PalmAddicts

An Old Game Revisited

Tegan was playing on the Nintendo DS today and the minigame she was playing reminded me of an old freeware favourit of mine when I first got my Visor. The game was Traffic. I had a look at FreewarePalm.mobi at http://palmfreeware.mobi/ and there it was. I downloaded it to the 680 and unzipped with HandZipper lite. Yet again in retro heaven. I beamed it to Tegan's Tungsten T and got a surprise as it was in colour as for some reason the colour didn't work on the 680. Tegan has sussed this game out and has got to level 15 with a wee bit help. This about sums up a good game, no fancy graphics but simple addictive gameplay

Google Maps to the Rescue!

I took my daughter to Disney's Animal Kingdom this past Friday. On the way home later that evening, we ran into several traffic issues. I took some turns trying to find a way out of it and realized that I was - well, I had no idea where I was. Luckily, I was in my pickup where I keep my BT GPS. I turned it on (glad it was charged!), waited for it to get a fix, and then used the excellent freeware app Where Am I, to find my location on Google Maps. Obviously, the way I was going wasn't going to work because traffic was at a standstill. I needed to find the quickest way home because my wife wanted to go out to eat. Well, Google Maps gave me good, easy to follow directions and we got home in plenty of time. My daughter wore me out walking around that park. She had a great time, though, which made it all worth it.

iPhone / iPod for education?

Please be noted that the subject is still written with question mark, so don't hope too much for some kind of application that have to do with education in your iPhone or iPod Touch. But this I can give assurance to you: some universities in the USA have offered iPhone & iPod for new students; apparently iPhone & iPod indeed is seen as good charm to lure the freshmen. Did this trick works, unfortunately the universities don't like to show us the result. But I'm pretty sure plenty of parents had pros & cons about this kind of tasty treat, especially the thought on do these schools need to offered shiny devices instead of the education itself? Read on MIR blog to know which universities are, and on Evolve here you can watch the YouTube videos of the commercial offering (yes, they even went all the trouble making two videos!)

But some other universities and schools are also faced with a dilema on whether to allow iPod or another MP3 player used by their students; it's no secret anymore that iPod is being used to cheat on exams. Exam answers and lesson notes have been found in almost every student's iPod, some are clever enough to conceal them in the song lyrics. So the universities have banned the use of iPod and MP3 players during classes, but few have even restricted the students to bring mobile phones & iPod to school at all. Dig more on Gizmodo and USA Today article.

I see a very contrast two sides from above examples, on one side the university uses iPod to attract new students to join. But on the other side, the university is beginning to repel iPod popularity among youngsters; which are mainly the students. It's an endless battle between the "aristocrat " and the free young ones, where both sides are determined to have their wish come true one way or another. Whose side are you on?

(blogged with my Treo 750v)

Happy Easter Everyone

Good morning my PalmAddict friends from New York City and happy easter to all of you who celebrate and I hope your going to get tons of eggs today. As I mentioned on my trip to NYC I am loaded with nothing more than my Centro and iPhone and last night I just took the Centro with me as for the last couple of days I have been using the iPhone so last night I was spinning some tunes at a friend of mine's Ev's in the city and as I always do I make a note of all the tunes and mixes that I am going to play using my Centro. I use Memopad before the event and write down my opening sessions and tunes that I want to play throughout the night and at the same time I will also list the end tunes at the same time, all the tracks in-between will come naturally. It's a method that I have used over the years and works. So thats one way I have used the Centro.

My friend who I was spinning tunes for lives in quite a large apartment in the City and with that in mind if I need to find my friends or vise versa I can just text them and obviously I am not going to be able to hear if my Centro rings or not but I do feel it vibrate so it suddenly becomes a pager and as my friends also have vibrate on their phones it is a good way to communicate and another use for my Centro.

Additionally yesterday afternoon, we needed to drive over to Brookyln to pick up some supplies and I knew the address but no idea how to get there and my friend Rich was driving so we just opened up Google Maps on the Centro and chose the location and we got instant travel directions and of course lets not forget the real time traffic updates so that comes in real handy.

Let's not forget the other uses including of course making calls, sending text messages, downloading email and taking pictures last night. The Centro may still be running Palm OS which is ancient but it still helped me last night to get through the night and have fun as well as proving it's worthy of being a useful Palm smartphone.

Happy Easter everyone and do remember my Easter giveaway ends in two days time so not long at all to get your user thoughts into me and as always the guidelines which are pretty much the same as usual can be found in this sticky post.

Red Alert to iPhone & iPod Touch!

For iPhone & iPod Touch owners; there's a new threat to your shiny gadget. As described by iPhoneWorld (who even published this new threat source code!): "...your iPhone will lock up after simply visiting a page that contains the malicious code in question". So all the hackers need is for you to visit their website, and your Safari web browser's memory automatically will be overloaded; thus resulting in a freeze situation or the worst is crash down. This new exploit was tested on the newest iPhone firmware 1.1.4, and no words or patch from Apple yet. But for desktop users, you can fix it by installing the newest Safari v3.1.

Another solution is posted by Robert Vamosi (C|Net); just disable the Javascript within Safari:

1. Under Edit, click Preferences.

2. Click the Security icon.

3. Uncheck Enable JavaScript.

4. Close and restart Safari.

Good luck & God speed...

(blogged with my Treo 750v)

Happy Easter

Today as I was on an Easter Egg hunt with my daughter, I remembered that Palm had a little "Easter Egg" of it's own. So tonight I thought I would remind those of us with Palms that it's easy to find. just follow the directions below. These are for Palm OS 5.

Open up the preferences

Click on Power

In the bottom right hand corner of the screen (above the dia area) draw a tiny clockwise circle. You might have to do it a couple of times to get it. When you are successfil a tiny Easter Egg will pop up in the corner. Enjoy

My iPhone on Saturday

Used the alarm to wake up and then checked the weather and my email with Safari.  Had to go into New York so I used Safari to check the traffic and decided to drive to Port Imperial and take the ferry over.  Beautiful ride, by the way, and if you are a tourist you should take the round trip just for the fun of it.

Used Google Maps to find the Heartland Brewery on 17th Street where I was having my meeting.  Listened to some jazz while I walked back to the ferry, and then plugged the iPhone into my car stereo to listen to a couple of podcasts on the way home.  Made a few phone calls and used Safari to check the time of the opera we are going to see on Tuesday.  Synced the iPhone to remove old episodes of Startrek Enterprise and downloded 6 more of them to the phone.  That's it for Saturday.

Camera Adventure

[From Ronald Abadi Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia] The camera on my O2 Xda IIi PDA Phone is, to put it midly, nothing to be proud out. To put it bluntly, it is downright ugly. The result is often blurry, too dark, or just simply not clear. Yet at most times, there is no other choice than to use it. Carrying my Kodak camera around is not too convenient and not really an option for mobility. So, when there is no other choice and I need to take a picture, my PDA will have to do. One way to make the result a little bit better is to ensure enough light in the room, or at least enough light around the object that I want to take a picture of. Even then it usually takes several shots before I get one that is rather acceptable.

Well, the other day while I was travelling by air, I saw an advertisement for a portable speaker on the flight magazine. As usual I did not have a pen and paper with me to write down the detail, and simply remembering it was not really an option because I do not have good memory. I might as well forget about it the next day. I could, of course, simply use my PDA to note the detail, but then I could not capture the look and appearance of that portable speaker. So, I had to use my PDA to take a picture of it. I turned on the overhead reading light on my seat, and I started to take a couple of pictures. None of them were very clear, but nevertheless I think they were better than nothing at all. Later on I showed the pictures to my cousin, for whom I actually took those pictures for, since I knew he would be interested to know of such portable speaker. Soon, we were on the net googling for it, and finding the website from which my cousin could order one. A few weeks passed and yesterday I got the news that his order had arrived, and he seemed to like it very much, thanks to my nothing-to-be-proud-of PDA camera!

PS: Happy Easter, everybody!
[Sammy - This post blogged on my iPhone from New York City]

SharkLinks in the Water

[From Roger Moore, Culver City CA] If you aren't using SharkLinks, you are wasting a lot of time. SharkLinks is Tyler Faux's free application that will take any web address and coverts it to a stand alone app. How does it save you time? If I want to go to the Palm Addicts forum using Blazer, I have to open Blazer, wait for Sprint to connect me, and then go through my bookmarks to get to my destination. With Sharklinks, I just open my newly created application called PalmAddicts and it opens right up to the Palm Addicts forum. It cuts the wait time for Blazer by more than fifty percent. I keep an entire tab in zLauncher full of the websites that I frequently visit. If you keep them alphabetically, then you just need to pop over to that tab and enter the first letter of the website. It's great. Thanks Tyler!!!!!!

Sharklinks is available here.