the ever winding path

After seeing a friend’s HTC TyTN II phone I simply had to have one. It’s a cracking piece of hardware and ticks all the boxes for my needs. But…. the OS is Windows Mobile 6. Now I have a PDA at work, which has the same OS, but it’s locked down, so I’ve never had a desire to do anything but sync it to the work PC.

So, when I’d finished drooling over the hardware, the software nightmare began. What an absolute PITA software is to add to the device, there are many different ways it can be installed, cab file on a micro-SD card, zip file on a micro-SD, executable on a Windows PC, cab, converted onto the device via Active Sync, and your guess is as good as mine as to which of these variants your software will need to be installed.

Of course, the next issue is cost, there’s very little decent free software out there for WM6.

Finally, and possibly most importantly, how on earth do you sync the normal day-to-day stuff, photo’s, music, podcasts, email, contacts? Answer, SynCE. What a life saver, if this great “package” wasn’t available, I may have sold the phone. But SynCE does it all, and their launchpad ppa has Ubuntu packages ready to go. Brilliant.

..and so I’m chuffed to bits with the new toy, now, do I attempt to flash one of these Carlos Fandango custom ROM’s onto it? Not just yet

What does £5 get you these days?

…maybe two pints of beer, or four litres of diesel. It won’t buy you a Linux magazine, it may get you a 1Gb SD card. In other words, you can’t get much for a fiver these days, so think about donating one to those fine, hard working people at the Open Rights Group

“The Open Rights Group is a grassroots technology organisation which exists to protect civil liberties wherever they are threatened by the poor implementation and regulation of digital technology. We call these rights our “digital rights”.”

They’ve advised the decision makers on such subjects as DRM, copyright, intellectual property, net neutrality and RFID. Have a look at what else they’ve been up to, and consider giving them that £5, they could certainly use it for great things.

Back in March I bought one of the Icon225 modems that Orange are selling, but had some issues getting it to work.

Not anymore! Paul at PHARscape has put a lot of work into the stack he’s produced and has topped it off with a cracking little Python front end to make the use of this little modem dead easy.

The ubiquitous Tony Whitmore has been at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Prague over the last week. Armed with a video camera he’s been interviewing people there about their involvement with Ubuntu, and what plans they have for the next release - Intrepid Ibex.

You can see all the videos on the YouTube Ubuntu Developer Channel

Glastonbury is a fantastic little town, with lots of communities thriving around the spiritual hub that the place has become. If you miss being there, the gardens, the shops, the people, the tor you can keep in touch by listening to Glastonbury Radio.

This has nothing to do with the summer concerts that we see all over the media. It’s about the community and what’s going on, no matter what your spiritual path or interest, it’s covered by this net only radio.

Centrologic have a great site about the Ubuntu Story, http://www.ubuntustory.com/ lots of good flashy graphics with clear simple explanations of the main topics that people searching for Ubuntu might want to know about.

I love my ASUS eeePC, it goes everywhere with me, but I think I’m going to have to fight hard not to buy one of HP’s 2133 mini-note PCs.

Orange are selling these rather nifty usb modems at the moment. The Option iCon225 supports HSDPA/UMTS/EDGE/GPRS/GSM with HSPDA giving 7.2Mbps. Of course, the package is aimed at the MS Windows user, and comes with all the required software on the device using Zero-CD Plug ‘n’ Play technology. This creates problem number one for the Linux user.

When the device is inserted into the USB socket the Zero-CD mounts it as a mass storage device rather than a modem. It’s possible to get round this using the information at Pharscape using their hso module and ZeroCD REZERO utility The second problem is that I can’t get this thing to connect to anything (although it works under MS Windows so I know it works). Yet. I’m sure that it won’t belong before someone figures it out.

Interestingly Vodafone have been working on something that looks like it may work, and they seem to be open to developing for other devices too. Using this beasty with Ubuntu on the eeePC will rock.

Back in December I was chuffed with the bandwidth that I was getting from my Virgin Media XL Broadband package, giving me a mighty 16Mb/s download speed.

How things can change in 3 months.

It’s been like that for about a month now, and even after a visit by an engineer this morning, nothing’s changed. Apparently there’s some work being done on the local setup next week. So they have until Friday, at which point I’ll be looking elsewhere.

Working on lug.org.uk I found that the Armed Forces LUG wasn’t just quiet it was effectively dead. By that I mean that the website was a holding page, but mailman was running although no-one was looking after it.

So after a debate with the rest of the team at lug.org.uk I’ve revived AFLUG. Most people will agree that location-less LUGs don’t work, but my main reason for taking this on is that, at the very least the mail list will work. I don’t think a central location for this LUG will be important to it’s members. Only time will tell.