1. SpamAssassin has been marking mail from 2010 as “grossly in the future.” It’s been fixed in the beta for months, but they issued an emergency update over the holiday. Of course, if they’d done the test by using math instead of pattern matching, it wouldn’t have been an issue in the first place. (via Pobox)
2. A 2010 bug has caused problems with German credit cards. It seems we got complacent after Y2K and stopped worrying about date changes.
So, Google has announced the Nexus One phone. Let’s see how it stacks up against what I want in my next phone:
Sounds great!
Only one problem: there’s no keyboard. Android’s on-screen keyboard is decent enough, but I’m not quite ready to give up that physical keyboard just yet. (OTOH, I don’t want the Droid. I played with the keyboard a little at Best Buy a couple of weeks ago, and really didn’t like it.)
I’ll have to practice with the virtual keyboard on the G1 some more. If I can get used to it, this might be worth the upgrade.
As near as I can tell, all they sell are iPod/iPhone accessories. But they’re right across from the Apple Store.
Twitter is never having to say TL;DR
First, some linkblogging…
And then the “fun” started.
Computer update: Disk check finished overnight, seems OK. Ran a backup just in case, but got some work done on that project!
I tried out Google’s new Goggles app. Basically it lets you use the camera on an Android phone to do an image-based search. The examples include landmarks, book covers, artwork, logos, contact info, and places.
So I played with it for a bit at home tonight. It’s good at picking out book covers and logos, if you’ve got good lighting and a clear image. 50-50 at landmarks, at least when taking pictures of my monitor. In a couple of cases, it actually picked out the exact photo as a match. It’s not so good at objects, even obvious ones like a Coke can. I’ll have to try it out in the real world next.
I briefly considered doing a fresh install on the old PowerBook to see if it could be used as a second laptop, instead of just wiping it to recycle, but quickly remembered that the reason we replaced it was a hardware problem.
Still, it would be nice to have two portable computers for when we travel. I have a horrible tendency to hog the laptop when we get back to the hotel.
The thing is, we don’t need a second laptop for normal use. So getting another MacBook, or even a full-size Windows laptop, is overkill. Would a netbook do the trick? What do I use a computer for when traveling?
Yeah, I could easily get by on a netbook, freeing up the MacBook for Katie to use.
But do I even need the netbook?
Almost everything on that list is something I can do with my Android phone, assuming WiFi or a decent 3G signal. Not as quickly, perhaps. I type a lot more slowly on the G1 than a full-sized keyboard, and even at 3G speeds web browsing can be slow, especially on sites that don’t optimize for mobile use. And websites that require Flash still won’t work.
The real deal-breaker is (still) photo management. I can upload photos I’ve taken with the phone, but only one at a time — and I can’t transfer photos from the regular camera. The small screen size also makes it harder to look through a set of several similar photos and pick out the best one.
So I could manage with just my phone if I had:
I guess for now the best way to handle it is for me to just upload photos on the laptop, without taking the time to label them, then hand it over and move to the smartphone. Though if the network connection is particularly slow, like it was at Comic-Con International this year, that would still be problematic.
Of course, we don’t have any travel plans at the moment until next spring. Who knows? By then a netbook (or a newer phone) may be more practical.
