Cingular Treo 650 hacked: Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking enabled

Yay!

Remember how a few days ago we got a hot tip that the Bluetooth
Dial-Up Networking profile had been disabled on the Cingular version of the
Treo 650? Yeah, well the phone isnt even officially out yet (just a few
more days, yo), and already Treo hackmaster Shadowmite has figured out way
to make your Treo whole again (he already did this for the Sprint version
of the Treo 650, too). Obviously you install this one at your own risk,
ok?

U.S. Kids Don't Understand First Amendment

From our
friends at Slashdot

l4m3z0r writes "This rather alarming article discusses a study
of high-school students in which they were asked about censorship,
protected speech, and other aspects of the first amendment. The results are
extremely worrisome: "Only half of the students said newspapers should be
allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories." and this
"Three in four students said flag burning is illegal. It's not. About half
the students said the government can restrict any indecent material on the
Internet. It can't.".."

This is horrifying. Note the casual evil of it. If the next generation
thinks we don't have free expression, it doesn't much matter what
the Constitution says...

Quote of the Day - Leo Rosten

"The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help
it."

Misunderestimating the market

Pocketfactory - Does Bradley's Departure Signal A Changing Strategy For PalmOne?: "Colligan has been the driving force behind the Treo line, since his days at Handspring. He brings a lot of marketing know-how to the table. And it is in this capacity where his presence will act as a catalyst for Smartphone growth, provided he stays at this post permanently and not simply in an interim capacity. But at the same time his appointment could spell doom for the handheld line. PDA sales are flat. With Colligan's Smartphone centric background, he will undoubtedly use this opportunity to strengthen the company's Smartphone line while weakening PalmOne's dependency on traditional handheld sales, which is a declining market. What this company needs more than anything right now is to push further into the Smartphone segment with innovative new products, and entry level models."

Kent doesn't get what's really going on, so I don't think he's actually trying to lie here. While PDA sales did decline by 8.7% in Q3 2004, smartphone sales more than made up for the loss, but they aren't counted in the same category as PDAs by analysis groups like Gartner. Smartphones and PDAs combined continue to grow as a market.

And here's the part people like Kent don't understand. It really is the same market. PDAs and smartphones aren't really different products, or they are, but the same way cars and SUVs are different. They're different segments of the same overall market. PDAs aren't going way any more than coupes have gone way with the proliferation of SUVs on the road. There is a market for both types of devices.

If anything, the line between them will continue to blur as more and more PDAs incorporate cell radios and WiFi primarily for data communications. While a Pocket PC Phone Edition can be used as a cell phone, like a Blackberry it's less than ideal for that purpose. It's great for cellular data. We'll see a lot more of these devices, but they're still PDAs at heart.

EFF: Endangered Gizmos!

EFF: Endangered Gizmos!: "FCC Chairman Michael Powell calls TiVo 'God's machine,' and its devotees have been known to declare, 'You can take my TiVo when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!' But suppose none of us had ever been given the opportunity to use or own a TiVo -- or, for that matter, an iPod? Suppose instead that Hollywood and the record companies hunted down, hobbled, or killed these innovative gizmos in infancy or adolescence, to ensure that they wouldn't grow up to threaten the status quo?

That's the strategy the entertainment industry is using to control the next generation of TiVos and iPods. Its arsenal includes government-backed technology mandates, lawsuits, international treaties, and behind-the-scenes negotiations in seemingly obscure technology standards groups. The result is a world in which, increasingly, only industry-approved devices and technologies are 'allowed' to survive in the marketplace.

This is bad news for innovation and free competition, but it also threatens a wide range of activities the entertainment conglomerates have no use for -- everything from making educational 'fair' use of TV or movie clips for a classroom presentation, to creating your own 'Daily Show'-style video to make a political statement, to simply copying an MP3 file to a second device so you can take your music with you.

Rather than sit back and watch as promising new technologies are picked off one-by-one, EFF has created the Endangered Gizmos List to help you defend fair use and preserve the environment for innovation."

Fwd: [PalmAddicts] 100-Year-Old School on Technology Fast Track; Illinois Institution Plans Schoolwide Use of palmOne Handhelds

href="http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2005/01/_100yearold_sch.html">PalmAddicts:

Avery Coonley School may be nearly 100 years old, but when it
comes to endowing its teachers and students with handheld technology for
the classroom, this private, independent school in Downers Grove, Ill., is
one of the most forward-looking schools in the state.

After the rousing success of a fourth-grade pilot program last year, each
student and teacher in grades four through eight now have their own
Zire(TM) 72 handheld, as well as a wireless keyboard, from palmOne, Inc.
(Nasdaq: PLMO). It's the realization of the school's vision to provide a
learning device for every student, and one that has earned full support and
cooperation from students, teachers and parents.

"The pilot program gave us a chance to discover the possibilities that
handhelds bring to teaching, learning and other aspects of school life,"
said Joe Janojak, technology director at Avery Coonley. "Once we
articulated our vision, parents embraced the idea and were instrumental in
helping us raise the funds. They see the benefits."

According to Jennifer Garetto and Laura Bojkovski, the fourth-grade
teachers who ran the pilot program, the benefits are obvious -- students
are more enthusiastic and motivated. They also require very little
instruction. Within a few days they are scheduling appointments, writing
memos, writing lists to keep themselves on task, filling in the calendar
with homework assignments and due dates, and even setting the alarm to
remind themselves of a deadline. But the benefits go beyond organization.

"The students write more often and more efficiently because they have
keyboards and are no longer dependant upon going to the computer lab once a
week," said Garetto. "They write essays, stories and vocabulary words, as
well as print them using a wireless Bluetooth(R) printer. They also take
their handhelds on field trips, use them to create animations and draw, and
use them throughout the curriculum -- keeping everything they need together
in one place."

Students fresh from the pilot program are ready and eager to show others
the ropes. "They are mentors to other students and teachers. It's a very
fun way for them to engage with each other," Garetto said.

The students also have enormous respect for the technology, thanks in part
to a creative program that rewards student responsibility. Before they can
take their handhelds home, students must earn a "palmOne Operating License"
by mastering a set of skills and demonstrating them to their teachers. To
get a license, students must be able to enter characters using the
handheld's built-in Graffiti(R) 2 software, beam, manage a To Do list,
schedule tasks, operate the handheld's camera, change preferences, and sign
a contract confirming their understanding of how to take care of their
handheld and keep it safe. Most kids get their license in three weeks, and
so far, not one handheld has been lost.

What impresses Headmaster Tom Kracht and the other administrators and
teachers is how quickly the kids adapt to using the technology and how
versatile they are.

"They work more independently, have more conversations, and share
information by beaming notes to each other," he said. "Overall, they are
more efficient and organized. Having a handheld to use is fun and
exhilarating. It gives them a certain measure of independence. To these
kids, handheld computers are indispensable tools."
- Jason McLoughlin, Associate Writer, (UK)

Quotes of the Day - Ambrose Bierce

"Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another."

How's that for irony?

Ship of Palm looking for a New Captain

Head over to Brighthand and read the lead article. A very thought provoking perspective on what Palm needs to do to "get right" again.

Personally, I think HP and Dell are wiping PalmOne's clock, and if Tapwave would make the right moves in marketing, they could be a major player (but I doubt they will) in the Palm space.

Most of you won't agree, but I think unless PalmOne does something radically innovative, their days are numbered. Let's face it - with Sony gone, only Tapwave has anything exciting in the Palm space. (There's Garmin, but they're even more of a niche player than Tapwave).

Anyway, go see what Shawn has to say. Thought provoking...

the (c) office asks a brilliant question

Lessig's blog

As is old news (but everything on the Lessig Blog is old news),
the Copyright Office has asked for comments on whether a solution is needed
to deal with "orphan works" -- works still under copyright but whose owner
cannot be identified.

This, as PublicKnowledge notes, fantastic news. For many years, many have
been trying to refocus this debate on copyright from the binary questions
that p2p sharing seems to raise ("seems to") to the more pragmatic and
fundamental questions that this insanely inefficient and bizarrely complex
system of speech regulation called copyright raises. When Congress shifted
our system of copyright from an "opt-in" to an "opt-out" regime, it
transformed copyright from a system that automatically narrowed its
protection (and hence regulation) to those works that had some continuing
need for copyright protection, to a system that totally indiscriminately
spreads copyright to every creative work reduced to a tangible form --
automatically, and for the full term of copyright.

This issue is the focus of our challenge in Kahle v. Ashcroft. It is
something I've been whining about in every publication that will have me
(see, e.g., this op-ed in the LA Times).

But this is an issue that I've only become aware of because of the writings
and emails from many who visit this space. And it is time for you to speak
to government. No one who read the emails that I've collected could think
that this was not a problem. But the copyright office doesn't accept email
inboxes. It reads submissions only. The requirements are simple. Submission
is free. We'll be organizing as many submissions as we can at eldred.cc.
But please help spread the word: The Copyright Office needs to hear about
every example of where the existing system is stifling the cultivation and
spread of our culture. Not because Congress extends the term of copyright
for Mickey Mouse. That battle is over. But because the way in which it
protects Mickey Mouse blocks access to the balance of our copyrighted
culture - for no good copyright, or free speech, related reason. This point
is clear to many. You need to make it clear to the government.

They never frickin' learn: Cingular to crippled Bluetooth on their Treo 650

The madness never
ends. Why do carriers hate their customers?

Cingular might have bumped back the release date of their
version Treo 650, but we just got a tip from a reliable source that when it
does come out, it'll have the Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking profile disabled
on it just like it is on the Sprint version of the Treo 650. That means you
won't be able to use it as a wireless modem with your laptop, and unlike
the Sprint version of the Treo 650, you won't be able to enable the DUN
profile with that hack that's been making the rounds. At least, not until
someone hacks the hack.

Old Habits, New Technology

I'm not just a podcaster, I'm also a listener.

I just noticed something that I thought was funny and maddening at the same
time. Remember when you where a kid and you sent off for something in the
mail? And every day you'd run out to the mailbox to see if it was there
yet. The crushing disappointment every time you opened that box and bill,
bill, junk mail... Damn! Still not here! And then one day, just as you'd
almost given up hope, you go out to the mailbox jaded, not expecting to see
anything and IT'S HERE! Oh happy day!

Well, I'm starting to do that with podcasts. My podcast for 1SRC.com seems
to be relatively rare in that it's posted every Wednesday, no matter what.
Sometimes I define Wednesday as 3am Thusday morning, but you get the idea.
No matter when I record it, you'll be able to listen by Thusday.

If only more podcasts were like that. When's the next Engadget Podcast
going to come out? Have Phil and Len just fallen off the planet? Every day,
I check my podcast download folder. Slashdot review, Rip&Read, stuff from
IT Conversations I probably won't get time to listen to... No Engadget!
Damn!

And I listen to three shows on Air America Radio by podcast so I can
timeshift them. Depending on whether I'm in morning person or night owl
mode, I can't listen to both Morning Sedition and Majority Report here in
Denver. I also get to listen to those and the Franken show sans
commercials, which is nice (for me, not the network).

Whoever puts these 'casts together does a great job. The sound quality is
great for the file size and the commercials are edited out cleanly. But
sometimes it can take up to three or four days for the 'cast to make it's
way to my download folder (from where it's dragged and dropped into Palm
Desktop to sync to the music player on my Zod and played in prodcast
order). It's Wednesday evening here in Denver (I'm at Chipotle, avoiding
recording my own podcast) and I just now got to listen to Morning Sedition
from Monday morning! Argh!

Again, I'm not complaining. These are free services and I wouldn't suffer
so much waiting for them if they weren't so darn good. But the waiting, the
endless waiting is just killing me!

Thank goodness I have Audible to fall back on...

Conservatives back Hollywood

href="http://news.com.com/Conservatives+back+Hollywood/2100-1032_3-5548781.html?part=rss=5548781=news.1032.20">It's
back.

Movie studios and record labels' Supreme Court fight against
file swapping draws unlikely bedfellows.

These people MUST BE STOPPED. Not only is this bonehead stupid legislation
that would technically criminalize PCs and iPods, but it's against the best
interests of the people backing it.

There are studies upon studies showing that at worst there's no correlation
between file sharing and record sales, and at best files sharing actually
helps studios by exposing new listeners to music they wouldn't have heard
and subsequently bought otherwise. The RIAA and other groups are fighting
with all they have to kill the goose laying the golden eggs, and they'll
suffer as much as everyone else if they succeed.

When Josh and I finally get Solo Media off the ground (technical
difficulties and I'm going to be spending most of next week at 30,000
feet), we're offering our issues in Fictionwise's Multiformat editions,
completely sans encryption. We're also releasing them under a href="http://www.creativecommons.org">Creative Commons license that
allows and even encourages derivative works as long as they're
noncommercial and share alike (basically, we want to see fan fiction set in
our stories). Why are we doing this? To encourage new people to see what
we're doing and jump on board. If an issue gets emailed to a few friends
who like it and decide to subscribe for a year (at year of issues for the
low, low price of $5.00), I come out ahead. Word of mouth marketing is the
most effective on Earth. Why would I try to stop it?

The RIAA is trying to put a bullet in their own head. It's our duty to save
them from themselves.

Issues with Sprint

Ten days ago I got the Sprint LG 325. It's Sprints only bluetooth phone, and I was pretty excited to finally start true mobile computing. Too bad the bluetooth is apparently only good for headsets however. I was kind of disappointed but decided not to get to angry since it seemed to be a pretty good phone aside from the lousy bluetooth implementation. Well this afternoon the phone took a turn for the worse, it started powering off mid-phone call. So I did what anyone who just bought an electronic device that stopped working would do and I went to my local Sprint store to have it replaced.

The guy at the Sprint store on my side of town (there are only 2 Sprint stores in Wichita) was very nice, and told me they could do an exchange, but they were totally out of the phone. So I hopped in the car and headed to the Sprint store at 3101 North Rock Road. A 20 minute drive didn't seem like too much hassle to just replace the phone. I waited about fifteen minutes and was finally asked if I needed help by a young man named Ryan.

I told Ryan that I had just come from the other store and I just needed to swap out the phone I had only had for ten days. He asks to see the phone and gives it the, did you drop and break this once over. He asks where I bought it. I say "Online at Sprint.com".

"And you brought it to the store for replacement?"

"Yeah I bought it at Sprint.com." At this point I'm thinking this isn't going to be as easy as it would have been at the other store.

Then he gets up and says he has to go ask his manager. Now I'm a bit confused, but maybe Ryan is new, maybe he doesn't know how the fourteen day policy works. I stand patiently and Ryan comes back with a new LG phone and says, "Just so you know any damage and we usually can't do this, even something this small." And he proceeds to point at the tiniest scratch, one I hadn't even noticed, that probably came from keeping my phone in my pocket. "But we're going to do it anyway."

So now I'm trying to figure out if he really thinks he's doing me a favor so I say "Wait a second, wait are you trying to say?"

Without missing a beat this 5'6" kid with a Napoleon complex says to me. "Well it's pretty clear that something happened to the phone. If you want to argue about it I don't have to do the exchange." So here's where I decide that as much as I would like to jump over the counter and kill the punk, I'd rather get my phone, go home and send a nice friendly complaint email to sprint. I shut my mouth, and even give the kid one last chance at the end to apologize. I tell him I sorry for being snippy. And I get "Sure whatever."

So now I politely walk out the door. And proceed to be pissed. I've worked as a Customer Service Manager, as a Sales Manager and every other retail position known to man. You don't treat a customer that way, especially a new customer. If Sprint thinks power hungry kids are the people they need doing customer service, then I need to look into a new cell provider.

So now my gripes about the phone. The one thing I tried before I ranted about this was to see if maybe my other phone had just been broken and this phone would do it's bluetooth thing right. Well forget about that. The phone has no Obex, I knew that going in, but it's supposed to support DUN. So I fire up my Zodiac, set the phone as a trusted device, create an all new network and connection profile. Then I hit the connect button and.... the phone disconnects after 13 seconds. This is a known problem, some people have it, some people don't. It only effects Palm devices but Mac's have their own set of issues. Pocket PC and PC devices seem to handle the DUN just fine. This is the first bluetooth phone Sprint has carried openly and it doesn't freaking work.

The Bradley thing isn't a big deal.

I'm a little concerned about the mobile industry. Man, people fly off the
handle at a moment's notice. There was less doom and gloom on the frickin'
Titanic.

As I'm sure many of you know by now, Todd Bradley has announced that he
will step down as CEO of PalmOne at the end of this quarter. Predictably, a
lot of mobile tech sites have chosen to see this as yet another sign that
the sky is falling for PalmOne.

But as with everything in life, kids, you have to read the fine print. What
has Bradley really done for PalmOne? He's presided over some of their great
successes, like the Tungsten E and Zire 31. But he's also been in charge
for the i705, the Tungsten W and the Tungsten T5 (which I still say doesn't
deserve the bad rap it gets, but it has been poorly marketed). Are we
really going to shed a tear for this guy?

Who's stepping up to replace him? Ed Colligan. You may remember that name.
He was the President of Handspring and is largely responsible for the Treo,
the most impressive line PalmOne has. He was with Palm from day one, and is
the forgotten member of the founding trio that also counted Donna Dubinsky
and Jeff Hawkins. In short, Colligan has a much better feel for the
industry and a better track record for building devices that people will
actually buy than Bradley. He came back to PalmOne as part of the
Handspring merger and it's about time he was put in charge.

So out with the new, in with the old. Welcome back, Ed.

Read/Write Web: Why Topic/Tag/Remix Feeds Are The Future of RSS

Read/Write Web: Why Topic/Tag/Remix Feeds Are The Future of RSS: "In 2005 in the blogosphere, RSS is a community-enabler. You find someone you like and you subscribe to them, and conversations ensue. What I'm suggesting is that in the future RSS will still be a community enabler, but by far its biggest use will be as a means to subscribe to personalised news and other information important to the lives of non-blogging people. Examples of the information I'm talking about: stocks, bank statements, weather, information needed for one's job, sports news, niche information (the long tail), lots of other things we can't predict yet ;-)"

Really interesting stuff. Technorati's new tag system is likely to feed into this as well. My question is how do you keep track of all the conversations in which you participate on a mix-and-match web?

RIM says, No lawsuits please, we're Canadian

Oh, the
humanity...

Blackberry maker/dealer Research In Motion has come up with a
clever new strategy to counter NTP's patent lawsuit  playing up theire
Canadian-ness. To get you up to speed: last year a federal court found that
RIM had violated about a dozen of NTP's patents, ordering them to stop
selling BlackBerry devices in the United States and pay NTP $53.7 million
in damages. RIM managed to get another court to stay the order while they
filed appeal, and last month an appeals cour overturned the injunction
barring them from selling BlackBerrys while upholding the most of the
patent infrignement counts. Heres where it gets interesting. Since RIMs
based in Canada, and so are their servers, they're now arguing that US
patent laws don't apply to them. Seems unlikely that they'll be able to
pull this one off, but they might be in luckNTP might not own those
patents either. Yeah, this makes things hopelessly complicated now, but a
company calledComputer Leasco Inc is suing NTP for patent infringement,
claiming that they're the ones that actually own the wireless email patents
in question.

GTD Template for Palm

PalmGear.com Link

Quickly setup your built-in Palm applications to fully utilize David Allen's Getting Things Done. The setup is completely based upon David Allen's personal recommendation on how to use a Palm with GTD.

First time users of GTD will appreciate how rapidly you can get started . Experienced users will use it again and again for "Processing".

Features

* Fast and Easy!
* Preserves all your existing data
* Perfect for both the first time and experienced GTDer
* A great first step in making GTD a part of your life.

Compatible with many third party applications, including Datebook5!

"Getting Thing Done" is copyright David Allen and his company. This program has no relation to David Allen or his company except that the developers are very happy customers. If you have not done it yet buy David Allen’s book! It will change your life.

I still think Life Balance is easier and more effective, but people keep asking me for this, so I'm glad someone went ahead and created it.

Great stuff from BJC

Wow.

We began with excellent session, led by Brendan Greeley, on
podcasting. Very informative and good at the conceptual level as well. It
seemed to be well received by the media folks. (Q: Why was this session
about podcasting accepted so well while text blogging stuff yesterday met
hostility?)

Next, Ethan Zuckerman is leading a session about tools. Jimmy Wales of
Wikipedia starts off by talking about why it has a neutral point of view
(NPOV) policy. Without it, he says, he'd lose tons of contributors.

I ask Jimmy: You have an operational view of neutrality: It's neutral when
we stop arguing about it. But who is the "we"?

Jimmy responded that he's concerned to make the community that supports
Wikipedia as diverse as possible, in part by encouraging a culture of
openness and niceness. Once you join the community, you gain some civil
rights. E.g., you can't be banned just for disagreeing with someone
politicallly.

I ask about the demographics of the community that does the bulk of the
support of the Wikipedia. He says for the English version, it's definitely
white, male, and a slim majority are US citizens. "We're in over 50
languages by 8 or 9 have over 10,000 articles. There's a certain kind of
diversity that's hard to achieve just because of where pepole live." He
points out that USB article in the US version is a "fantastic, clear
article, but the article about Emily Dickinson is Ok but not fantastic." He
says they're trying to reach out to people. "I'm very interested in
reaching out to the Arabic community. We're trying to reach out but it's
difficult."

Jimmy says that the quality of the encyclopedia takes precedence over
almost everything else, including being open to anyone to edit.

Jane Singer asks Dan Gillmor what he wants citizen journalists to learn
from established journalism. Dan says that, for example, most people don't
know that the Freedom of Information Act applies to them, not just to
professionals.

Jonathan Zittrain worries that when Wikipedia gets noticed by the
mainstream, its norms will be swamped by its catastropic success. "How do
you batten down the hatches against that?" Jimmy says: We try to think of
problems ahead of time but not try to solve them until they happen. "The
community's already scaled much larger than I ever imagined."

Jimmy says that wikipedia does not do original research but wikinews will
have some original reporting. It's going to have to be high-quality, he
says, and he has no prediction about how much of wikinews will be original.

Dan points out that the Emily Dickinson article that Jimmy uses as an
example of an ok-but-not-great article quotes her poem "Tell all the Truth
but tell it slant," and suggests that that's a good motto for this
conference.

Dan asks how the various constituencies would handle seeing a charge about
a government official posted on an anonymous blog.

Jim Kennedy says the AP wouldn't publish it without checking it out. E.g.,
the wife of a Navy Seal posted photos on oFoto (maybe) that looked like it
was Abu Ghraib-style abuse. The reporter checked it out and ran the photos,
and now the family is suing the AP. No matter how it comes to you, you
follow the same rules.

Jay Rosen says he wouldn't run it.

Dave Winer does run items he hasn't checked out. He asks himself if he
thinks it's true, and asks himself what he's basing it on. He also tells
his readers the degree of confidence he has in it.

Jill Abramson says that in the old journalism craft, verification isn't
enough. Even if you confirmed the story, you'd have to get comments.

John Hinderaker. Powerline doesn't go with anything that's anonymous.

Me: This is right where this conference hits the shoals we were warned
about. This discussion assumes that blogging is continuous with journalism
and ought to be judged by the same criteria. And it isn't. The change to
the institution of journalism will come, I think, not from bloggers who
think they're sort of journalists but from the 99.999999% of us who don't
think we're journalists at all.

Jane: Bloggers have an ethical obligation to their readers. Saying untrue
things cause harm.

Ethan says that I'm being disingenous when I say that my blog is like a
talk over the water cooler because it gets read by more than two buddies
and it gets indexed. [Yes. It's not identical to water cooler talk, but
it's more like that than it is like journalism. So, the blogging form of
rhetoric has a set of responsibilities that water cooler talk doesn't. But
those responsibilities aren't the same as journalists...although we can
learn a lot from the ethics and practices journalists have developed. E.g.,
disclosure.]

Jay: I'm trying to increase informational certainty but decrease conceptual
certainty.

Jimmy: Free licensing does the media no harm if they're revenues are based
on advertising. Release your work under a license that requires attribution
back to you. People say "Gee I wish we had your Google power." We got that
power because people are copying our content.

Jim Kennedy: In concept, it's kind of neat. I'm worried about what sort of
abuses would occur and how the brand might be hijacked by people who
thought they had a right to it. And it's more of a problem for images and
video.

Jimmy: Take a look at the spectrum of licenses...Your model doesn't depend
on people coming to your web site so maybe it doesn't apply to you. But it
does to newspapers.

Dave: How do you point to something that disappears after a couple of weeks.

Jim: It's an archive issue. We sell access to the archive.

Jay: In five years you'll change.

Dave: How can we judge the credibility of an author if we can check what
he's written?

Jim: I don't disagree with you. We just don't have a mechanism for it.

Dan puts in a plug for Creative Commons. "I don't know if it hurt sales,
but I do know it helped bring attention to the topic."

Dave Sifry: The elephant in the room is about business models. Until we ask
how people still make money doing it, we can't talk well together. (Dave
says that every page of Technorati is Creative Commons licensed.)

Jay points to the damage done by locking up the archives. He says
journalists don't recognize the damage because they can always get at the
content via Lexis/Nexis. But for the rest of it, the content is simply
gone. This is critical to the development of the Web and the future of
journalism. the place to watch is Greensboro North Carolina. Jay calls upon
journalists to demand this.

Bill Mitchell of Poynter says this discussion is changing his mind. He came
in thinking that archives were one of the reliable sources of revs, but now
he's thinking about the social impact of locking up the archives and about
alternative business models.

Jay points to an article about The Guardian's reasons for making the
archives permanently available.

Alex Jones of the Shorenstein says that it would bring people to the pages,
and they could sell advertising.

Jim (AP): Our management is enlightened. We're just stuck between models
for a while.

Fwd: [Boing Boing] Torrent site-owner running circles around MPAA lawyers

Great stuff here. Keep fighting!

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/21/torrent_siteowner_ru.html

Cory Doctorow: The creator of Isohunt, a BitTorrent indexing service, has
been duking it out with the Motion Picture Association of America's
lawyers, in public. He's running circles around these bullies, too:

You repeatedly mention the "representative" list of works, which serves
only to intimidate us as a search service. If you look at the Betamax vs.
Universal case, the VCR was not deemed illegal since it is capable of legal
use. isohunt.com is a content agnostic search service on indexing torrent
links over the net, which is very much capable of legal use. While as a
service we can filter content, and that is exactly how we cooperate by
filtering identified copyrighted titles, we do not have the man power to
manually verify the tens of thousands of torrent links, nor is it even
technically possible without a complete list of copyrighted works to filter
against. Since you seem to have trouble producing a complete list, a
technical difficulty I can understand, you should also understand the same
difficulty we have in making your copyrighted works magically disappear...
somehow. So instead of calling it a complete list, which seems unfeasible,
it should be referred to as a sufficient list. Without it, we cannot help
you in filtering your works in our search results.

> Although you have suggested that you would like us to provide an index
> of copyrighted works to which you can refer regarding the torrents on
> your website, we simply do not find it credible that you are unable to
> identify as copyrighted material the many popular motion picture titles
> currently referenced on your website. To the extent you need further
> guidance, the United States Copyright Office maintains records of every
> motion picture and television program in the United States that has a
> copyright registration. Additionally, on-line databases provide
> information regarding who distributes motion pictures and television
> programs. You are already aware of at least one such source, the
> website imdb.com, to which you provide your users deep-links for motion
> pictures.

Read above. According to normal procedures of DMCA takedown, it is your
responsibility to identify what maybe infringing your copyright, and then
we will comply. Your notion that we should know every title MPAA owns,
while you have difficulty producing such yourself, is absurd. Links to
websites such as imdb.com is user submitted, while torrent links may be
user submitted or indexed from other sources on the internet. We do not
moderate this process, we don't have the resource to do so and it is not
our policy.

(Man, did you catch the MPAA lawyers drop the "deep-linking" bomb on him
-- Earth to Hollywood: "deep linking" is what the Web is for, and it's no
crime!)

Wireless Carriers Must Stop Crippling Bluetooth

Get 'em, Ed! Bluetooth is wonderful when it's not crippled.

http://brighthand.com/article/Carriers_Must_Stop_Crippling_Bluetooth

Ed Hardy urges carriers to end their habit of disabling some functions on
their Bluetooth-enabled phones, forcing their users to pay for services
they otherwise could have for free.

Life, liberty and blogging

>From CNET:

http://news.com.com/Life%2C+liberty+and+blogging/2061-1030_3-5545951.html?part=rss=5545951=news.1030.20

Recent actions by tech companies are making bloggers wonder whether they
have the right to free speech or only the right to remain
silent.

SJG unDRMs RPG PDFs

(Alphabet soup, anyone? :)

Back during the WoYP blog's first go-round, I wrote a lengthy piece on the idea of role-playing game books on one's PDA. The observations I made then are still largely true today.

Nonetheless, one roleplaying game company has moved a little closer to the sort of openness with which Baen publishes their SF ebooks under Webscriptions: Steve Jackson Games is publishing a line of unDRM'd PDF RPG books, with a distinctly Baen-like philosophy.

Q. Are the files in e23 copy protected?

A. No. That would interfere with your use of them. We just have to hope that we can sell enough to honest people to make up for what gets stolen by the kiddies and cheapskates.

They also keep your orders on file so that if you should lose your copy, you can download another one.

PDFs aren't really suited for PDA use, but it's still nice to know we're getting closer.

Legal Digital Downloads Up 10 fold

My Way News: "LONDON (AP) - The recording industry reports a tenfold increase in the number of people legally downloading music from the Internet and the first significant revenues brought in by digital sales.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, also says it will continue its campaign of suing people who illegally download music, a practice it claims severely erodes the profits of its 1,450 member record companies across the globe.
The IFPI said Wednesday that music fans in the United States and Europe legally downloaded more than 200 million tracks in 2004, up from about 20 million in 2003."

I'm glad to see digital music gaining so much popularity. The problem is the IFPI smells blood in the water now. Digital music has become such big business that recording executives are going to want free file sharing shutdown even harder. As the recording industry embraces digital music as a format, they look to shutdown the people who showed them how valuable the medium could be.

Quote of the Day - Alfred North Whitehead

"Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not
discover it."

Puts a new spin on "derivative" works, doesn't it?

State bill could cripple P2P

href="http://news.com.com/State+bill+could+cripple+P2P/2100-1028_3-5540937.html?part=rss=5540937=news.1028.20">This
is stupid for so many reasons. The biggest is that it's flat out
unreasonable to expect a service provider to be liable for any use of that
service in which they're not directly involved. If this bill passes, I'd
have to ask, who's making sure people don't send copyrighted material
through the postal service? The act is exactly the same, only the medium
differs. So why should the internet be less free than the "real" world?

California proposal would impose jail time for file-swapping
developers who allow copyrighted music, movie trades.

Treo 650 Hacked Again!

If you've got a Treo 650, href="http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2005/01/blog_mention_tr.html">check
this out. I helped a client hack a Treo 650 over the weekend to install
the sound quality fix, and it's not only really easy to do, it takes about
five minues to reflash the device. It's nice to know that if PalmOne won't
give people what they want, the user community will do it for them.

Blog mention, this time it's from it's funny to me..."It was
cool when the 650 was hacked to enable Bluetooth DUN. Now the geniuses have
done them one better and hacked the 650 to enable WiFi
support...."

Saving you from cartoon ass

And people wonder why I've completely written off television. From Jeff
Jarvis's blog...

http://www.buzzmachine.com/archives/2005_01_18.html#008906

Feeling the chill... in more ways than one

: This is what the FCC's censorship has brought: Rampant stupidity
necessitated by stupid government. From the AP:

Fox says it covered up the naked rear end of a cartoon character recently
because of nervousness over what the Federal Communications Commission will
find objectionable.

The latest example of TV network self-censorship because of FCC concerns
came a few weeks ago during a rerun of the "Family Guy" cartoon. Fox
blurred out a character's naked butt, even though the image was seen five
years ago when the episode originally aired.

"We have to be checking and second-guessing ourselves now, and that's
really difficult," Fox entertainment president Gail Berman said Monday. "We
have to protect our affiliates." ...

PBS executives also said this weekend they will edit out a glimpse of a
naked woman in a fictional account of a terrorist "dirty bomb" attack that
will be aired next month after being shown first on HBO.

Why MAC Filtering Alone May Not Be Enough

This is yet another reason why I don't have or want WiFi in my apartment. I
just isn't secure, no matter what you do with it. I worked in data security
in the Pentagon years ago and the only really secure PC is locked in a safe
with no power and no one knows the combination. But wired ethernet is a lot
more secure than wireless.

(and while I'm out, Bluetooth to cellular 1xRTT is fine, thanks)

http://channels.lockergnome.com/mobile/archives/20050118_why_mac_filtering_alone_may_not_be_enough.phtml

We hear it all the time -- WEPs broke, so why use it? Most people then
move to MAC filtering and are content to just leave it at that. However, as
this TechRepublic article explains, that may not be enough. The short
version: with little effort, an intruder can pull a valid MAC address out
of the air and bind it to their card, thus spoofing a valid address and
getting onto the network.

Quote of the Day - Dorothy Parker

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with
great force."

FontSmoother

This is amazing stuff. For anyone that's used Plucker with anti-aliased phones, this brings the same capability to the entire system. Beautiful, clear fonts that rival the printed page.

There's just one problem. It doesn't work on the Zodiac because it's a hack and requires YAHM to run. YAHM uses some ARM-native code, and thus requires Tapwave to sign it.

If you want to use this on the Zod, email Igor Nesterov nest at palmoid.com and let him know you need a copy of YAHM that works on the Zodiac! That's the only part we're missing. He just needs to get YAHM Tapwave signed and we can enjoy smooth, easy-to-read fonts too.

Exclusives are Fun, Too

But this is the way journalism should be.

http://dangillmor.typepad.com/dan_gillmor_on_grassroots/2005/01/exclusives_are_.html

Kevin Marks gives me more credit than I deserve in this Many to Many
posting, where he notes the traditional journalistic model of going for an
exclusive scoop. He says some journalists are thinking how to make stories
more inclusive: "measuring success by how many people they bring into the
conversation, and they recognise it doesn't necessarily start with them."

This was with most of the things I used to work on when I was writing a
regular column. I was writing about people, issues and organizations after
the news had already come out -- trying to put it into perspective with my
own take on the topic.

But I also hungered for the scoops. And when I got something all by myself,
which happened periodically, I loved the feeling.

This is a valuable part of journalistic competition. It is surviving the
shift we're seeing from Big Media dominance to a more synergistic system
including the rest of us. Scoops will continue to occur -- though they'll
take different forms, and the scoop will last for about five minutes before
it spreads widely -- and that's a good thing.

Meanwhile, the involvement of more people in the conversation is the big,
and most important, shift of all. This definitely doesn't start with us, or
end with us. It continues, and grows.

palmOne Announces Change in Global Operations Leadership

Does this matter?

http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2005/01/_palmone_announ.html

palmOne, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLMO) today announced that Angel Mendez, senior vice
president and head of the company's Global Operations, will leave palmOne
to become senior vice president of Worldwide Manufacturing at Cisco
Systems, Inc.

Mendez, 44, joined palmOne in July 2001. He assumed responsibility for
maximizing the company's operational excellence and efficiency by leading
its supply chain, manufacturing, quality-assurance, logistics and
customer-service efforts. Prior to palmOne, he was vice president of Global
Supply Chain Management at Gateway.

Mendez will remain with the company through the end of the quarter to
facilitate a smooth transition. palmOne has launched a search for his
successor.

"Angel brought many valuable and lasting contributions to palmOne," said
Todd Bradley, palmOne chief executive officer. "He initiated and oversaw
comprehensive system and process improvements that allow our company to
scale to meet the exciting growth potential before us. He also built an
outstanding team, a team I am confident will continue to execute well on
the strong foundation established. We thank Angel for his years of
service."

Pair Arrested After Telling Lawyer Jokes

How can this not be a joke?

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/13/2344253=rss

fembots writes "Two men were arrested for telling lawyer jokes while
standing in line leading into First District Court. A spokesman for the
Nassau courts said the men were causing a stir and that their exercise of
their First Amendment rights to free speech was impeding the rights of
others at the court."

Older Copyright Works Not Worthy

Save our culture!!!

http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/1,2167,66229,00.html

Why extend the copyright on works that no longer have commercial value? By
Lawrence Lessig from Wired magazine.

How copyright is killing culture

Okay, this is freaking terrifying. Our past is disappearing before our
eyes. Mister Orwell, your table is ready...

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/17/how_copyright_is_kil.html

Cory Doctorow: Today's Globe and Mail contains an amazing, disturbing
article about documentary films that are disappearing from the world
because the filmmakers can't afford to re-clear copyrights to the archival
footage they contain.

The makers of the series no longer have permission for the archival footage
they previously used of such key events as the historic protest marches or
the confrontations with Southern police. Given Eyes on the Prize's tight
budget, typical of any documentary, its filmmakers could barely afford the
minimum five-year rights for use of the clips. That permission has long
since expired, and the $250,000 to $500,000 needed to clear the numerous
copyrights involved is proving too expensive.

This is particularly dire now, because VHS copies of the series used in
countless school curriculums are deteriorating beyond rehabilitation. With
no new copies allowed to go on sale, "the whole thing, for all practical
purposes, no longer exists," says Jon Else, a California-based filmmaker
who helped produce and shoot the series and who also teaches at the
Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California,
Berkeley.

Diesel eBooks adds mobile browser support

This is pretty cool. I've shopped at Diesel before, and while their
selection isn't as good as eReader, they're not bad. Follow the link from
MobileRead below to get 20% off.

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3128

Try visiting Diesel eBooks with a mobile browser and you will see that they
now automatically sense your browser and redirect it to a mobile-friendly
version of their site. Very nice addition!

If you visit them, don't forget our exclusive 20% discount on any e-book
valid until 2/15/05.

Tiny Robots Powered by Living Muscle Cells

This is cool, but extremely icky.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/17/1738204=rss

voma writes "Tiny robots powered by living muscle have been created by
scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles. The devices were
formed by "growing" rat cells on microscopic silicon chips, the researchers
report in the journal Nature Materials. Less than a millimetre long, the
miniscule robots can move themselves without any external source of power.
Muscles like these could be used in a host of microscopic devices - even to
drive miniature electrical generators to power computer
chips."

No New Zodiac Until 2006

From Brighthand - looks like no new Zodiac until 2006. Check out the link at Brighthand. Looks like his Jeffness was right about the hard drive, though. And didn't he mention WiFi as well?

Everything on the net is a reprint

I don't get this. Why post anything online if you don't want other people
to run with it?

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/15.html#a9204 |
Comments

I've just removed Martin Schwimmerfrom my subscription list. Why? Because
he doesn't want his posts reprinted in Bloglines (and, I assume, in sites
like my link site).

The real trick here is: if you don't want your full posts reprinted
somewhere else, don't put them into RSS. That's one reason most commercial
sites don't include full content in their feeds.

I don't mind that Bloglines reprints my content and I don't mind that
anyone using an RSS News Aggregator looks at my content without seeing my
design or my navigation links or my email address or cell phone number.

If I did care, I'd switch my RSS feeds to only shove out partial content,
or I'd delete my RSS feed altogether.

Handango's Dirty Tricks

As much as PalmGear has been reviled by developers over the years, they
never tried this. Among the reasons I don't shop at Handango...

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3104

Msmobiles.com runs a story this morning that made me practically climbing
up the wall: "Handango does not allow a trial software to contain a link to
the developer's web site (e.g. for trial activation), and they want the
trial version to only provide a link to handango.com for purchase of the
full product. Links to the developer's website in the product activation
dialog are now forbidden."

50 Tips to Make Yourself Write

http://sfwa.org/writing/strategies.html

This is some good advice. My favorite is to pay yourself an hourly wage for
writing and pay for leisure activities (movies, eating out) exclusively out
of that fund. If you're not writing enough to pay for that movie out of
"writing money", you're not writing enough.

This just in: establishment still blind to change until it runs over them

I think the subject line pretty much sums up my take on this. Ignore the
future at your peril.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/01/15.html#a9208 |
Comments

ZDNet's David Berlind talks about how a Wall Street Journal reporter told
him that a source in the financial sector said that Web sites with content
in reverse-chronilogical order are insignificant and that podcasting is
nothing that anyone has to pay attention to.

Oh, he's right! How many readers a day do I have? A few thousand? Maybe
10,000 on a good day. Now, how many users of computers are there? Hundreds
of millions, right?

But that's totally missing the point. How many people does it take to
change the world? Not many. .NET was done by a handful of people. From what
I hear from Apple the iPod team was a handful of people. From what I hear
from my friends in politics change in massive policies usually happens due
to a handful of people. Ever watch the West Wing? They say it's pretty
close to how it's done.

I've seen what happens when Dave Winer and Adam Curry get together.
Podcasting happens.

So, it doesn't take too many people reading you to make some wild things
happen.

I am just wondering: who's next to change the world?

Working in someone else's business: been there, done that

Wired has a story on a Mac software developer that works out of a coffee
house, paying their "rent" for the office space by buying coffee. I'm
familiar with the tactic, as I'm typing this from a table at my local
Chipotle, where I can be seen most days that I'm writing.

http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,66276,00.html

Delicious Monster's cataloging software is a big hit, but the company works
out of a coffee house. Not only is it cheap, but the collegiate atmosphere
is an inspiration for turning obsessive catalogers into personal lending
libraries. Leander Kahney reports from San Francisco.

BostonHerald.com - the Edge: Readers turn new page with e-books

BostonHerald.com - the Edge: Readers turn new page with e-books: "Driving the demand for e-books is a drop in price and a wider selection, said Nick Bogaty, executive director of Open eBook Forum. Nearly all major publishers now offer electronic versions of new hardcover releases.
Plus, ``People are more comfortable reading on screens now than they were just five years ago,'' he said."

Duh.

Take Back The News

Take Back The News | A News Sharing Community

Pretty interesting experiment in grass roots journalism. Your news, your way.

Gaming: Eric Snider's Blackjack

I have a confession to make.

As a writer, I often find myself looking for a diversion, any diversion, to
avoid writing. It's a sickness, really. If I've got a deadline looming over
my head, I'll become fascinated with the texture of the desk, or try to
find what patterns work best with my optical mouse. Anything to avoid
actually writing.

So it's with mixed emotions that I've recently discovered Eric Snider's
Blackjack for Palm OS. This is a pretty good game, and thus a pretty good
way to waste time when I should be writing.

The game is really simple, especially if you've ever played the actual card
game. You're dealt two cards, and the dealer is dealt to cards. You can see
both of yours, but only one of the dealer's. The object is to take cards
until you get as close as possible to 21 in the combined value of your
cards without going over. Face cards are worth ten points, aces can be
either one or eleven. Whoever get's closer to 21 wins, but you lose
automatically if you hit 22 or more.

Easy, right?

Well there's a little strategy involved, and in playing this game, which
comes as close to the real thing as I think you can get on a Palm, I've
realized why I don't spend more time up in the casinos here in the
mountains of Colorado. About all I know about Blackjack strategy is not to
take the "insurance" offered if the dealer has an ace showing (and I
learned that from the excellent help system within this game) and to stand,
or stop taking cards, once you reach 17 or more. Even so, I've had good
runs and bad runs in the game. You start out with $1,000 in chips, and I've
both gone broke and doubled my money.

For you blackjack geeks out there, this game offers a lot of realism. You
can configure how many decks to put in the shoe and how deep to put the
yellow Shuffle card. This alters the odds of what will come up when.
There's a big difference in playing all the way through a single deck like
most of us have done with friends and playing 30% of the way into a six
deck shoe before reshuffling. In the latter example, there's almost no
limit to how many tens and face cards can pop up and bust your hand.

The betting system is really easy, just a matter of tapping on the chips in
front of you with your stylus to add to the bet, or tapping on the bet to
clear it and start fresh. You can buy in more chips whenever you want,
which is really my only problem with this game. I'd have preferred to be
able to set a limit on how much of "my" money I can gamble, just like I do
with real casinos. It's too easy to say, "hey, I'm only down two grand,
I'll just buy in again and win it back." And yes, the game keeps running
statistics, so you know how many blackjacks (being dealt 21 on your first
two cards, an automatic win that pays 3 to 2, or 150% of your bet) have
happened, your tally of wins and losses, and how much money you're up or
down.

The graphics on my Tapwave Zodiac are impressive, but not the best I've
seen. There was a blackjack game for the Pocket PC back a few years ago
that actually had photorealistic dealer's hands against a black background
dealing you cards. It gave the impression that you were in a dark room with
a real human dealer. This game looks more like a computer card game, which
it is. While it's not as snazzy as that Pocket PC game, I think the
gameplay is actually better, as you can see the shoe and how many cards are
left in it before the shuffle. This is a very easy game to play, but not so
easy to win. And untimately, for a casual gamer (like a writer avoiding a
deadline) that's the best kind.

I should point out for my writing readers that this isn't just about
avoiding deadlines. Games like this, which require a little thought, but
not too much (Bejeweled 2 in puzzle mode, for example) and can be played at
a leisurely pace are great ways to let your mind stretch and wander. I've
found that when I'm stuck on a story problem, it's when I'm doing things
like playing blackjack that my subconscious solves the problem and then
shoots it to the front of my mind in one of those "Eureka!" moments. So
give this game a try. It might just help you write.

Or not.

Check it out at http://www.sniderware.com

Movin' Out

I started thinking recently again about location. A friend of mine keeps talking about moving back to New York because there's no jobs for him here in Colorado. Another friend has just moved from Denver to Wichita, Kansas and is loving it (by the way, Josh and his wife just had a kid, so everyone give a shout out to my writing partner and his new daughter, Victoria!). And I, as I've stated in the past, am almost location independent. I live in Aurora, but what I do could really be done just about anywhere. And now that I know I wouldn't have to learn Spanish to move to Belize...

So I started wondering, if you have a job composed of "knowledge work", does it really matter where you live? The internet means you can work "alongside" people anywhere in the world. The open source movement proves that geographic distance between team members is no barrier to producing a top-notch product.

And if you don't need to live in a big city because you work there, why would anyone live there?

Don't get me wrong. I love NYC. It's one of my favorite places in the world... to visit. But even though my life is fast-paced, even though if left to my own schedule I go to sleep at 5am and wake up at 2pm, even though I can curse at cabbies and faster-than-light bike messengers with the best of them, I don't think I could ever live in New York. I'm an urban kind of guy, but ten million or so people is just too damn many.

We've seen one after another corporate exodus from major metro areas because they finally learned that they could spend less money on overhead in Boise than Boston. But what about the rest of us? When will knowledge workers start to migrate away from the big cities and into smaller towns where the rent is cheaper, the crime rate is lower and, one would think, the traffic is less maddening (though Josh will fight me on that one)?

(As a side note, there's a company out there somewhere that's figured out that when you factor in communications costs and language barriers, it's actually cheaper overall to outsource IT support to Oklahoma than India. Let's see more of that. I was born in Texas. I can understand Okie accents.)

Writing, Blogger's post-by-mail and PalmOS's stupid freaking clipboard

A little procedural, here.

The clipboard on PalmOS sucks. Even though my Zodiac doesn't have the blessing/curse 32k memos that the newer PalmOne units have, we're all stuck with a 1k clipboard! Agh!

So here's the problem I have and a workable, if inelegant, solution. I need a way to write, store and ultimately email my articles to my various blogs. My actual fiction I can write in Documents To Go since I can just send it as an attached Word document to fictionwise when it's ready for publication. But Blogger's blog by email feature can't extract text from a Word document into a post entry, I have to put my post in the email message body itself rather than an attachment.

Which is where the 1k stupid frickin' clipboard comes in.

Most of my stuff is well over 1k. That's about 175 words. I've been known to go over 175 words before I get to a topic sentence. I need a way to record my writing and get it into SnapperMail as an email message so I can frickin' post it.

I've tried every clipboard extender out there, and was quite fond of both ClipPro and CutPaste5, but neither can actually copy text out of Documents To Go, even if I have the "enable active text field" option turned on. So as much as I'd live to be able to write all my stuff in Documents To Go, I'm not copying over 1k at a time every time I post. That's just whacky.

I thought about writing in Slap and then either zapping it over to Snapper if it was done or into DTG if I needed to work more on it later, but DTG can't accept text from Slap, either. Come to think of it, this wouldn't have solved my problem anyway. Don't know what I was thinking.

So the only thing left is to write all my posts in SnapperMail from start to finish. But wait, there's a problem here, too.

You may remember my recent post about my email woes and the wonders of IMAP. This works great, and is still chugging strong, but there's a catch.

If I want to save an article as a draft and come back to it later I can, but it goes into SnapperMail's draft folder, not the draft folder of my IMAP account. That means that if I start an article here at Chipotle, save it as a draft and try to finish it in Outlook when I get home, I can't. It isn't in Outlook.

So I tried emailing incomplete drafts to myself, then forwarding them to the blog with additions. The problem there is that there's no way to turn off Snapper's line wrapping and I have to remove all those hard returns every time I do this.

And then it hit me. I'm an idiot.

I have something on my Palm that works with CutPaste5, allowing me to copy an entire article and paste it into SnapperMail. It also syncs with Outlook, allowing me to work on stuff on the Palm and on my desktop. What is this miracle application?

Memo Pad.

So that's it, then. I'm writing my articles in Memo Pad, good old Memo Pad, and then using CutPaste5 to move them into SnapperMail to post.

Ya know, when I started writing on PDAs back in 1997 the only tool available was Memo Pad, and I had to keep my writing in 4k segments. How far we've come.

AvantGo 6.0: the new browser is out!

I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but it sounds promising. And if it is as it sounds (did that make sense?), then we may have an answer to some of our frustrations with PalmOS web browsing as well.

From OSNews:

The brand new AvantGo version offers improved wireless synchronization; an integrated Internet browser; real-time searching of AvantGo channels; a redesigned user interface with tabbed navigation, customized channel layout and small-screen optimized navigation. Also, users will now be able to add and remove channels directly from their device.

Go get it at: http://avantgo.com/frontdoor/index.html

Update:

After doing a little fact-checking, it seems that OSNews doesn't quite have their facts straight. There is *no* AvantGo 6.0. Apparently there have been internal changes made to the service, not necessarily the browser. The browser version is 5.7 Build 35. Still, after AvantGo's reputation of being flaky, it might be worth another look.

The press release is here:
http://www.ianywhere.com/press_releases/ag_new_version.html

Then again, maybe I'll just save myself the headache and stick with Plucker. It works.

The Bloggers' Rights Blog

The Bloggers' Rights Blog

International Bloggers’ Bill of Rights

We, the inhabitants of the Blogosphere, do hereby proclaim that bloggers everywhere are entitled to the following basic rights:

FREEDOM TO BLOG.

FREEDOM FROM PERSECUTION AND RETALIATION BECAUSE OF OUR BLOGS:

1.) If an employer wishes to discipline an employee because of his/her blog, it must first establish clear-cut blogging policies and distribute these to all of its employees.
2.) Blogging employees shall be given warning before being disciplined because of their blogs.
3.) NO ONE shall be fired because of his/her blog, unless the employer can prove that the blogger did intentional damage to said employer through the blog.

Blogophobic companies, who violate the Bloggers’ Bill of Rights, will be blacklisted by millions of bloggers the world over.

Check this out, especially the list of companies that have fired employees for blogging.

New freeware util for Pocket PC

I just got this email and thought some of you might be interested.

Hi,
new freeware - psShutXP - turn off, display off and restart PDA

http://ppcsoft.narod.ru/english/

With psShutXP for Pocket PCs you can easily control power and display of
your PDA. Unlike other similar utilities psShutXP covers all power
functions:
*Soft Reset;
*Shutdown;
*Display switch Off/On (You can bind it to any hardware key);
*Password lock;
*You can also schedule all these functions using timer dialog;
*Icon in "Today" screen in the tray for quick access
*Microsoft Windows XP-style main dialog with gray background and shadow;
*Program is very small, only 35 Kb;
*look for and apply funny skins for psShutXP or create new one;
*for advanced users psShutXP has a hidden function: hard reset with double
confirmation;
Also we have special version for WM2003SE that supports VGA screen.

Power Users, Ready for a Refill

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Power Users, Ready for a Refill: "Every day, millions of people are finding themselves scurrying about in search of wells of electricity they can tap so their battery-powered mobile devices can remain mobile. Dependence is growing on laptops, cellular telephones, digital music players, digital cameras, camcorders, personal organizers, portable DVD players and the latest hand-held gaming devices - most of which operate on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries - and finding available electrical outlets away from home and office has become more urgent.

Starbucks and other establishments catering to wired customers appear to do little to discourage or regulate customers who plug in, either to work on AC power or charge up. In large part, the power seekers seem to negotiate their needs among themselves with cooperative grace, following a series of unspoken rules.

Chief among them, some say, is never to use more than half of the sockets in a wall outlet. If an outlet provides four sockets, electrical etiquette dictates that you can plug in, say, your laptop and your cellphone, but not the iPod, too."

Copyright enforcement gone too far

Eyewitness News 11.com: Young Prospective Artist Finds Herself in a 'No Sketch' Zone: "Julia Illana is a second grader who was visiting the popular exhibit there with her parents and was sketching the paintings in her notebook.

'I love to draw in my notebook,' Illana said.

Her sketch of Picasso's Woman with Bangs, which came out pretty good, and Matisse's Large Reclining Nude got the promising artist into trouble with museum security.

A museum guard told Julia's parents that sketching was prohibited because the great masterpieces are copyright protected, a concept that young Julia did not understand until her mother explained the term.

'If you wrote a book and someone saw that book and copied it,' Julia's mother said. 'Then people would think that that person was the one who wrote the book when you were the actual one.'

Actually, the museum guard was mistaken. There was no copyright issue, and the museum apologizes and is telling artists to sketch away as long as they do not interrupt the flow of traffic in the always crowded gallery."

Creative Commies

Gates holds forth on Red Menace of IP law reform | The Register: "It must be wonderfully simple inside Bill Gates' head. In the world outside the debate over patents and copyright may be raging, but at Bill Brain Central there's no need for reform, the system works fine and is becoming more popular, and the opposition consists of 'communists' threatening the American Way.

Bill added this little gem to the Microsoft High Command's collection of well-reasoned debating points (GPL is a cancer, it eats businesses, no, it eats whole economies, etc, etc) in an otherwise largely dull interview with CNET's Michael Kanellos. Asked what's driving the growing campaign for patent law reform, and whether he feels intellectual property laws need reforming, Gates responds:

'No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.'"

Speaking as someone who's licensing his own work under Creative Commons (I allow noncommercial derivative works), Gates couldn't be more wrong. But it doesn't surprise me that he doesn't get it. Microsoft's core problem since 1994 is that they didn't see the internet coming and they have repeatedly overlooked cultural effects of the internet.

Microsoft releases ActiveSync 3.8

Download details: Microsoft ActiveSync 3.8

Go get it if you use a Pocket PC.

But does he have a mouse?

Sci Fi Wire -- The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel: "A man awaiting trial for making bomb threats against a U.S. attorney is suing best-selling horror author Stephen King, Court TV reported. In a suit filed Dec. 27 in U.S. District Court, inmate James Richards asks for $10 million from the writer and his publisher for allegedly stealing the idea for the novel-turned-movie The Green Mile from him, the TV network reported. "

palmOne Update - Tungsten T2, New Treo, New Zires, More...

palmOne Update - Tungsten T2, New Treo, New Zires, More...

Bargain PDA has a pretty good rundown from CES on upcoming stuff from PalmOne. Worth a read.

PalmOne wins patent-infringement case | CNET News.com

PalmOne wins patent-infringement case | CNET News.com: "Handheld maker PalmOne said Thursday that a federal appeals court upheld a ruling that its products do not infringe on two NCR patents. In March 2001, NCR sued Palm and Handspring, alleging the companies infringed patents for a type of 'portable personal terminal.' NCR had been appealing a district court ruling that had sided with PalmOne, the company formed from the merger of Palm and Handspring."

Graffiti Anywhere

One of the things I really missed from my T3 when I switched to the Zodiac was the on-screen Graffiti. It's handy, being able to writ anywhere on the screen (think jotting things down while not looking at the PDA) and it lets you spread out the wear so you're not deforming just one spot of the digitizer. Actually, I've got this problem with my Zodiac, and had it with my Tungsten E and many PDAs before it. While I've gotten used to and even grown to like Graffiti 2 it's a pain to use because of the spurious strokes the digitizer thinks it sees going from the center to upper right of the
lowercase area. (I'll probably exercise my replacement plan to fix this.)

So when I saw that a new version of Graffiti Anywhere had been released, I decided to give it a try. I'd used it before on my Zodiac but eventually decided it wasn't worth the performance hit. It was hard to control and didn't provide very smooth character recognition.

Things have changed. The latest version of Graffiti anywhere is much smoother when drawing characters, resulting in more accurate recognition. I have it set to echo the strokes on screen so I can see what I'm writing, and I'm using a thick, easy to see ink line. The result is that it looks like I'm drawing on screen with a Sharpie, but the recognition is great.

The problem with on-screen writing, generally, is how the software determines whether you're tapping a checkbox or just dotting your I. I don't remember if the previous version supported the Press and Hold feature, but I've just recently discovered it and this makes Graffiti Anywhere dead simple to use and pretty much flawless, at least for left-handed Zodiac users, all three of us.

One of the activation methods in Graffiti Anywhere is Press and Hold, where on-screen writing is only enabled while one of the hardware buttons is held down. When the button is released, screen taps are again handled by the system. I have this mapped to the left trigger on the Zodiac, which in portrait orientation (far more comfortable for handwriting) puts the button under my right pinky. While I'm using the Zodiac, I can tap away like mad, but when I need to write something I just apply pressure with my pinky rather then opening the soft input area. I write what I need to write anywhere on screen and then release the button when I'm done. Simple, accurate and error-free.

Graffiti Anywhere is free and available at Palmgear.com. If your device doesn't already support on screen writing (T3, T5) I highly recommend checking it out.

Review of the Tungsten T 5

My review of the T5.

I am the friend that Jeff mentioned who changed from the C to the 5. It is not that I did not like the C. Far from that, the C was the longest running Palm I had had. It went the length of the country when I was in New York looking for work. I really enjoyed the wifi and the genuine operating of it. The damn thing was like the old Timex commerical. It took a licking and kept on ticking.

The biggest reason for my change was that I had my old phone crap out after two very heavy years of useage. I then went to my provider and got a brand new top of the line Motorola with Bluetooth. After a lot of "open and frank" discussion, I decided to take the plunge. I switched. So far, it has not been a disaster.

Let me explain my reasoning. I have found that the 5 is lighter than the C. Which helps after a long day of carrying the device and the keyboard on a belt. Bluetooth to my surprise and this is only an observation on my part, seems to download Email as fast as Wifi on the C. The internet browser is slower, but Blazer is superior to WebPro. The images are sharper and the interface works better with Versa Mail than with WebPro.

The 5 has been working well after Jeff and I worked out the kinks with it. This is more of my doing than the machine, I usually had the C full of all sorts of downloads. The majority of which I never used. When Jeff looked at the software he was surprised to find that a lot of software seemed to be cobalt influenced. This did cause a lot of "burps" with some of my old software. It wouldn't work with the 5. As soon as I learned that, if I wanted to use some software, I went directly to the developer's own website and downloaded the latest version. So far, I have had good luck. I was even able to use that infamous (according to Jeff) latest FranklinCovey software with the 5. No problems. Docs to Go sent me another patch and it has also worked with the 5. The lesson is if you are planning to use the 5, find the latest version of whatever program you are going to use and install that one. That being said, some of my software like SplashMoney works fine with the 5.

The screen is fantastic and I love being able to use the landscape with the new keyboard. Even better is when in landscape, I can plug the travel charger on one side and still continue to type. The application button is great, when you are in a rush. It can get you there when needed. I really like the contact section, especially with the bluetooth dial-up feature. I use to use Z launcher with the C. While there has been an update to it, I am remaining with the PalmOne version. Many of the features from the Z appear on the PalmOne original. As an example, you can touch the time and it will bring up battery useage, memory space, and brightness level (Jeff complains that mine is always too high, he thinks that it is like a flashlight.)

Are there some issues with the 5? "Well it ain't no ubergeek device". For all my ubergeek friends I met in Bryant Park in NYC, who carried three PDA's all with WiFi, bluetooth, and Klingon disrupters. One major reason I don't miss WiFi is that with the Bluetooth, I can check my email where ever my cellphone works. This has proven advantageous when arranging interviews with people. They were surprised to have someone respond as fast as I have. Plus Docs-to-Go and Mobile Docs have done a good job of keeping my resumes looking like the original.

Why did I tire of Wifi, having returned to Denver, I had the culture shock of wifi spots being miles apart, then at times, you wondered if the C would even connect. At T-Mobile most of the time it would. Other places, it was a crap shoot. Do I miss Wifi, then, well yes and no, I did and still do like the speed it would download the browser. I may breakdown and get the Wifi card later. But, I really am not that broken down to not use it anymore.

Some complaints of mine about the 5, I would have preferred to have the Docs-to-Go come with the Spell Check, though it now appears that the delete works on Docs to Go 7 and the 5. I wish that the 5 did have complete access to all of the 250 meg of memory. Come on you clowns, if TapWave can figure out how to do it, so can Palm One. I wish that VersaMail would sink better with Outlook, especially with the sent folder. Sometimes it will sync and other times it will not. Two other complaints, when reading email on VersaMail sometimes the down arrow will work with the keyboard and other times it will not. Either this is an OEM error or some software glich that needs to be fixed. (Come on Folks, remember TQM, Deming and his like, stop the beta test on the general public.)

Finally not with the 5 itself, while the new keyboard is ideal and I love it, the beta test boys and girls need to fix the glich that shuts off the board, causing me to either slide the board back and forth to turn it back on, or go to the keyboard shortcut on the Palm and screw around with it to get the board going. I believe this is a problem, since I noticed Jeff having similar issues with the Zodiac, ( by the way naming a PDA after the serial killer from San Francisco?).

Overall, I like the 5. It is not the ubergeek device I was hoping that PalmOne would come out with, but when dealing with PDA's, you are always dealing with compromises. You cannot expect these things to do everything.

So for Aaron, sent with a brand new and shiny T5.

FCC leaks details on the Tungsten E2

Dave's PDA Place - News: PalmOne Tungsten E2: FCC Approved: "From the FCC test documents we know the LCD will be 320x320 (not 320x480 like was rumored) and the display will have 18-bit Color. The sync connect will be different from the Tungsten E, but the same as the Treo 650 and Tungsten T5."

Pictures at Dave's PDA fromt he FCC page (which has since been taken down, for all the good that will do). The E2 looks almost identical to the E, with the new Multiconnector and Bluetooth being the only major changes. No word on how much memory it will sport, but there's no WiFi and it will almost certainly run PalmOS Garnet 5.4, just like the T5. It's probably safe money to expect it to use Flash memory as well.

Discussion Memes

I've been thinking a lot about discussions recently. Blogging is about starting conversations, and if you've read the Cluetrain Manifesto, you know that markets are conversations too. If you don't talk often and clearly with your audience or customers, they'll find someone who will.

The problem here is that I can't figure out the best way to get that conversation started and keep it going. Anything that encourages discussion on the web has to be easy to use, inviting, and simple to read and find out what others have said. There's lots of things out there that do this to some degree or another, but what's the best?

In rough order of complexity, we have:

Blog comments. If you run a blog, this is the easiest way to go. Nearly all blogging systems support comments, and for those that don't you can add them after the fact with something like HaloScan. If set up properly, blog comments are easy to post, easy to read, and very easy to see to what they refer. The problem with blog comments is that you have to be on the blog to see them, and once a post scrolls down the page to make way for new posts, comments drop off as fewer and fewer people see the commented post. And once you've posted a comment to a blog, there are few ways to see if anyone replied to you. Comments are really just that: comments. They're not all that conducive to conversation because there's no mechanism to keep that back-and-forth going.

Mailing lists. These usually take the form of a Yahoo Group or Google Group and they work fairly well for back-and-forth conversation. In fact, that's what mailing lists are for. The downside to mailing lists is that they can quickly diverge off topic and there's really no clear way for someone to jump in mid-stream and know what's going on. There's no strong connection to the original post that kicked off the discussion, even if, as I do, every blog post is also emailed to the list to start a new thread. Mailing lists also have a tendency to become very "clique-ish", with regular contributors making up the bulk of the traffic and, often inadvertently, making it uncomfortable for newcomers to speak up. I quite often see people subscribe to the Writing On Your Palm Yahoo Group and then unsubscribe two days later having never posted. So while mailing lists are great for creating a community, I'm not sure how well they work for focused conversations.

Online forums. More common on "news" sites like Brighthand and Tapland than blogs, online forums give people a discrete place to discuss specific topics. It's easy to see what people are talking about, and it's easy to jump in. But the structured nature of online forums makes them obviously less flexible than the other two options. While you can get email notification when someone responds to a thread in which you're interested, it's fairly uncommon to be able to read a forum comfortably on a mobile device. Reading and replying to discussion forums is a lengthy, sit-down activity and it can take quite a while to get caught up on an active forum. Does this requirement for extended focus make it harder to people to stick with a discussion?

If you were going to set up a web site where conversations with your readers were absolutely vital, how would you do it?

Apple doesn't get it

Apple suit foreshadows coming products | CNET News.com: "In the suit, Apple outlines the damage that leaks cause, noting that disclosures give competitors a head start and hurt the buzz created around its products. 'Unauthorized disclosures diminish the interest of both the mainstream and trade media in the launch of a new product,' Apple said.

Apple makes an effort in the lawsuit to say it is not trying to step on the First Amendment.

'By this action, Apple does not seek to discourage communication protected by the free-speech guarantees of the United States and California constitutions,' Apple said in the suit. 'These constitutionally protected freedoms, however, do not extend to defendants' unlawful practice of misappropriating and disseminating trade secrets acquired through the deliberate violation of known duties of confidentiality.'"

There's been a lot of buzz about this recently. Apple is suing a rumors site for disclosing information about the upcoming $500 monitor-less Mac and iWork, a new office suite with a word processor called Pages. It's worth noting that dePlume publications never signed any NDA with Apple and should be able to talk about whatever they want.

Now, it's obvious that Apple doesn't really want to take Think Secret to court. What they want is to threaten Nick dePlume with costly court costs and make him release the names of his sources, which Apple will then presumably kneecap.

But would they be doing this if David Pogue had broken this story for the New York Times? There's been a lot of talk about bloggers and other web site operators as "citizen journalists". Do bloggers have the same obligation to protect sources as professional journalists?

In the end, Apple's really only hurting themselves here. Not only have they lent authenticity to the rumors (there'd be no reason to protect trade secrets that aren't true), but they've forgotten that juicy rumors can help CREATE buzz for upcoming products. Did Doom 3 suffer from all the talk leading up to release? How about Half-Life 2? The Treo 650? Getting your customers excited is some of the best marketing you can do, and Apple is doing their level best to shoot themselves in the foot.

Users Don't Really Want Device Convergence: Study

Mobile Pipeline | Users Don't Really Want Device Convergence: Study: "The study and survey noted that device vendors obviously believe in the convergence of the two types of devices or they wouldn't be adding wireless connectivity to PDAs and PDA functions to phones, the study noted. But each form factor has its strengths and a survey run as part of the study found that users don't necessarily want convergence.

'PDAs stand out from phones in their input capability -- via keyboard or touch screen -- and personal information management (PIM) applications like calendar and contacts,' the report said. 'But only 6 percent of mobile phone owners say that a keyboard or pen input is important in their choice of phone, and only 10 percent say that PIM applications matter.'"

I've been saying this for years. PDAs and phones each have their own strengths and you don't necessarily get more by mashing the two together. That said, linking a good phone and a good PDA with Bluetooth is magic.

The more things change...

It just occurred to me that now that I'm "self-employed" and do a lot of information work, writing, blogging, podcasting, etc... I'm an office worker again. I may work from home, but and I get out when it's not so cold that my car superconducts, but really, I spend about 8-10 hours a day seated in front of my computer, just like when I worked in a cube farm...

Weird.

Cingular hits 3 megabit

Gizmodo : Cellphones Archives#cingular-test-hits-3-megabit-028839#cingular-test-hits-3-megabit-028839: "Lucent and Cingular completed a test today of some next generation cellular data technology that hit data rates of up to 3Mbps. The service, called High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), is built on the UMTS service that Cingular is slowing deploying in some markets and could possibly reach speeds as high as 14.4Mbps."

See and here I was impressed with EvDO. We'll see what the practicle speeds are before I'm really impressed though. This is the only real competitor for EvDO I see.

Fine, I'll do some predictions

I'd hoped to avoid this New Year chestnut, but everyone else (engadget,
Brighthand) is doing it and they're getting it wrong. So I figured I'd
throw a few things out there for 2005.

Windows Mobile 2005 will finally appear in devices 3Q, but no one will
care. The new version, code-named Magneto, will be announced at CES, but it
will still be in beta until late spring, then take a while for vendors to
tweak(break) it and release devices. It will sport a better version of
ActiveSync and slightly better Office applications (charting in Pocket
Excel, full screen in Pocket Internet Explorer), but not good enough to
matter. Windows Mobile is an increasingly obvious placeholder that
Microsoft doesn't really care about. It's just there to mark time until
UPCs become affordable and Windows XP can make the transition to mobiles.

UPCs will pick up steam, but only a little. Despite the fact that they
actually break Microsoft's spec for Windows XP Tablet PC Editon, these
almost pocket-sized devices are actually the right size for tablet PCs.
This boost in portability will make devices like the Sony VAIO U750p and
the OQO better sellers than previous tablet PCs, but they're still going
to be niche devices. $2000 is still too much to pay for what these machines
deliver.

RIM will surprise everyone by taking over the smartphone market. The new
7100 model is a scary good combination of touch-dialable phone keypad and
thumb keyboard. While I personally detest predictive text, the RIM "two
letters per key" keyboard is a neat innovation and the 260x240 screen is
plenty big enough for email, the only thing RIM is really good at. The
Blackberry line will not appeal to folks that use Treo 650s or iPAQ 6300s
as the computers they are, but it will further entrench with the business
market, patent or no patent.

PalmOne will stay the course, refusing to release Cobalt-based devices but
continuing to provide excellent PDAs for "normal" people. When confronted
by complaints about Monty Python and Benny Hill way back in the day, a BBC
exec said, "There are some people we want to offend." This attitude will
continue at PalmOne, who makes devices for everyday users while blatantly
ignoring the gadget geek market. Their sales will continue to grow in spite
of sniping by the geek press.

HP will release a UPC, after which they're going to start neglecting the
iPAQ line. This will probably be late in the year, for the holiday market.
This will resemble the iPAQ 4700, but run Windows XP and sport a 40GB hard
drive. It will probably be a better device than Sony or OQO's models, and
will be the darling of the holiday season. The "many sizes fit none" iPAQ
market will start to shrink noticeably as device after device is quietly
discontinued.

Someone will release a portable video recorder based on either Windows
Mobile or PalmOS. Geeks will flock to this hard drive based device in
droves.

Samsung will release a PalmOS Cobalt smartphone in 1Q. Hopefully this will
finally put an end to the "Cobalt is vaporware" smack.

PalmSource will make a serious move for the "feature phone" market. While
everyone's looking at PalmOS for Linux, PalmSource will quietly ink deals
with carriers to use less powerful phones with the PalmOS user interface
and basic PIM applications. While these devices will not be able to run
third party PalmOS applications, they will provide the basic functionality
of say, a Zire 31, on phones in the same price ranges as today's camera
phones. In retrospect, this will be seen as the rebirth of PalmOS.

Tapwave will continue quietly making smaller, lighter, better game consoles
than the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. Let's face it, they're bricks and can't
play as many games as the Zodiac. Tapwave is an excellent candidate to
build the PalmOS-based PVR, by the way.

We won't see any PalmOS for Linux devices in 2005, but '06 is going to be a
transformational year for mobile tech. More later.

IMAP is the shizzle, yo

I wrote a few days about about how my email solutions kept falling just
short of perfection. With a little help from those of you out there in the
blogosphere, I think I've finally hit the jackpot.

My solution is a little unconventional because, well, I'm still broke.
While I should have lots of money later this month, right now I can't swing
FastMail's highest level of service. I'll get there. But what I have now
(for free, or at least using stuff I already have) is working pretty well.

The first thing I did was redirect my jeff@writingonyourpalm.net address
from GMail to FastMail. Thanks to folks on the blog (and counter to
FastMail's own help documentation), I configured Outlook 2000 to use IMAP.
I then set up SnapperMail to do the same.

Now I had two problems with this initially. One was that I get about 10,000
spams a month, and FastMail's spam blocking for their free accounts is
pretty weak. A ton of spam kept coming through. I get a lot of legit email
as well, but it's probably 1% or less of my total mail traffic. I needed a
better filter.

As it turns out, I already had it, but hadn't thought about it because I
was still "thinking in POP". I have SpamBayes for Outlook, an excellent
trainable Bayesian filter. It does an increasingly good job the more "ham
and spam" it sees. I had it trained for my old PST file, so all I had to do
was tell it to monitor my IMAP inbox as well. Spam is dumped into my "Junk
Mail" folder on FastMail and marked as read. Suspicious but borderline
messages are also sent to Junk Mail, but kept unread to make them easier to
spot. These message moves are updated on the server due to the magic of
IMAP. Every so often I scan through the messages in Junk Mail and then
select all and delete. I generally don't bother to purge deleted messages,
though, since this is a minor pain in Outlook 2000.

I have SnapperMail set up to automatically purge deleted messages when it
connects to each folder. It also picks up the updated location of spam, and
I have it set to download the first 12k of all messages EXCEPT the Junk
Mail folder, where I just download headers. Why bother downloading message
bodies I'm probably just going to delete?

So the end result is that as long as my PC stays on (and conencted to my
cable modem), my PC does my spam filtering for me and updates the server
accordingly. When I check my email with SnapperMail, I rarely see any spam
in my inbox. Neat!

My other problem was capacity. Spam aside, I get a lot of mail. I was
already up to 230MB on GMail after six months of use. FastMail's free
service only allows 10MB of storage. How was I going to work around that?

As it turns out, this problem solved itself. One of the things I'd decided
to do anyway in the spirit of GTD was to handle email only once. That was
the whole point of the IMAP exercise. In this vein, it also makes sense to
delete most of the legitimate emails I get unless there's a reason to hang
on to them after I get done processing them. Once I reply to a mailing list
message (or read it and decide no reply is necessary), I can delete it
rather than filing it. If I ever need it again, it's in the message list
archive. Google means never having to keep a local copy.

So when a new message comes in, whether I'm in Outlook or SnapperMail, I
read it and then ask myself what, if anything, I need to do about it. If
the answer is nothing and it's mailing list traffic, I delete it. If it's
sent directly to me, I move it to my "Filed" folder. If it needs a quick
reply, I reply and then either delete or file. If it needs a lengthy reply,
I move it to the "Respond" folder with other things with which I need to
deal.

After a few days of doing this, my storage commit on FastMail is 176k.
That's it. I'll almost certainly upgrade later, but I've proven that
prudent processing can keep my inbox empty, my mind clear and I can get to
my email anytime, anywhere, and never have to deal with the same message
twice.

It's the little things...

I was having one of those days again. Those days when it seems like
technology is revolting against me, things just refusing to fall
quite into place.

Then I went to refill my cup of iced tea at my "office" (my local Chipotle,
a cat-free zone where I can actually write without interruption). They're
out of tea. No Alanis, it's not ironic, but it's damn aggravating. I fill
up the cup with Coke, which is unusually fizzy today. Then I notice the
lemons. On a whim, I grab a lemon wedge and squeeze it into the Coke. Not
only does my Coke now have a subtle citrus zing, but the lemon juice
completely dissipated the foam, letting me top off the cup and get back to
work quicker.

Really nothing in the grand scheme of things, but it made my day a little
better.

The search for mobile email nirvana continues...

As many of you know, I'm trying to stick with Life Balance and David
Allen's Getting Things Done principles this year. A big part of that is
only having to deal with things once, unless you really like dealing with
them. In that spirit, I've tried to streamline my email handling, but it's
not going very well.

Let me explain my ideal, then we'll look at what doesn't work. Ideally,
I'll have just six email folders: Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Outbox, Filed and
Respond. When mail comes in, either on my handheld or at my desktop, I can
read it and then either respond to it immediately, move it to Filed if it
doesn't require any action from me or move it to Respond if it needs more
than two minutes or so of activity. No matter where I process my email, the
changes I make are reflected everywhere: if I move an email to Filed on the
handheld, it should already be in Filed when I sit down at my desktop
again. This would let me keep things out of Inbox and have one place to go
to find email I still need to do something about. It would also give me
easy archival reference to informational, filed email.

The first thing that popped into my head when thinking about this was to
ditch SnapperMail and sync VersaMail with Outlook. Why? Unlike SnapperMail,
you can sync VersaMail with Outlook, and you can also move a message to
another folder from within the message. SnapperMail has no in-message move
command, so I have to read everything, then go back through the list again
to file stuff. Ick. Outlook also supports moving messages while you read,
and can sync multiple folders with VersaMail.

But it's not that simple. Messages I downloaded with VersaMail not only
didn't sync down to the desktop, but they were actually removed from
the handheld by the sync conduit because they didn't exist on the desktop!
And to make matters worse, Outlook refused to redownload anything VersaMail
had already touched. Upon reading the fine print in VersaMail, I find that
folder support really only works with IMAP accounts, and isn't really meant
to sync POP mail between the handheld and desktop. My version of Outlook
(2000, the last that didn't require activation) doesn't support IMAP.

I might have an Outlook XP CD lying around somewhere, though, and IMAP
really looks like what I want: folder support synced across multiple
clients. But again, there's a catch.

I have an accound with FastMail.fm, they run a pretty good IMAP server. The
catch is that the spam filter is weak (I get about 10,000 spams a month,
and no, that's not a typo) and they don't have enough storage space for me.
One of the things I really liked about moving from GMail to Outlook is that
I can already see myself outgrowing the 1GB of space I get with GMail. I'm
at 23% right now (just over 230MB) and I've only been using GMail since
July. At this rate, I'll hit the limit in the summer of '06. I need
something more scalable, and FastMail is less, not more.

So no matter how I slice it, I have problems. Right now I've gone back to
using GMail's web interface and SnapperMail on the PDA, but it's far from
ideal. VersaMail 2.5 doesn't have Snapper's server flexibility and archival
features. SnapperMail doesn't have VersaMail's ability to file messages
while reading them. GMail doesn't provide IMAP support or sufficient space.
My version of Outlook doesn't support IMAP for folder sync with the
handheld. And FastMail doesn't provide enough storage to "park" all of my
email there.

I'm I just doomed to inefficient email?