I just recently bought a TomTom Go 720. It’s pretty neat. Has handsfree with my phone, multiple methods of getting audio to me (via internal speaker, line-out, wired headset 2.5mm cell style, and FM transmitter), and an expansion slot for SD cards that I can put my Security Now podcasts on. The player is a lot better than the Windows Mobile player on my phone, so that makes me happy. It also has voice-activated commands! Yeah, I can talk to my car now. “Computer… navigate to…” almost like Star Trek. (oh god, I’m such a dork)

There is a feature that doesn’t work, but its because of my phone and not the TomTom. It will use the data plan on a PDA phone to update things like traffic. I’m considering buying a phone on the Bluetooth compatability list (scroll down and you’ll see a link for the compatibility list), but none of the PDA phones I’d be interested in do anything more than my current phone - which is just for handsfree.

Buy your own! I bought mine “recertified” - cheaper and works just fine for me.

TomTom GO 720 4.3″ Automotive GPS Navigation TomTom GO 720 4.3″ Automotive GPS Navigation

As I’ve said, I’m so far unimpressed. Windows Media Player will, for no reason I can tell, not remember my place in the podcasts I listen to. It will not resume playback consistently. Sometimes it just skips to the next track or reqwinds itself. And yes, it does this even when the phone is supposedly locked.

The ActiveSync is another bit of a problem. This is the software that synchronizes the phone with our company email server - Exchange. During synchronization, I get a couple errors a year about a malformed contact that breaks synchronization. That I can deal with. What hurts me the most is the way ActiveSync will lose its synchronization frequency settings. I usually like to have it set to always be connected and receive all items as they arrive to the server during business hours. After hours, I have it check once every 4 hours. For some reason I have not been able to work out, ActiveSync will lose all of its synchronization settings and revert back to manual sync - meaning it will only sync when I engage the sync function.The touch screen leaves much to be desired. To use it effectively, you need to use a stylus. Not because the screen isn’t sensitive enough, but because the icons and things you need to click on are so small. It took me about a month to get used to how to click with my thumb so I didn’t hit the wrong item - and I still hit the wrong item about 10% of the time. Pulling out the stylus is inconvenient (and I lost mine anyway).

On the recommendation of a colleague, I bought a piece of software that does help me out a little bit in this department. It skins itself over Windows Mobile - its fairly customizable and makes the phone easier to use without a stylus. The software is called SPB Mobile Shell, and it came bundled with a decent (not fantastic) RSS reader, another SPB Phone Suite utility, and a nfity utility I don’t need to use (because of my plan) that measures your data activity so that if you have a limited plan you can know when to stop using features like data, texting, or air minutes before you sky rocket your bill.

I hear there’s an update to Windows Mobil 6 - moving up to version 6.1. Its not available today, but I hope it resolved some of the problems I’m having with the phone. Like locking up on me (or at least appearing to have locked up), managing memory better so I don’t have to soft reset the device (which SPB Mobile Shell makes very easy, so I do it weekly at least).

I don’t mind the slide-out keyboard, but I prefer the Treo 650 and the Blackberries for their “in-your-face” keyboard. The Treo gets my overall bid, but I hear that Palm isn’t doing as well as they have in the past and I’d be worried about their Operating System becoming something obsolete and un-developed.

I dislike Blackberries, but only because in order to get them to work with an Exchange server, you have to purchase licenses for software and it becomes another maintenance issue if something goes wrong. Before Virtualization was at its current state, that usually meant purchasing not only software, but also hardware (I should offer vmware appliance services to RIM for Blackberries - hmmm… I wonder if I can offer hosted blackberry server services to people including Exchange… not a bad gig). Other than that, they are good phones and have a lot of custom software avilable to them.

Actually, that’s not the topic of the post. I was curious about what happens to coffee grounds when you flush them down the toilet. I know you’re not supposed to put them down the drain or even in the disposal unit in your sink (I’m guilty) but at the office I’ve been flushing the grounds left over from my press. So with a little google-fu, I ended up finding this very misconceived article on “To Flush or Not To Flush“. It starts off very well with some valid points about poisoning aquatic life with chemicals down the toilet. It makes sense. However, their proposed solutions aren’t so great:

1. They mention that landfills are the best place to put chemicals and medical waste products because of the plastic liners in all modern landfills. This seemed dubious to me. First I doubt that all landfills actually have this geomembrane (that’s what they call the plastic liners). Secondly, while plastics can be pretty amazing materials, they aren’t immune or inert. This means that plastics will eventually break down, they can be pierced by heavy machinery, they can leak. A little more google-fu shows some details on this from a trash presentation at a university.
2. The one that really gets me is:
   

   Placing kitty litter in empty milk container and pour liquid cleaners, or liquid medicines into it that way it will be absorbed, with no worry of contaminating the environment.

   Sounds good from the outside, but think about this a little more. Kitty litter? Have you ever smelled well-used kitty litter? Smells like kitty pee, doesn’t it? Have you ever picked it up with your bare hands?  No, because its wet with kitty pee and who knows what else!?  This is a solution for no worry of contaminating the environment?

So what has me so riled up?  Its misconceptions like these that lead to lazy environmentalism. Lazy work can often get things really messed up, maybe not at first glance, but over time I’ve come to know that lazy work just fails. What’s the point of giving someone a false sense of saving the environment?  If it ends up in the landfill, and the landfill leaks into the water tables, then the aquatic environment is still threatened.  These are ultimately empty measures.

(note about coffee presses: I like the idea of using a press because I use less materials (no coffee filters) and don’t waste coffee (only 1 cup at a time) or water. It also makes a pretty nice cup of coffee. The water cooler also has hot water in it in the office, and I’d hate to see all that energy expended if noone used it.)

I reported that there were no casualties from the coffee + laptop test, right?  Well, there was 1 casualty.  I thought at first it was this nifty LED darklight that comes on the top of the screen so that you can see yourself typing in the dark (without using a back-light on the keyboard which would be more expensive).  Turns out, the light works fine.  Its the PgUp key that has the problem.  It doesn’t like to register that I pressed it very often and the key combo to turn on the LED is Fn + PgUp.  Ahh well, if you ever see some dude in the corner of Panera hammering away at the corner of his keyboard like Linus from Peanuts having a seizure, its just me trying to turn on (or off) my nightlight.

TrueCrypt with whole drive encryption has been, as I said earlier, great.  There is a bit of getting used to the fact that I have to type in a 22 character password before I can boot the computer - so I often turn it on and come back after getting coffee with it prompting me not for my windows password, but the TrueCrypt one.  I only mistype it about once or twice a week, which isn’t bad considering how often I power on/off this device.

And I finish this post up with words you can live by: “Coffee plus wind pipe = :(”  yeah, I just inhaled the coffee.  Maybe Panera is bad for my health.

I have no problem with the hulu.com advertising between scenes, its very traditional. I don’t even mind the hulu logo in the bottom right corner of the screen, as I’ve gotten used to that from some television stations. However, I do not appreciate the new ads I see on the bottom of the screen during the show. Bah! I don’t really want to know about Chili’s Bottomless Express Lunch. All those restaurants are serving us portions that are too large as it is..  now its bottomless?