Dumping Ground for Diverse Dictus Thoughts of Me
Making GPS work for my hp and me
- TrekBuddy and getting offline maps.
- Wacking GPS Track & Mobile Trail Explorer sources
Testing other J2ME Software
- DictionaryForMids and its forum
NDS Homebrew
- Checking Neoflash updates
- Programming (wiki) my homebrew. See NDS Lib (guide)
- Testing other homebrews
Fixing my router problems
After feeling nausea for weeks, I thought if men could get morning sickness too. At least I thought it was motion sickness.
So I went to the doctor, and my surprise was I had gastric. The doctors said many patients didn’t know too, claim they just had “wind” and the next thing was they vomited blood.
I then heard the longest list of “do not eat” I have heard in my life. No spicy, no chilli, no curry (only porridge), no fruits- no orange, no kiwi, no … (only apples), no tea, no coffee, .. (only milo)
After medicine, I went home and concussed in bed.
Buying the receiver.
While my “thoughts cells” war over each other whether to buy the GPS Receiver, my urge decided to put an end to the fight by heading down to Eastgear to buy the product, days before I went to Malaysia for a short trip.
The downsides I thought initially-like why I need to pay few hundred dollars just to tell me where to turn left or right in Singapore- weren’t too bad. At least I bought the receiver at a bargain. Since I reasoned I do not own a PDA therefore having no need for the software, the Boss gave me a special price of $99 (dollars less than the priced they offered at the IT fair).
About Global Positioning System
From “I know where I am `anywhere from this world`”, to spying tracking devices seen in movies, or high tech waypoint tracking anti-terrorism attack tactics in the game Rainbow Six: Rouge Spear -these are a reality with GPS. Basically GPS has a network of satellites hovering round the globe, broadcasting data down to earth. What a receiver does is it picks up these data, perform some mathematics on them, and let you know your whereabouts. Not so complex like a device communicating with outer space, almost works like a radio receiver. That’s is why these devices could last 10 hours on 2 hours of battery charging.
Usage
Some good things about having a Bluetooth GPS receiver are its processor is dedicated for GPS processing, and you can share the receiver among different people on different platforms (eg. Laptop, PDA, Smartphones..)
I tried running it on a PDA (not mine) with MapKings which is pretty nice looking and good. Forgoing buying MapKings, you could try the malsingmaps, the free community contributed GPS garmin-based maps covering Singapore and Malaysia. There you get instructions to make the garmin software work with non-garmin bt receivers.
Smartphones (Symbian based) aren’t left out. Nokia released Smart2Go, which they acquired last year, for free this month. IMO, Smart2Go is a pretty good GPS software (for S60 3rd Edition, N and E series phone users can use them. There’s a version for Windows Mobile too), and they provide maps covering countries almost everywhere on earth. Its features include 2d/3d views, poi(place of interests-landmarks, parking..), routing, (and if you pay for) detailed maps and voice navigation. Smart2Go is also actually the software which they named Nokia Maps for N95 (known for its GPS support and smartphone features). Well nokia had a free GPS software called NRC - Nokia Sports Tracker, although very data based, very usefully and perhaps a Garmin Forerunner replacement.
Well, there are other interesting commerical GPS software for smartphones but I’ll not mention them. You can read up SmartCOM GPS, Route 66, AGIS Navigator.
As for myself with a pitefully S40 j2me phone, I have my fair share of j2me applications to test and will be reviewing them shortly.
Beep beep beep… Satellite connection disconnects.
When I had to chose a mobile phone to be tagged to the MIO plan contract, I paid about $138 for the Nokia 5300 XpressMusic. Now my impressions of this phone.
Some general info: This model is more of a music edition phone, likely to compete with Sony Ericsson’s Walkman Phone series. Comes with a 1.2 MP (Mega Pixel) Camera, Radio, Micro-SD (trans-flash) hotpluggable, BT (Bluetooth) & IR (InfraReD), 2.5G - GPRS & MMS. The phone is a slide out format (Like some Sony Ericsson’s models), comes with side buttons for music and camera.
Well, since there are already reviews that compared this Nokia model with some Sony Ericsson model (which 5300 didn’t fare too well against), I will compare it with my previous nokia phone I bought…
The N-Gage Classic, which didn’t die too worthy a clause (Nokia Service Center announced it BER-Beyond Economic Repair, likely due to a faulty PCB).
Platform
N-Gage runs on Symbian S60 Edition 1, while 5300 uses S40 Edition 3. Its such a pity, not running Symbian on 5300, mean no application multitasking for me, and lack of a many powerful software, but the only advantage perhaps is better battery life using S40. Yet, the lack of symbian makes a differences for me. Even a low end S60 could be considered a “smartphone” while years later the 5300 on S40 makes it pretty average.
Multimedia
Its disappointing to see 5300 being packaged for music issn’t that impressive. Its on par with n-gage for its radio, and its newer software for music library playing would beat the n-gage in that. But why the lack of support of audio formats? I at least could play OGG using symbian software on n-gage but any java ogg players around? The speakers issnt too good, in my impression the n-gage could play music much louder at a better quality than the 5300.
Ergonomics
Comparing the shape of n-gage to 5300 is like compare apples to oranges, so let me focus more on the 5300. As a slide phone, it has more room for screensize, so 18bit colour 320×240 tft is a nice bonus even when its thickness is not. I see a miniaturisations of certain stuff- the memory card to the current industry small flash format - micro-sd card, smaller earphone/mouthpiece jack, smaller charger jack (means need a different charger!), but why not the smaller micro usb connector as seen in other nokia phones?
Language
Now this’s something that 5300 have, compared to the n-gage made lots of improvement- Chinese support. Also it is now easy to switch to chinese input even if you are using english as your language. The predictive chinese input is very quick and easy to use. 5300 comes with dictionary to translate english into chinese (even though I find the dictionaryformids much more useful on the ngage)
Java/ J2me/ Midlets
I’m happy that 5300 would support much newer/advance midlets (like bluetooth, camera, ir) in supporting MIDP 2.0 and CLDC 1.1 yet I’m very upsetted by its JAR size limit of 1MB. In contract even low end sony erisson phone would support jar size of virtually no limits. Also there issnt a way to send jar files using 5300 using bluetooth to others. My consolation would be at least this phone could read&write to the file system to cover come its lousy jar size limit.
In closing, I would feel Nokia 5300 would be quite sufficient for the average users, but a little below my expectations for me who had seen years older technology phones doing some better jobs that it is now currently.
Or OCD for short.
A recent “Help Me Help My Child” documentary shown on Arts Central was on 2 separate cases of 2 kids from different background with this disorder.
My short review..
One was about 7 years old who kept “hearing” a voice in his head, and he thought he would kill himself and his family.
Another was a teenager, but was obsessed with tidiness or perfection. That made it hard for others to live or interact with him.
Both were brought to see a psychiatrist by their mothers, but its wasn’t that easy even though the psychiatrists were specialised in this field.
Both had to over cover come their anxiety, and it seemed it both cases, the psychiatrists gave them confront their own anxiety by place more anxiety on them, until they could accept it.
It was nice to observe that in these families, their parents were very patient to them, and tried to talk to them about their behavior or illness. This was in contrast to my thought that parents would just lash out at these children in their frustrations.
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