gpoul's Out Of Memory Blog

I’ve now been using my N1 since Thursday May 27 and given that my posting about the iPhone titled Things to fix in iPhone 2.0 had such high impact, I might as well finish writing this one ;-)

In general I’m very pleased. I don’t like the fragmentation in the Android handset market, but that’s maybe just me. On Android the Alarms still work when the phone is muted. The options that are provided are pretty nice and I especially enjoy the fast switching of input-locales, which switches keyboard layout and dictionary between German and English.

So what’s annoying?

• When contacts are joined and the names differ the one that is selected to be joined will be ignored. This is a reasonable behavior and was only fixed in froyo issue 6067. What’s still annoying is that to do this with Facebook contacts you need to go into the Facebook app to import all friends into your contacts because otherwise the names you don’t have in your address book will not be displayed and later turn it back off. Is that a workflow I want to tell someone how to do? This is crazy.
• Graphical emoticons in the messaging and gtalk apps can’t be disabled. Not sure if there are any plans to fix that or when.
• Integration with Flickr is lacking and is much behind Picasa. Still, I like Flickr much better than Picasa.
• Miles/KM usage is confusing in Maps and other applications and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to configure it.

Apps I installed and plan on using:

• Adobe Reader
• CheckMyTrip
• Facebook
• Goggels
• Maps
• Talk
• Shazam
• Twitter
• Calendar and Gmail
• Finance
• Mein A1

Missing for me:

• Public transport timetable app. ÖBB (Austrian Train Agency) made the stupid decision to no longer provide timetable data for public transport to Google, so this is not available in Google maps anymore.
• Billig Tanken (as available for the iPhone) or a similar application to find the nearest & cheapest gas station.
• Movies app to find what movies are on and to book tickets. – Movie Finder and the Flixster app look cool, but don’t support Austria.

Interesting apps I’m not currently using:

• Yelp – very US-centric, but might be interesting when on vacation there
• OpenTable – too limited in Austria; maybe useful in other countries
• cab4me – interesting idea, but I didn’t ever have the need for something like that
• Astrid – the ultimate todo app, but I’m currently trying not to use todo lists anymore :-)
• NewsRob – I currently don’t really see the point in reading RSS feeds on a mobile device
• WordPress – Yes, you can blog from your phone, but why would I? Maybe for getting alerts for comments and replying to them, but I already get e-mail notifications anyway.
• ConnectBot

Mobile web sites I bookmarked:

• Gmail Tasks
• Dopplr mobile
• Flickr mobile

Want to know more about my life on Android? Do you have any other questions about the N1? I’ll be more than happy to answer any of your questions about Android and the N1 in the comments.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to play with a new T410s with the following specs:

i5-520M(2.4GHz), 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, 14.1in 1440×900 LCD, Intel 5700MHD, CDRW/DVDRW, Intel 802.11agn wireless, WWAN option, Bluetooth, 1Gb Ether, UltraNav, Sec Chip, FPR, Camera, 6c Li-Ion, Win7 Pro 64

+ ThinkPad GOBI 2000 Broadband Option (part 78Y1399 / Qualcomm Datasheet)

You really have to see this thing to believe it. I think it’s currently the ThinkPad I’d buy if my MacBook died. At 21.1mm thick and 1.77kg/3.91lbs (with optical drive) it’s thinner and lighter than any MacBook Pro currently available. The SSD makes this TP extremely responsive and nice to use.

I was using the default Lenovo build with all the Lenovo ThinkVantage tools. While you really notice these tools being loaded on startup on my T61p they’re not even noticeable on the T410s. This is very nice given that these tools are really useful and now they just feel like a part of the OS.

In the time I played with it I didn’t really get used to the keyboard. It’s somehow different from my T61p and I sometimes seemed to type characters in an incorrect order. The TP also now has lights directly on the keyboard for mute and caps-lock, which is nice.

Unfortunately it only has one light for the wireless receivers; my T61p has separate indicators for when WWAN, WLAN, or bluetooth is activated. There is a software tool available (same as on the T61p) that will show the state of the wireless receivers separately and allows you to active/deactivate them.

Configuring the WWAN card with a T-Mobile Austria SIM through Access Connections worked instantly. I’m still confused by how easy it was.

I really like it; too bad it’s not mine ;-)

Vowe’s thoughts on the Nexus One sound very positive, but I’m still not convinced I want a $520 phone.

Should you have some more time over the holidays and want to play with a few toys, you might want to take a look at these:

• irssi
• MacVim
• Vimperator
• Muttator

They’re not exactly new, but I’ve recently noticed they existed while reading a blog post and I definitely intend to try them :-)

Have you ever wondered what happens after you put all your data in the cloud? Will you always remember where you put your stuff in the cloud? Will you at some point lose things? What are you going to do?

It’s not really a question of if, but when.

Don’t ask me for solutions. This time I only provide the questions :-)

Transport Layer Security (TLS, RFC 5246 and previous, including SSL v3 and previous) is subject to a number of serious man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks related to renegotiation.

Update 11/15: CVE-2009-3555

I just migrated to Snow Leopard this weekend and I really like it. I also replaced my backup solution with Time Machine. Everything looks nice and it was pretty painless.

Want to know what’s new in Snow Leopard? There is a great Snow Leopard Review on Ars Technica.

btw: I also used this weekend to move my primary work ThinkPad to the Windows 7 release candidate. Up until now it looks pretty nice. I’ll probably test this for a month or two and decide whether I want to go back to XP or move to the RTM version.

NetNewsWire 3.2 has now been released a few days ago.

I upgraded because I wanted to try the synchronization with Google Reader, but I only got this far:

You cannot use the application “NetNewsWire” with this version of Mac OS X.

So I exported my feed list as OPML and imported it into Google Reader. Until now it looks good. No further needs to upgrade my feed reader; no requirement to upgrade to Snow Leopard and no need to synchronize.

Until now I wasn’t motivated to give Google Reader a try, but the NetNewsWire developers made it happen.

I’ve been surprised by how VMware is being used quite a few times in the last year, but never got around to posting about it. Billy did a great job in describing the issues involved with running Java on a hypervisor and I hope it reminds people that hypervisors are not a silver bullet.

I just read Matt’s posting on RSS in the Clouds and thought… hey… I haven’t heard something like this in a long time. Let me check this out…

Looks like Dave Winer came up with a notification mechanism for RSS aggregators. He called it rssCloud. Very catchy. It somehow looks similar to PubSubHubbub. rssCloud only allows you to get a callback at the IP address you made the initial request from. No way to direct it anywhere else. Useless for RSS clients.

Just to remind everyone we’re still far away from addressing two of my pet peeves with RSS:

• RSS items are still sent multiple times to the same client, even if the client already got a copy of those items
• Clients still lose information when they’re offline and the feed updates faster than the number of RSS items the server supplies in the feed

Looks like we haven’t really made much progress in the last 8 years. I really like my NetNewsWire RSS reader, but I’m afraid if Google Reader provides more complete news aggregation and even gets news items faster I’m probably going to migrate.