Still waiting for my next phone

A few months ago, I wrote about my plans to upgrade my phone to a new Windows Mobile 5 one.

Well I still haven't bought anything as I decided to wait for the 3G version HTC Hermes.

Whatever phone I get will have to last a good couple of years, by which time I can see 3G being in more common use, so I thought it was probably best to wait. Some people have moaned about the processor in the Wizard being too slow, so the improved speed of the Hermes CPU was also a consideration.

Anyway, at the recent 3GSM conference, some more details about the Hermes have come out, and I still think this will be my next phone. Msmobiles is reporting that T-Mobile still expect to release it in May, and that it will also support HSDPA (the so called 3.5G) :)

PocketPCItalia has some more specs, along with some pictures (Google Translation). The only slight concern here is that the processor seems to have changed from a 400MHz XScale to a 300MHz Samsung one, but this is still faster than the Wizard one, so hopefully will perform OK.

Office 2007

Yep, that's right, the next version of Microsoft Office (known as Office 12 until now) will imaginatively be called Office 2007 when its released later this year! :)

I wonder how much their marketing department gets paid to come up with these names??? :)

The details of the different packages available can be found on the Microsoft website here , along with their pricing information .

I am looking forward to the new version, as I am still using Office 2000 at the moment. I would probably look to get the main 4 applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, which is the Standard package, but the $399 price tag seems a bit steep!

This is especially true if you compare it to the 'Home and Student' version which replaces Outlook with OneNote, but goes for just $149. You could buy this and Outlook for $258 - just over half the price of the standard package, and including the extra OneNote program!!

To be honest I don't know what OneNote is or what it does (time for some searching I think :) ) but this seems the way to go to me, especially as Paul Thurrott says that this version includes a licence to install it on up to three different machines !

Multiple Monitors in Windows XP

I recently received a new graphics card for my work PC to try and setup a dual monitor system and was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was!

My machine was currently using the onboard video, so I bought a cheap PCI card (a Radeon 7000 64MB PCI for £23 from dabs) to provide the second output. This was because I had read that using an AGP graphics card prevents the onboard graphics from working as well.

Once the new card was installed, it was detected fine and windows automatically installed the required drivers for it.
I then had a moment of concern when I realised Windows was no longer detecting the onboard video, but this turned out to be because the BIOS had automatically disabled it. A quick change of the BIOS setting fixed this problem, and Windows could see both graphics adapterss correctly.

It was then a simple matter of going into the Display Settings and choosing the 'Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor' option for the second (onboard) display.

Having got the 2 moitor setup working correctly, there were two things that stood out that I wanted to fix. The first was to have the windows taskbar on both monitors (ideally only showing the windows displayed on that monitor), and the second was to get a nice panoramic wallpaper that displayed across both monitors.

The UltraMon product does solve these problems along with providing lots more features, but it isa commercial product and I didn't really want to spend any money so I started looking for some free alternatives. :)

Oscar's Multi-Monitor TaskBar from Mediachance solves the first problem. This free tool provide a new taskbar for the second monitor, and ensures that only the windows displayed on each monitor appear on the associated taskbar. This tool also provides buttons to easily move a window between monitors. The only problem with it is that it doesn't really fit in with the XP look and feel!

In order to get a wallpaper to display across multiple monitors, I read that if you choose the 'Tile' setting it will do this. However, as a consequence you need to make sure that your image has the right resolution, as no scaling will be applied. I found a great collection of suitable images from deviantART in their multi display wallpaper category.

Overall I'm impressed with how easy this was to setup. I'm only just working out how best to make use of the two monitors at the moment, but I'm sure that once I get used to it I wont want to go back! :)

24 Season 5

The new season of 24 started last night (at least here in the UK) and after just 2 hours I'm totally hooked! :)

I think it's the fast paced action, and the fact that nobody is guaranteed to survive (except Jack of course) that keeps me interested, even if the stories are a bit similar.
I really wasn't expecting Palmer to get shot pretty much straight away, and then to kill off Michele & Tony as well!! There gonna need a whole new cast! :)

It's just a shame I've got to wait a week to see the next episode, but I'm glad I've got the PVR to fast forward the adverts! :)

Google Desktop 3 - Privacy continues to erode...

Google have just released version 3 of their Desktop Search application , and it seems to be generating a lot of talk across the blogosphere!

The main new feature in this release seems to be the ability to search across remote computers, e.g. seach your desktop machine from your laptop, or search your home machine from work etc.

Although this sounds like a pretty neat feature, Mike (from TechCrunch) raises some interesting security and privacy issues about it, as in order to use this feature, all your search index data gets stored on Google's servers! (Although apparently only temporarily .) The EFF have gone as far as telling people not to use the product at all !

It's interesting to watch the gradual changes Google (and others) are making into how they store and use our data. I'm sure if they came straight out and announced that they will store all our data, a lot of people wouldn't use it, but by making lots of small changes as part of new features they are gradully storing more and moe of our information.

For example, if you use a lot of Google services (all linked to your google account) they have access to at elast the following details:

• All your email messages (and contacts) through GMail
• All your IM conversations (and contacts) through GoogleTalk
• All your searches through Personlised Search (Includes web searches, news searches, products you're interested in (froogle), etc.)
• Any feeds you use through Google Reader
• And now the contents of all documents on your computers through Google Desktop.

And I'm sure I've missed a lot of stuff!

From Google's point of view, the more information they are storing for us the better. It makes us more likely to use their services, therefore increasing their advertising revenue, and reduces our reliance on the Microsoft operating system.

I personally think there are a lot of benefits to storing everything on remote servers (access from anywhere, automatic backup and protection, etc.) but how far would we trust third parties with all our data, especially given their ability to change their privacy policies etc as needed??

I think this question will only be answered over time as we see how much trust peole are willing to give out, but I can't see us moving to completely remote storage any time soon!!

IE7 beta2

Microsoft released the first publicly available version of IE7 recently, the beta 2 preview.

Anyone can download and try this out, but being a beta release it is not recommended for production environments.

Having tried it out briefly, my initial thoughts are that it is definitely an improvement over IE6, but I can't see myself switching from Maxthon any time soon!

There are some good features in this release:

• The printing support has been greatly improved. There is now a 'shrink to fit' option that will automatically resize the data so that it fits on the page. It is also now possible to print preview selections, and to adjust margins easily in the preview window.
• A page zoom option has been added, that zooms images as well as the text, so that the layout of the page stays exactly the same regardless of the zoom level.
• The 'Quick Tabs' option, which shows live thumbnails of all the tabs currently open to allow easy switching between them

However, I wouldn't recommend using this release as I had it crash on me quite a few times while I was trying it out.

Also, compared to Maxthon its features are quite lacking. For example, I use the following features all the time and they are missing in IE7:

• There is no way to reorder tabs (that I could find)
• It does not support mouse gestures.
• It does not support 'super drag and drop' - Dragging links to open them in a new tab.
• I couldn't see any mention of URL aliases (Being able to assign a short name that can be entered to go to specific URLs)
• There currently isn't a supported search provider for Google UK, although I'm sure this will change.
• And I'm sure I could list plenty more!!

I am looking forward to the final release though, as because Maxthon is based on IE, it will automatically gain the security improvements, and a lot of the new features such as printing and zooming.

Six Degrees of wikipedia

I saw this site mentioned on a BoingBoing post and found it very interesting.

It tries to find connections between any two articles on Wikipedia, and provides the route taken to get from one to the other, the count being the number of degrees of separation.

There is so much stuff on wikipedia that you could spend hours playing with this! :)

Did you know there are 3 degrees of separation between The Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire, and only 3 degrees between SG-1 and Shakespeare??? :)