Archive for October 2004
GMail invites at your disposal
9 October 2004 in Root | Comments (7)
Would you like a GMail invite? I have got 6 pieces to share with the first 6 to comment to this post with valid email details in the email field. (WordPress, my blog backbone, automatically protects the emails against spamharvesters, so don’t worry. 
)
Rules:
- 1) FCFS, first come — first served
2) One invite per person.
3) No jokes about a certain Brad and his SCOTTeVESTs…
The Loox is finally HERE!
6 October 2004 in Pocket PC | Comments (0)
I’m happy that my brand new Loox 720 is here and happily running! Man, this thing is really beatiful and the screen is absolutely amazing. It is almost an unreal feeling staring at the screen with the soft images and texts. VGA screen definately rocks. 
If you got any questions about the Loox 720, feel free to post a comment below. Meanwhile, I’ll let this beauty recharge and start writing some sort of a review…
Lazyboy’s song “Facts of life” contains at least one false fact
6 October 2004 in Root | Comments (1)
If you live in Europe, you might have heard the song “Facts of Life” by a group called Lazyboy that has been playing quite effectively on MTV Europe and radios. Truth is, there is a false fact in the song and namely in this verse:
Donald Duck was banned in Finland, because he doesn’t wear pants
It is one of the most documented and assumed “true fact” that I’ve seen (perhaps because I’m from Finland ), in reality, the statement is actually an urban legend. This is what I like to call a case of the jungle telegraph getting things totally wrong. Fact is, Donald Duck was never banned in Finland, rather a library’s subscription to his magazine was cut. To support my claim, here is what Urban Legends Reference says:
When a similar incident had taken place in the Finnish town of Kemi a few years earlier, the international press had gleefully exaggerated the story with headlines such as “Finland Bans Donald” and “Donald Vanishes from Libraries,” reporting that Donald’s banishment was due to concerns over his lack of pants and questions about his marital status. As the foreign news reports about the alleged banning of Donald Duck filtered back to Finland (and neighboring Sweden), the local tabloids didn’t attempt to verify the story — they merely ran articles about the reaction it was receiving abroad. “Donald Not Married; Politicians Outraged!” and “Donald, Where Are Your Trousers?” were headlines in foreign papers, Finns were told.
So, there you have it quite nicely summarized. Today, more specifically last year[in Finnish], the Donald Duck magazine Aku Ankka had the biggest reader base of all Finnish magazines, at 983 000 readers! Furthermore, Aku Ankka is the third most read magazine (the two others are free membership magazines) in the country.
I hope that you are now a bit wiser…
Finally, the week starts on Monday!
6 October 2004 in Root | Comments (3)
One of things I didn’t like with either MovableType nor WordPress is that the calendar that shows when you’ve posted, always had the week to start on Sunday instead of the “standardized” Monday that most of the world uses.
Well, doing some searching for a plug-in or tweak to change that, I stumbeled upon the blog “MooKitty” where Kitty has done a ready made function that fixes that problem. This is something that requires the my-hacks portion of WordPress, but it could not be easier to implement than this. (It can be harder though ) Read on more in Kirry’s post “International Calendar” or download the source.
So, now I got a properly formatted calendar on the left side of this post… 
Mac OS X Tiger shows better layout
5 October 2004 in Root | Comments (0)
The upcoming, next version of Mac OS X; 10.4 aka. Tiger is showing off some better design in my opinion. The previous “horizontal gray lines” background that previous OS X applications has apparently been scrapped in place of a less epilepsy threatening, solid metal look. Here is a screenshot of Mail from AppleInsider, that shows what I am talking about.
If you would like to see more, then head over to AppleInsider’s article on the subject. Do note that the pictures will be there until Apple’s legal department wakes up… (A usual trend, for those of you who aren’t familiar with news stories at AppleInsider.)
Nokia 7710 makes an appearence once again…
4 October 2004 in Phones | Comments (0)
… and this time with more pics than you can dream about. Ok, maybe not that many… 
What is interesting to see is that the Nokia 7710 seems to have a better input panel than the Pocket PC that supports localization! This means that I can switch to Finnish keyboard layout, and a guy in Germany can use his German keyboard layout. At least, so is the theory for the moment…
Now, my Chinese is practically very, very bad (I can’t read a single symbol) but what I could make out from that page, linked below, was that this 7710 will support DVB-H. For those of you who do not know, DVB is the digital television system used almost around the whole world. DVB-H is a derived format that is optimized mainly towards handheld devices on the move.
Fujitsu Siemens Loox 720 coming my way?
4 October 2004 in Pocket PC | Comments (0)
It seems as if I might be getting my Loox 720 Pocket PC in the near days. *yey!* Today I got an automated email message from Multitronic (from where I ordered it) telling me that they have — lo and behold — as many as 1 in stock! (OK, I won’t be needing more than one piece) 
When checking the Loox stock page at Multitronic, it shows that they’ve gotten 8 in stock at the importer! That’s way too little for little ol’ Finland, but I suppose that will have to do.
If it is “mine”, someone else’s remains, or a bug in the system to be seen tomorrow…