HartlessByDesign

So Garmin released his new ROM which works perfect on my tilt.  All my SIPs (soft input panels) are now working.  The ROM is fast and more stable than any other I've used.  Great job Garmin! 

So today Google FINALLY came up with a solution to keep your contacts clean and uncluttered.  Traditional Gmail auto added email addresses as an email conversation took place.  This was really annoying since email addresses for mailing lists, Blog posts, forum posts, etc were all added to the contacts thus adding hundreds of unwanted email addresses to the list.  

 They wrote on their blog:

My Contacts contains the contacts you explicitly put in your address book (via manual entry, import or sync) as well as any address you've emailed a lot (we're using five or more times as the threshold for now).

Suggested Contacts is where Gmail puts its auto-created contacts. By default, Suggested Contacts you email frequently are automatically added to My Contacts, but for those of you who prefer tighter control of your address books, you can choose to disable usage-based addition of contacts to My Contacts (see the checkbox in the screenshot above). Once you do this, no matter how many times you email an auto-added email address it won't move to My Contacts.

 

Hooray for Google!  I am a happier Google user.

Now there are just two more things that would put me in Google bliss.  The first, a TASK LIST MANAGER.  This has been asked for since they released Google Calendar but of course still no go.  They posted in a Google Calendar Help Group,

Hey everyone - thanks for the loud and very clear feedback on your desire for a to-do/task list feature. We're pretty passionate about to-do lists here as well, and we've got something in the works. Of course, we're working to add our special Google secret sauce to the to-do lists space (which can take some time to get right,) so we don't have something to announce just yet, but the entire team is listening to these threads closely.  

 

Well that was in October of last year and still no Task List.  

And of course after the task list has to come a complete Google PIM sync with mobile devices.  Then, I'll be in Google bliss.

So I just upgraded to the best ROM I've played with for my Tilt.  Garmin's Garmin.DK.1 WM 6.1 Premium has been the most stable, best performing, unbloated ROM I've tried. I'm sticking with his ROMs! I love it.

But...at no fault of his, WM6.1 has apparently made it a headache to get third party SIPs (Soft Input Panels) to work properly. I've had gone round and round and round trying to get TouchPal v3.5 (my absolutely favorite SIP) to work. As a matter of fact, I can't get any third party SIP to work. I asked in the xda-developer forums:

Skatdawg (or anybody), could you enlighten me as to why it is so important for the sip to be installed first? I'm just curious because does that mean when (if) I can get a sip to actually work and I want to add a new one or change it later down the road, I have to hard reset, install the sip, get the sip working, and then totally re-setup my device? I don't remember having this problem with wm5 or wm6.

Skatdawg, a very active member in the forums, stated the following in response:

It's unfortunate but true that wm6.1 doesn't seem to play will with SIPs, though you may be able to install them later on, it doesn't always work. WE just recommend the mentioned method because it gives you the highest probability of success. The reason you don't remember this problem from wm5 or wm6 is that it probably didn't exist, but SIP issues are becoming increasingly more common, and accordingly the senior members around here are recommending the "best practice" which is not a requirement, but probably a good idea. Hopefully that helps clear it up a little.

The mentioned method is to install the SIP first before anything else. Then use IMselector or sipchange to make it default. I've tried that, numerous times, and to no luck. I'm not for sure why I'm having such a difficult time with this. I'm quite aggravated. This is my only issue and if I could just get it fixed, this ROM would be the most perfect one yet!

[video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZyYjQHcXEU]

So, Google added Gmail Labs which is a play ground for Google's employees to place their 20% projects.  (Google gives their employees 20% of their time to create whatever they want. Pretty cool).  I like this idea and hope some useful things get incorporated into Gmail.  Right now, there are only 13 features which are not very useful. 

 At first, Gmail Labs was not enabled in my Google Apps account even though I have the setting enabled in my Gmail control panel to add new features as they are available to general Gmail users.  I found that Labs appeared when I created a new user.  

Now if Google will only give the option to disable auto add of contacts!!  My contacts are extremely cluttered with email addresses I don't care to keep!

Microsoft is wipping out some crazy technology. I read an article by Bill Gates in a magazine all about robotics at Barnes And Noble (I can't remember the name of the magazine.) Mr. Gates was talking about how great it would be and how close we are to running our household with robots. The Microsoft Home in Redmon, Washington is the play ground for Microsoft's new innovations to making the home advanced with amazing technology.

 I just read an article on CrunchGear and watched a video about Microsoft's new TouchWall which is a touch screen technology. It is pretty cool. It is made up of lasers, cameras, a projector, a flat surface (any flat surface), and software named Plex which runs on standard Vista. You can zoom in, zoom out, watch videos, flip through word documents, flip through pictures, annotate, and more. If you have a red pen in your hand, the camera will pick that up and allow you to annotate with red pixels on the screen. If you have a digital camera on the surface, then it will recognize the camera and begin to download the pictures. Quite amazing. Check it out:

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPrfqdl55D0]

Back to my title. With Bill Gates' dream regarding the future of robotics and with the obvious financial backing and innovation to make it happen, will Will Smith's sci-fi movie I, Robot become a reality to us in the year 2035? And will Microsoft be the cause of it?  Dum dum dum.

I made the move to upgrade my site to Joomla 1.5.2. Along with it came a new look, new blogging component, and a few other tweaks. If you signed up for an account at my old site, you will have to sign up again. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Let me know what you think!

So I had this long, descriptive blog entry for my favorite online apps/services. And then Firfox locked up on me and I lost it all. Grrrr....

I am now out of time so I am forced to simply list them for now. Maybe another day I will expound on them. Regardless, check them out! (Note, they are not listed in any kind of specific order).

1) Google Apps - host my mail and calendar. Gmail and Google Calendar rocks and now I can have them both with my logo and my personal URL! Best part, it's FREE!

2) Zoho Office Suite - an amazing online office suite and more with all the bells and whistles one can imagine. If you like simple, stick with Google Docs. But if you like features, go with Zoho! Best part, it's FREE!

3) Grand Central - one number to rule them all. A person can call one telephone number and all the numbers you set up will ring simultaneously. Listen to voicemail online either through their web interface or by email. Receive notification by email or SMS. Block numbers, send telemarketers to a spam voicemail box, customize rings, utilize webcall buttons (see mine to the right; call me toll free!), and much more. Best of all, it's FREE!

4) YouMail - replace your carrier's voicemail with this one and listen to voicemail by phone, online, or by email! A ton of features and best of all, it's FREE!

5) Yodlee - a great online app to track your finances. It automatically connects to your financial institutions and downloads transactions. I can go to one place to see my balances, transactions, bills, etc. Best of all, it's FREE!

6) SendMeRss - get all your RSS feeds in your inbox for FREE!

That's it for now. I'm sure you noticed that all the apps/services above are FREE. I'm all about free :-)

So a number of years I decided to put windows in the closet and use Ubuntu. And I am very glad I did. Ever since, I have been notorious for upgrading to alpha/beta stages of Ubuntu before they are released. There has only been maybe one occasion that I have absolutely regretting doing that. But overall, satisfied. I like the adventure of it because usually when I upgrade before to a beta version, things are broken and I have to find the solution.

I'm not very good at it since I am not a first/second generation Linux user who had to create everything themselves including drivers. Now they know how to get around Linux! Me on the other hand started off with Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog and almost immediately upgraded to Breezy Badger. Even then, Ubuntu had streamlined things so much to where there really wasn't a tremendous need to be able to get around Linux using a command prompt. Don't get me wrong, I'm a total Linux noob, I can now drive the command prompt decently well. My problem is that I have not taken the time to learn the basics of some of the programming languages Linux and Linux programs are built upon thus I am not dive into the reasons bugs exist. However, I try to feed back into the community as I find bugs and am able to do so.

Anyway, so I took the plunge into Hardy. At first glance I'm not noticing a whole lot of differences than Gusty. I'm going to describe them in a bulleted list for glancing purposes.

 

• I first noticed that they changed the apt updater icon that sits in the notification area which looks much nicer than the one in Gusty.


• They also changed the layout of the list of applets in the Add To Panel to alphabetical order rather than sections (I like this very much).


• When you connect to a remote server, they mount it and give you the option of adding it as a bookmark which adds it to a quick list in the menu and nautilus. It no longer lists it as the name you provide it but rather "ftp as username on serveraddress" which I really don't like. The bookmark is named as I chose, but the drive mounted is not. I'm also having some trouble staying connected to the ftp server. Nautilus is consistently throwing errors then I have to kill nautilus, unmount and remount the server.


• FF3 is the default but as of right now, the majority of the addons I use are not FF3 compatible so I had to downgrade to FF2.


• Checkgmail which I rely upon heavily refused to open. After screwing around with it for a while, I finally tried completely uninstalling the program and deleted my ~/.checkmail directory. Reinstalled and setup and now it seems to work fine.


• My number pad on my keyboard would not type numbers regardless if numlock was set or not. I found a solution to that here. They write:

   

  
  I was finally able to do some hunting around Launchpad to find out why the numeric keypad on my keyboard "broke" once I got Ubuntu Hardy installed, and I was able to find a workaround for it. It's also not a Hardy bug after all but a GNOME bug, and I've got both a workaround and bug links for all that need it.

  First off, there's an easy workaround for it. Go into the Keyboard Preferences (System >Preferences > Keyboard) and go to the Mouse Keys tab. Simply uncheck the box for Allow to control the pointer using the keyboard. (I know the grammar sucks on that sentence. I need to find a bug for that as well.) That will let users of Ubuntu Hardy, and other distros that use GNOME 2.22, to regain the use of their numeric keypad.

  There are two bugs for this on file. for Ubuntu Launchpad has bug #197589: Numeric keypad no longer works after upgrade. That bug actually pointed me to the GNOME bug on Bugzilla, #521197 - Numeric keypad no longer works after upgrade. With any luck we'll have this fixed for the next milestone for Hardy.

  
  


• They have a cool little program in the System Tools menu called Hardware Testing. It runs tests on your hardware where you can say yes it works or no it doesn't and provide comments as needed. At the end, Ubuntu sends a report to launchpad so that Ubuntu can get feedback on hardware issues. Very nice. Thankfully, all my hardware thus far seems to be working well including compiz fusion with my nvidia video card. Of course some of that could be that I got it working with Gutsy with a bit of work thus it rolled over to Hardy. It may be different if I did a clean install.

 

Well I suppose that's it for now.

As I said at my old blogger site 

Well, I'm a geek and geeks have to do things their geeky way. So, I moved my blog to http://www.hartless.org :-)

 What more can I say? Here I can do a lot more with my site than at blogger.