Monthly Archives: July 2005

lol, RIAA, lol

Posted by on July 27, 2005 No comments

I decided I’m going to keep track of all the bone headed moves that the RIAA and MPAA make. To start off this grand journey let’s take a look at this.

So some people set some footage they took in a video game to some music for the enjoyment of their friends. The RIAA sees their music being used and BAM IT’S TIME TO SUE!!!!11!111one

As Mike at Techdirt notes, this sort of usage of the RIAAs product is going to do nothing but help promote music sales. But then again the RIAA has never been any good at understanding anything that falls out of the purview of their old business models.

MiniSD + WiFi = Amazing

Posted by on July 24, 2005 No comments

Gizmodo links to a working MiniSD WiFi card. This is amazing. In case you’ve never seen a MiniSD card before, one card is slightly bigger than your thumbnail.

My Audiovox SMT5600 has a MiniSD slot. I dont know how useful WiFi would be for it since there’s only one slot and taking out my 512MB card to put the WiFi card in would leave me with less than 20MB of on-board flash memory. Awesome, nonetheless.

World War II as a RTS game

Posted by on July 22, 2005 No comments

Hilarious. It’s an overview of WWII written as if it was an RTS game and you’re reading the in-game chat.

Weather

Posted by on July 21, 2005 No comments

Scoble points out weather.msn.com. I really like this. I’m so tired of sites like weather.com that are so big it takes like 30 seconds to load the page and are overloaded with gaudy advertisements.

This is the future of the web, people. Simple, attractive, small.

Water on Mars

Posted by on July 20, 2005 No comments

Quite a stunning example of water on Mars.

Man, I’ve been busy

Posted by on July 20, 2005 No comments

I’ve been so busy with work-related stuff I haven’t had time to post much for awhile. I’ll do a little catch-up this evening.

First off, the Start.com beta still doesn’t work correctly in Firefox. This despite the fact that they just updated it.

Also, it’s going to be hard to get some of us to really test it out without OPML import capabilities.

Audiovox SMT 5600 mini-review

Posted by on July 3, 2005 No comments

Hmm, it’s been quite a while since I posted something, I’ll try to rectify that today…

About a month or so ago I went ahead and got the Audiovox SMT 5600 from Cingular. I won’t do a full-fledged review of the phone because there are plenty of them out there. I’ll just share a few of the things I do with the phone.

  • One of my favorite things about the phone is something I didn’t expect to be using. I haven’t ever really used Outlook to organize my life, but as part of Microsoft Windows Mobile Outlook syncronization is built in so I decided to give Outlook a shot. Currently I’m just using the Tasks feature of Outlook. As I’m sitting at my computer I can make up to-do lists in Outlook and then when I sync the phone to my PC those lists get transferred to my phone automatically. Then when I’m on the job or wherever, I can use the phone to check off items that I’ve completed. Next time I sync my phone the items I’ve completed are automatically synced back to Outlook. I find this to be very handy.
  • Another thing I do with the phone is use it as an MP3 player. When circumstances permit I use headphones, but the integrated speaker isn’t bad at all. I use this mode when I have the phone in it’s holder which is attached to my tool belt at work. My tool belt has suspenders and the phone is held on the suspenders up on my chest and I can hear the phone just fine as well as hear people around me. Additionally, I’ve recently decided to try some podcasts of different talk shows I usually am only able to listen to part of while I’m driving around in my vehicle, now my PC automatically downloads new episodes of such shows and then Windows Media Player syncs them to my phone.
  • Orb. While it doesn’t happen that often, there are times where I’m stuck somewhere waiting for something like a meeting or whatever. If I’m tired of listening to MP3’s I can browse to a website on Pocket Internet Explorer and then stream any of the hundreds of videos and movies I have stored on my home PC to my phone. While the phone only has a GPRS radio capable of around 40kbps, the screen is small enough that the data rate of such videos isn’t that great and the stuff is pretty watchable. This leads me to another thing I use the phone for a lot.
  • Pocket Internet Explorer. I’ve gotten to the point where I use my mobile internet connection all the time. From using Google Mobile, to Answers.com mobile, to Wapedia.

    • To tell you the truth, I’ve yet to find any real negatives to this phone….