binaryslate

Crazy! I wouldn’t mind a go though

Girl in human sling shot - Google Video

Just to buck the trend, i’m not posting any info on the new iPhone.

I mean, it’s a phone. After you’ve had one for 2 days all it’ll get used for is sms and standard calls like every other new phone you’ve ever bought.

Only on the rare occasion do I find myself actually getting excited about software. Today is one of those days, and what is the instigator you may ask. Well it’s FinchSync.

FinchSync is a tool for synchronizing contacts, appointments and tasks from Mozilla email and calendar products with a Pocket PC or SmartPhone.

Contacts are synchronized with the email client’s address book. The build-in applications of the Netscape- and Mozilla Application Suite are supported as well as the standalone Mozilla Thunderbird.

As a devout user of Thunderbird and Sunbird I’ve been unable to truly get 100% out of my Axim. I’ve had to settle for copying contacts, tasks and appointments across manually, a laborious task as you can well imagine, and a total productivity inhibitor.

And then Finchsync hoves in to view with it’s absolute simplicity. A small java server on the pc and a small sync cab on the axim. The setup was straightforward, server and client, the documentation perfect. I simply chose the Thunderbird and Sunbird files that I wished to be sync’d and then setup a user and server account, hit the sync button and hurrah, 250+ contacts zoomed over to my Axim.

If you’re an Outlook abstainer like myself, get this now !

I’m in heaven, thank you, oh thank you, finchsync !!

UPDATE:

I did have one problem, but more related to Sunbird than Finchsync. They changed from ics files for the calendar and tasks so you’ll need to follow this sunbird v3 how to if you are using the latest Sunbird.

Red tape has given way to black marker tape for thousands of bemused civil servants as part of a £7 million paperclip revolution aimed at ensuring that they keep the tools of their trade in the right place.

Office workers have been given the tape to mark out where they should put their pens and pencils, their computer keyboards and to indicate where to place their phones.

“We had a situation in some offices in Scotland where staff were asked, ‘Is that banana on your desk active or inactive?’, meaning were they going to eat it? If not, it had to be cleared away.�

The scariest point in all this is that these kind of stories seem no longer out of the ordinary. The government seems to excel in finding pointless ways of spending money. It’s almost Lord Irvine’s wallpaper all over again, although seems ironic that wallpaper only cost £650K and black tape costs £7.4m.

tip: Times Online

a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world. It is true to MIT’s values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.

Kinda says it all. MIT courses online and available to download. Pretty darn cool as opposed to searching for scraps of information from tutorials generally found on the web. I might actually be able to learn something from scratch.

MIT OpenCourseWare