Treo 700p, T+3 weeks

I’m only catching this train two years late, but as my Twitter readers know, I picked up a used Palm Treo 700p about three weeks ago to give myself a smartphone upgrade while keeping my Sprint plan and avoiding a contract extension. Some observations seem appropriate.

• Once you do the maintenance release 1.10 upgrade, the difference between the 700p, 755p and Centro is essentially form factor. The antenna nub on the 700p is slightly aggravating, but the full-sized SD card slot is great (as opposed to miniSD on the 755p and microSD on the Centro) — I can swap cards between camera and Treo to upload photos straight to Flickr on the go.
• As such, there are several applications/upgrades that Sprint/Palm may claim are only available for 755p or Centro, but which work fine on the 700p anyway. The highlights: VersaMail, Google Maps and Facebook. The VersaMail upgrade is an absolute necessity to access GMail via IMAP, which you want to do if you have a home machine running POP due to GMail’s slightly odd handling of POP message availability. Google Maps won’t do aGPS location (because Palm didn’t include those APIs in the OS build, unlike the Centro), but otherwise works fine. Facebook is just fun.
• Blazer is only tolerable as a web/WAP browser, but Opera Mini is darn near unusable. I suspect the primary issue is between Palm OS and the Java VM, but the end result is too aggravating to deal with on a regular basis. I’ll start Opera if I have to reach a particular site that Blazer can’t handle, but that’s it.
• MoTwit is a great little app. I only wish its writer would have coded it to pass the client name with updates, so it could advertise its awesomeness rather than just say updates are “from web.”
• Only notable instance of FAIL: US/Eastern time zone management between Missing Sync and iCal. Mark/space claims it’s an Apple problem, but if they know it’s an Apple problem that only affects their software, they could at least code an internal workaround. And no, editing the time zone manually on each event for my entire calendar (several thousand events dating back close to ten years) is not practical. My personal workaround, creating a DST-less location to match what Missing Sync sends me from iCal/SyncServices and turning off tower-set time zones, breaks World Clock and displays VersaMail timestamps an hour off during DST, but shows me accurate appointments in Calendar, which is the most important part.

Overall report: quality, at the right price, and no nasty contract extension to get in the way of something Android-tastic if/when that becomes ready for prime time. I’ll give it a WIN.

A new toy

As you can see, we’ve made some changes here at BTN, including a webhost move and a switch to Chyrp for blogging. Old content should be reappearing over the next few days, though old URLs may be unreliable.

UPDATE: Comments didn’t all import properly, and I still have some theme (look-and-feel) work to do, but otherwise a smooth move.

FINAL UPDATE: All comments now successfully imported.

Back, but not really

So, how about that LSU game I was so looking forward to the last time I posted here?

Life moves on. The last time I posted here, I was waiting for a job offer. Well, I got it… in Charlottesville. And we bought a house. (And got a mortgage.) And the job beats my brains in enough that when I come home, the last thing I care to do is put together a well-thought-out blog entry.

As some of you have figured out, you’re better off reading my Twitter feed at this point, 140 characters being about the longest coherent thought I can muster. Plus, that format allows approximately 400% more snark, particularly helpful in a month where every day is more fun than the last if you hate WVU fans.

So there are going to be some changes to this site, in order to make it look less like a pathetically abandoned blog and more like a portal to the places I do occasionally update. I may put together the odd column from time to time, and the archives will remain up, but regular posting in blog format is probably a thing of the past at this point.

I’d say the reformat is “coming soon,” but really, that would just insult your intelligence at this point, wouldn’t it?

Becoming A Twit

You may notice a new section over there on the left (if you’re on the main page). It’s called Twitter, and what it does is display my latest update from the remarkably similarly-named Twitter, the microblogging/social networking site that appears to be the latest craze on the Internets. I can post a one-liner (140 characters or less) to Twitter, and therefore to this section, via just about any means of electronic communication around, the most handy being a text message. If you want to follow my posts there, click “follow me”, and if you’re a Twitter user, you can add me to your follow list; if not, you can find a feed there to add to your RSS reader. (You are using an RSS reader by now, right?)

If you use Facebook, this is awfully similar to its status function, only without the slightly-restrictive “name is…” formatting. And, of course, it doesn’t require you to be logged in to Facebook in order to read it.

The common name for an individual Twitter post appears to be “tweet.” I guess that leaves “twit” to refer to the users, then?

Construction next 5 miles days

We’re building a better BTN, complete with comprehensible, self-written CSS and coherent-looking individual and archive pages.

So things may be a little bumpy for a while. Go look at my Columbus photoset while you’re waiting. The aim is to have things here completed on a slightly faster schedule than your average VDOT project, and well ahead of Metro to Dulles.

UPDATE: Interesting discovery: for at least the past month, I’ve had a botnet DoSing the crap out of my politics archive. Thankfully, my webhost is (a) strong and (b) rather slack on load restriction enforcement. Time to rename that category and delete the old pages… apologies to anyone live who gets 404’d and finds their way here.