Thursday, November 3, 2005

Five Days with the Palm TX -- 9:47 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Now that I've had my Palm TX for five days, I thought I'd post my impressions of the device. I'll start with a piece of advice. If you are upgrading from a previous device, move the directory where the Palm Desktop had saved your old settings (or, in my case, I renamed .jpilot to .jpilottungstene). System settings from older devices will cause the Palm TX to freak out, guaranteed. Second, make sure you check for updates to apps that appear to be wonky. I spent a day or two thinking I was having problems with pilot-link when the real problem was I needed a new binary. Third, install apps one at a time and verify that they don't blow anything up before proceeding.

Anyway, there are a lot of things to recommend this PDA. The battery life is great. I charged it when I got it Saturday night and didn't have to charge it again until last night despite the fact that I was messing with it almost constantly. The 320x480 screen is very slick and makes reading longer documents much easier. Wifi on a PDA is the coolest thing since sliced bread. On Tuesday I visited a hotspot and giggled like a schoolgirl as I surfed the web on my PDA. I must've used it for a half-hour straight and it didn't put a serious dent in the battery meter. The bundled Media app and Pocket Tunes are much better than the Tungsten E's apps. It is very snappy and the speaker is much louder than my E.

At this point I only have one gripe, but it's a relatively significant one. The Palm TX (or PalmOS or the apps or some combination therein) doesn't seem to have very robust error handling. Most any problem will cause a soft reset. I've even had a soft reset loop which is a PITA. Now that I've gotten my apps upgraded, I haven't had a soft reset. Let's just say that it's touchier than my E ever dreamed of being.

Despite that significant caveat, I really like my TX. The extra speed, battery life, and especially Wifi more than make up for the initial wonkiness.

NFL Week #8 Final -- 9:10 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

At long last, Eeyore and I tied again at 9-5. That makes us both 71-45 (.612). Due to yet another scoring correction (the kicker scores were messed up) my Fightin' Wombats improved to 6-1-1 in my fantasy league. Hopefully I can finish strong and actually do some damage in the playoffs!

Look! Microsoft gets back at OpenDoc -- 10:59 am CST, Update by The Master

Check it out: Massachusetts bill endangers OpenDocument decision. You can also read the Groklaw coverage.

That's right--Microsoft managed to get a politician to take a strong shot at killing OpenDocument in Massachusetts. According to the article this may be due to political infighting over records control, but I think this is M$ passing some ca$h under the table to mister politico, creating a 4-person committee with 50% business involvement to control standards-setting in MA. Since there aren't enough people who care about this to vote these people out of office, I think that's the end of the road for OpenDoc in MA. We'll have to see how it goes.

I guess my pessimistic side is showing, huh?

Tuesday, November 1, 2005

Bleh: More Q4 -- 10:55 am CST, Update by The Master

Put in another hour on Q4 last night after doing some system upgrades on The Haus. I'm still having a lot of fun, but then again everyone I know tells me I'm easily amused. I finally got to drive a hovertank in the game, and I enjoyed it. The only complaint I had is that the hovertank is not nearly as fast or maneuverable as I would expect it to be. But then again, I may have gotten spoiled by UT2K4.

No Old News

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