Thanks again to Burt Lum for organizing the Unconferenz.

All in all, the camera on the Pre is quite good for a point and shoot and has been very convenient to whip out at a moment’s notice. I ain’t giving up the D90 for this though.

My Palm Pre Set on Flickr

Keyboard is small but workable. I have a iPod touch that I keep in a pocket at the same time as I carry my Pre in my belt holster. I have used the Apple touch screen keyboard heavily when I was trying to use the Touch for my mobile e-mail. It just didn’t work for me, because of all the reasons others have complained about already. The Pre’s keyboard is one notch better than the Touch’s keyboard. The little keys are just enough for me to focus my attention on while I type with my thumbs. However, I must concentrate to find the keys with my thumbs. I would not call this touch typing. That said, it is a workable solution and I find myself reaching for my Pre rather than my touch when I want to type a quick message. The keyboard on my old Treo 700p was not any larger but it is easier to find keys because the gap between keys are more pronounced. The Pre’s keys are too level, when you run your thumb across them, you can’t quite tell where the edges of the keys are.

The camera is a bit better than average in both image quality and ease of use. Low light situations are improved by the flash, but the effective range is 2 – 3 feet. Macro photography is out of the question, minimum focus distance is nine inches by my guess. E-mailing the photo to Flickr for uploading is a snap, as is Twitpic.

More thoughts about the apps and music player later. It’s after midnight already.

So a couple weeks ago my e-mail client on my Treo 700p died. It would send the Treo into reboot hell whenever I launched. In the four years or so prior to that, it was probably the best mobile e-mail program I could ask for. But, there no point to naming names now, since the makers of that software sold out to Palm and are no longer selling new licenses.

Anyway, I got in line just in the nick of time on Saturday. Turns out the Sprint store had 25 units in stock, I was the 24th in line and one of the guys ahead of me bought two.

After my first 36 or so hours with the Pre, I feel comfortable enough that I will keep it. The only really big concern of mine was the battery life. On Saturday, I ran the battery down from 90-ish percent down to below 50% in two hours while I was setting it up and trying out everything. This morning, I intended to buy a spare battery and another charger. However, I decided that I would try to get through one day one a single charge just to see if the battery could be coaxed into making it through the day.

I charged the Pre overnight and unplugged it from the wall around 7 a.m. As I write this it is now around 11:30 p.m. and the battery is at 57%. Admittedly, I used the Pre rather lightly today because I expected the battery life to suck. However, I am now confident that the Pre will survive my normal work day.

I configured my Pre to extend battery life without too many tradeoffs.

• I disabled wi-fi and bluetooth.
• I left location services and GPS enabled. But only because I forgot to disable them. I will likely leave these enabled in the future, it doesn’t seem to be too much of a drain.
• I set e-mail to only check for new mail once per hour

During the course of the day, I checked e-mail about a half dozen times and I left Tweed (the only WebOS twitter client so far) on in the background. Although Tweed was running in the background, I don’t think it queries Twitter’s API unless it is in the foreground.

So bottom line, battery is suitable for every day use if the above caveats are acceptable to you. I’ll probably get another battery just for those rare occasions when I use the phone a lot. Well, that’s a lot to say just about battery life. It is 11:30 so I’ll leave the rest for another day.

Zapatag has the pre-requisite mashup of web services to be part of the Web 2.0 crowd including Twitter integration, avatar pics, and a Google map for every license plate. There are a couple hundred license plates listed so far, mostly from Hawaii but a few others scattered around the mainland U.S.

Unsurprisingly, I haven’t used Zapatag as it was intended. I don’t really care enough to warn the Internet of bad drivers. So, I’ve been Zapping interesting license plates or notable vehicles. I include a pic whenever I can. I’m kind of anxious to see if any license plate will become a repeat offender on this site. As of now there hasn’t been a single plate listed by more than one person. There are no names to connect plates with drivers and usually no pics of either the cars or drivers.

One interesting thing I’ve found is that none of the license plates on Zapatag will show up in a search engine unless you type the contents of a license plate in a comment or description field. CORRECTION: Sometimes a plate will picked up in search engines through the Zapatag Twitter feed. I’ve tried searching for plates I’ve zapped in Google, Yahoo, MS Live and Altavista. I’m not sure if this should be called a bug or a feature, but I’m leaning towards “feature”. I bet you’ve never tried Googling your own license plate…but you will now. I’m a bit relieved that my license plates don’t return anything of interest.

All in all, Zapatag looks like a promising toy to add to your collection of wacky websites. If anything, I’ll bet that Tweeting about cars you see on the road will become more entertaining.

This happened around mid-December and all of the usual AV tricks I tried could not find the source of the infection. The search hijacking affected multiple browsers and search engines.

Both IE and Firefox were compromised, but not Google Chrome. It also hijacked search results from Google, Yahoo, and I think MSN Live. Luckily OpenDNS’s search was clean. I made the user use these workarounds up until this afternoon.

Today I noticed that this search hijacking was running a bit slower than usual and I saw that search results were waiting on something from IP address 7.7.7.0. I searched for malware originating from that IP and came across this blog entry.

Deleting C:\windows\system32\wdmaud.sys has worked so far. The user’s search results are now clean. I recommend uploading any suspect file in the C:\windows\* through Virus Total before deleting it though. Better to be safe than sorry, especially when fiddling with the Windows system folder.

I’m now running more malware scans on the infected computer. This time using Malwarebytes in addition to SuperAntiSpyware. Superantispyware didn’t catch anything the last time I ran it, but Malwarebytes found a similar piece of malware in C:\WINDOWS\system32\sysaudio.sys, and Virustotal confirmed it.

This piece of malware was harder than usual to diagnose because searching for “Google hijack” didn’t return any useful results. Hopefully this little post will push this Google Hijacking description a little higher up in the ranking. And kudos to the Podnutz Podcast for turning me on to Malwarebytes.

1. Lightning – a.k.a. Mozilla’s Calendar Project and Provider for Google Calendar

The most essential missing piece in Thunderbird is a fully functional calendar. Lightning is a better calendar than Outlook’s calendar because it natively handles iCal compliant web calendars. Combined with Google Calendar and the Provider for Google Calendar extension, this will enable two-way calendar synchronization between your computer and Google Calendar. But, the really useful part is that you can now easily synchronize your calendar across several computers, and through Goosync, most mobile devices for free.

2. Goosync
The free version will allow you to synchronize the calendar on your mobile device to a single Google calendar within a 30-day window. The paid subscription allows multiple calendars and the window synchronizes up to 1 year in advance. Goosync only works over the air and you will need a data plan with your wireless provider.

3. Mbox Import/Export Tools
Thunderbird can import your Outlook e-mail natively, but oddly enough, it does not export e-mail. Now, a true Kool-Aid drinker wouldn’t care that you are quietly locked into another platform. It’s not really a lock-in because Thunderbird stores e-mail in a plain text mbox file. But, the savvy user will recognize that it is still a pain to move a plain mbox into another system. The beauty of this extension is that it will export each e-mail as a separate .eml file. And, it will compile a HTML index to make your e-mail searchable without an e-mail client.

This feature is critical if you ever want to use Thunderbird in an office environment. Your co-workers will likely need to access your e-mail at some point during your employment. So you must have some way to get your e-mail out of Thunderbird and into another e-mail client with a minimum amount of friction. Forwarding a hundred megs of e-mail is not an option!

4. Winmail.dat Reader
Rich Text Formatted (RTF) e-mail sent by Outlook is generally unreadable by anything other than Outlook. Instead of a nicely formatted e-mail, you get a blank e-mail with a winmail.dat attachment. Instead of complaining to the sender, just open the winmail.dat in this reader. You can then export the contents into human readable e-mail.

Nice-To-Have Extensions:

1. Quickfile
If there is a single feature that will keep me from switching to anything else it is Quickfile. Move e-mail o any folder by hitting Ctrl+Q and typing the folder name. It doesn’t even have to be the complete name of the folder, Quickfile will auto-complete the folder name. If you want to create a new folder on the fly, Quickfile will automatically create the new folder too.

2. WebMail
Here is an extension that will download your webmail even if the webmail provider does not provide POP or IMAP access. This means you can stop paying for Hotmail or Yahoo Mail POP accounts. The WebMail extension acts as a proxy and downloads the webmail as though it were a POP or IMAP server.

3. Minimize to Tray & Minimize to Tray Enhancer
Need to free up some space on the Taskbar? Minimize Thunderbird to the System Tray instead. It will display an icon in the System Tray when new mail arrives so you can reclaim that Taskbar real-estate.

4. Remove Duplicate Messages (Alternate)
Let’s say you have imported e-mail from several computers and dumped them all into a single folder. Now let’s say you have to consolidate them and remove the duplicates before exporting the folder. You could go through them all by hand and match dates and file sizes, or you could just let this extension do it for you.

Make sure you install the (Alternate) version for TB 2.0+, the standard version only works on TB 1.5-.

5. MozBackup
Backup your Thunderbird (and Firefox) profiles because reinstalling each an every one of the above extensions by hand sucks.

“It’s the Great Server Chuck and Kreg!”

Convinced that the Great Server will be making its yearly appearance, Kreg refuses to go Trick-or-Treating with the rest of the FiT gang and instead pulls an all-nighter waiting for the Great Server to “…rise up out of the server farm and brings technology to all the good geeks around the world.”

Written by Douglas E. Welch and the Members of Friends in Tech

Click here to download flier

Click here to go to map

Here’s some thumbnails of the pics I took. They link to the originals, which are rather large, especially the photostitched ones.

Marv