Spotlight on Me

Maybe a year ago, iLounge introduced a spotlight comment that would highlight a user comment on one of the news articles they had recently posted. Yesterday they had an article summarizing several different news items (which they call a mix) and one of those items was that Dataviz was introducing Docs to Go for the iPhone and Touch. This is one of the crucial apps I use on the Palm that wasn’t available on the Touch yet. They have had a page saying it is coming soon for about a year. So it finally showed up and it’s only $5 (for the next 2 weeks anyway, so I went ahead and bought it even though I don’t have a Touch yet). So I wrote a comment that I was happy Docs to Go was finally available. Today I was the spotlighted comment!

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End of AvantGo

One of my favorite uses of my early laptop computers was as an offline browser. I had a program that would download a page and everything linked on that page. By pointing it to the table of contents of that month’s Business Week, Atlantic Monthly, or Scientific American, I was able to download all of the articles. Then I could read them on the go and they would come up instantly without any sort of wired or wireless connection. It was great for the train.

When I ditched the laptops and got a Palm, there was a similar piece of software called AvantGo. It was designed to download sites of its partners, but you could also tell it to download custom sites. I used it for a while to download US News and World Report and still use it to download my blog and movie reviews. Since I am reading on the train and it goes underground, even wireless networks can’t provide this kind of service (if I wanted to pay for them, which I don’t). I use it to get most of the New York Times, movie times, movie reviews, space.com, and Tidbits (a Mac-oriented newsletter).

In the latest AvantGo download they announced they would no longer be providing mobile service as of June 30. Apparently they have become obsolete in an age of smartphones and data plans.

This was one of those programs that really made the Palm useful and unique. I don’t think offline browsing was ever really embraced by the general public, but I love it. And as far as I know there isn’t anything to replace it. They mentioned a program that is available, but it doesn’t run on Palms. There are RSS feeders, but I’m not sure what exists for Palm and if I can get the entire articles at once so that I can read them later without being connected. Unlike Amazon’s Kindle, the content was all free. And unlike smartphones, there was no data plan I had to buy. I could still carry around my dumb phone.

I know eventually I will replace the Palm TX I have now with an iPod Touch, but the Touch still lacks some key functionality that the Palm has like synching with an Access database, Word and Excel documents, and my Outlook calendar. AvantGo (or some kind of offline browser) was one of those things I wanted for the Touch to have too.

Lately I have been watching movies on the Palm on the way home from work so I haven’t used AvantGo as much, but I definitely use it every week. And with my newspaper subscription running out soon and the price doubling, I was thinking I would be synching every morning to AvantGo so I could still read the news on the way in. Oh well. A great idea, now thrown on the heap of obsolescence.

Ex is in Texas

Well Susan is moved to Texas for the most part. She still has a lot of furniture in her Atlanta house to make the house look lived in while it is on the market. Once the house sells, she will have everything moved out to her professionally. Unprofessionally we packed up a big U-Haul trailer attached to her Jeep and drove out last Thursday. We wanted to leave by 7 AM, knowing it was 820 miles and all needed to happen in a day because it would be hard to stay anywhere overnight with all of the animals. After helping her pack until almost 11 the night before, I was back at her house at 6:40 Thursday morning. There was still a fair amount to do, but the trailer was packed up and ready by 7:30 anyway, so I offered to take it while she got the cats and house ready, knowing the Prius would be able to catch up pretty quickly anyway.

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Maha MH-C9000 Results

I got the charger yesterday and started putting it through its paces right away. My oldest batteries are 1500 mah. My newest came with a cheap charger that was free with my flashlight. I picked two from each of those sets. Time to put the testing regimen into action.

I have worked on 4 old generic green 1500 mah cells that came with my Archos and therefore are 7 years old. I got capacities from 571 to 1220, so all over the place. I may throw away the weaker of those. I have 4 more, so we’ll see how it goes. It would be nice to have a set of 4 strong ones. Doing a Refresh/Analyze cycle actually seemed to hurt a couple of them.

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Battery Rehab

I wrote all of this up based on reading up on the Maha C9000 charger, but before I got it. Once I start getting some results, I will post that later. I have a collection of 40 NiMH batteries ranging in age from 9 years to just a couple of weeks. They all take a charge on my old charger, but some are pretty weak. A couple of sets that Susan used in a quick charger are pretty damaged and don’t hold a charge for very long at all. I was interested to see what kind of results I could get in reviving them with my new charger, the Maha MH-C9000.

If a battery hasn’t been used for 3 months or has just been purchased, Maha recommends starting out with break-in cycle. This cycle is based on some international standard used to measure the capacity of batteries.

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