“T-Mobile has the release honors and is now showing the HD2 as “coming soon” in its phone inventory. We’ve also got the first “in the wild” shots courtesy of TmoNews showing that big Blockbuster shortcut linked front and center for downloading On Demand movies directly to the device. Still no firm price or date but $199.99 on contract ($449.99 unlocked) sometime around 24 March sounds about right”

Photo Courtesy of TmoNews, and a piece by Engadget to as well, are the latest proof that the HD2 is about to drop on T-Mobile USA. Start preparing your credit card or bank account now…

This was originally posted at Windows Phone Thoughts, check out the the source for discussion.

Got my usual 90 minutes of “Super Productivity” in, now taking some time to tinker with my Dash 3G.

Got an interesting phone call this morning from a company that sells Voice over IP (VOIP) hardware and accessories on a Business to Business basis. They had my name in their customer database and were quite confused as the company name I had listed was simply “Jonathan Westfall”. The conversation went something like this:

Sales Rep: Hi, this is X from Y, and I was wondering if your previous voice over IP hardware purchases were for yourself or a company

Me: Uh… OK

SR: Yes, I know it’s an odd question, but you’re in our database and your company is just listed as “Jonathan Westfall”, and we were wondering if you had purchased the equipment for a company.

Me (realizing the purchases they are referring to): Oh yea… I think you’re talking about some Voice over IP equipment I purchased last year… it was for personal use.

Now at this point I probably should explain myself. About 2 years ago I read an article talking about Asterisk, and thought “Hey, that sounds kinda cool”. I had been interested in phone/computer interactions for a long time (ever since trying to turn a computer into an answering machine, with software I never got working quite as well as I’d liked). So I did a bit of research on Asterisk and decided to teach myself how to set it up and, by extension, how Voice over IP worked. I took some of my geek “fun money” and spent about $200 on various hardware (that I still have in case I need to wire up an office worth of phones) and devoted an old machine to be my Asterisk box. I put phones in practically every room of a small ranch house (connected over wireless bridges as I didn’t have Ethernet hookups in the rooms), built custom equipment boxes that packed a wireless bridge, voice over IP box, and power strip into a compact package, and hooked up my Asterisk box to the outside world using a service called CallWithUs. After around 3 months I realized that the setup wasn’t exactly needed in a household of 2 people and a cat, and the bandwidth on my Sprint wireless card (which I was using for internet) wasn’t sufficient to run VoIP with any good quality. So I packed up my equipment and decommissioned the server. It was a great experience – I learned far more about VoIP than I knew before (and thus could wire up an office if I felt like it now…), and had a lot of fun for $200. Haven’t played around with it much lately so that’s why it wasn’t on the top of my mind when this sales rep called. So back to the conversation:

SR: Uh… so the purchases were…

Me: Yea, just for me. I’m a geek, and I got interested in VoIP a few years ago and decided to teach myself how it worked. So those are the purchases you’re seeing, they were just personal use.

SR: Well.. that’s actually pretty cool. You have no idea how valuable those skills you learned are going to be!

Me: Yes, I hope so. So I’ll keep your company in mind if I ever need anything, thanks for calling.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that this geek was also a psychologist who was quite happily working in a profession quite far away from VoIP phones (Other than the fact I have a VoIP phone in my desk drawer at work right now… just for fun).

After much gnashing of teeth and cries of angst, I was able to move a Google Site to a Google Apps Installation. In the end, it was actually really simple…

The first approach was to use the Google-Sites-Liberation tool, published recently on Google code, which looked very promising. However I soon found 2 issues with our particular domain (This one and this one) which unfortunately prevented me from using the tool. I also didn’t have much time to devote to debugging it. Desperate, I pieced together the following method through a few inferences and forum posts. It’s pretty simple: Copy the site from your account to your apps account!

You’ll need to be an “owner” of the site you’re trying to migrate to do this, and will probably need GMail enabled on the destination apps installation, here are the steps:

1. Log into the google site you want to migrate and bring up sharing properties.

Next, share the site to your Google Apps account’s e-mail address

2. Log into your Google Apps GMail and you should find an e-mail telling you that you’ve been added as an owner to the original site:

3. Click on the link (you may want to sign out of your original GMail account here so that you enter the site as your Apps identity). You should see your Apps e-mail address in the upper right, not your GMail address. If you see the GMail address, sign out and then click the link again from your Apps GMail.

4. click on “More actions” then “Manage Site”

5. Click on General in the left link bar.

6. On that page, click “Copy This Site”

7. The dialog box for copying should be for your Apps domain, not for regular Google Sites, it should look something like this (With your apps installation name where I’ve blacked out):

8. Click Copy Site (Unchecking revisions if you have a lot of them, and site members if you don’t want them), and you should now have an exact copy of the Sites site in your Apps installation!

9. You’ll probably want to close off editing of the old site to the new, if applicable to you. Now pop some champagne and enjoy!

I often talk with people who spend just as much time as me (or more) surfing various blogs and sites to keep up on news in a broad array of areas. One complaint is usually that people miss material, or material is posted so rapidly that they feel overwhelmed. A solution to this is to use an RSS reader, a favorite is Google Reader, to read your news. When I mention this, I often hear  “No, that’s too much work” – quite a funny statement since once it’s set up, the RSS reader will actually save hours and hours of time wasted surfing to pages and refreshing them.

And it isn’t even a lot of work in the first place – you can be up and running with Google Reader in under 10 minutes, and here’s how.

1. Get a Google account if you don’t already have one.

2. Log in to Google Reader

3. Once in, it will look pretty empty. However never fear – you’ll soon have your news and blog posts show up. Click the “Add Subscription” button and enter the web address of the page you want to add. Most blogs and news websites now have their RSS feed links set up so that Reader can automatically find it:

Once you hit “Add”, you’re done – the news items from that site will now appear. Occasionally you may need to track down a specific feed address (for example, some larger sites have feeds just for certain news items, like Science news or Entertainment news). If you need to find those, go to the site you’re reading and look for the RSS icon:   – clicking on it should take you to the RSS link. You can then copy and paste it from your browser’s address bar to the Add a Subscription box in Reader.

Once you have reader set up, all you need to do to read your feeds is log into reader, and click All Items:

It will then display all items from all of your feeds in the right hand reading pane. You can spend more time reading and less time loading pages.

I estimate it would take a medium-to-heavy blog reader around 15 minutes to add all of their feeds to reader, and then most likely save them about 5 minutes per day in page load times, bookmark clicks, and such. So after 3 days, reader’s setup has paid for itself time wise, not to mention you’ll sound cool since you can actually tell everyone all of the cool things you’ve read – not have them say “Hey, didn’t you see that article on X blog about…”

“At next week’s CTIA Wireless Show, Opera Software will be announcing the new Opera Mobile 9.7 server-accelerated browser for smartphones and mobile devices. Opera Mobile 9.7 features Opera Turbo, Opera’s breakthrough compression technology, along with the company’s latest Presto 2.2 rendering engine (also used in Opera 10 desktop) and full support for dynamic Web technologies such as Ajax and Flash (for accessing popular sites like Facebook and YouTube)”

I’m a fan of Opera when it’s pre-loaded on my devices, however I’ve yet to have the ambition to go out and download it to install. Opera Mobile 9.7 though may be tempting to download as we get ever closer to the “real” internet on the “really small” screen.

This was originally posted at Pocket PC Thoughts, check out the the source for discussion.

“At next week’s CTIA Wireless Show, Opera Software will be announcing the new Opera Mobile 9.7 server-accelerated browser for smartphones and mobile devices. Opera Mobile 9.7 features Opera Turbo, Opera’s breakthrough compression technology, along with the company’s latest Presto 2.2 rendering engine (also used in Opera 10 desktop) and full support for dynamic Web technologies such as Ajax and Flash (for accessing popular sites like Facebook and YouTube)”

I’m a fan of Opera when it’s pre-loaded on my devices, however I’ve yet to have the ambition to go out and download it to install. Opera Mobile 9.7 though may be tempting to download as we get ever closer to the “real” internet on the “really small” screen.

title="Read the full story on the Jon from PPCT site."

href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/news/show/93248/opera-mobile-9-7-announced-at-ctia.html" >Read More at Original Site
(continue reading…)

“Microsoft Corp. and South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc on Monday said they had signed a preliminary agreement on strategic collaboration in mobile technology. “The agreement ensures continued strategic collaboration in R&D, marketing, applications, and services in the field of converged mobile devices,” LG said in a statement.”

flickr: Orin Optiglot

So Koo was like “Hey Steve, Lets Collaborate” and Steve was like “OK”. Seriously, it’s never bad to see agreements like this, as they hopefully mean more market saturation for Windows Mobile and, in turn, cooler devices for us. But really, when was the last time you saw something directly come of these agreements? Too bad the announcement is public but the results rarely traced back to it.

title="Read the full story on the Jon from PPCT site."

href="http://feeds.pocketpcthoughts.com/~r/pocketpcthoughts/~3/443134105/microsoft-and-lg-sign-mobile-collaboration-pact.html" >Read More at Original Site
(continue reading…)