Scott Yang's Playground

Found this nice app for my Nokia today — Mobbler, an Last.fm client for Symbian S60 phones, i.e. most of the Nokia smartphones. It lets you sign into your Last.fm account, start a station, or scrobble the music files you have played through the Nokia Music Player on your phone. A very nice way to discover new music on the move except it can easily chew through the data plan (around 128kbps streaming I think).

My Last.fm username is scottyang btw, and no, I haven’t listened to U2’s latest album :)

So yesterday afternoon I tweeted:

Did a day of ‘cold turkey’ on the main walkway of UNSW. Really exhausted now but had some good conversations.

Got a reply from Big Al a few minutes later:

@scottyang cold turkey.. ?

So… What exactly does cold turkey mean, especially in my context?

I cannot remember where the term “cold turkey” was from, but I guess it would be familiar with the gangs at Unichurch or Campus Bible Study at UNSW — especially if you have done some SOCM courses (oops, way too many jargons already). It basically means doing street evangelism with complete strangers — and in my context, on the main university walkway during O-week. Another phrase for it — “library lawning” although as an engineering student back in my days, library has never been my territory :)

O-week 2009 for UNSW kicked start yesterday so I took a day off from work to get on campus to do pamphleting and chatting with whoever is interested to come to Christian church on campus. I had a few good conversations and I think one guy from China where I talked to near CLB might actually understand the gospel for the 1st time!

Another thing I have realised — I am probably getting too old to do this. Body is still aching…

Via Simon. Here is my super-hero, created with The Hero Factory.

No mention of what the knight is gifted at…

Well. Not really mine, but rather a loan phone from Optus and Bang PR, and I still need to return the phone back to them on Friday. The HTC Dream came to the office this morning with a strange packaging.

It came with only 15% of juice in the battery so the 1^st thing is charging it up. I like how it can be charged with an USB cable, similar to my old Skypephone, which means 1 less cable to carry around. Nokia E71 can be charged with an USB cable as well, with a $2 Nokia CA-100 cable that should have came with the phone.

Some first impressions:

• It’s smaller and thinner than I thought.

• It feels “plasticky” when I compare it with my Nokia E71. Nice grippy surface though, and less a finger print magnet than the E71.

• Nice sliding keyboard. A bit awkward to type on but maybe I haven’t got used to it.

• Awesome user interface. Light year ahead than Symbian/S60. The web browser is very usable for daily browsing, unlike the one on Nokia.

It’s currently on $59/month Optus contract + $15/month phone payment over 24 months, i.e. expensive — even more expensive than iPhone. I do see a lot of advantage HTC Dream has over iPhone, which is a phone that I would probably never buy.

More review in the next couple of days.

Just to preempt you that in case you have not seen me on MSN/Live Messenger for a while — I am still alive. Just that I decided that I would not use MSN Messenger any more.

No. I’ve got lots of friends there — some I know in real life, and some are just acquaintance on the net. However, there are also some — usually with weird email addresses — kept on be-friending me and trying to get me to add them into my contact. I do not wish to know what will happen if I approve their request so I usually just discard them, but it’s now getting more and more annoying. Just this morning I have to discard 18 such requests. Friends and spammers… Hmm sorry friends. Spammers made me do it! I am no longer a user of MSN Messenger.

The only IM that I am using regularly now is probably Jabber/Google Talk. Recently I migrated this domain to Google Apps, and now Gtalk is the XMPP server for yang.id.au. So feel free to add me if you are using Gtalk or Jabber. You can find my JID at the contact page.

Luke 13:1-5 from English Standard Bible:

¹ There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. ² And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? ³ No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. ⁴ Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? ⁵ No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

Dominic Steele used these verses in today’s talk at City Bible Forum in response to the Victorian bush fire, and they made great rebuke to pastor Danny Nalliah who dreamed the Victorian bush fire was caused by the abortion bill.

Here’s a picture of my Dell Latitude D630 when it boots up.

The random freeze started around 2 days ago. Out of sudden the laptop will freeze, and left the screen with a blue’ish tint. A power cycle is required to get the computer back to work, and it happened a couple of times a day. Last night when I was working on my talk for this Sunday on it, it just dropped dead and refuse to turn back on. The symptom looks like there’s something wrong with the video card (it would sometimes boot with two Dell logos in “split screen”).

Anyway. It’s my work computer so it’s covered by warranty — but the Dell guys won’t be able to come and fix it until next week. Meanwhile I am stuck computer-less. :(

Have to blog about dalziel’s Twitter status here:

1. Go to WhitePages.

2. Search for “magic shop” (without the quotes) under Queensland.

3. And you get this:

   

Not sure whether it’s deliberated at WhitePages/Sensis, but surely it’s funny.

Problem

I have recently bought a Nokia S60 smart phone, and have migrated my email to Google Apps. I am now using the Gmail interface to access my emails when I am on my desktop, but I am wondering how I can send/receive emails on my mobile phone.

Solution(s)

Well. It is complicated and so far I have no found a perfect solution in my case. There are a few good alternatives, but none works perfectly for me.

Gmail for Mobile

The most natural solution would be Gmail for Mobile from Google. It is a J2ME based application (so it is not native on Nokia S60), however it has probably the best Google integration currently.

What I like about it:

• It works well — just like Gmail inside the browser. Sent and received emails are linked together (just like on Gmail). You get your full contact list just like how it works on Gmail. There are lots of very convenient short-cut keys — just like Gmail!
• It supports multiple Google accounts. Not a big deal for me but I think it would be for those having a dozen Gmail accounts that need constant monitoring.
• Good off-line support. You can still read/compose email when you don’t have data connection.

What I don’t like about it:

• Slow. J2ME-kinda-slow. With Google’s focus now on Android, I doubt a native Symbian/S60 executable will be released.
• Buggy. Crashed on me a few times. There are also some bugs that prevent me from sending/replying emails. Currently I have two domains associated with my Google Apps account, and in Gmail I sent up to receive from both. However I cannot reply emails if it’s sent to my additional domain — it will say something about the connection problem.

Currently I have Gmail for Mobile bound to my “Message Key” on my Nokia E71.

Nokia Messaging

Nokia Messaging is a push-email-like service provided by Nokia, and currently they are offering free trial and it allows you to manage up to 10 email addresses/accounts.

What I like about Nokia Messaging:

• Pretty responsive due to being a native executable. Good message listing view. Very concise message view.
• Very flexible sync options to provide you a push-email like experience.
• Good integration with the rest of the system. For example home screen notifications. Contacts. Etc.

What I don’t like about Nokia Messaging:

• Sync chews battery. A lot. It also chews through your data usage, which can be costly.
• Not Gmail-enough. While it claims full Gmail support, I don’t get conversation view between sender and receivers. Label obviously does not work.
• Delete emails from Nokia Messaging actually does not delete that email from Gmail, but move to “All Mails” instead. It should have used IMAP command to move it to the Trash for deletion. So I ended up have to go back to the desktop version to delete all the unwanted emails.

Another issue — who knows how much Nokia is going to charge this?

Others

There are of course other free solutions. Default Nokia email client? Use mobile browser version of Gmail? I don’t think either have provided me the functionality of either Nokia Messaging or Gmail for Mobile.

Any other suggestion?