moontrap.net

I’ve installed the WPTouch theme on the site.  If you browse here on your iPhone, iPod or Android device you get a nice mobile-friendly version of the site.

This is a short one, but one I didn’t see anywhere else until I did some digging. By default when you setup Google Sync with the iPhone (using ActiveSync as I described earlier), it only syncs your main calendar. If you have other calendars, you have to go to http://m.google.com/sync/ and configure your device. You can sync up to 5 Google calendars with your iPhone.

I’m a big fan of e-books and have read many on several devices, including my old Palm Tungsten T and T|X, Nokia 770 and most recently my iPhone.  There are issues with all of these though, mostly with battery life and the screen, but the Nokia 770 was the best of the bunch.  I don’t read many on my iPhone mostly because the screen uses a lot of juice.  I didn’t look into the Kindle 1 at all but with all the hype out about the Kindle 2 I decided to do some research.  So for the past week or so I’ve been reading reviews and comparisons and yesterday I finally broke down and ordered one.  Thanks to next-day shipping (very cheap actually) I got it the next day. 

I’ve had it for about two weeks now and have been using it during my trip to Germany.  The screen is excellent.  My main fear with the screen was that it would take too long to refresh.  I got this impression from many reviews of the Sony devices and the Kindle 1.  However, the Kindle 2’s screen refresh takes about a second, and once I thought about it, it takes no longer than it does to actually flip the page of a book.  I also think there is an inherit aesthetic value in the page flash and refresh.  When you flip a book page, your eyes are basically unfocused for a small amount of time, as there is no text for them to look at.  The screen flash and refresh produces the same effect, which I believe helps with eye fatigue. 

Getting books on the device is pretty easy.  I have only bought a couple of (free) books from the Kindle Store so far, which are automatically pulled down through Whispernet (but can also be downloaded from Amazon’s site and uploaded via USB).  I’ve also uploaded some ebooks I have in text and Mobipocket format which work fine.  Mobipocket format is nice because if the book is created correctly it will have a table of contents, something a plain text file lacks.  However for just getting the text itself, plain text files work fine because the Kindle reflows all the text anyway.  Mobipocket has a free program available, Mobipocket Reader, for converting PDFs and text to the mobi file format.  This seems to work ok, although I’ve had some issues getting the metadata (title and author) correct.  The Kindle 2 will use this if it’s there, else it uses the filename (e.g. for text files). 

Whispernet uses Sprint EVDO for access, which works fine for me.  There is a handy page for checking EVDO coverage as well.  The wireless can be turned off to save battery life and for airplane usage.

I have not used the built in web-browsing and Kindle Store access very much, and I doubt I will.  From what I’ve seen so far I haven’t been really impressed, plus the web browser takes a long time to start up.  Mobile web browsing is pretty much what my iPhone is for. 

On that topic, Amazon released a Kindle iPhone app recently, which I downloaded.  It works great – it can read the Amazon Kindle format, you can access the Kindle Store through it, and the app syncs itself with your Kindle (Amazon calls this Whispersync).  The app is free so anyone can download it – but it makes a great companion to the Kindle if you have an iPhone.

Overall, I am very impressed by the Kindle 2.  I’ve been using it on planes, in airports, in cars and at my hotel and it just works.  I’ve been using it to re-read the Honor Harrington saga starting from the beginning, and thanks to Baen Books releasing almost all the Honorverse books for free all I had to do was upload them to the Kindle.  I’ve already finished the first one and am plowing through the second very quickly and I’m sure I’ll use the Kindle to finish them all.

I picked this up from the Bad Astronomy blog (which I love) – the Galileoscope.  Galileo used his telescope to discover 4 moons of Jupiter, observe Saturn’s rings, and look at the Moon.  For the International Year of Astronomy 2009, a group of astronomers and educators created a replica of Galileo’s telescope.  I just ordered 2, so my girlfriend and I can both go out and look at the same thing without having to pass it back and forth.  They’re only 15 dollars a piece and extremely easy to assemble, plus the whole thing is for a great cause.  You can even donate Galileoscopes through the website easily and for a cheaper price ($12.50 instead of $15.00).

I just found out you could do this.

My favorite weather site, Weather Underground, exports its forecasts in iCal format.  For example, the link for Dayton is here.

Google Calendar lets you import other people’s calendars if they have them in iCal format out on the Net.

If you add the Weather Underground iCal link to your “Other Calendars” section on your Google Calendar page, you get automatic entries every day with the forecast.  And since I have Google Calendar all synced up to my multiple computers and iPhone, they all get the forecast too.

Pretty neat!

This is pretty nifty… I just discovered it today.

I have been affected by several incidents in the past when some organization has lost info about me.  I just read about the latest one today over on the Arkansas Blog.  I went to the supplied URL (notify.arkansas.gov) and punched my stuff in, and boom there I am.  I expected to be there though.  The list that was leaked was a list of criminal background checks, and I would have had one run on me in the process of getting my security clearance.

The main point here is that organizations do terrible jobs of securing their data.  What other times have I been affected, you ask?  Well, a quick look at the awesome website DataLossDB.org reveals several incidents I can think of.

• Names, SSNs and DOBs of 26.5 US military vets taken
• Personal data for 33,000 officers breached (this was when the USAF Assignment Management System got hacked into: story)

And there are at least a few I can’t remember the details of right now and probably ones I don’t even know about.  There’s not a lot I can do about it (other than be vigilant about my credit info) but it’s annoying.

I’m pretty spoiled by Exchange and Outlook at work.  Regardless of all the Microsoft hate out there, Exchange/Outlook is great for email, calendars, contacts and tasks in an enterprise environment.  For a while now I have been wanting to set up something similar at home.  Recently I started using Google’s various services (GMail, Calendar and Contacts) along side my primary emails at pobox.com and it has worked out well.

I use Thunderbird as my main email client (on both Mac and Windows) and started looking for ways to sync it up with Google.  For calendars there is the Lightning extension, which can sync with Google Calendar using the Provider for Google Calendar extension.  (Update: Google Calendar now supports CalDav which means you can edit calendars directly from Sunbird/Lightning.) There’s also the Google Contacts extension which syncs Thunderbird’s address book to Google.  Finally, Thunderbird can, of course, access GMail and pobox.com using IMAP.

Once I got my workstation and laptop syncing to Google I moved on to my iPhone.  The iPhone itself can only access GMail via IMAP.  The phone can sync contacts and calendars with MobileMe, a pretty clear competitor to Google’s offerings, as well as Exchange servers using ActiveSync.   MobileMe is not free however so I started looking at other solutions.  At first I had to rely on Google’s iPhone enabled webpages for Calendar and iTunes’ ability to sync to Google Contacts.  I was also using Google Calendar Sync to sync between Outlook and Google, and then using iTunes on Windows to sync between Outlook and the iPhone, but this was kind of clunky.  However, yesterday Google trumped Apple by enabling Contacts and Calendar to use the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to sync with the iPhone directly.  With this I now have a direct link between the iPhone and Google Contacts and Calendar, and can avoid the whole iTunes intermediary thing or using the Google mobile webpages.  Another good part is that the iPhone’s Exchange support utilizes push, so updates made on one computer are instantly reflected on the phone.

Finally, I discovered calaboration which allows iCal 3.x to sync directly with Google Calendar.

With all these pieces together, I have a fairly complete mail/contacts/calendar solution that works across multiple computers and my iPhone.  The only glaring hole is task management, which can be handled in part on the iPhone with Things, but not across platforms.  There is hope on the horizon with GMail Tasks, but that just came out and there isn’t any sync support for it yet.  Otherwise, the Google-Thunderbird-Lightning-iCal-iPhone sync system seems to be working pretty well so far.

We’ve gotten a lot of snow here in Ohio in the past several days. Work has been cancelled the past two days and I wouldn’t be surprised if we at least had a 2 hour delay tomorrow.

I took a few pictures that I’ve uploaded to the gallery.

After finishing Fallout 3 (post on that to come), I’ve started playing Morrowind again. I played it to completion when the game first came out, but I never played the expansions and there are a LOT of modifications to improve the game, so I thought it was time to give it another go. There are a million mods to look at, and graphical enhancements you can do, so in order to help myself and possibly other people I’ve started on a Morrowind Mod Guide on our wiki. It’s mostly done at this point and should be a good guide for anyone wanting to get back into Morrowind but doesn’t want to modify the storyline or core gameplay.