) but I still have lots of memory left to load up neat apps.

I got it sync'ing today (finally) and got my Avantgo running (cannot live without the news feed). A lot of my older apps won't work with Palm OS 5 so I'm engaging in a new search.

I'm looking for a good video player (I gather it's fast enough to play small movie clips), a good MP3 player (I'm setting up Pocket Tunes right now as a trial), a version of Mac Stumbler (to look for WiFi access spots), and maybe a good games package (I would love to play Spy Hunter on it if I can find it).

Suggestions are very welcome (especially with URLs).

I'm behind the tech curve on this one but at least that means I have a "target-rich" environment of apps already developed.

Posted by artandscience at 10:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 05, 2004

Gphone (VOIP) and the Tungsten T3

It looks like I should be able to use VOIP (voice over IP) with my new Palm Tungsten T3, wireless keyboard, and SD Wi-Fi card. GPhone is a VOIP client designed to work on the Tungsten C. But the T3 is very similar and with the addition of a wireless keyboard and WiFi should be fully capable (I believe) of sustaining a connection.

On a related note, I've found a great new (to me) resource in PalmAddicts.. Huge public blog but lots of pointers to new software and hardware.

Posted by artandscience at 07:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 03, 2004

Oh, yes.. OS X == advanced encryption

So.. I'm planning on picking up both an SD 1Gb card for my new Tungsten T3 Palm and a 1Gb USB Flash drive on Monday.

I want to be able to store MP3 tunes that I can access from my Palm and also work-related files.

As far as the 1Gb Flash drive I want to be able to back up some of my files to it for security. I looked around to see if FileVault (Apple's great encryption facility) would indeed encrypt a single directory for storage on the USB drive. Apparently, this feature wasn't available until recently and some folks had developed Byzantine workarounds. I found the reference to Disk Utility (Apple's disk management utility) in the discussion and fired it up.

What do you know? It offers an option to create a disc image from a folder and to encrypt it using FileVault. Rockin'! I just tried it and it works beautifully. I'm now much happier at the thought I can secure certain files just by dragging and dropping them into a directory on my USB drive.

Totally transparent, totally easy to use. The way encryption should be.

Posted by artandscience at 02:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 02, 2004

Spam in blogs..

So I seem to be getting an ever-increasing amount of spam comments in my blog these days. I delete them and ban the URLs promptly but it has only kept the problem manageable. Now I've added banning IPs and have closed comments older than ten days old.

Scum bags. I'm really tempted to do something terribly vindictive. These people should be put up against a wall and shot.. at least have vital body parts painfully removed.

Posted by artandscience at 09:39 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 01, 2004

Allawi a hand puppet?

Why am I not surprised?

It looks like Allawi's speech to Congress last week was prepared by the White House.

But we're told that "We're making progress".

Posted by artandscience at 08:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack