Nerd Life

There's this freeware app, called Torch, that allows you to buse your Series 60 phone as a torch/flashlight by blanking the screen and maintaining the backlight on until you exit the app.

Pretty interesting (you know when you drop your garage keys at night... :P), except the screen backlight isn't even remotely as bright as the the camera Flash LED on the Sendo X. That's what I would like: an app allowing me to turn on/off the camera Flash on demand!

The incredible thing is that apparently noone ever bothered to release something like this... although it's very likely to be just a simple API call... Well... I guess not enough Series 60 developers own a Sendo X... :'(

Moving in is such a boring thing to do. Almost as much as moving out. You waste time reinstalling everything you had before, but in different places. You also realize some items don't fit their purpose anymore or don't fit into your new place at all... |-|

I was already feeling bored about this when I crashed my PC, just to make it complete! >:(

Yeah yeah I hear you thinking... a backup saves the day (actually the month), right? I actually had a pretty decent backup... and did not loose any personal data. It's just that reinstalling the whole system & apps is such a pain (no, I had no 'disk image' backup) that I decided I would make the most out of it by switching to XP as a replacement to my aging W2K... That's where it started to hurt! XX(

Actually, I had an XP CD+license available from another PC where I had not installed it... The only problem is that CD was 3 years old. The original flavor of XP.

When you install a 3 years old Microsoft OS, the first thing you gotta do is a comprehensive Windows Update and virtually redownload all the files in a newer version, right? That was my plan...

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I mean, you gotta love it!

A picture is worth a thousand words:

Working on the balcony

Okay, so much for the showing off. A few hours later:

• I had to switch to a "High Contrast" Windows color scheme (now I know what these are for!) to be able to see something with my sunglasses. And without the glasses, the sun hurts my eyes!
• I had to move the table more in front of a window to get better signal strength...
• I had to plug in the power adapter since WiFiing through the walls really sucks a lot of power...
• I had to clean the screen at least four times before the sunlight stopped reflecting on the dust... (sorry for sounding like I had never tried to open a laptop outside :.)
• And now the neighbours are mowing their lawn! Damn it!

Yeah, next time they tell you nice stories about WiFi in the magazines, don't believe what they say! :-/

PS: This is just for fun, I still enjoy WiFi very much. Example.

I still carry around that vintage Palm V that I still haven't replaced by a smartphone to carry around things like my address book and some access codes (heavily encrypted).

Since I moved my email/outlook to my newer Presario X1005 laptop I was a little bit annoyed though... that laptop has no RS 232 serial port! Thus, I cannot connect my vintage Palm craddle and cannot hotsync my email address book no more the way I have been doing it for years... |-|

I thought it would be wise to buy an USB to RS232 adapter... but these aren't actually easy to find. I finally got one on ebay, but that peace of crap came with an unverified XP driver... and I think there's a reason for that: the device worked properly only twice over about 50 desperate attemps... >:XX

Then, I remembered that RS232 ports may have been heavily replaced by USB ports but IR ports have not been wiped out by Bluetooth yet... That sounded so easy I wondered why I hadn't thought about IR earlier! Morevover, I had done that kind of IR sync before on an NT 4 laptop... :crazy:

Well, it isn't quite as easy as it seems... that IR port just wouldn't act like a serial port, so there was no way to get the palm hotsync manager to listen to it. :!: Huh? What's that, it worked on NT 4 a few years ago!

A few days later I finally realized that I needed a missing brick over the IR port driver: a virtual COM port driver! :idea:

Luckily, the open source community has produced such a thing: http://www.ircomm2k.de/english/

Even better: it works like a charm! B)

Now I just wonder: did I install something like that on NT 4? Well, now that I'm thinking about it... I have a vague memory that I did... :oops:

I have been using outlook 2002 since... errr... 2002 ? (Yeah I know there are better email clients avialable... this one just integrates with nearly everything! And you can't beat that! :P)

I have always had it configured in a way were any message I wrote stood in the outbox until I click on Send/Receive.

Now I reinstalled the same Outlook 2002 (with the same CD!) on my laptop, I cannot seem to find how to achieve the same config! I went through the options a thousand times and really feel stupid! :roll: Any mail I compose gets sent out right after I'm done with it.

That's such a pain in the ass, since my MTA needs me to check mail before I can send some (yet another crappy anti spam measure! :( )

Can anyone help me out here and tell me how I get Outlook to not automatically send emails before I ask it to?