Today the San Jose Mercury News has this article on Fabrik, a company which the Mercury News bills as "A YouTube for Adults" (see My Fabrik). Interesting idea but, for the life of me, I don't get it. Maybe I don't know enough about it yet but it seems that Yahoo's photo service as well as a lot of other free ones give you the same control. Email me if you understand what I don't.
In this post, Scoble posted this link to a Windows Live Spaces page that has links to 150 cool downloads from Microsoft. Like what? Well, Calculator Plus, a great calculator replacement that can do binary, hex and octal arithmetic, unit conversions and so on; FolderShare a Windows Live Service in beta that allow one to share files across computers, over the Internet; My Font Tool which one can use to convert handwriting to a font and a whole bunch (147, to be exact) of other tools.
T-Mobile finally released their update to the MDA ROM. This update brings the Bluetooth Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (aka AADP or A2DP) to the phone and what this does is permit connecting high quality Bluetooth headphone like the Motorola HT820. It also brings Direct Push Email which is a pretty cool feature. Blackberry users have had this for a long time but it's relatively new for Windows Mobile devices. It sends email updates to you, live, when they occur. And there are also miscellaneous stability updates. All in all, a really good package.
Just FYI, HowardForums.com hosts a great T-Mobile MDA/SDA forum which is where I learned of this release and of a beta or two before the formal release. Another great site is XDA-developers.com.
Microsoft maintains a bunch of converters and viewers for the Office suite. You can see the complete list here No Project viewer, though.
I'm hosted at 1&1 Internet. They're pretty big over in Europe and when they launched here in the states they gave away a really serious hosting package, including SSH access, a ton of utilities, MySQL databases, CGI, Perl, PHP and a lot of other stuff, all free for 3 years. Of course, being the cheap b*stard that I am, I snapped it right up. Well, the 3 years is nearly up and I'm happy with their services (you can't beat $5.99 for private domain registration) so I'm thinking about upgrading my service and actually paying someone to host me.
So, this is a heads-up. If I decide to upgrade, it'll probably be more or less on a whim and you'll have short notice. The site should only be down for a few days, maybe less, but I've got to pull all the data off because upgrading means they actually change where my stuff is located and they don't move the site. It's up to me and, to keep everything consistent, I'll pull the site down, backup the data, do the upgrade and restore it all.
Fair warning.
Every time I reinstall QMail3 or add a new account and try to send email, I always end up with an error message "Error occurred while sending". And every time, I scratch my head and wonder what the heck I forgot. Here the answer: mark one of the folders as an Outbox. You do it from the properties display of the folder within QMail3 and the easiest way to do this is to select the account from the top drop-down. This will display all folders for that account. From there you can click-hold a folder and select Properties. Once there, you'll see that you can set the Box Type to Inbox, Outbox and a few other things. If there's no Outbox selected for the account, you can't send email. It's that simple.
My recommendation: create a local folder and make that the Outbox. Otherwise you'll have to connect to write the email to the Outbox and the email will be transferred a total of 3 times: once from your Pocket PC to the Outbox, once from the Outbox back to your PocketPC to be sent and once to actually be sent. The easiest way to create a local folder? Click-hold on the name of the account in the top drop-down and select Create. From the resulting dialog, make sure you select Local in the Type field.
As of 7/26 there's a new version (2.9.25.3319) of my favorite free Pocket PC IMAP client, QMail3. It now suposedly supports WM5, although I'm running WM5 on both of my devices and I've never really had a problem with it. There's also a set of updated SSL modules (which you can download from here, down at the bottom). Matter of fact, if you look at that page, you'll see that you can download not only what he calls the "snapshot" (aka stable build) but the nightlies, too.
Download links, all for ARM processors:
Snapshot for WM5
Nightly build
Open SSL
I've been lax in my posting. Busy busy busy at work and at home but that's no excuse. Thanks for being so patient. I can't promise I'll post more often but I will promise I'll try.
I've got a couple of posts backed up. There's a new version of my favorite IMAP client for the Pocket PC, QMail3, I've (re)discovered how to fix a configuration problem with it, a new software ROM update for my T-Mobile MDA, I'm moving one of my domains from Lux Scientiae to Fastmail.fm and, well, a few others.
So, without further ado ...