This morning I picked up from the Post Office delivery centre my new smartphone, the just released Palm Treo 680. (Which meant that I had to get up at 6:25am! Blurgh.)

My thoughts so far:

Good bits relative to the Treo 600..

• Nice screen.
• Lighter and nicer looking
• Faster
• Mocha telnet works.
• The e-mail client does IMAP properly, just downloading headers and then the message body on demand.
• All the cards (SIMM & SD) are enclosed.
• Non-volative RAM so that data’s not lost when the battery runs down.
• The keyboard is far better and easier to read.
• It’s not locked to a telco and you can upload and download MIDI files and MAP3 as ringtones via USB without paying the phone company a penny.

Bad bits..

• The battery’s smaller and hence shorter life (slightly)
• I’ve found a bug which can stop the whole device from functioning.
• There’s no reset button, you have to remove the battery.

As for the bug, it looks like while the phone is hibernating the battery and signal level sub-systems are still sending screen refresh requests to the display sub-system. When you unlock it and wake the device up the UI spends a while updating and refreshing the display and it unresponsive to the touch screen or the buttons. It’s locked up a couple of times during this refresh deluge.

Still, it is definitely an improvement and only days after release so bugs aren’t a surprise really.

I went to Parcel Line‘s web site to track a shipment and I got this page instead:

I didn’t know that Parcel Line was run by Sun Microsystems Ltd. 🙂

Those of you who hanker after the days of Elite can now re-live the whole thing under MacOS X, Linux or Windows with a re-implementation (the authors say inspired by) called Oolite.

Here’s a promotional video on YouTube.

Some wally locked their bike to mine at work this evening so I had to take the bus home. Grrr.. It also means that I’m going to have to take the bus to work. That’s £3.60 I’m having to spend unnecessarily and it’ll take me nearly an hour to get to work (as it did to get home tonight). What a pain.

Well, this weekend started with the aborting of a trip to Reading to see a film with Grim, Alec and Holly due to a lack of any good films being on and Holly being too shattered to go out.

Saturday, however, went to plan. The morning was taken up with the normal weekend shopping trip into town and to Sainsbury’s. Just after 4pm I left for the flat warming party in London I had been invited to. The traffic was OK so, with the help of my GPS until I arrived outside the flat at about 6pm. (Though in the final stages the GPS unit was a bit of a pain as it would tell me to turn either too soon or too late which meant that I did about three circles of the little area before finding the place.)

It was a good party. Soon after I had arrived one of the guests sitting out on the balcony was overheard saying to one of the other women there, “Sorry, I can’t fit your number on my phone, the memory’s too full of porn. Yes, you did here me right.” Which is not a usual think to hear at a party. This same woman, when about to leave decided that everyone needed to see her breasts and so pulled down her top and pressed them against the window. Apparently, she goes through some extrovert periods and was in one of them this weekend.

Anyway, that was all the real debauchary, unless you include salsa dancing.

I left the flat, giving a lift to two of the guests to Marylebone, at about 2:15am (BST) or should it have been by then 1:15am GMT? Anyway.. it was at about that time. The GPS unit decided that I should drive through Westminster and up Regent’s Street. That was a very stupid thing for it to do as the whole place was heaving with people, drunks, stupid drivers (and a couple of wrecked Mercedes, one with at least one wheel missing).

Still, I managed to get home at about 4:30am(BST) and went to bed.

Sunday was a bit of a null day as I was shattered by the late night before.

So, it’s now Monday evening. I’m still a bit tired, so it’s now off to bed.

I’ve just had two red kites land on my TV aerial!

Hmm.. Someone bounced me off my bike tonight using their car… thankfully I had anticipated their action (coming out onto the roundabout) and had swerved away to the right so the car clipped me on the back of my left thigh and my left pedal sending me off the bike.

Thankfully, my personal injury is merely a sore thigh and some bruising and road rash on my left palm where I hit the floor. As for the bike, it’s a broken pedal, bend crank, a very minor buckle to the rear wheel and the handle bars are slightly skew-wiff.

A Royal Mail truck driver whitnessed the whole incident and pulled up so as to protect me on the ground but he had to go into the depot before I could get his address, but he did tell me to stop by the depot and ask for the “Swindon driver.” I also got the name and address of the car driver.

It took me a whole three quarters of an hour to get into the Royal Mail depot, which was frustrating. There was no security on the gate, I tried flashing my cycle light at all and sundry but no-one took any notice. Eventually I managed to flag down a driver going in and he told me to come on in.

Anyway, I’m home now, a little worse for wear but basically OK.

So, the bike goes off to the cycle shop yet again in the morning!

Last night, after hearing all the hype over the last few months, I tried out Second Life…

I created the character “Wholenut Holsworthy” and, after installing the software, entered the world, adjusted my avatar to look somewhat like me and wandered around for a bit.

So, what’s my impression?

It’s rather mixed to say the least. In some ways it’s really quite advanced, such as the character design. However, the world itself made me think of early virtual reality systems such as SuperScape. It was rather jerky and slow as well, even on my decent games machine. Hmmm…

I think that there’s still a great deal of scope for a replacement, using something like the Half-Life 2 (or even original Half-Life) engine and a large library of pre-loaded textures and forms, combined with a modelling system similar to that in Second Life. Now, add an Elite-style space roaming, trading system, a bit of inter-planetary politics and a dash of Universe generation using the ideas of the “Strong Anthropic Principle”, oh and a tax system to fund it all and I think you just might have an interesting and fun virtual Universe.

P.S. Another thing which took my attention… yes, the sex industry has already populated Second Life.