Yesterday my PDA totally locked up, just froze with the backlight on and nothing on screen. Finally last night the battery gave out. But apparently there is happy news! My dear wife reports from home today that when she plugged it in to the charger, it came back up and appears to be working correctly. Let’s hope that it keeps it up – I don’t like my choices for replacing it, even if I could afford them:

First there’s the Palm brand products. I like their OS, but I’m getting a sour taste in my mouth for them after my recent troubles.

• Cheap-o Palm Zire 22. Does most of what I need, but has a lousy screen (160×160 res) and is under-powered. $99.
• Palm Tungsten E2. What I have right now. Causing problems after 9 months. $199.
• Palm Tungsten TX. Bigger screen than what I have, plus it has Wi-Fi built in. $299.

Or, I could make the big leap and go to the ones running Windows CE, or whatever the heck they call it now.

The trouble there is that the bottom-of-the-line units start, price-wise, about the same place that the Palms stop. I could get the basic Dell Axim for about $250 right now, sans case and extended warranty.

Let’s just hope my E2 is back alive and good to go for a while. As much as I rely on it to keep me on schedule, $250 for a product that lasts only 9 months is ridiculous.

I updated the Brewed Awakenings website tonight to use the new logo and a revised header. I think it’s a big improvement. Slowly but slowly, it’s going to become a decent site.

The long-awaited FeedLounge finally opened for public signups yesterday. For those of you not familiar, FeedLounge is a web-based RSS aggregator/feed reader. As a sometime-user of Google Reader and a sometime-user of Bloglines, and never very happy with either, I was excited to hear that this product might be what I was looking for. Geof has been alpha-testing for a while and has sung its praises far and wide, so I was all primed and ready to sign up yesterday.

Having been a FeedLounge subscriber for all of twelve hours now, I can say this: I am not disappointed. FeedLounge has an amazing user interface, good enough that though it’s just a web page, it tempts you to think that you’re running a separate application. It allows for feed tagging, tagging and flagging of individual posts, and, what may be one of my favorite features already, direct links to subscribe to comments for blog posts that provide you that capability. Fantastic!

FeedLounge won’t be for everyone. If you’re only subscribing to a dozen or so blogs, just use bloglines or something similar. Also, FeedLounge is a subscription service; $5/month or $50/year. Well worth it, IMO, but that’s your judgement to make. But for people like me who are subscribed to hundreds of feeds and want to be able to get at them from anywhere, FeedLounge is a great way to go.

I woke up this morning to find that I had very limited, analog cellular service. US Cellular has usually been reliable, so I was a bit suprised. I checked with a few coworkers and found that they had the same problem.

Digital service was restored around 10:30 this morning, but I still didn’t have any luck calling out. I walked past a US Cellular office on my way to lunch around noon, and they reported that they had some electrical problems and that most of the towers in eastern Iowa were problematic. As of that hour, apparently inbound service was working, but outbound was still disabled.

As of a few minutes ago (1:20 PM) outbound calling appears to be working again. Specialized calling (for instance, #BAL to get your minutes balance) was still kicking you off to the analog network. Hopefully they’ll have it up again soon.

OK, so when we bought our 40-hour Tivo, it was small-ish for storage space, but it worked. Now that we’ve got subscriptions going for kids programming like Sesame Street and Zooboomafoo, I’ve been wishing for some more storage space. Having been assured by Mark that the upgrade was fairly easy, I decided to take it on myself.

Step 1 was to get a larger hard drive. I didn’t want to spend a lot, but I wanted a lot of space. A Christmas gift card to Best Buy (thanks Ryan!) was a good starting point. Then I found a good deal on a Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 160 GB hard drive. It started at $119.99, but has $80 worth of mail-in rebates. So I picked it up today and got started.

There are good instructions out on the web for upgrading to a bigger Tivo hard drive. The most detailed and useful was www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html. It has very specific step-by-step instructions.

Step 2 was to crack open the Tivo and backup its hard drive onto the new hard drive. Most of the time here was spent just opening cases and swapping in and out hard drives. Per the instructions I had created a bootable CD running some specialized Linux, and that allowed me to do all of the fun backups and restores.

The whole copying process (including all of the programs I currently have recorded) took about 2 hours to complete.

Step 3: put everything back together and check out the system status page.  The results: 40 or so hours of recording space in “Best” mode, up to 183 hours in “Basic” mode.  I think I’ll stick in “High” mode, which’ll give me 83 hours of recording time.

Note: depending on the type of Tivo, you may not be able to use all the hard drive space; older Tivos software limits you to addressing about 137 GB. However, my Series 2 Tivo model TVD540040 is able to address larger amounts, so I was able to use all 160 GB. Woohoo!

I’ll echo Mark’s comments here on Tivo upgrades; I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was. If you’re comfortable swapping hard drives in and out and setting the master/slave jumpers, you can do this. No problemo.

I’ve just finished upgrading all of the thehubbs.net blogs to Wordpress 2.0. It all seemed to go smoothly. Now we just have to use it for a while to gain some familiarity. I will say that this WYSIWYG editing seems pretty slick so far.

Last night Becky asked a question that seemed like it should have a simple answer: how could we create an online map that shows several different locations all at the same time? She is planning our church’s Christmas caroling, and wanted to be able to map all the possible locations we’d go so we could see how they’re grouped geographically and how we might best choose a route to them all.

First stop: Google Maps. Unfortunately, they don’t appear to have any built-in easy way to map multiple user-defined locations.

Second stop: Google search for “map multiple locations”. I found several links that gave me info on how I could use the API that Google Maps makes available to create a Google map with more than one location. But that was more work than I really wanted to have to deal with last night.

Third stop: another Google search led me to communitywalk.com. CommunityWalk is still in beta testing, but it does exactly what I wanted it to: I could type in addresses, it would mark them on the map, allow me to edit data about each address, and would even show me directions between different addresses. They’re using Google Maps as their back-end. Their UI is obviously still under development, but it worked fine for what I was wanting it to do.

If you’re curious about my map, you can see it at http://communitywalk.com/map/1269. I will likely find myself coming back to use this site again.

OK, I finally got my import from Blogger to Wordpress working. I followed the handy hints at the Wordpress Support forum, and found a modified script that ran the import OK. You can find it at http://alittlebitleft.com/import-blogger.phps. Note that you’ll have to click on that link, then copy and paste the text into a file called import-blogger.php.

So now if you’re a reader and really bored, you can go read my old posts from last November and December. Hard to believe I’ve been blogging for more than a year now! I know, that still means I’m a newbie compared to some of you.

I have been attempting this afternoon to import some of my old blog*spot posts. I was doing my best to set the dates, but it looks like WordPress is smarter than I am and is disallowing dates older than when it was installed. I’ll have to attempt some geekery to get around it. Just thought I’d let you know.

Carry on.

OK, all the cool kids have ‘em, now I do too…

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