My gadgets and gizmoes

Added a newer template with a lot of possibilities and made my own style for my Wordpress blog. Take a look at www.riktig.no to see the result. All images are taken by me and collected from my Flickr account.

Flickr

is an excellent tool for storing and sharing of photographs. I have seen it metioned several times, but haven't gotten around to testing it out until now. The pictures are presented in several ways and sizes, and you can upload as much as 100MB per month.
There are possibilities of albums, tags and descriptions for them, and they can be displayed on your homepage through a really easy tool called Badge.
I can now illustrate my homepage with dynamic images from a big album, so the site will newer become boring.
And my images will be available to me from anywhere, as long as I have an Internett connection
There is even more. With a little java programme on my cell phone I can even upload images from my cell phone. Check out www.shoZu.com after establishing your Flickr account.

So, I once promised to never write about Adobe reader again, unless...
and now I have come up with an alternative, wich means I do not have reason to eat my Qtek.

Foxit Reader

And the alternative is: FoxitReader, from www.foxitsoftware.com
A pdfWiever so small in installation I can run it from my USB memory stick. There are several versions available and they are FREE. So now I have installed this on my computer and ditched the Adobe version all together, and I feel very releaved.
As Flash- and Shockwave players are now under the Adobe umbrella, wich doesn't promise very well, it's probably time to look around for alternatives to these as well.
Feel free to drop a comment here if you come by one.

What's on my USB drive
My USB drive, a Corsair Flash Voyager, 1GB in size and one of fastest around. I'll admit, this is my second thumb drive. I grew out of the old 256MB one. It still finds it's way into my pocket though.
It wasn't until I got the 1GB one I was able to put it to good use. Sooo, what's there? Well there are:
Programs
Thanks to open source a lot of resourceful people are doing a job of making programs runable from such a thumb drive. On this drive of mine I have a Firefox browser (Link to be added), an e-mail client (Link to be added) Open Office, a web editing suite, FTP-client and a lot more.
This way, I can have all my bookmaks in one place, all my e-mail accoounts ready to check, all my FTP sites readily configured. And all in one tiny little device that's easy to bring everywhere.
Why I even bother to hurl a laptop around, I'm beginning to wonder? I'll let you know if I ditch it.
Documents
All my workload is there as well. If I need a file, it's there. Not at home, not at work and not on my laptop wich I left the place I' not at.
As well as the patches for my faovorite games, installation files for my virus, spyware and other tools.
The future
In the future I might make it bootable, but first I must feel the need to.
PS: I will add a list of all programs with links at a later date. Not far off :-)

My history with PDA's

I have been through my share of PDA's and when I got my first one, a Palm IIIx, my wish was for my cell phone and PDA to be able to talk to each other. This was accomplished at a later date with my Palm m125. Still only by infrared, but it did work, and I was able to check e-mail on the go. But it still lacked in usability, and it was still two pieces of hardware.

Enter the Smartphone

A few years ago the Smartphone arrived on the market. There was hope but the devices were expensive, big and slow. So we took the timeout to let the technology mature a little, and save up for a good device as soon as it shows up.

Qtek 9100

When I finally had the money to get one of these babies, the Qtek seemed the best choise. The size seemed about right. There is a fold-keyboard that works reasonably well for larger chunks of text, like this, and is out of the way when you don't need it.

Pros and cons

Pros

-Size. The size is reasonable, and I do not have to carry two pieces of hardware anymore.
-Connectivity. This little baby have WiFi, Bluetooth and Edge GPRS. The GSM phone is triple band. All this means I am connected at all times and most places in the world.
-Comatibility. With pocket Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint I can swap files between my devices without worries of compatibility.Not a big issue on my old Palm, but not as smooth.
-Versatility. I can use this device for a lot of things:
-MP3 player. That's actually one more device to not hurl around
-Gaming device
-Checking e-mail
-Surfing the net
-Chatting on MSN
-Telephone
-Image wiever
-Video
-Reading, e-books, documents and Internett

Cons

-Size. It is a bit bulky, compared to a phone.
-Syncronizing. Seems to be issues with syncronizing. Compared to the Palm where sync was a no hazzle, this is cumbersome, as I regularily get the message that syncronisation was not possible.
-Slow. It's a bit slow, and using it as a phone is not as easy as a regular phone. Seems there are some tweaks to do to speed it up. Will look into that.
-What's with this, not quitting programs when you quit the programs issue on Windows Mobile. I can't understand this at all why there is no choise between these options, and the mechanics to turn them all off is also to well hidden.
-Storage, is a little teeny out of the box, but nothing that a 1Gig miniSD card won't fix. It did cost a little extra though.
-Compatibility. Yes, it seems hard to find programs that run on WM 5.0
-Language. The OS comes in Norwegian, but the norwegian version do not have hand writing recognition. NOT GOOD. Actually, had I known this I would have bought an English OS version.

Conclusion:

All in all, this is a very good device, it does all it promises to do and then some. It does not quite replace the laptop, but it substitutes it a long way. I guess I have to wait another generation of these phones, for all quirks to be ironed out. I will be a very happy user of this device for a long time to go. What to wish for now?