Two new blogs I’m going to add to my Netvibes RSS feed: Diego Rodriguez(metacool)’s Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness and Mister Jalopy and Mark F.’s Dinosaurs and Robots. I hope I don’t need to explain Mr. Rodriguez’s new place to you; Dinosaurs and Robots says about itself, “Rather than focus on the newest trend, we will seek authentic, handy, rarefied, disgusting, illuminating, delicious, mysterious, intoxicating, commonplace, historic, intensely personal, entertaining and enlightened objects, both priceless heirlooms and exquisite trash.” Sounds good to me. Uniting both new blogs – a certain, shall we say, augmented, Ford product.
Author Archives: dr.hypercube
Great new Gmail feature
Just click “Set custom time” from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.
Whaddaya mean, “What’s today’s date?” Oh, right…
Bibliomane's paradise
On the way home yesterday, I was able to swing into one of the most dangerous places north of New York: the New England Mobile Book Fair. It is a near-perfect book store. Things it does not have:
- endcap displays
- DVDs
- a coffee stand/counter (actually, not the worst thing that ever happened to a bookstore, but something that definitely distinguishes NEMBF from a chain)
- glossy formica – except perhaps at the registers
- wheels (it hasn’t been mobile since basically forever)
It does have:
- books, books and more books
- funkadelic shelves
- labyrinthine floor plan (in the remainders area – where I do most of my browsing)
- great clippings, pictures and signs on the walls
A slide show to give you a taste…
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Nokia N810 nav functions
The N810 I recently purchased has a built in GPS receiver. I had a drive to do this morning and figured I’d put it to the route-finding test. There was very little route to find – directions were about as easy as can be imagined – a perfect first outing. Call me conservative, but I prefer to shake things down before I’m in desperate need of them (when possible). There are two options, as far as I can tell, on the N810:
- Wayfinder comes preloaded on the N810 with a big caveat – to get route finding, you need to spend $$ to upgrade to the ‘full’ version. At this point it looks like a 36 month subscription is about $140 – too rich for my blood.
- Maemo Mappper is a free open source app that’s a one-click install, To get voice directions you also need to install flite, so maybe I should characterize it as a two-clicker.
I spent 10 minutes or so yesterday with Maemo Mapper – figuring out how to ask for directions, download maps along the route, etc. First thing this morning, I fired up Mapper and set out. A note on the N810’s GPS performance – every review you read says the same thing – it takes forever for the receiver to find satellites. True fact. I think my ancient Garmin 12XL comes up faster. However, once it’s up the N810 does a great job staying connected. I drove with the little beastie on the passenger seat (the Garmin would have lost signal for sure) and it knew where I was throughout the trip. No tunnels – it would be interesting to see how quickly it re-composed itself once above ground again – but as I said, baby steps. The voice directions were just fine; standard syntho-voice, something I prefer – don’t startle me with a “who the heck is in the car?” moment. All in all, a positive experience – encouraging for the first time out.
Mapper generates a track as you move – I saved the ‘going away’ track and loaded it to my server. Right-click here, choose save link as and it’ll load into Google Earth like a charm. Some pics from the ride:
Local point of interest
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Navigator/radio operator’s station
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Got the radio on
I’m like the roadrunner
Alright
I’m in love with modern moonlight
128 when it’s dark outside
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(I’ll bet a million bucks Steve knows exactly where these antennae are.)