darryl ramm's blog

I get totally fed up with spam and by companies and organizations that overuse email to the point that their messaging just becomes spam noise. I killed my facebook account because of what looked like a bug in the Facebook email system that just pounded repeat emails at me. And now a sports team my son is on is going email happy…. Over the last few weeks I received something like 40 email messages, many of them restatements of the same thing.  I compare that to his little league team, who’s coaches and parents had a very effective small email list that bounced around useful information. Anyhow part of my issue with the current sports team is they are using UptoUs. One annoying thing with UptoUs is that they apparently think it is OK to proactively spam potential group members. Anybody can apparently create a group of people and send out emails to that group, including to people who are invitees but have not signed up to be a group member. And non-signed up people seem to be able to keep being sent emails (forever?). How is this in any way a good idea. By all means provide a way for new members to sign up but there is no excuse to keep spamming people who have never signed up. Anyhow that just got uptous 30 or so “spam” clicks in my Yahoo Account and across enough annoyed email recipients hopefully that be will help get them ranked as a spammer with popular email services.

Since I was playing earlier SeeYou Mobile simulator and also with the new SeeYou Mobile release candidate running on a real iPAQ 310 I decided to make an iPAQ 310 skin for the simulator.  The simulator is currently the older SeeYou Mobile 3.0 release and not the version designed for PNAs, Naviter confirmed they will be updating the simulator to pick up all those UI changes later, for now it is quite usable however and the large 800×480 screen works  very nicely.

The skin is based on  a photograph of my iPAQ 310 with some Photoshop cleanup work. There are up, down and enter buttons added on the top right hand edge that do the same as the iPAQ scroll wheel, and the power button will turn the simulator off.

I was hoping that the SeeYou Simulator might support transparency/alpha to allow a nice rounded shape but (after wasting time trying) I checked with Naviter who confirmed it does not.

Here is the Bigscreen_310.zip bundle, it installs the same as in my previous post.

I was playing with my iPAQ hx4700 running Naviter SeeYou Mobile connected over Bluetooth to the NMEA output from Silent Wings  soaring simulator on a Macintosh (see details here). While messing around with this I discovered that with Windows Mobile 2003 and ROM and firmware version 1.0 that the PDAs shipped with, that there is a bug that will case SeeYou Mobile to hang when waiting to access a Bluetooth serial device where a Bluetooth connection has not yet been made. I suspect this affects all types of Bluetooth connections, but the fix is just to do a simple upgrade to ROM and firmware version 1.10.

I had one iPAQ running Windows Mobile 2003 (with the as supplied version 1.0 ROM and firmware) and another running Windows Mobile 5.0. Selecting COM5 (the Bluetooth serial port)  as the input port for SeeYou Mobile will cause SeeYou Mobile on the Windows Mobile 2003 PDA to hang until I started Silent Wings and it made a Bluetooth connection. On Windows Mobile 5.0 SeeYou Mobile does not hang, it just shows the “NODATA” status message in the top left of the screen. Once Silent Wings connects SeeYou Mobile on the Windows Mobile 2003 would start running OK. The problem was if I did not have the Mac with you to start Silent Wings then  you could not get in and even change the serial port settings before SeeYou Mobile would lock up.

I don’t know if other  Windows Mobile 2003 PDAs have similar problems. To see if a PDA has his problem just turn on Bluetooth on the PDA, don’t do anything else and don’t have the PDA connected to an active Bluetooth Serial connection. Then go into SeeYou Mobile and set it to use the Bluetooth COM port (COM5 for the iPAQ hx4700, this may be different on other PDAs). If SeeYou Mobile hangs it has the problem,  if it reports “NODATA” after a short while and the user interface is still responding to to menu events etc. then the PDA does not have the problem.

Besides SeeYou Mobile and Silent Wings, I suspect this bug affects all sorts of Bluetooth serial connections on the iPAQ 4700. Anyhow upgrading the Windows Mobile 2003 PDA to ROM version 1.1 and firmware update 1.1 appears to fix this problem. Software updates are available on HP’s web site.  The updates I used are available here -

iPAQ hx4700 1.10 ROM update for Windows 2003  (install this first)

iPAQ hx4700 1.10 Firmware update for Windows Mobile 2003  (we will see how long these link works)

I  certainly recommend doing these upgrades and staying with Windows Mobile 2003, and not upgrading to Windows Mobile 5.0., which is a performance dog.

BTW be sure to use a real Windows PC to flash the ROM to the iPAQ, I normally run Window XP under VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro, every time I have tried to run an iPAQ  ROM upgrade from within a VMware Fusion virual machine it will brick the iPAQ, leaving it stuck in the USB ROM loader. I’ve reported this to VMware.

I was crusing the aisles at Whole PayCheck the other day and noticed these Kettle brand Organic Chipolte Chili Barbeque potato chips. Junk food nowdays comes low sugar, reduced fat, trans-fat free and yes, sigh, organic. I mean you’d hate to be eating any non-organic bad things with those oh so good for you deep fried chips.

The trouble is being a chilie head I had to try them. The worse problem is they taste great. Net weight five oz. Five servings per container — who are they kidding? Once opened that packet is mine. At one serving per container thats 38% of daily calories, 70% of daily total fat, 25% daily saturated fat… but 10g of protein, 40% of daily fibre, 70% of daily vitamin C, and Organic to boot. Hey, almost good for you. Ugh now I’ve really got to go work out at the gym.