Fun with Mashups

My Saturday morning wanderings turned up a fun little clicky thing that I am putting here since it has a bunch of image links and stuff.

Oh boy!

Calligrapher / Write Pad seems to be working even better now that I have disabled a few more startup processes.

I was worried one of them might have been needed for using wireless, but I'm corrected right now and it's working fine.

Next up, trying a newer version of smartfeed.

Write Pad Test

Will the test posts never end??

Yeah, um, apparently not!

the important thing for me to remember is to kill Microsoft Voice Command before attempting to invoke Write Pad.

If I do that, it works great!

So now I need to find a faster way to do that, or to have Voice Command not load at startup.

Cell phone feature we could use

Someone needs to make a cell phone with a built-in thermometer. Not for measuring people's temperatures, but for reporting room or ambient temperature.

And I guess they might as well slap a compass on there too (the directional kind, not the circle-drawing kind).

First mobile photo post!

First mobile photo post!
Originally uploaded by jiffener.

Here it is, my first mobile photo post, taken with my new camera phone, sent to flickr, and now jettisoned over to blogger.

Not only is it cool that there is a site devoted to the topic of sustainability, www.sustainablebusiness.com, but at the moment it includes a dollar bill shirt like my sister knows how to make! One day I will be able to do them myself, but right now I can only do them when she helps me. 

I defy you to find a better End User License Agreement--anywhere! This one is from Emulamer's x50Mix for the Dell Axim. I've had it sitting around waiting to upload since January 7, and now that jiffener.com has successfully moved over to the new host, I have a small pile of stuff to throw up onto my blog. 

Bluetooth and XP SP2

So what is the friggin' deal with Bluetooth and SP2? I have spent the better part of the past 2 days trying to get a bluetooth mouse to stay working for more than an hour. Once it stops working, it's JACKED indefinitely, and there I am in driver hell again.

I don't understand why it has to be so complicated.

At the moment it is working, but if it stops working I'm not sure what to try. The Windows drivers? Install from the mouse vendor's (Iogear) CD? Follow their instructions, or not, and then afterwards, update the drivers that got replaced by Microsoft's drivers with the vendor's drivers in the device manager?

I'm still not sure where the problem lies, to be honest. I have had problems with a Bluetooth keyboard as well as a different RF wireless mouse. But, with the other mouse, turning it off and on would usually fix the problem. So, I thought maybe it was the bluetooth adapter (a D-Link DBT-120 rev B3) and today I picked up an Iogear GBU211. I thought maybe it play nicer with its sibling mouse.

I really like the little mouse, but unfortunately it doesn't have a PocketPC/Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition driver. There is a "hacked" ThinkOutside Stowaway driver that supposedly will work for any bluetooth mouse, and with that driver I did manage to see the mouse from my Axim, but got a message saying there were no services on the device that I could use. So it didn't exactly work.

I'm tempted to buy ThinkOutside's Stowaway mouse for the simple reason that I have a Dell Executive Bluetooth Keyboard which is actually made by ThinkOutside. I bought it from Dell, but when the plastic stand broke, I emailed ThinkOutside and they sent me 2 new plastic stands for free, without filling out any forms or anything annoying like that. They didn't care I bought it from Dell. They didn't try to pass me off to Dell. They just solved the problem.

And it's a great keyboard, and the driver for the mouse is actually installed at the same time as the keyboard, and I know how well the keyboard driver works. So, I'm seriously considering buying the ThinkOutside mouse. I don't especially want to spend 40-80 more dollars on bluetooth pointing devices, depending on where you shop, but it might happen.

It's just sad that I have had so much trouble with Bluetooth on the laptop, on what is supposedly a mature platform.

So, anyway, I better go do something with my mouse while it's still working. Gotta go!

Calligrapher

This is a test post using Calligrapher, running on Bitsy, of course. Now that I finally have it running, it does work very well. It's actually kind of eerie, it works so well, Of course saying that seems to have jinxed me.

The quick summary of getting it running:
Disabling unused SIP's (i.e., transcriber, letter recognizer)
Uninstalling an unused today plugin (freeing up some memory)