Sunday, November 9th, 2003
iSync with Nokia 6600
Now if i wouldn’t push my tech purchases further and further away, this would help me a lot: how to use apple isync with nokia 6600. That’d currently be my fav setup: an apple ibook g4 and a nokia 6600…
Thursday, November 6th, 2003
iPod under pressure?
Apparently i’m not the only one who doubts that sony could release a hard drive based mp3 player rivaling the ipod for just $60: sony to offer $60 ipod? Not likely
And writing of ipod rivals: roundup: ipod faces more opponents. Of course my personal favourite, the ipod, is the overall winner.
Wednesday, November 5th, 2003
If something sounds too good to be true…
"Sony executives said that next year it will introduce versions of a rival music player to the ipod for as little as $60…"
Can’t believe in that, even dell couldn’t dump the ipods price with their dell dj that significantly and i’m pretty sure that dell is used to operate on much smaller margins than sony. (via gen kanai)
Burton announces new iPod gear.
Burton announces new ipod jackets and backpack. Though my inner geek cries out loud to immediately get one of those jackets as soon as they become available i still hesitate to make a final decision because i’m not exactly the sporty type and don’t wanna ridicule myself. I quite possibly don’t have a single item in my wardrob matching either of these two jackets. Inner geek will go to bed unsatisfied today, i guess.
Ubiquitous Technology
Anil de mello: "what we need is a new type of service : mobile ubiquity integration (mui)." True. If you look at all the tech we are using in our everyday life there’s a lot of unclaimed potential, primarily in interoperability, but thanks to vendor-lockin things don’t just work. I’m quite certain that the next ubiquity revolution shouldn’t be a hardware, but software revolution. We got some rock-solid hardware in the market; pcs, cellphones, pdas, printers, input devices, displays, cars, all sporting the ability to communicate with each other via personal, local and wide area networks like bluetooth, wlan, gsm or cables. But they aren’t integrated good enough. The question is how to achieve this. Open standards appear to be the right way to go. I can’t sync my cellphone with a linux system and i’m pretty sure i would be able to do that if nokia used open, publicly available standards for syncing (they do support syncml, but rather for business-oriented ota syncing). There’s also no good reason why i can’t use a bluetooth keyboard with my cellphone, for example for text messaging. Of course i could write my own drivers if i really wanted, but that’s not exactly a consumer friendly approach. The support of hp printers in nokias series60 devices is an important step in the right direction, but there’s still way to go.
Tuesday, November 4th, 2003
Valid XHTML 1.0
I’ve played around with my markup a bit and most of the site now successfully validates as xhtml 1.0 transitional. Some markup in earlier posts in the archive is still a mess, specifically content predating and including march 2003. The index page, recent archive pages, the about and the contact page appear to be valid though. If you encounter any invalid pages (excluding the archive and specific posts before march 2003), please let me know so i can fix it.
The markup is still not the best and rather inconsistent, but to clean all of that up i’ll wait till a total rewrite of my cms.
Monday, November 3rd, 2003
Kill the N-Gage (sort of)
Once again, russell beattie gets it: he proposes that nokia should dump their flawed n-gage device and start marketing the associated brand as a platform. Numerous reports show that the n-gage isn’t exactly flying off the shelves and the n-gage brand is slowly turning into a joke among the media. They should try to limit the damage by turning the n-gage brand into a platform supported by numerous other devices, possibly even by various manufacturers.
Technically it looks like both the n3650 and n6600 could be expanded to support the platform, at least through a firmware upgrade. They sport a similar screen, mmc slot, operating system and wireless connectivity as the n-gage, and most likely, many future series60 devices will do the same. Extending the range of compatible devices could also spur the number of games sold and therefore help nokia to get more game developers to leap to their platform. Another advantage would be that they could continue to play the upgrade game more easily by stretching n-gage support over a whole line of models. Phones typically have a far shorter lifecycle than portable gaming devices.
The n-gage (as a device, not a platform) would still fit in the plan - perhaps even better than it does right now. Want a great, attractive phone with a wide array of high-quality games available? Get an n-gage-compatible phone. Want the ultimate gaming device which also features rich multimedia and phone capabilities? Get the n-gage portable gaming device. By focusing on making profit by means of licensing deals with both game developers and device manufacturers they could quite possibly create a successful platform which not even sony could render obsolete. With their current strategy, that won’t happen for sure.
flex film nacht
Just returned from the ‘flex film nacht‘ (flex movie night), saw the morcheeba dvd ‘from brixton to beijing’ there. The flex is quite likely viennas best club (great music, great location, fantastic atmosphere) and enjoying a relaxed sunday night with some movie screenings there is amazing. I think i’ll return around 6am for the gentleman and nick cave screenings. If you happen to be in vienna on 30.11. don’t miss the next flex film nacht.
Sunday, November 2nd, 2003
Longhorn follow-up
After thorough consideration i have to confess that my recent longhorn rumblings were perhaps a little too harsh (and the title was terribly wrong chosen). Perhaps longhorns ui won’t suck, microsoft will fulfill its early promises and they’ll release the one os to rule them all, but i can’t believe in that. Microsoft is and has always been great when it comes to generating an early hype around their upcoming, usually faraway windows versions, but i remember always being disappointed when the product finally shipped. I hope things will be different with longhorn, but only time can prove me wrong in my assumptions.
Nonetheless, my first point is still perfectly valid: i want a new machine, i want a new os, simply put, i want a new computing experience, and microsoft won’t deliver me something like that till 2006, perhaps even later. Apple gladly will, and even if longhorn turns out to be the holy grail of operating systems, i can still get a new wintel machine in 2006 when a new laptop will most likely be due anyway.
I still insist however that the current longhorn screenshots look plain awkward.
Saturday, November 1st, 2003
Delldjsite.com gone
Delldjsite.com is no more, or to be more precise, it’s turned into digitalmusicsite.com due to legal issues. I linked to their dell dj review a few days back. It’s a quite good review, but currently not easy to find cause their link on the frontpage wasn’t updated yet.