About a month ago I bought a brand new Samsung Tocco Lite, otherwise known as the S5230.  I’m ashamed to admit that it was bought from Phones4u, against my better judgement, but I guess we all make mistakes every now and then.  I had actually only gone into the shop to have a look, and hopefully try it out for real rather than just watching YouTube videos and reading the specs, honest.

Phones4u aside, the phone is mostly fantastic.  Jumping on the touchscreen bandwagon, the Tocco Lite is an iPhone for plebs like me who can’t afford the real thing.  My previous phone, just for reference, was a Motorola L6, which was gorgeous, but was beginning to show its age a little (not in performance, just in a few cosmetic scratches to the case, which turns out to be more plastic than metal, despite appearances).  The Tocco Lite has a comparatively enormous screen, is more or less the same size, and is actually fractionally lighter.  That’s good, because it means it’ll sit in my pocket nicely.

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On Monday it was my wife’s birthday.  Part of my present to her was tickets to see the ballet Giselle at the Bristol Hippodrome in a few weeks’ time, but as the tickets haven’t arrived (and she was sat next to me when I booked them) it wasn’t something I could wrap up for the big day.  So instead I gave her two boxes – one was a box of Matchmakers chocolates which she was eyeing up in Tesco the other day, and the other was something a little more special.  A delicate little pink box, inside which were nestled a couple of shiny earrings.

Well, sort of.  In actual fact the box was a hand-made creation, the template for which I had made on my computer and printed onto card, constructing quietly and surreptitiously in the study so she wouldn’t notice.  Fairly simple, but it had a sticky tape hinge, our wedding logo on the top half, and the clasp was made with two split pins and a tiny elastic band.  It was quite ingenious.  Inside, the earrings were actually just a printout from a web site, which could have been a let-down, were it not for the explanation – I was taking my wife to Cribbs Causeway to buy her the real thing.

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(Below is a solution for getting iSync to sync iCal’s “delegate” calendars from Google Calendar onto a mobile phone.  Feel free to skip all the blurby bit at the top if you’re not interested in my life story.)

My job means sitting in front of a computer all day, playing with the internet.  There are of course times when I leave my desk, or need to use a different computer, and then it’s nice to still have the same tools to hand.  So I’ve put my diary onto Google Calendar, so that it’s available wherever I am.  Nice.

Oh no, wait a minute.  I also need that same calendar on my mobile phone.  So far there is no bridge directly between Google Calendar and my Motorola L6, unless I load up Google Calendar on my phone’s browser – but that costs me money because I’m on a PAYG tariff and I don’t get any free data, so that’s out of the question (not least because it’s far from instant, even using the incredible Opera Mini browser and its clever servers).  So, that means having the calendars on iCal as well, so that I can use iSync to copy everything across.  And here’s where it all gets rather complicated.

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My friend Phill recently bought a new mobile phone.  Apparently it’s shiny.  Last Christmas I bought my wife a new mobile phone.  It too is shiny.  My own mobile phone, on the other hand, was shiny and new in 2005, and is now considerably less shiny than it used to be thanks to my keys rubbing a lot of the silver off the bottom of the casing.  No wonder, then, that I felt a few pangs of jealousy this week.

Unfortunately I just can’t justify buying myself a new phone, since my Motorola L6 does actually work fine.  So rather than get depressed about the situation I decided to have another go at revitalising my phone and getting the most out of it.  A little research got me Opera Mini 4.2, which is a sleek and feature-filled web browser for my phone.  Not only is it infinitely nicer to look at and use than the built-in one, it’s also miles faster thanks to a proxy compression that Opera provides – basically every web page my phone requests is sent via the Opear server, compressed until it’s tiny and then sent to my phone, which speeds up download times considerably.  The result is that my phone is now capable of checking e-mails and looking at web pages without a century passing between pages.

Then I started downloading yet more stuff.   (more…)

I wouldn’t say I was backwards, exactly, but I do have some very old technology sitting in my study, some of which is still in regular(ish) use.  To take an example, I have a PC sitting on my desk that is almost 7 years old.  Granted it’s only used for testing web sites, but it’s got to the stage where it’s struggling just to do that, and that’s taking into account that I reinstalled everything fairly recently too.

I also have an old Palm m125 which I’ve been carrying around with me to act as my diary, syncing it to my Mac when I remember to.  It does the job, just about, despite being older than the PC (it would have been new in 2001).  I say it does the job, actually it’s been throwing tantrums just lately, refusing to switch on and then losing everything in memory and thus any changes I’ve made since the last sync.

Then there’s my mobile phone, a Motorola L6.  Granted, it’s nowhere near as old as the aforementioned relics, but I did buy it back in 2006, so it’s a few years older than your average mobile.  I still reckon it’s got at least another year of use in it though, despite the paint coming off the bottom, a dodgy battery connection (sort of fixed by stuffing some paper between the battery and the cover) and a dead camera.

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