Lilla Svea reborn

Today I finally have the time to reinstall my Swedish laptop, which I bought 2.5 years ago, and had recently become so pollluted, that even the Windows start-up tune had become “crackled”…

First I failed to use the official Packard Bell Master recovery DVD, which didn’t come with the machine. No, you had to create them yourself, which I did about a year ago. However, after booting up the Win/98 PE version, it just crashed with a stack overflow. Wonderful! So I installed a student version of XP Pro Swedish, which seems to work fine.

However, I was still missing PackardBell specific drivers (like for video, audio, touchpad, etc.). Luckily I was able to download them here .

Converting for Mobile Devices

So last weekend I spent quite a lot of time fiddling with software for my mobile devices: my Palm Tungsten C, and my Nokia 6131 phone.

1. I tried to transcode movies (actually, episodes of the Heroes show) first for my Palm, then for my phone. The challenges were: how to correctly transcode an AVI in HD-format (16:9) to the 320×320 screen of my Palm, and then to the QVGA (240 x 320) of my Nokia.
I succeeded at the first quite acceptably; the drawback of my Palm is that I don’t have a very good player app. (MMMedia, which) and that the earphone jack is a bit broken (1-channel sound and a 2.5mm jack)
With the Nokia conversion, I didn’t succeed in finding the correct settings for the right program to convert it to the required 3GP container.
I tried both the free MediaCoder program and a trial version of Xilisoft’s 3GP Video Converter.

2. The other piece of software I tried, was Mobile Master. My problem was: I have appointments on both my Palm and my phone, and I want to synchronize them. Also, I am used to synchronizing my Palm with the Palm Desktop software, which I prefer over crappy M$ Outlook. Using Mobile Master, I’m now able to synchronize Palm Desktop with my Nokia phone, so I can (through the PC) keep my 2 mobile devices synchronized. Yay!

Memory Hog

Hurray, I’ve found what program was slowly eating the RAM on my PCs. The culprit turned out to be… ZoneAlarm!
Although I’ve used this program for a few years, lately I found that after having left my PC on for a few hours, the amount of used memory slowly increased, even if I’d close all applications. To the point that after 2 or 3 hours (depending on which machine it was) it was completely full and unusable because “No resources are available” or something.
Now that I’ve uninstalled ZoneAlarm (version 7.0.337 if you’re interested), even after several hours of uptime, the amount of used memory is still almost what it was when I started the machine up.
Can anyone recommend another good free firewall app for Windoze?

SD = SSSSSSecure Digital

After having tried reading three different SD cards on my 2003 Toshiba laptop, I found that the only one it actually wants to read, is one of their own brand… Is that security??? Aren’t those things supposed to be universal? Is it a marketing trick by Toshiba to make sure you only buy their brand of cards?

Portable Apps

Okay, I’m probably the last one in the universe to find out about this, but in case you’ve been living in a cave for the last 5 years, you may not have heard of this cool site, which offers all kinds of applications you can run from your USB stick:

Portable Apps

Great freeware

Okay, the heading sounds like spam, but if you haven’t seen them, go check these out:

- Firefox 2.0

- Google Maps for Palm. Advertised for Treo, but it also works on any other PalmOS 5 device, with the PRC that you can download.

Garmin GPS 60

After studying a lot of specs, getting users’ opinions, and considering pros and cons, I decided to buy this GPS receiver for my new hobby (geocaching):

Now that I’ve had it for a few weeks, I can say I’m quite pleased with it. The protruding antenna makes it a little less compact, but does improve the reception substantially.

Svensk laptop

Went shopping for a keyboard, but came home with… a laptop:

.

Well, it wasn’t completely an impulse purchase. For a long time, I’ve wanted to have:
1. A Swedish keyboard
2. A *really* portable laptop (not the 3.4 kg of my current one).
3. A Swedish version of Windows.
So now I have all those in one, and for under EUR 1000, a lot less than ultraportable laptops used to cost (> EUR 1500).

Main features:
- 13″ glare screen. Although I had my reservations about these reflective screens, now I’m quite pleased with the brightness, contrast, and sharpness of the image. Even at 13″, the picture is crisp and clear.
- 1.97 kg. Light enough to walk around Stockholm for a day, and still have some feet left.
- 512 Mb RAM, 50 Gb HD. Not excessive, but enough for daily needs, and 10 Gb more than in my 3-year old Toshiba.
- Wifi.
- a Celeron M-370 at 1.5 GHz isn’t that impressive, but hey, it’s a machine for on the road and traveling, not a processing powerhouse. Although: does anyone know if it’s easy to replace this by, say, a Pentium-M ?

ADSL diagram

Just so it won’t get lost when they move house, I’ll post this photo + diagram of how I connected all the ADSL and phone stuff at my parents’ house:

Compiling under Linux

I probably started using Unix fulltime about 13 years ago, and I still love Linux. However, this CVS contraption, automake adversity, and linker limbo is almost making me pull my hairs out.

Where does this “myComponent.so: undefined symbol: XtDestroyWidget” message suddenly come from? Or better: how do I get rid of it?

And why is CVS so bloody slow? Is it our network? My machine?