My gadgets and gizmoes

the stuff that makes life easier

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Welcome

to my lttle corner on the net. This is my latest presence on the net, the former being:

Here I will try to share my thoughts atound my different gadgets I surround myself with, to make life a little easier.
The one rule for posting that I have, is that it is done from my Smartphone. The Qtek 9100. Additional proof reading on a regular comp will of course occour.
Feel free to comment this post with wievs on the nature of this post, and questions you expect an answer to, as this will be monitored on a dayly basis. Corrections to my english spelling and grammar is also appreciated.

Some planned posts:
- Widgets
- External Hard Disc
- World of Warcraft. Not a gadget I know, but I will have to.

THX for visiting. Hope you will enjoy your stay

My web presence II

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.

My web presence

So, I have been updating my web presence a little bit the latest days.
My homepage (in Norwegian) has got a brand new engine from Wordpress. A very excellent blogging tool wich will simplify the work I have to do there a lot. Another great tool from the open source community. It was very easy to set up, I could do it, and it works very well "out of the box".
There are a ton of great templates to play with as well. So my next job will be to set up one that suits my needs/taste. But the default one will do for now.

A subdomain


I have also set up a subdomain for a temporary website, dedicated to a schooltrip for my son. This will be done quick and dirty with xxx (my memory fails me, must be the age) A simple tool for simple websites, that almost everyone can use, without the knowledge of any HTMl or databases.

That's it for now, will need some editing I see

An alternative to Adobe reader

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.

World of Warcraft

I', gonna write a little on this topic here, come back a little later, in the meantime you can read this article over at Gamasutra.com to find out more about this coming topic.

Why everyone should have a USB memory stick

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 :-)

A much simpler gadget

The beauty of the Qtek is that it does a lot of things rather well.That is a good gadget of it's kind, but there is another kind that is just as handy.
The gadtget that does only one thing, but remarkably well. One such gadget is a little program callet: BurnAtOnce www.burnatonce.com This program burns CD's and DVD'S from disc images like *.iso and others. It can also make such images from discs, and apart from a few functions, that I ever use, that's about it. Excellent.
It does this with a very small footprint(size here), it runs on all Windows OS'es that I care to know anything about, supports all the hardware you can imagine, and then some, and it is remarkably easy to use.
That is the kind of software we want
  • software that works,
  • software that does what it's supposed to and nothing more. And
  • software that don't fill up our hard disks with all kind of crap we don't need

like BurnAtOnce and Opera. Even though Opera tends to grow out of this segment, and

as opposed to megabloaths like:
Adobe reader. Why do my brand new computer with overpowered hardware for my gaming thrills grind to a halt when I click on a link in IE. Why can't Adobe make their plug-in work like a plug-in. Cause that's what it is.
A PLUG-IN get that in to your corporate marketing butthead of yours.

And here is a promise: I will not mention Adobe again but for only two reasons:
  1. Adobe starts making simple to use, small footprint programs, or
  2. I have come up with alternatives

If number 1 ever happens, I will also eat my Qtek. So until I find the next gadget.

So long

My newest gadget

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?

Moved to Opera.

This is more or less a move to Opera announcement. This meaning I stumbled over this opportunity to blog on testing out the latest Opera 8.5 browser.
Nothing wrong with Blogger but as I allways tend to go with the underdog, moving from the ever expanding Google empire to little Opera seemed like a, if not wise, but at least a sound decision.
Opera being based in Norway as well as me are also a reason to make this move, even if Opera is more or less international at the moment.

My games

Finally, a list of all my games. I really don't think it's fully complete, but I will work on it.

  • Need for Speed - Road Challenge
  • Half Life, Generation
    • Half Life
    • Opposing force
    • Counter Strike
    • Blue Shift
  • Clive Barker's Undying
  • Close Combat
  • Close Combat - A Bridge Too Far
  • Close Combat - Battle of the Bulge
  • Grim Fandango
  • WarCraft III
  • Age of Kings + Conqourers Exp.
  • Age of Mythology + Titans Exp.
  • Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance
  • Army Men - Air Attack
  • Army Men - In Space
  • Army Men - Operation Meltdown
  • Sim City 2000
  • StarCraft + Brood War
  • Worms - World Party
  • Enemy Engaged - Commanche vs Hokum
  • Myst
  • Riven
  • Zork 1, 2 and 3
  • Zork, the Grand Inquisitor
  • Red Alert
  • Civilization 2
  • Quake 2
  • Doom 1 and 2
  • Aquanox
  • Hidden and Dangerous
  • Homeworld 2
  • Unreal Tournament 2004 DVD SE
  • World of Warcraft

Now playing

  • World of Warcraft, way to much
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