An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

[tag]TreoAlarm[/tag]After getting my Treo a couple of weeks ago I have been on a quest to find quality software to put in my toolkit, which has been an interesting adventure as I have never owned a Palm device before nor have I ever owned a PDA phone.

After taking care of email with ChatterEmail (push email at that!), a RSS Reader with Quick Newsand a SSH client with pSSH I started thinking of what else I was missing. My first thought was that there was no easy way to check the weather on my Treo, sure I could fire up Blazer and check a website like Weather.com but that is just way too bothersome.

A Google for “treo weather” led me to TreoAlarm, at first I was like why would I want to get my weather within an alarm clock? So I passed by it and continued my search but I couldn’t find any other decent looking weather applications so I thought I would give TreoAlarm a try.

TreoAlarm is an Application that provides a replacement for the Treo’s inbuilt pathetic excuse of an alarm, with my last phone being a s710a I was quite used to being able to set recurring alarms for certain days of the week, which was really handy to get me up for work and not wake me from my beauty sleep on the weekends but on the Treo that single alarm just was not cutting the mustard.

TreoAlarm fixes this and gives you up to a maximum of eight different alarm schedules, where you can set the time of day and the days of the week the alarm will sound. You can have the alarms be silent or choose from one of the built-in Polyphonic tones (possibly others that you add but I haven’t explored that yet), additionally you can also set it to turn your Treo’s wireless on/off, update the time (assumedly from a central server or maybe just from your carrier) and whether it should disconnect from the internet when done.

You can also set how long the snooze time will be, hang on a minute…. Wasn’t I looking for a weather application? Well what I neglected to mention was that there is also an option to update the weather forecast with each alarm, so what does that mean? It means you can awake and have the weather forecast right there at your finger tips and on the screen even! What a wonderful concept, have the weather ready for you when you most frequently want it!

You can choose from retrieving weather forecasts from the US National Weather Service, Yahoo Weather or the Canadian Weather Service, personally I use the US National Weather Service and by entering my post code it is returning details from a local airport. Once you have setup your weather service then the main TreoAlarm screen displays the current time in large type along with the details of any alarms you have enabled plus the current weather forecast complete with icons (although the icon for current weather doesn’t seem to display for some reason) and you can scroll through the next 7 days of forecast information.

The main screen also has a button to update the weather forecasts and another button that takes you to the alarm setting area where you can quickly enable/disable alarms and add new or edit existing alarms. Getting back to the alarm settings just quickly I forgot to mention that you can also set how long the alarm tone should sound, how often it should repeat, how long of an interlude there should be between each repeat, vibrate on/off and the minimum volume so it can gently wake you up by starting soft and getting louder.

All in all I have been quite impressed with TreoAlarm and highly recommend it whether you want an application to have weather forecasts at your fingertips, an application to provide a much better alarm clock than Palm’s bulit-in one or both then you can’t go past TreoAlarm. The only cons I have found with it is that there doesn’t seem to be an option to use MP3’s for the alarm sound even though I have Ringo installed at the moment and that an icon doesn’t display for the current weather on the main screen.

PS. I was intending this to be just a short and sweet review but for some reason I really got into the spirit of reviewing, something I haven’t done since the days of 3DfxOzStyle.com so stay tuned for future reviews of Treo software and accessories as I have been bitten by the reviewing bug!

Seeing how my girlfriend is driving though I thought I would try moblogging on my Treo using the Xiino browser as the WP Admin interface is actually usable in it unlike the mess that Blazer displays.

[tag]Treo[/tag]

• A sync and charge USB cable for my Treo 650
• An extra battery for my Treo
• A USB charger for the spare battery

I’ll add to this post as I have any other ideas.

[tag]paintball[/tag]Went by Academy today as well and added the below to my arsenal:

• Camo pants, long sleeved shirt & cap
• Some better knee pads without the hard shell
• More cannisters for paint
• 3,000 high quality paintballs
• Some goggles for Megan
• a better barrel cleaner
• Some army style boots (but more comfy)

The next paintball outing is going to be fun!

Best Buy, I am never going to you again! We made the trek out to Fry’s yesterday and they had everything we wanted and the staff for the most part left us alone, which was wonderful!

We picked up two 1GB SD cards - a high speed SanDisk for the DigiCam and a cheaper PNY one for Megan’s PDA, a USB flash drive/card reader for SD cards, a clear Skin Tight case for my Treo and a portable PDA keyboard. It was all pretty cheap too without any damn rebates! Die rebates Die!

Now if only someone would build a Fry’s inside the loop….

1. I am yet to meet a Best Buy salesperson that knows what they are talking about, yet every time I go there at least half a dozen ask me if I need assistance and if I am silly enough to ask them to help then they always feed me with some marketing drivel. Although once a Manager helped me as I asked if they had the Gameboy Micro and he went to the back to get me one, then started the drivel but cut himself of admitting that I probably know more than him so that was admirable at least!
2. They don’t have any of the consoles on the shelves nor do they have any tickets you can take to the counter so how the heck are you supposed to know if they stock consoles or not?
3. They don’t stock a single portable keyboard for PDA’s
4. The only Treo 650 cases they stock are ghetto (one was a holster, the other a body glove with cheap plastic over the whole front
5. If I see one more cheap item only to look closer and see if it is after a freakin’ rebate check I am going to scream!
6. To be in the Geek Squad should it not be a requirement that you actually be a geek?

I am still trying to find a decent blog client for my Treo. This one does look promising though…
Treo

Let’s see if this client works to my satisfaction or not!

I was in Super Target last night buying a steam cleaner as Pix’s house breaking isn’t going as well as we would like and they had a shiny new Xbox 360 on display, when I first walked past there was a single guy there but when I lost my girlfriend and got back there it was free. So I navigated through their demo disk to Kameo and WOW! Previously I was snubbing my nose at the Xbox 360 but now my mind has been changed! In Kameo your actual character is this scrawny looking girl fairy that can hover with her little wings but she can morph (well actually it is more like mecha with her being inside what she morphs into) into various things like a leaf monster that is good for some monster slapping fun, a big ice bear looking thing that can climb up ice & throw things and a spiky ball thing that lets you get your Metroid morph ball fix.

The graphics are pretty damn cool with dragons flying around the landscape and the camera following them, it seems there is a huge area that can be panned and zoomed within a level so it would be very interesting to see what the rest of the game looks like. I may just have to pick myself up an Xbox 360 now after all but it won’t be for some time though given my recent Treo purchase, all the cleaning equipment we’ve bought recently and then there is the whole christmas thing.

[tag]Google[/tag][tag]Microsoft[/tag][tag]Yahoo[/tag][tag]Google Analytics[/tag]Google Analytics is a new free service provided by Google, which looks to be the same service or a very similar one that http://urchin.com used to provide at a considerable fee. Now I’m kind of regretting my purchase of Mint as I haven’t been that happy with it as it often counts hits multiple times and the regexps to pull out the search terms is pretty poor plus it doesn’t handle referrers from Google Images at all well and now it looks like Google has a better product available for free.

As Scoble would say, what a major disruption for Microsoft and Yahoo! This will add a lot to the statistics that Google has at its fingertips especially with its integration with AdWords and will help Google remain at the forefront of online advertising for the forseeable future.