Living good in Qingdao

So I have this LJ thing. I guess I might as well use it. One of the things I'm going to do is post random translations on it of Classical Chinese stuff. Start out with the basic Classical Chinese short stories (Children's stories, almost), then move to the more complex pieces my lecturer has provided. I don't imagine I'll get through them all before end of term, but meh. Still worth a try :). And I need to not be slack. Otherwise the exam *will* hurt. These are mostly the original Classical, except with punctuation, and in simplified. The original had no line breaks, full stops or commas or anything.

( 枭逢鸠 )

( 守株待兔 )

试一试。

There's been a bit on /. recently about piracy and how the corporations are fighting it and similar such things.
What gets me is that there are some people, even on /., that do not seem to quite understand the way that software has changed the way things work.
The thing that really gets me, that really makes me angry (at the moment) is that some people feel that they have a natural right to resale with everything they buy. And that's cool for most things. Books, cars, TVs, houses. But not for software. Not at all.
The reasoning is fairly simple. When you sell a car second-hand, you no longer have that car. It's gone from your possession. What's more important is that you can't keep a copy of the car hidden somewhere else. As it stands, you can't clone a car. You could steal it back, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.
With software there's no guarantee that the person who has just sold the software has deleted it or otherwise ensured that they can no longer use it. Hell, even if you watch them delete it, erase the serial key, and give you all the original packaging, there's no guarantee they don't have a copy somewhere. And that's the big deal. Copying software is so easy. That's really the point, in a way. And it's why resale will never be legal with software.
Imagine the following example for proof:
Person A buys software S. A sells S to B, but, unknown to B A has kept a copy of the software. There's nothing to stop him. Sure, it's illegal. But that just makes him a criminal. The Law won't come around to his house to stop him. B won't nark, because B won't know. And there's no end to the number of links in the chain. Well, potentially anyway. B can sell to C who can sell to D, etc etc. Remember, the sales are all legal if we allow first-sale right to apply for software. Keeping a copy isn't, but who'll know? Even worse, as I understand first sale allows for gifting. Wouldn't that be like legalizing piracy? If I can gift my copy to someone, they can keep on gifting around the circle, until everyone has a copy. Sure, all but one are illegal, but that doesn't matter, assuming that one person doesn't nark. The rest won't as they're just as guilty as each other.
So what we have is a situation where allowing software resale essentially makes the piracy problem much, much worse ("I didn't pirate it, I have a receipt!"), or where we need even more restrictive DRM to ensure everyone is abiding by the terms of the resale. Not that the DRM helps. It exists today in applications like Photoshop and Steam, and yet, strangley, they're still pirated. Hmmm.

The point of this is for me to have a good rant. And to provide food for thought for anyone that reads this.

Heh. I didn't realise they offered driving licenses to dogs these days :-).

Bleh. Money is good, and I have like none. Thus I could do with a job... Applied for a couple, but thus far nothing has come back. Probably the most interesting one would be the Windows Mobile Developer one, but I suspect I lack experience for that. Sad :-(.

Couple of others interest me, but the sad thing is they're all summer jobs. Had a look on Seek, and most of them don't really interest me. Feh.

Looks like I'll be sticking around until my girlfriend has residency. At least. Once she has that, I'm really tempted to go for a six-month holiday in China, provided I can save up around six grand + airfare. Shouldn't be a hard task. Just need to find the right job.

That's all fine and good. From next week, I'll probably try and do some development. Maybe learn how to write code for the Palm. Add some stuff to me Treo. Like the ability to search for a Chinese contact via Pinyin. It's driving me crazy that I can't! I have found a solution to it, but that prevents me from searching for my non-Chinese contacts. Doh! Sadly, it's unlikely to work in my messaging app as well (though that is far less essential). But if I can make it work with Ultimate Phone, then that'll be fine. Ultimate Phone being an app that makes my phone look rather a lot nicer.

There's a few other things I'd like to see. A slightly better LJ client would be good. Having the ability to read my current music from Pocket Tunes would be grand, as would a mood selector and a couple of other things. One more thing to code.

I'd also like an email client that is both free and being actively developed. But that's a bit beyond my means, I think.

Oh, and I should get onto studying Chinese some more. Yeah. I converted the Four Great Novels so they're on my PDA, but I can't exactly read them yet.

They are Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Water Marshes, and Journey to the West. There's a couple of others on here too, but again they're beyond my ability.

That's it. For now.

I get up in the morning, read my email, and then get nothing until like the afternoon. It's weird. Probably because A) Most people are at work, and B) I get a lot of (forum-related) email from different Timezones.

Either way. Strange. And when I get one, I'll probably get several.

Also, I can apparently post images straight to my scrapbook, with captions. Awesome. Must make good use of that.

Woot. I can now post to LJ from my Treo, with an actual nice interface. Still can't do formatting. Unless it'll accept HTML? <b>Testing Bold!</b>.

Anyway, I may now post more often, which is probably a good thing...

Oh, and photos are posted directly! Attaching one now.

They should work together such that this post will appear in my Facebook mini-feed. Let's see if that's the case.

Like the title says. I have my last exam, hopefully forever, in about 2 hours. As such, this had better be a short post. And then I'll do some study (reading textbooks on the train is not the best idea).

So this next exam is going to be OK I think. Or at least much better than my last exam. Fucking AI. I'm not fond of it, to be honest. The idea is cool, but in practice... Not so much. Too many disparate ideas that, while all falling under the umbrella of 'AI', have little to no connection. Hmmm. That makes it a real pain if you miss lectures, as knowing one area provides no guarantees about another area. I just find them all too disconnected, personally. Whereas todays exam is more interesting, more practical, and more connected.

So yeah. I like one course over another.

After exams, need to get a job, Of course, the exact type of job does depend. Getting a full-time permanent job right now seems like a bad idea. Strange as it seems, it is actually true. The major reason is that I'd like to head overseas, and kinda soon.

The exact destination has been narrowed down to Shanghai, London, or Qingdao. Which means China or the UK basically. I'd prefer China, as getting a job teaching English should be pretty easy. And I have 2000 RMB in cash, which does me no good herez, and would be worth like £150... I could survive for like a month or two in China, provided I was frugal on that much money. I could survive for like a week in London. Ignoring Rent in both cases.

On the other hand my girlfriend really wants to go to the UK, and I could probably actually save money there. It would also have more cool stuff to buy, but the cost of living is way higher and I'd probably be working longer hours in a harder job. Or I might not be. It's hard to tell. But that's my feelings about it at the moment.

And that relates to getting a job in that a full-time permanent job would make it hard to go overseas, while a short-term casual type job would make it much easier. (Fuck! Treo texbox length exceeded!).

Here is some GB2312 Chinese. Does it look good? Ok, nevermind. LJ only accepts UTF-8 text...

I really should. But I'm slack. Got a COMP 307 assignment I need to start at the weekend. Definitely Monday at the latest... Yeah...

Anyway, what the hell have I been up to?

Shifted onto a Plan from Prepay. They have a good deal on at the moment, $39.95/month for 600 txts (Vodafone or Telecom), 60 minutes, and unlimited calls/txts/pxts/video calls to any single Vodafone number. That might not sound good to those of you not in New Zealand, but it's not bad for over here. There are a couple of downsides, namely that I'm locked into a two-year plan, which is a bit shit, that I can't actually change anything about it, for the most part, and that I had to get a new number. Admittedly, it's only a few digits off (having 87 instead of 159 somewhere in there).

On the other hand, it's fucking nice not having to worry about if I have enough money to be able to text Telecom numbers, and it's also lovely that I don't have to look at my 2000 Vodafone-only texts every time I text a Telecom number. And having included minutes is damn nice. It's actually 70 minutes a month, as I have a two year plan. Could have gone for three, but that seemed a bit excessive.

It's interesting to note that this only slightly more expensive ($1/month) than exactly the same plan, but with 20 minutes instead of 60. Good fun. I can change the plan if I need to, but then I end up paying rather a lot more than I really need to.

However, I can include a data plan on it, which I am definitely going to do. I've already burnt a good $30 this month (and I've had my plan for, like, two weeks) on data, and it sucks. I'll go with the 3MB plan to start with, see how much I actually end up spending. That should drop my monthly costs rather a bit :).

It's still just bullshit though. I mean, I'd like to be able to do a lot more with my phone. It has the potential. But with Vodafone's (and likely Telecom's) severely limited data plans, I'm basically screwed for doing any sort of wireless, web-based stuff. And that's very much the way of the future.

Look at it like this. I want to buy a new book. So I go into the bookstores and have a look around. See a couple I like. But buying books in paper form is a pain in the ass (and more expensive than buying eBooks). So I figure I'll buy it off the internet. Which I have done already. Now, there's a couple of ways this could go. Either I could go home and use my broadband to find, buy, download and synch to my PDA, or I could use my PDA to browse through the websites of various eBook vendors, seeing who's offering this book, buy it then and there while still in the shop, and have it download straight to my phone. But with the cost of downloading stuff via Vodafone's GPRS, downloading a 1MB book would kill nearly all the savings I've made in not buying a paper copy. And that's ignoring the fact that I'll have to pay when sending data to login to the website, search for the book, go through the cart, and all that crap. It's nothing when I'm at home, but Jesus, it very quickly adds up when browsing from a Mobile device.

Other things I'd like to be able to do are listen to Internet Radio Stations. I'm not sure if it's fast enough to listen to it, but it'd be nice if it was. On the other hand, with Vodafone's hideous charges, I'd end up with a gigantic bill if I tried doing that for too long. :(

There's plenty of other things. Reading web comics. Reading news-based RSS feeds. Posting to Live Journal. Reading Live Journal. Ordering crap from Amazon, TradeMe, E-Bay, installing new PDA applications, all that sort of thing. There's such a huge potential here, but it's being wasted because no sane person would pay the prices they're charging for mobile data rates if they didn't have to. Vodafone (and thus Telecom) really, desperately need to do something about this. I want to have more options. I don't just want to be restricted to my desktop or laptop in order to gain the full internet experience...

In other news, for those of you that are unaware, someone leaked about 6600 emails from Media Defender, a company that purports to monitor and prevent piracy, basically. That sounds nice. They charge vast amounts of money, so they must be doing a good job, right?

Wrong. The way they go about it, basically, is not to sue people, hack people, or anything like that, but rather to place up fake files, making it hard to tell the wheat from the chaff. They obviously assume that people will just give up after the first or second time... Yeah, right. As opposed to blocking the IP of the person who gave them that fake file and moving on... Sure. Given that there are virtually guaranteed to be legit copies out there, it's not like you won't eventually find what you're looking for. And once you have, you can trust that IP... It's really a bit stupid. Add to that that they're just adding more woes to what piracy already causes. Not in terms of "lost sales" (which is blown way out of proportion, but still true), but in terms of the amount of bandwidth used. I mean, they're using it as a sad and somewhat lame attempt to prevent piracy, as opposed to doing something truly useful.

Add to that, they do use P2P networks to get some idea of the popularity of songs, for example. It's really amazing.

On some forums, it has been said that in a leaked MP3 recording of a call between the CEO of MediaDefender and New York's Attorney General, where the AG was asking them to help him fight Child Porn. Fair enough. While some people have lambasted New York for needing to outsource this, I'm not so sure it's a really bad thing. Anyway, ignoring the pros and cons of outsourcing your major crime-hunting, some have commented that there's a real lack of disgust in the CEO's voice when he talks about Child Porn. It's a nasty thing, to be sure, but some have said that he seems a bit happier about it than he really should.

Of course, that could be a desire to vilify an already hated individual even further. We'll see what happens, should Media Defender be investigated (which sounds likely. There's a number of things in there that their clients are going to be very unhappy about).

If you're interested, Pirate Bay have a link on their blog. The download's about 140MB, and expands to almost 700. That's a fair bit. It can then be copied into a directory for you to access it with Thunderbird, or an email client of your choice. It's also available online. Try http://www.mediadefender-defenders.com/

Bah. One anti-piracy company down, many left to go.

Interestingly enough, looking at the amount I've spent on data usage, as listed, it doesn't seem to be quite accurate. I'm not sure why. I guess the billing system is just retarded right now. I'll see what happens when I finally get my damn invoice. And then probably have to call up and complain. But the thing is, I've got no billed calls listed, and all my unbilled stuff doesn't have a cost listed, apart from two calls to voicemail. Fuck it. That can be dealt with later.

Unknown Armies tonight. Should be interesting. :)

Finally arrived back in Wellington last week. All fun and good. I'd've posted earlier, but I've spent the last couple of weeks being sick. Which fucking sucks. I get back to New Zealand, and what do I find? That I've got Salmonella and a chest infection that mean I spend most of my time in bed wishing I was even warmer... :( That does not make me a happy person.

I was planning to spend a fair amount of time at Uni doing my assignments and whatnot, but I really just couldn't. I was a bit too sick to really be going into Uni to study or actually do my huge AI assignment, which sucks, but there's nothing I can do about that. Bah.

On the other hand, I'm feeling better in time for Term to start again on Monday, so I guess I should be glad that at least I wasn't sick during term... But meh.

I've also now got wireless in the house, so I can sit down my room and use it. Which is nice. Sadly, I'm a bit too far from the router for it to be really effective. I typically get stuck on Very Low, Low, or even no connectivity. I don't think I've ever had higher than that. But that's what I get for having several walls between me and the router. At funny angles too. But still, at least it works. :)

So we're definitely leaving China on the 19th, meaning we'll be back on the 20th, at about 1.30pm NZ Time. Cool. I'll probably see most of you on Friday, barring any strange mishaps or being dragged out to get pissed off my face for a late birthday.

Looks like I'll be leaving on the 19th, not the 20th. Bur. Things keep changing. We haven't actually changed the air-tickets yet, but we will tomorrow.

Also, other stuff that's happened:

Sunday was a funeral-type thing. Apparently it's my girlfriend's grandmother's birthday. However, given that she died some years ago, they don't throw a normal party.

Rather, I was dragged out of bed at eight in the morning, chucked in a van, and driven off to a cemetery somewhere. We drove past Laoshan, which was quite nice. Laoshan is basically a big mountain out on the edges of Qingdao. It looks quite nice, but we don't really have time to hike up there before we leave. Sad, but there we go.

Arrived at the cemetery, and my girlfriend's Aunt instantly got mobbed by people wanting to sell her flowers, firecrackers, money (fake for burning), incense, the whole nine fucking yards.

She eventually managed to get away by buying some flowers. I think one of them made a half-hearted attempt to mob me, but I just ignored her (and they were all old hags, which was interesting). After we've got away from the mob, we start heading up the hill. It's not a huge distance, and it's not a steep hill, but damn, that Cemetery is big. It'd be quite easy to get lost, I reckon. It's also very nice, nicer than the ones I've seen in New Zealand. Lots of trees, with each grave separated by a small tree. On the other hand, I don't think any bodies are actually buried there. I saw some open ones, and there was no way an entire body was going in there. Likely cremated, or only for ceremonial purposes. Not sure which.

Anyway, eventually find Grandma's grave, and they lay out some food, some drink, and start burning incense. Make a few prayers, saw a few nice words, drink the coke (apparently Grandma was very fond of coke :)), burn some paper, and back down the hill we went.

Before leaving, they grabbed some firecrackers, lots and lots of paper (I'm assuming it was a special type of paper), and burned that along with some of the food. Lucky Grandma :)

All in all, it was pretty quiet, pretty respectful, and fairly traditional. I'd have been more appreciative, but I was tired and hungry and really wishing I was still asleep. Oh well.

In other news, my girlfriend has a new cellphone, a Sony-Ericson W610c, which is basically an MP3 player and a cellphone. While I wouldn't say it's as powerful as mine, I would say that it looks nicer, with a slick black front, and a nifty orange back. It's also got expandable memory which is sweet, can set MP3s as ringtones, and is basically awesome. Had a play around with it, and I do like it, but I think my Treo is slightly easier to use, for a number of reasons. I'm sure those of you that want a look can have one when we get back.

Those of you who want specific gifts, ask me now. Provided they're cheap, I'll see what I can do. Otherwise, I'll surprise you :).

Finally, one note on software, it's not as cheap as I thought. Photoshop and the like were actually instructional videos and crap, not the actual software. Sad, but there we go.

Treo 680 Review
Introduction
I'm pretty bored, so I figured I'd write a review of my new Treo 680. I'm not exactly experienced at this, so it might not be very good. You'll just have to deal with that.

The Treo 680 is a fairly new (< 1 year) product produced by Palm. It, in theory, combines both the functions of a cellphone and a PDA all in one. But does it manage that successfully?

We'll answer that in a moment. First, what did it come with? Well, when I opened the box, I saw:

Contents of the Box
1x Manual
1x USB Synch Cable
1x US Power Cable
1x Treo Smartphone
1x Universal Screen Protector
1x Cingular-Branded Treo 680
1x Hands-Free Cord
1x Installation CD

So it's not exactly vastly loaded down with stuff. And the user manual is pretty thin. That could be good, in that everything is easy to use. Or it could be bad, in that it can't do crap. Or just not tell you how to do crap.

As it happens, a quick flick through the manual shows that it's got a decent amount of functionality. Nothing that I wouldn't expect from a PDA though.

In terms of the other stuff, the screen protector is good, in that it's included, but I'm honestly not sure why they didn't just cut it to the right shape for the 680... That would have saved me a bit of time (and meant it would have been an accurate cut too...). I actually can't think of a reason you wouldn't want to do that. Moving on, the power cord is the US style one, which is mildly annoying seeing as how I live in New Zealand. But that can be dealt with with an adapter. USB synch cable is pretty standard: one end goes into your phone, the other into your computer. The hands-free is nice, but I would not recommend listening to music with it. It's only got one ear-piece, and you also can't pin the mike on to your body. It's just left to float about. A clip or something would have been nice just so I can remove the ear-piece temporarily without it falling to the floor. Also so that it doesn't blow away in strong Wellington winds...

In terms of the Treo itself, it's very nice. It's a bit longer than most traditional cellphones, and probably wider and thicker too. On the other hand, the screen is quite large, offering 320x320 resolution. It's definitely superior to any other cellphone I've seen or owned in that regard. There are four buttons for accessing the various elements of the phone: phone, calender, mail, home. you can re-assign the calender and mail buttons, along with the option+(phone, calender, or mail) buttons. Can't chane the home button though.

It also has a full alphabetic keyboard, along with 8 other keys, for a total of 34. It's much more usable than you may immediately think. The other 8 keys are the option key, caps/find, space, alt, menu, fullstop, enter, and backspace. The option key allows you to enter punctuation and numers that don't have their own key, but are instead mapped to one of the letter keys.

You can think of the options as being divided into 3 regions: calculator, numbers, and punctuation. The decision of where to place these options obviously had a fair bit of thought go into it, as the most commonly used things, like ,'.?!)(@ are all on the right hand side of the keyboard, the oppposite side to the option key.  Which makes it just that much quicker to type as you don't have to move your left hand as much. It also feels a bit more like typing on a computer. The caps button is also in a good palace, but there were always going to be keys that were inconvenient. At least it's on the far side from I... :-)

Of course, in order to make typing not heinously painful, the option and caps keys turn off after you've typed a single keystroke with them. You also can't have them both on at once. Not that you would need to... However, this behaviour will be annoying, especially when typing phone numbers and the like, so you can do either of the following: hold down the option or capslock key until you've typed out your TLA or number, at which point releasing the option key will turn off the option flag in the program. Or you can hit it twice to lock it. Hitting it a third time turns it off. That's pretty good. It's easy to type a comma, it's easy to type a short number, and it's easy to type a long number. What else do you want?

The alt key is the least useful to me, as it brings up accented characters when you type a letter, similies with a :, or other symbols with most punctuation. E.g. Café. That's probably quite useful if you're French or German or Spanish. But for me, I only use the smilies. :-).

The menu key brings up the application menu. Exactly how useful this is depends on the application. However, you can type the menu key followed by a letter key as a shortcut. You can also use option+menu to set the brightness to minimum. Which I highly recommend doing whenever you can. It'll reset when you turn the screen off, but that's not such a big deal.

In terms of actualy typing with this mini-keyboard, how convenient is it? The answer is surprisingly. It's a pain trying to type one-handed - the keyboard is a bit too big. On the other hand, it's small enough that you can type with your thumbs and still get a decent speed. The stuff not directly placed on the keyboard seems situated to ease typing. The only time I've ever had issues is when typing I followed by '. Or when using the calculator. And apparently holding down caps then hitting backspace deletes a word. Interesting.

A proof of how useable the keyboard is should be that I typed out this entire review on my Treo. How awesome is that?

In terms of the CD, it installs the Palm Desktop Software, along with a few other applications. The most useful of those depends upon the user. However, Documents to Go should almost definitely be installed on every Palm as it is just so useful. Reading and creating Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents, along with viewing PDFs. I may post a seperate review of that later. Pocket Tunes is another one that many people will want, as it allows for the playing of MP3s, provided you have an SD card. eReader should also go on if you have any desire to read books on your PDA (not a bad idea).

In terms of the design of the Treo, it's small and compact. Eveything is within reach provided you have both thumbs on the keyboard. No stretching required - it's all in easy reach. As I said above, it's longer than a normal cellphone, thicker and wider. But not much heavier. Indeed, it's quite possible to hold the Treo one-handed. And despite the fact that it's thicker than a cellphone, it still manages to not feel it due to small groves on the side, exactly the right shape for your fingers.

Despite what I said above about one handed typing, the Treo is otherwise fully useable one-handed. The five-way navigator (4 directional + center) works like a charm in every application installed on the Treo.

To give an example, in the Memo application I'm using to type this post, pressing the center button removes the caret and places a blue highlight around the textfield. When like this, up and down scroll screenfuls of text, while left and right move the cursor to another form. While the text field is highlighted, pressing the center button will place the caret either where you left it, provided you haven't moved the screen, or in the first column of the first row if you have.

It's extremely simple to use, and most applications provide full support. And there's the touch screen for when they don't.

Speaking of the touch screen, it works as you would expect: touch the screen to activate a button, move the caret, or do whatever. The Stlyus is placed on the back of the phone into a special slot. When inserted it is flush with the phone. Which is great for aesthetics but crap if you don't have nails. Like, at all. I don't find it a problem, personally. Also, the five-way is so good that I mostly only  pull it out for Pleco (which I'll discuss in another review).

On the right side of the phone (is it embarrassing that I had to stop and think about which was left and right?) exists the SD Card slot. SD stands for Secure Digital, and it's just a way of expanding memory for the most part. The 680 officially supports up to 2GB, but I've heard reports of it accepting larger ones as well.

The slot is covered by a little flap that you need to flick open with a finger-nail (maybe the 680 was designed by women?) and then insert the SD into it. Once it's properly secured, put the flap back in place, and it's basically flush with the side of the phone. It's not perfect though, and you can still feel the edges, which I don't with the stylus.

On the left are the volume buttons and another one, whose only purpose seems to be 'set the volume after moving it up or down'. Strange, that one.

So after having gone through all that, how does it actually perform? What's the software like? Is it even fun to use?

The answer to those is yes. Mostly.

Phone Calls
We'll start with the basics. As the Treo is a phone, how does that bit perform?

Pretty simple, really. Pushing the phone button takes you to the Phone screen. Which is a lovely picture, five icons at the bottom, and status information at the top.  From here you can start dialing right away, just by pushing the number buttons. No need to use the option button - it knows there's nothing else you want to do. You can also activate a shortcut.

Contacts
On the right is the contacts screen, showing all contacts you have, organised by category. It shows SIM contacts by default, but you can easily turn that off.

Contacts are sorted by categories (like most things on a Palm PDA) and then by either Last Name, First Name; or Company, Last Name. Why it can't do first name, last name I don't know.

Not that it really matters. Simply typing a contacts initials will bring up people with those initials (in any order), so jp will get James Porridge or Peter Jones. Very nifty. You can narrow your search by typing one initial then the first few characters of the next, but not the other way, sadly. It provides room for every potential detail you might want to provide about someone, including a number of custom fields. You can also take a photo straight from the camera, rather than mucking about trying to find one on the SD, card and set that as someone's picture. I would, however, suggest doing mass data entry on the PC, rather than directly onto the phone. It also integrates birthdays and anniversaries into the Calender, which is nice.

The incoming/outgoing/missed calls screen is pretty simple. In fact, I would say overly so. All it gives are calls, when they occurred, and who they were from/to. The call timer doesn't even provide a distinction between incoming and outgoing calls. Very sad for an otherwise excellent phone. It also won't tell you how long any given call lasted for, which is quite annoying.

In terms of making a call, very simple. You can either look in your contacts list for them, select their number with the stylus or the center button and choose to call or message, highlight the number and hit the green call button (which instantly calls, bypassing one button press), or use a shortcut.

Shortcuts
A shortcut is like speed-dial on a cellphone, but far more powerful. Basically, you can set it to launch an application, make a phone call, set up a text message, or link to a web page. You can have any number of shortcuts, and may link them to keys on the keyboard. E.g. My girlfriend is linked to X. They can only be accessed from the phone screen, which is a bit annoying, but it's only a button press away.

Text-Based Services
Email
Of the many other things that it can do, the Treo can also happily download your email for you, should you so desire it. This requires a bit more work, mainly setting up everything on the desktop client for Versamail, and then hot-synching your Treo to have it set up everything on your phone.

The default email client, VersaMail, isn't exactly full-featured, but it does the job. It doesn't do formatting. At all. Nor does it allow for CC or BCC fields, a reply-to address, etc. Basically, it's good for sending a quick email that's basically eqivalant to a text message. It does, thankfully, allow for attachments. It also supports basic rules for moving emails from the inbox to other folders. Finally, it also happily looks up email addresses from your contacts list, which is about the only other good thing that can be said. However, it doesn't cost you any extra money, and I believe there are other clients out there if you're looking for something a bit more complex, like italics or bold-face.

Text Messaging
Text Messaging is as you'd expect. It's a simple application, with the folders you'd expect. It shows the sender, and below that, the first 20-30 characters of the message (ignoring line-breaks). Multimedia (PXT) messages and normal (TXT) messages are stored in the same folder, just differentiated by icon. I'm not sure if there's a limit to the number of text messages that can be stored in one folder. I'd be surprised if there was a hard limit, but there's only a finite amount of space on the phone, and only a finite amount of time you can wait around for the inbox to open :) In order to allow you to keep your inbox size down, you can purge text messages based on how old they are. I usually opt for a week, but you can opt for longer if you feel a burning need to keep your text messages. You can't opt to purge messages that have come in more recently than a week ago, however, which seems odd, especially if you get a vast number of them. This feature is also present in the email application, by the way.

Productivity Apps
This is basically things like the calender, calculator, task list, etc. I'll also include bluetooth here as it's not something I use much. They're pretty stock-standard, really. The calender gives you the choice of a day, week, or month view, only showing the name of the appointment in day view, otherwise just showing the colour of the appointment. Calculator is better than anything you'll find on a normal cellphone, including not only the basic stuff, but actual, useful, scientific functions, and more importantly, weight, volume, and distance conversions. So it's not a big deal, but it's something that will be useful occasionally.

Downsides
Given that I've been playing up the good features of the phone, what's wrong with it?

Foreign Language Support
It only really supports English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian right out of the box. It certainly doesn't support anything that can't be supported by the basic ASCII character set. So no Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, etc. Now, you can get these languages working by installing more software, but it's not always perfect. For example, the CJKOS software causes me issues in regards to Chinese stuff.

It also likes to replace unknown characters with '?', meaning that if you install software later on that will recognise these foreign glyphs, it won't work. This mostly seems to come into play with text messages, but it does mean that if I don't have CJKOS turned on, then I can't read Chinese text messages, even if I later turn it on. Very frustrating. I suppose a reset might work, but I'd be surprised.

Battery Life
The battery life is also worrisome. I suppose that virtually any smartphone these days has limited battery life, but if you're coming to this from a cellphone, then be prepared for a bit of a shock. It'll last maybe two days, three at the outside, if you use it occasionally. Otherwise, nightly charging is what you're looking at. It's better than some reports will lead you to believe (I understand that was a problem with the camera, which has since been fixed). But even so, it's not perfect. There are third-party batteries on the market, and it does come with a user-replaceable battery so hope is not lost.

Resets
I've only had one issue with the phone just freezing randomly so far. All the other resets have been due to me playing around doing strange things. The one thing that may seem strange is that to reset the PDA you must remove the battery. Unlike other PDAs you may have experienced, there is no "reset button", which seems a little strange, but that's just the way it goes.

Call Volume
I've had issues hearing my girlfriend on the phone if I'm somewhere busy. It's nothing serious (yet), but it's still a pain. There's third-party software that can fix this, but it costs....

Third-Party Software
This is somewhere that the Treo wins, and loses horribly. There's plenty of it around. It's generally of high quality. It also generally costs money. And they also fix shortcomings that Palm should have dealt with in the first place.

e.g. Want to play MP3's? Third-Party software. Want to have MP3 ringtones? Third-Party software. Want non-European Language Support? Third-Party Software. Want to read MS Word documents? PDFs? Third-Party Software. Watch Movies? Third-party software.

Admittedly, some of that is included with the Treo for free (MS Office stuff, basic MP3 player), but a fair bit of it's not. It's quite frustrating to see so many good programs that people see a need, or otherwise feel some strong urge, to charge for. It's like the Palm Development Community has never heard of SourceForge.net. Very depressing.

No Multitasking
The Treo, and Palm OS in general, only allows one application to be running at once. This results in major stability, but in a lack of flexibility. I am personally OK with stability. But there are those for whom having to close one application to open another is a real hassle. It's also not totally true, in that there are ways for programs to have a say when other programs are running, otherwise stuff like CJKOS would never work, nor would the MP3 player (which plays in the background, even while other applications are running). But it's basically true, especially for end-users, rather than developers.

Conclusions
Overall, I find the Treo 680 to be a wonderful phone. However, it's probably not worth the price unless you plan on making full use of the innumerable third-party apps that are out there. I personally use a Chinese Dictionary application that will only work on a Microsoft PDA or a Palm PDA. I know which one I don't want, so that left only one choice, really.

It's damn stable for the time I've been using it. The only issues I've had have been while using Card Export, which makes my memory card directly accessible to the PC when I've got the synch cable plugged in. And that's probably a pretty hack-ish application which obviously won't do wonders for stability while it's running. Having said that, I think I've figured out why it was crashing my phone (I think it was something to do with the web browser having a lock on files on the SD Card...).

I'd give this phone a 4/5, the 1 lacking for the reasons above.

In fact, it looks like we'll be returing to Wellington on the 21st of August, about 3 or so weeks earlier than we had planned. Why is that?

Basically, my girlfriend's boss wasn't super happy with her going overseas, but figured that, hey, it's a family emergency, what are you going to do?Anyway, he kinda expected her to return on the 8th of August, which just wasn't on. And he only figured that late because we'd lied about when her mum was having surgery. Said it was later than it was.


Told him a few more things and he eventually agreed to give her a couple of extra weeks. Yay. :)

On the other hand, I can kinda sympathise with him as one of his employees has just quit, and another one will do so fairly soon, meaing he's in a bit of hot water there, and needs my girlfriend back to learn what she needs to do when the other chick quits. Fucking yay.

But yeah, we'll be coming back in about a week, basically. Fun times. We originally changed the tickets so we'd leave on my birthday, the 18th, but her dad called and said that if we held of until the 20th, he might be able to come and see us off, basically.

Might be able to. I've been here for over a month, and I've seen all of my girlfriend's other relatives, both her Aunts, both her uncles, both her cousins, her Granddad (Grandma's dead), another older relative. But I still haven't seen her dad, and might not before we leave. Bloody strange.

I've uploaded some photos. Whether you want to see them or not is another question. There's still plenty more than this, though, which I'll upload later. I also upgraded to a paid account to have enough space to store all these photos. Which was maybe not the smartest move in the world, but it's better than advertising. I'm also not sure how to link you all to the whole gallery without pasting in a photo. So here's a pretty one :)

EDIT: Removed Picture. This link might work: http://pics.livejournal.com/ipsi/. Give it a shot :)

Just thought I should bring that to peoples attention, should they feel a burning desire to respond to something I've said, even if it is something as lame as "you suck goat balls like a cunt". Don't need a livejournal account or other such silliness.

It's not as hard as it seems. I've heard of Tor before, but I've never actually got around to using it. I've no idea why I didn't. I suspect I thought it required slightly more effort than merely downloading and installing, like being requiring an invitation or something. But no. Very quick, very simple. Only problem was that it said it would install the Firefox Plugin, which it didn't. Had to install that manually, but it's nothing a Google search for "Tor Firefox Plugin" couldn't fix. :)

As it happens, I'm amazed that I could even get to the Tor site in China. One would have thought, given how famous it is, that they would have blocked it quicker than you could blink. But no. It was, in fact, totally unblocked. Very strange. At some point, the government will realise how damn stupid it is trying to keep people in the dark, and then they'll either release control, or bring down some stupid form of control (like isolating China's internet from the rest of the world...)

The only problem I have with tor, at the moment, is that the speeds are bit slow. Like Dialup Slow. But being able to access my blog, despite anything the Chinese Government might have to say about it, is nice. So yeah. I'm pretty happy in that regard. :)

Not much else to say. My girlfriend is out, doing girl stuff (massage, facial, spa, manicure, petticure, the whole nine yards) with one of her friends, and is then going out for dinner. Not sure when she'll be home. I'm just pottering around on my laptop.

Picked up a Chinese Copy of Serenity yesterday for 39RMB, which wasn't bad. It's a Region 6 DVD though, which means my default DVD software doesn't like it. Had to use VLC, which had no problem :). It's interesting that I've never actually had to think about DVD regions before. My mothers Laptop doesn't like them, but mine has always been fine, so I'm not sure why it suddenly decided it couldn't play Chinese DVDs. Given that it's played Region 2 and Region 4 DVDs before, I'd always kinda figured it was region-free. Apparently the software isn't. Very, very strange.

I'm also thinking about picking up a copy of some other random Chinese Films, but I'm not too sure about that yet. Probably grab some pirated ones, as they'll be a damn sight cheaper. :) But I can't grab too many, otherwise Customs might get suspicious... :( Oh well. I suppose a few hundred will do me for a while :D

I've also heard that James doesn't have the internet at the moment? Can someone expand on that?

I think that's basically it for now. Tune in again later for more amazing news! Or something...

Here's a cut. It's the entirety of the post. If you have not finished Harry Potter, then skip this post.