E90 & Infrant ReadyNas

I’ve not written about about my favourite 2 gadgets yet. probably because I’ve been too busy playing with them. I finally got my Nokia e90 (writing on it now). Its fairly large for a phone, but open it up and it’s way, way better than any smartphone I’ve ever had before. It is fast, and after being used to the UIQ Symbian interface this makes a nice change.  But mainly the keyboard and gorgeously sharp screen (’bout 800×200) mean it really is a mini pocket pc.  Along with a nice wifi connection it rocks. VOIP applications from a mobile are cool.  I’m just glad I never wasted money on one of those Skype wifi handsets. This doubles as one. The gps is basically crap, and the cursor lacks a lot.  Perhaps because I also miss a touchscreen (the screen is ful of dirty fingerprints where I forget). I also need a lot more practise with this keyboard. But I can really, truly recommend this phone.
Secondly my cute little ReadyNAS with propreitary raid of 4x512Gb discs (like Raid5) is great. Only downside is that the CPU lacks horses for any decent throughput for ssh. Rsync over ssh is far, far slower than this little beasty deserves wuth Gigabyte ethernet. Otherwise it fits v nicely with my Mac/LinuxWin network. Every home network/home office deserves one.

Next step when Mythtv .21 comes out is to play with disc groups, and to see how fast I can record video to it. More on that functiom later, a it’s like LVM for video easily, and something I’m quite excited about.

Stupid Holiday beard

Reading on Raj’s blog abut his sponsored ‘tache “experiment” reminds me that my stupid annoying holiday beard is still firmly on my chin. I think it is the godgiven right (well as god given as an atheist has any right to expect) of any man to grow a beard on holiday. The type of beard that you would quite rightly laugh at if it was on the face of any of your peers. Normally I end up shaving days before I return home. However, this one has lasted (2 months since the end of my holiday), and whats more this is probably the stupidest looking beard I have ever grown. Far, far stupider looking that the big goatee when I had long hair, and probably stupider than the full beard with the missing underlip hair. Either I’m becoming old enough to not care, or perhaps because I’m working from a home office and I shave so rarely, that it just looks like an extra hairy bit on the Grizzly Adams rest of my face.