My Treo has a silver stylus built into the body, which i rarely use, although I am happy that it’s there.

Many of the flip-style phones feature a short, retractable antenna.

Honestly, I’m no special genius, and am sure that I can’t be the only person who has wondered why cell phones don’t come with a retractable earbud and throat mike by default. I mean really!

It wouldn’t add appreciable bulk or cost to nearly any phone.

The hordes of one-handed drivers we share the roads with would vanish overnight. You, of course, would never, ever speak into your handset while driving, gentle reader.

And me? I wouldn’t have a new rat’s nest of cable in my pocket to thumbwrestle with daily.

Cell phones: evil or loathsome? Tune in tonight!

Treo 650 buyers qualify for a free 128mb SD card.

Wow! I haven’t missed a day for a couple of years!

Today’s Treo update:

I installed Ringo, a ringtone manager which looks to be based on the Apple-store model of app. The default tone-selection methodology is to direct you to a store to purchase tone. Since I hate that business model with a burning passion, I deleted the app immeditaely.

I’m experimenting with another electric pocket utility, Busker, which is an MP3 player that includes podcast support. I imagine I’ll be looking at other players but it’s clear to me that podcast support is the single feature I really want.

I have also put Butler on the phone, which looks very promising indeed. It offers up to 60 day-configurable repeating or non-repeating alarms, 2 more than my beloved (and sadly mourned) BigClock, as well as a host of other little reminder-oriented features.

Finally, I’ll be experimenting with both ToySoft’s mp3Ringer and MotionApps’ mRing. Both apps advertise the ability to set ringtones based on mp3s and other media-stoage file formats.

UPDATE: both apps disqualifed themselves on initial launch. One required non-standard phone-answering behavior, so it’s gone. The other required Pocket Tunes; the ring manager I want has to be standalone. Onward!

After all, even if all the Palm Pilots stop, the cellphones will still all play Jason Webley tunes.

My question about AvantGo led to someone pointing me at moblierss. I believe it’s a different app than a previous feed reader I tried out.

Now I gotta hit the books again to see how you point things at AvantGo.

The light his morning reminds me of dawn in early summer. Looking out the front window, I see that the floral buds on the tulip tree in our courtyard have erupted overnight, and as the morning light hits them, they are toning the courtyard – and my livingroom – a pale, deep pink. The flowers are acting like a cumulus cloud in the sky at dawn or sunset.

Florent Pillet’s iTreo offers photo-sync for the Mac-based Treo user, and his Sync Buddy looks like it will serve that portionof the market that is resistant to the Missing Sync’s price point, while also oferring a few fewer features.

Regarding audio recording, I downloaded both the Palm-oriented Audacity (not to be confused with the opensource project of the same name) and SoundRec. Audacity costs $99 and requires a PC-based installation and setup, which I could probably hack through, but: meh. SoundRec looked promising, but the project hasn’t been updated since Summer ’04 and required some sort of tweak to enable the Treo 600, so I was unsurprised when it refused to record to the Treo’s SD card and then errored out after a minute thirty when recording to the internal memory of the Treo.

I’ve dropped a line to the PAR developer, and hope to hear more soon.

Regarding the Nokia Series 6 apps, I removed Natural Recorder from Viv’s phone for now. I had a nice exchange of emails with the CTO of the company selling the app, and he confirmed that there is no way to turn off the recording in the current release – it’s a feature, he said, more or less. If you look at the marketing for the product, you can see that he is quite serious.

He did confirm that they intend to add an on-off feature in a future release, but that no release date is set. I understand this; the product was only released in January, if I recall correctly, so the company doesn’t even know if they are going to be in the ballpark on sales.

Finally, the Mac forum at MyTreo.net has been quite helpful.

This MacOSXHints entry proved helpful this evening: macosxhints – Copy Address Book contacts to a Nokia 6620.

Boy, my brain hurts. Remind me not to dive into two new OSes on new hardware in a deadline again, mmkay?

The good news is that everything seems to be going as well as could possibly be expected.

UPDATE: The Treo mostly synced but then a) quit part way through the first sync and b) refused to sync again. Markspace says to try the beta.

This may also prove helpful.

Mother of god, am I an inadvertent early adopter?

Haven’t fixed a one of the other blogs’ commenting yet!

I’ll pick one to do tonight, I think.

Last night and much of today was devoted to a research frenzy on my chestnut of a topic, cell phones. I presented the problem, albeit with much greater specificity, in May of last year to the same venue with slightly differing results.

The upshot of all this is that I am pretty settled on a Treo 650, with the intent of installing one of several voice-recording software apps on the thing in order to allow an all-in-one replacement for my microcassette recorder, Palm PDA, and recording adapter. The apps under consideration include SoundRec, Audacity, and PAR.

(UPDATE: The preceding may be in error.)

My intended workflow is to record phone interviews to the Treo’s SD card. I have SD cards already, for camera use, and so can experiment with the approach before forking out for a large-capacity card.

In discussing this with Viv, I realized that our cell-use pattern is very likely to change when we have two cells in the house, and that therefore it makes sense to set up the new plan as a family plan, so that we can call each other without using time. Viv currently invests about $20 a month, so I can simply add that to my plan estimate. In the end, it does look as though Cingular has plans that will work well for us and our price point.

The problems come in when I try to think about how else I might use the device. It lacks wifi, for example, forcing me to rely on subscription data-access at Cingular, which had pricing that made me quite unhappy enough to simply not consider using the feature. Things got more ridiculous when I tried to set up a Family plan with two different phone models, as Viv doesn’t need or want the Treo.

“Cain’t get thar fum heah,” the pixels on my screen told me. I was unable to reach a Real Person (TM) even at the neighborhood Cingular store to check if the 650 is in stock or if it’s possible to get two different phones.

I did reach a real person at Fry’s, and he told me they only have the Sprint 650s, and that obtaining an unlocked 650 can only be done over the internet. I looked at Sprint’s pricing, and it’s crazy.

So as usual, I find myself nearly ready to cell out, but stymied by the bewildering pricing plans and purchasing decisions. I have a secret weapon, though. I know where all the PalmOne stores in the US are. If a plan makes sense, I don’t have to rely on the hardware the carrier provides.

That said, I doubt that I’m going to geek out about locked v. unlocked cells; I mean, last night, as I went to bed, I had only the vaguest idea what the hell the term even meant. Convenience and immediacy, given the specific hardware, will surely rule in this instance.

—

Viv and I traipsed about the town today. My vintage car coat is coming undone, so I’m looking for a new one; a couple of weeks ago, I lost my beloved ninteen-sixties Pendelton wool fedora, and my ten-year-old glasses are falling apart. So I dealt with this by clawing through bins of the eyeglasses of what I have always assumed to be the recently dead, pawing though coats intended for sale to the indigent, and conducting a whistlestop tour of the vintage-merchant precincts of Fremont. No promising hats or eyeglasses were found. A fine specimen of car coat was fitted for me from the always-pristine stock at Private Screening, but alas, it proved too small.

—

Right, so: the Oscars are on, and my Oscars feature intended for the mag got cut. So I don’t have to sweat bullets about getting things wrong, although I’m gonna be a little chafed about cutting the tie-in to Dr. John Dee’s stolen crystal ball. I made as many jokes as I could in 200 words concerning the words “ball,” “stone,” and “crystal,” considered in the light of a piece purporting to predict the Oscars.

Are we done here? Am I caught up? No? I have to cook the salmon? OK.

Sleep tight, my sleep-deprived beauties. The world is in fact accelerating, and yes, its’ goal is to sell you more crap faster! Buy in good faith.

Alright, closing in here. Christ, my whole frickin’ day has been wasted. The problem with flood-control denied comments stemmed from one of the layers of sparmor. It requires the comment to be funnelled through a preview before it will be accepted.

Argh. I looked at one of the plugins, and found it was easy to install on my main blogsite, but relies on an update to the stored comments templates that I have not applied to any of the additional blogs. So now I need to review the comment templates on the old blogs for design idiosyncrasies. What a pain!

UPDATE: Nice! It’s now 2:30. I think everything is in place. Christ, I sure don’t want to have to screw around with mod_security stuff at the apache level.

Would-be commenters, please email me if you get a big fat denied or 404. Meanwhile, I need to see a man about a horse.

I receieved a succinct email from the proprietor of daymented.com, to wit: “why??”

She’d attempted to comment on one or another of my recent posts but alas, I, acting in my primary occupational capacity of distracted halfwit, had closed the comments along with the trackbacks the other day.

Comments are once again open but moderated. Talk amongst yourselves. My sincere apologies.

UPDATE: um, never mind. For now. The second I opened comments, the spambot pinned my CPU again. That was about an hour ago, and it took that long to wait for the lag in processing the few clicks needed to pull mt-comments.cgi out of the directory.

Unfortunately, I have Things To Do to day and so I shan’t be implementing yet another layer of comment-spam security just this second. Comments are brute-force disabled for now, so sorry for the inconvenience.

Damn I wish MT had just built the stupid local white-listing feature instead of the dumbass centralized key-ID system. It looks as though it builds value, but in the long-term, central user-IDs actually build liability.