Crappy viewable angle with monitor in the office

I have DELL 1907FPc and 2208WPF monitor in the office. But, when viewing at portirat mode look TERRIBLE. 1907 FPc only got 160 degree of viewable angle. Same 160 degree for the 2208WPF. Hopefully my new 2408WFP will do a much better job. Otherwise I will be very very pissed.

iPhone app

iPhone apps were from ground up designed for use in a mobile device. You interface with the device by finger instead of by a stylus. That's partly why Pocket PC app sucks cause they expect you to use stylus.

speed

Event though EeePC is such a nice laptop, but there's something that works better on Windows mobile that works better than NetBook: instant on. Sure the Linux bootup time on Eee PC is fast, but there's no way that it can be as fast as with Pocket PC's instant on speed.

Day of learning to love my old gear

I spent most of my time today to try to make the gear I currently have more useful so that I don't get tempted to buy new gear, like Asus Eee PC 901. After all, my current gear seems to do the job OK as long as I keep pushing. Here's what I accomplished today:

• I installed Windows Mobile 6.1 on my Dell Pocket PC (x50v) and then installed the most critical software so that the system won't slow down by having too many software installed. Specifically, installed Monster Chinese 5.3, Resco Media Suite, and ... that's about it.
• I get Outlook Syncing working with both my mobile phone Nokia 5300 and iPod Classic. I also took the oppotunity to clean up the mobile phone contact list, and now it's much cleaner than it used to be.
• I restored the messed up Mac OSX 10.5.1 , and now I am working on restoring the XP OS to the previous cleaner state so that the Touch screen can work again.

Eee PC .... errr .. maybe not now

I found a nice money back rebate deal with Asus Eee PC 901, so I was planning of getting the device, but THEN I did more resource and found that there are some stuffs that I don't like about Eee PC:

• The vertical viewable angle is NOT good. So it suffers the same problem as my x50v.
• No tablet feature.
• Can't flip around like a Tablet PC. Somehow this is such an important feature to me. The open angle of lid is OK but can't do all the way 180 degree flat.
• People keep complaining about how small the keyboard is.
  

On the bright side:

• There's reasonably less heat problem with 901

What? No search in iPhone and iPod Touch?

I just found out one thing that dramatically decrease my willingness to get an iPhone or iPod Touch: iPhone does not have song search feature. That means I can't enter the prase "fast" and let iPhone find out all the songs that has the word "fast" in the song title. What a BUMMER! Well, maybe I am a bit over-reacted. But I always hope that there's a way to find songs easily. Sometimes I even have problem finding the song that I want to hear within iPod Classics 80Gb because I have thousands of songs in it and navigate to the one I want takes time.

Hopefully someone can write an iPhone app that does the search.

Installing Vista in Office machine

Now that I have a much faster machine than I used to, I gave Vista Ultimate another try on my development box, and it seems to running OK now. There was a serious glitch while I installed it the first time and it corrupted the system big time! So next time after I finished the installation, I have to run Vista SP1 right away, and after then everything goes very smooth.

Multiple Instance of KM Player

Others seems to like single instance of KM PLayer, but I like multiple (again, my symptom of having ADD). To turn on multiple instance of KMPlayer, select [Perference], Under the [General] tab, UNCHECK the check box "Disallow multiple Instances".

Finally found an app that remembers audio playback position

I was very happy with KMPlayer's ability of automatically remember the position of video file playback. But in the version 2.9.3.1214 that I was using, it still doesn't support remember audio file position. So I started looking around and see if there's any mp3 playback application that remembers the position of audio files when I stopped playing the file.

At first I was pretty glad to know that the Winamp 5 plug in Time Restore & Autoplay v2.1.1 seem to be able to do the job, but after playing it a while I realized that it only remembers the last played file and its position. That doesn't work for me since I always jump between multiple audio book and podcast (yes, I have serious ADD problem).

And finally I found my solution, and not surprisingly, it's KM PLayer doing the magic again. The current stable version of KMPLayer 2.9.3.1428 supports saving audio playback position automatically. All you need to do is go to Perference, under General, check both [Remember the played position of video files] and [Remember for audio files too].

Wasted time

Darn it. I wasted time online quite some stuff this morning that yield no fruit at all.

• I tried leaving my Dreamcast on for a whole night hoping that the recharagble battery in the motherboard can start keeping track of time. It didn't. So I either need to learn how to replace internal parts (hard to find and need some technique to install), or have to torelerant the time setup screen. I ... lean for the second one.
• I tried to use some of the harddisk enclosure I brought from Hong Kong. They all seemed to have problem with the transformer, not providing enough power to drive the harddisk, making the harddisk spin up a bit but not enough to make them work. Even the EIDE to USB cable failed even when enough energy drawn by my another working harddisk. All these junk are in my trash can now.... Rest in peace.