What to do on a quiet weekend.

On Wednesday I was wondering what I'd have to do over the weekend.

By Friday I had a very full Saturday planned.  By Saturday I also had a full Sunday planned.

Firstlym, I wantedf to buy a Blu-Ray player.  I'd heard rumours that the Toshiba BDX1200 was region hackable.  It's also end-of-line.  Makes actually buying one a bit tricky...  Found one in Comet.  Ex display so haggled a bit.  Then turned out that I suffer from sudden onset dyslexia, and ended up with a BDX2100.  Doh!  On the plus side I did get it cheap.

I was invited to a geeky get together at the Caroline of Brunswick.  I aimed to be a little late because everyone else would be.  My obsessive nature made me feel very anxious about this.  Turns out the pub was empty when I got there except for the barmaid.  So I chatted a bit and exchanged mobile phone tips.  Eventually people arrived.  Yay! 

In the evening was the Castle Greyskull joint birthday party.  I attended.  Listened to people froth.  Found myself way too tired to really interact so left earlyish.  Sorry guys. 

Sunday erestania had mentioned wanting to see the engineerium!  It's only open once in a blue moon these days and probably isn't going to re-open again until refurbishments are complete.  Gune would have liked the place and converted it to do something completely different from pumping water.  Erestania squeed a lot ina disturbingly cute way over all the pretty steam powerd shinies.  Got lots of nice photos.  Chatted to some engineering geeks - one guy had built a half scale steam tractor.  It was beautiful!  And road legal.  .  Ross the stoker gave us a full description of how the boilers worked and what not to do if you want a boiler to not explode. 

Finished off the day with dinner at parents place. 

I have another busy week coming up. 

Soemhow the house has become a complete tip again.  How!?  I'm never there!

Disintegration devices

I miss my PDA  The stylus allows for much higher precision tapping.  As a result, the UI takes up less space and that makes having a taskbar a viable option.  Grafitti is a lot better than the onscreen keyboard, and the thing can be connected to a mobile phone via bluetooth. That means that it can be paired with a mobile phone.  Alas, the screen on mine is dodgy, so these days I still use my Palm T|X as an e-reader.

What I rather like about Android is that I have a capacitive screen (plus multitouch), a more modern browser, a faster processor, and lots of sensors.  Also the Google Market. 

Integrating a phone with it is not an advantage.  I prefer the separate devices.  They do different things.  All of the above can be added to a simple PDA.  There's no actual need for an Android device to also make phone calls.  The phone aspect of an android phone is rubbish.  I like buttons.  I like decent sound quality.  I like having a battery life (A typical mobile will last days on standby, an android device barely makes it to 24 hours).  I like having separate devices.  Integration means you end up with nasty compromises.  My mp3 player plays mp3s and does it well.  I want a phone that makes phone calls and a handheld computer that I can hold in my hand .

My choice is horribly limited.  I can have a iPod Touch, a selection of small Android tablets that are way too large, a couple of cheap small android tablets, or a device that is pretty much obsolete.  I could go for the iPod but is that really my only option?  Where are the Android and WP7 PDAs?