Trampled Underfoot

It's been a month since I blogged here due to some changes in my career and life in general, but things are well and the future is so bright.

A few weeks ago, Manila was battered Typhoon Milenyo and a lot of infrastructure was affected, not to mention life and damage to property. There was no electricity for days and the phone lines were damaged, affecting my dsl as well. Fortunately, the mobile phone network wasn't affected much and was already available a few hours after the typhoon passed.

So basically, I was out of touch from the rest of the world via conventional means. I still have my Nokia E61 though on a 3G network, so it wasn't so bad, altough it was pricey but I needed the connectivity while my line was dead. My laptop battery already died and since I didn't have power yet, I could not charge it. The E61 was my only hope.

I never really used Opera Mobile before, since I didn't think I needed it, and Opera Mini was good enough for basic surfing. But now I needed a real web browser to do my work online (some forms and stuff), so I decided to download Opera Mobile and see if I could replicate my desktop browser requirements.

It sure did made wonders especially with the E61's QWERTY keyboard and big screen. I was able to cut my 3G surfing time by almost half because I didn't have to struggle with the limitation that sometimes hampered by SSR. I managed to do all my online work because I had access to a full browser in my mobile phone!

In short, Opera Mobile became my hero.

Unfortunately, Opera Mobile is not free but I still have 26 days to enjoy it. After that I will have to think if I should purchase it. Considering the high exchange rate of the Peso against the US dollar, I will have to start saving a part of my salary to purchase it next month.

After waiting for a few days for it to be delivered, it is finally in my hands! Unfortunately, the DS is with my brother so I haven't tested it yet, but will do so this weekend.

Oh joy!

I just read a good preview of the DS browser from organicchunkysalsa and from the looks of it, the browser would be part of my "must-buy" DS items when it comes out. At home, we have very limited space and we don't have the budget for a new laptop so having the DS connected online would be great for my wife and to my daughter even. I think it would be a great way to introduce the Internet to my 4 year old daughter and she's already well-versed on how to use the DS so it shouldn't be an issue for her.

Come to think of it, I didn't have access to such technologies when I was at her age!

There was also some weird feedback on having Opera easily installable in Ubuntu via a partnership with Canonical Ltd. While I'm all for free software, I'm also for end-user choice. Choice is one of the essential cornerstones of freedom so anything that tries to curb choice tries to lessen our freedom.

I could say that Opera is one of the few non-free applications that I like using and hope for the day when it truly becomes free. But for now, I'm still enjoying it despite its non-free nature.

It seems I couldn't install the latest version of Opera in the upcoming Ubuntu 6.06 release. Even if I download the static deb, then trying to install it with gedebi, I still get a dependency error on xlibs and xlibgc6, both of which I could not find in the archives. So that's the reason why I haven't been using Opera in Ubuntu 6.06 yet.