Thursday, December 6, 2007

General update

Between my Flash class, apartment hunt and pregnancy (Andrea's pregnancy, actually), I haven't had much time to do any real writing. Today, I'm at a venture capital conference in Half Moon Bay between sessions. Anyway, here are a few odds 'n' ends:

  • My iPaq 6915 died. Or more accurately, it stopped syncing to PCs through the USB connection -- which for my purposes, is the same thing. A repair and badly needed battery replacement looked like it was going to be $100 or so, and who knows what else was about to go wrong with it? So I replaced it with the AT&T Tilt, which was going for half price Thanksgiving Day weekend. I'll write more about it later, but it's a pretty nice phone -- powerful and 3-G network ready. My data plan went up another $20, but it connects at true broadband speeds, dulling the financial bite a bit. I can even share the Internet connection with my laptop over Bluetooth. So no more hunting around for Wi-Fi.
  • Andrea has reached the 7-month mark of her pregnancy. She's starting to feel the physical discomfort of having another person inside her. The baby is very active, which is a good thing.
  • Google Maps has added a "send to GPS" feature that lets users send a destination to their TomTom device. I haven't gotten it to work with my TomTom Navigator 6 software, though.
  • And in other Google Maps news, the mobile version of the service added a feature that shows your approximate location without GPS. It triangulates your position using information from your phone carrier's cellular transmission towers. Kind of handy, but a little creepy, too.
  • And this is a little old, but Microsoft's Live Search mobile application has added a feature that lets you use voice input. It works pretty well and comes very handy in certain situation.