How does the Loox look?
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on January 25, 2005
It’s just a word joke, but now that a Fujitsu Siemens Pocket Loox 720 is in my hands I can give an answer to that question: the Look rocks, definitely! 🙂
It was a while I was examining the latest VGA Pocket PC models for the next purchase and when I read about the Loox 720 and its exceptional overall features in various reviews I decided that was the one I had to get although the wallet wouldn’t have agreed as much as the will.
“What a display!” has been the recurring first exclamation when I showed it to friends last week, but from the best VGA LCD on the market to the loudspeaker positioned on the front side there are a lot of killer features inside this limousine among current PDAs.
I got it from Clove Technology, and they were kind to check for any dead pixels on the LCD before shipping it. The italian version should be available in february from Trilogy, although I really hope to see more stuff and accessories for the Loox from this new italian shop soon enough.
In fact the first thing I’m going to add is a screen protector to safeguard such a punch in the eyes! 😉
Then a nice case, and then who knows, surely any useful software optimized for VGA. I’ll write more about the Loox, but the first impression I got is that VGA is the future. I purchased my first Pocket PC to be able to increase productivity, being able to read documents away from the PC, so now with 4x times the resolution of a QVGA Pocket PC you can imagine my joy in reading docs on the Loox! 
Of course I’ve already installed the useful GAPI speed up driver hack by Picard and SE_VGA which is invaluable when using PIE to browse the Internet.
I’ve already did some experiments with the VGA Emulator in the past months, but the impact of seeing such an amount of pixels on a real 3.6-inch LCD is a completely different thing.
I’ve no more excuses to not work on a VGA version of Ecpc. Actually Ecpc, as any other software designed for a QVGA display, does look too much blocky due to pixel doubling routines. Adding detail is a lot more fun, easier and in the end rewarding than removing it to adapt the interface of Ecpc to the smaller Smartphone display, for example. 😉
Il Sole and his Planiverso
Just before Christmas I decided to make myself a special gift, obviously ignoring what would have happened a few days later in South East Asia.
I became a member of Il Sole, a charity organization active with distance adoption and abused women recovery programs in countries such as Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and India.
Thanks to my Uncles who are members since a long time I had the pleasure to get in touch with this organization a bit at a time and to appreciate the work and the outstanding results of its staff and the genuine dedication of his president and founder Olivia Piro.
So in the end this appreciation naturally turned into my decision to support them once I was able to do it. Then the deadly Tsunami stroke and brought his waves of destruction up to India including Pallepalem, a village in the Nellore district where Il Sole operates. It’s a village of fishers (Pallekars) and the 394 families living there lost all their mud-huts and their boats, so Il Sole immediately decided to act in two phases, a first emergency one in which they provided rice, medicines, water and sheets, now concluded, and a more financially demanding second phase aiming at rebuilding the fishing activity to gradually overcome the damages caused by the Tsunami. You can visit their website and read this article published by the local daily newspaper La Provincia and decide to give your help in their project.
This is a real way to help the Tsunami victims in my opinion, not by SMS. 😉
When I became a member I also purchased some of their merchandise I’m proud to wear, but there was a really original thing I couldn’t miss: the Planiverso.
As you can read in the description it’s actually a big poster showing the world upside down with the meaning to give back dignity to the so called third world. I like it because it’s cool and with a serious meaning at the same time, but now that it’s hanging on the wall of my room I can’t but notice the area around the Indian Ocean every time I look at it.
It’s as if the Tsunami did really put the world upside down…
Update: Mrs. Piro wrote a touching letter to La Provincia about the Tsunami tragedy. After some days of thinking I wrote my reply which you can read here. They cut it a bit, but they did it perfectly since you can read here on the blog what’s missing.
The funny De-Lurking Day
This is so amusing I couldn’t agree more, since it’s about a matter I’m involved in myself: Lurking. 😉
I spotted it on manteblog, the blog of Massimo Mantellini, but the original idea comes from paper napkin.
Statistics tell the true, but are they just numbers? Oh, no, there are real people behind those “unique contacts” which make up for those graphs, don’t they?
So they proposed the De-Lurking Day by inviting readers to leave a trace of their usually silent presence writing a comment on the author’s blog.
There isn’t the chance to comment on my blog, at least until the new website will be up and running (hint! hint!), but if you’re in the mood why don’t you send me a “Hello, I’m the lurker which made your #### unique contact of the day!”? 🙂
Ehm, no I won’t start donating 1 Euro to aid the Tsunami victims for each e-mail I’ll receive. Sheryl of paper napkin did that and had to close the comments due to their unexpected high number!
Do you know italians donated a total of 28 millions through the 1 Euro per SMS campaign for the South East Asia tragedy?
The whole total will go for the donation campaign, but mobile operators will be happy when we’ll understand our credit needs recharging sooner than expected. Even I fell into the “trap”… and I’ve already recharged the credit, doh!
There are better ways to donate out there by using your credit card or other payment methods.
Seneca once said “Who spends his life traveling very often will have many guests, but no friends”. Change traveling into browsing and guests into reading blogs and we’re talking about the same thing: Lurking. 8)
I’m a lurker myself because I love silence and I work better in silence. Today you’ve got the chance to not be the usual lurker if you’ll e-mail me. Don’t take the bad example of some friends who can click on anything, but can’t write a few characters in a simple e-mail…
Light Up Only Your Dreams Announced
Here we go with another update planned since a long time. 😉
Today has been a sort of D-day in Italy since it came into force the law forbidding smoke in public locals.
There have been a lot of talk about it lately, with different opinions on both sides, smokers and non-smokers, often losing sight of the real meaning of this law just like only we italians can do: it’s a law which expresses a strong civic sense since it represents a victory of the respect for the good health of non-smokers.
Something that has no relation at all with the argumentations of smokers who (consciously) forget their affection is not a bad habit, but a deadly disease actually.
But what does this have to to with me?
Well, passive smoke did affect me negatively for the last years, then there could ever have been a better time to announce my new educational software application I was planning to build in the last months? 8)
Given its educational nature and my strong commitment to the subject matter this will be a totally No Profit work.
You can get more info about this project in the products page. All I can add for now is that this project, called “Light Up Only Your Dreams” will proceed as quickly as I’ll manage to organize priorities during the next months, but a release for the 31st may, the World No Tobacco Day looks too good to be true!
The Incredible Tide
This is the original title of the book by Alexander Key which inspired the japanese anime of my childhood, Future Boy Conan (Mirai Shounen Konan) by Hayao Miyazaki.
Finding that book and purchasing the DVDs of the anime was on my to do list since a very long time. Then suddenly on december 26th a real incredible tide stroke South East Asia, a world tragedy I think will remain impressed in our memory like a few others. The reference to the anime came immediately to my mind, since the tide which changed the world of Conan impressed me a lot when I was a child.
Well, now watching those terrible videos as well as the astonishing satellite images of the areas involved by the real tsunami made me feel breathless and almost as without the earth under my feet, although I watched it from a warm home.
It will take time to fully understand the real proportions of this tragedy, but by finally being able to read the book by Alexander Key I’d like to close with a quote by Hayao Miyazaki, which sums up the meaning of the book and gives a hint of hope to the people involved in the tragedy, both those who faced the tide in first person and those who watched it from a safe distance and are now willing to help:
“What fascinated me about the book was its main meaning: at the fall of any ‘great civilization’ some ‘primitives’ always take the lead, not to be intended in negative terms, but as people with a great vital strength, full of vitality and willing to rebuild a new world. It’s their vital pulse which captured me.”
I think you’ll agree these are wise and current words. I’ll write again about this event in one of the next updates.
Update: speaking about satellites, on December 23rd the local daily newspaper La Provincia published my full page article about GPS and TomTom Go.
End of the Year Thought
I know that with this post I’m breaking the promise I made in the last one, but it was planned to be posted as an end of the year thought since a long time. After all this might be an example of the good and bad of being an independent software developer following the motto “it’s ready when it’s ready”. 😉
The 2004 has been a particular year, with some changes in my private life and pretty different from what I planned at the beginning, so it couldn’t end without some thoughts about the hard work as a waiter during the last months. I benefited from this experience in many ways, well beyond what people could think, especially the ones who don’t read the blog. 😉
This was an article published on the local daily newspaper La Provincia about a charity dinner held at Villa d’Este the last November. I worked voluntarily for that dinner but I didn’t like at all some of the things I saw there and the tone of the article, so I wrote a first letter to the director of the newspaper published in the feature with the same name. The letter was ironical and meant to propose a thought to the readers, but it wasn’t appreciated, to say the least, by some colleagues, who felt involved in some way, so I had to write a second letter to clarify my point of view. Fortunately someone caught the point and the discussion went on with a letter by Luciano Forni, a former senator, and with others from some readers here, and here.
I got compliments for the courage of writing something like that, but I’ve been also surprised by the venom tongues of some colleagues, people who are used to accept compromises to be able to work, think always about money (or the lack of it) or haven’t enough neurons to distinguish irony from charge. My letter was a general thought about the hypocrisy in the modern world, which is even more actual if you consider what’s happened with the Incredible Tide in South East Asia, the so called third world…
I close this post with a sentence inspired by the director of a restaurant I worked for during this summer, a long time friend, brilliant and always busy in keeping his old habits and his life style: in his opinion italians should return doing humble works like in the past, in particular young ones with a degree and the “stench under their nose”.
How true I can say and I appreciated his words even more since he was referring to me as an example of a good worker.
So let’s close with the sentence I remember from the movie Life is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni, said to the waiter-Guido (Benigni) by his Uncle: “You’re serving, but you’re not a servant. Serving is a supreme art, God is the first servant. God serves men, but he’s not a servant to men!”
Back to work now, “le grand cirque” of the world must go on! 🙂
Update: irony inside irony, if you’ll have the patience to read my two letters, just take a look at the horoscope at the bottom of the page, I’m a Leo. 😉
BatteryLife Activator Test
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on December 21, 2004
When I first read about the BatteryLife Activator I got immediately curious, although I admit I was pretty skeptic about its real capabilities until I read positive comments on some german websites. This mysterious black foil appeared to keep its promises of increasing the charge of a common lithium ion battery by up to 30%, which was pretty amazing actually.
But it wasn’t enough for me and I asked for a sample to make some tests. The guys at BatteryLife sent me the samples and then I’ve been able to use them on the batteries of my Axim X3 and of my Motorola MPx200. On the Axim I run the Spb Benchmark with the option “Max backlight, standard using” several times and if I got 3:05 hours without the Activator, once I applied it on the battery I got results up to about 3:35, which is exactly the increment the Activator promised to provide.
On the MPx200 I did a different test by playing the default video sample at full volume with the Media Player and I got the same percentage increase from about 4:00 to 4:35 hours until the device went off automatically. I’m very satisfied of this product and I hope it will be commercialized and promoted even in Italy. I also wrote an article about it for the local daily newspaper La Provincia, which you can find it here in PDF format.
The advantages of the Activator extend beyond increasing the standby and the talk times by even shortening the battery charging time up to 40%, something I’m glad to confirm, and providing a longer lifetime for the battery itself. Very interesting improvements especially considering a street price of only 9.90 Euro per foil.
Now that I’m fully back to my development schedule with the new workstation, I really hope to make old and new Ecpc users a nice Christmas present with the release of version 1.4.
The next update will be the one they’re waiting for! 😉
Hardware Upgrade and EmEditor
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on December 8, 2004
If used heavily, sooner or later a PC turns into a snail, and I don’t mean the nice gastropod featured in the game Snails by PDA Mill, which I installed on my Pocket PC and Smartphone thanks the special offer reserved to Pocket PC Thoughts subscribers.
That’s to say I’m in the middle of a complete hardware upgrade. In the building of the new workstation I took particular care of two aspects: a fast mass storage subsystem, the real bottleneck of modern PCs, by installing two Barracudas in RAID-0 mode, and a quality Chieftec case providing a good internal ventilation and most importantly silence through the use of quiet fans. 8)
The next step has been the installation of the Windows XP Pro operative system and the software I daily use, each one with its customizations, a procedure that’s time consuming if done properly.
This time however it has been easier thanks to Raxco’s FirstDefense ISR and PerfectDisk, the first one useful for testing drivers and applications without messing with the main snapshot and the second one to keep the Barracudas defragmented. 🙂
And speaking about useful tools to improve productivity, I’m happy since I’ve finally found a text editor with great general features and full Unicode support, EmEditor, useful to edit the language files of Ecpc. Even better is the fact that it’s free for academic and technical use, which includes shareware authors. Thanks to Yutaka Emura of Emurasoft for his policy and as you can read in the Ecpc Wishlist page now I recommend his software to translators. 😉
Update: since at Raxco they’re happy that PerfectDisk v7.0 just won the 2005 Redmond Magazine’s Readers Choice Award for the “Best Disk Defragmentation Tool” they’re offering a 25% discount off their products with the promo code REDMOND25 that they invited me to share. 😉
Coming Full Circle at the Mobile Fun Forum 2004
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on November 26, 2004
On Wednesday 24 November I attended to the Wireless Forum Fall event and in particular I followed the Mobile Fun Forum 2004 conference.
The last year Ecpc won the Cellulari.it Special Award at the first edition of the Mobile Fun Awards and my friends from Impressionware did a big applause when I went on the stage to get the prize. This time they won the Best Gameplay Award for their Java game Metal Racers: Quad Bikes and I had the pleasure to congratulate with them, so I can say that the circle closed perfectly! 🙂
This year the event took place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Milan. The expo area was much bigger and the event was divided into four main forums: the WLAN Business, the Mobile Office, the Mobile Fun and the Spam Forum.
I followed some interesting presentations during the morning in the Mobile Fun Forum area and I had the chance to meet some old friends such as Pietro of Bryo, Tiziano of Cellulari.it, Fabio of Wireless Gaming and the always kind Marco of Wireless. It’s good to know that wireless technologies are getting even more attention in our country, although mobile gaming and PDA sectors are not certainly at the pace of other countries.
If you’re curious to know if I passed the selections of the Premio Palinsesto Italia contest, well, the answer is no, as they communicated me a few days ago.
Since in any contest part of the fun is in participating, I asked them if the participants will have the chance to show their projects during the two days of the event, set to take place on December 10th and 11th in Bologna, but they told me this was not in program for the first edition of the contest and that they won’t even manage to publish all the submitted projects on the website too soon.
Although I’m curious to know more about the selected finalist projects I doubt I’ll attend to the prize-giving as I was going to, I’ve too much things to do to for the release of Ecpc version 1.4. 😉
Bill Gates at the Microsoft Technical Conference 2004
Posted by Albegor in Euro Coins Pocket Collector, Mobile, Software on November 22, 2004
On Thursday 18 November I’ve been in Milan to attend to the Microsoft Technical Conference, held at the Assago Forum.
3008 people were present at the event, mostly developers and Technet or Msdn subscribers. The day quickly passed away among the presentations by Microsoft staff divided in four main areas.
Of particular interest have been the application installation and deployment issues discussed by the always brilliant and friendly Fabio Santini, although a bit unlucky with his demos ;), and a preview of the features of Visual Studio 2005 by Gabriele Castellani-Donald Duck voice, as a friend funnily pointed out.
Then Bill Gates performed the final speech in the crowded auditorium. It was the first time I saw him in person and I must say that it has been fascinating hearing about his visions of the incoming future and his intentions on focusing on well-made software to provide a challenging experience to the common non technical user.
After the speech he answered to three questions from as many MVPs and then he disappeared just as he came in. Here are some pictures of the event, sorry for the low quality of the digital camera I used.
Now some news about the incoming version of Ecpc: there’s still some testing to do, but judging from the increase of traffic towards the website it seems this release is getting some attention and that’s a positive sign considering the important switch to the Shareware distribution model I already announced.
This additional time will be well spent since I’ll probably also include the full spanish translation! 🙂