Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

My latest piece of superfluous technology arrived. While perhaps not as shiny as drplokta's new beast, it's certainly rather on the small size...

Recently a rash of Psion NetBooks have started to appear on eBay. They're small devices, somewhere between a PDA and a laptop in conception, and come with a reasonable selection of applications - as well as the ability to be used as mobile Java terminals. This last factor is what captured my attention - I would be able to do some experimentation with developing J2ME web services clients on a platform with a bit more ooomph than a Palm. I'll also, hopefully, have a small word processing beast, suitable for writing fiction on the move.

So I decided to bid on one, prompted by emails from autopope. The initial batch turned out to be surplus stock from a Malaysian educational project, with a custom boot loader - which meant they were essentially a fixed configuration. Luckily I was able to find a refurbished British-spec NetBook for a very good price indeed, which after some tooing and froing (involving the wrong parcel), finally arrived this morning.

I've now downloaded the latest ROM, installed it, stuck in a spare WLAN card, and am online, using Opera to access LJ - and to post this entry. I do like it when things "just work".

Hmmm. I wonder if there is an EPOC LJ client...

[update, it appears not - but I wonder if this Java client will work...]

In today's Guardian there's a piece on how much Jeffrey Archer has read while in jail. They seem to think that 16 long works in 67 days is a goodly amount of reading - though I think they may well not have met fen.

According to my calculations Archer is reading around 0.24 of a novel a day. Looking at the review section of this blog I seem to be reading at a rate of around 0.37 npd - and I know I'm not the fastest fannish reader about. I'd actually guess his reading speed as being fairly average amongst the people I know.

I'd have expected better of a literate newspaper.

I do this quiz and I get this result...

Oh dear. I don't think there is any hope for me now...

I had to laugh at the comments on the quiz pages - they were so 2000. "Is this Flash?? if not, why not???"