The Guardian Online produced a report on “Nokia’s Lifeblog software”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1166303,00.html for turning the contents of your picturephone into a life journal. BBC followed up with an article with a few more details – most interestingly the clever idea that the software would automatically match up the pictures you took with your phone and the location where they were taken using the automatic phone location service that mobile phone operators provide. So as well as relying on labels you add yourself you can query your lifeblog software and find all the pictures you took in central London last week.

Before you get too excited it isn’t due to be delivered before the end of June and the first version (“blog” name notwithstanding) does not connect to the Internet but this still represents the first appearance of the next generation of ‘life capture’ software on the mass market.

Searchengine Watch alerted me to an interesting tool –
“Furl”:http://www.furl.net/ – which makes it easy to add URLs I run across to an online library, lets me sort them by topic, share them, and search the text on each of the pages. I don’t think it will displace my favourite bookmark tool, “Powermarks”:http://www.kaylon.com/power.html but if you can’t run a stand-alone application like Powermarks because your computer won’t let you run unapproved applications this could be just the thing for you. And because it is on the web in a central database it will enable all kinds of interesting group sharing and rating. Well worth taking a look at.

Just a few days ago I was griping I couldn’t find how to do conference calling via Internet telephony. Now I read that Skype is going to provide “free five-way conference calling”:http://news.com.com/2100-7352-5162119.html with the next version of its software. And it is also planning a version that will run on broadband-enabled PDAs – as I hope my Palm will be as soon as I manage to get a wireless card “with a driver for it”:http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/68/34458.html!

“Adobe Reader Speedup”:http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bootblock/files/misc/ar-speedup.zip does what it says (by telling Acrobat not to load up a lot of plug-ins you probably weren’t using anyway). While there is a “restore” option it only works once so if you do discover later that you need to use a tool you removed you may have difficulty in restoring your settings without reinstalling Acrobat. Still, it’s probably worth doing for most Acrobat users.

Thanks to Need To Know 2004-02-20 for the link

Well, I finally plunked down my plastic and picked up a Tungsten T3. Now what? I have already downloaded:

• “Eudora Internet Suite”:http://www.eudora.com/internetsuite/download/ so I can sync my Palm with my Eudora email and
• “Avantgo”:http://www.avantgo.com/ for content on the move

  I’ve also bookmarked:

• “Palminfocenter”:http://www.palminfocenter.com/
• “Handheldnews”:http://www.handheldnews.com/ and
• “Brighthand”:http://www.brighthand.com/morenews.php?site=Palm

for news about what new stuff is coming up. Where should I be looking to find lists and reviews of the best freeware and shareware apps for my Palm? Are there any must-have applications I should run and get right away? Any I should shy away from? Where should I look for the most up-to-date news about Palm-related stuff? And where should I go for good Palm-related peer tech support?

Later: This article suggesting that there may be “no upgrade path to PalmOS 6”:http://www.brighthand.com/article/palmOne_Refuses_to_Confirm_OS_6_Upgrade for existing models has me nervous. Should I cancel my order (I ordered online and it hasn’t arrived yet)? I don’t want to be stuck with the last incarnation of a dead-end OS. On the other hand, if I waited a few months to get a new PalmOS 6 model it might be buggy… What do you think? Do you think they’ll make the top-end models of Palm upgradeable but just don’t want to guarantee anything?

My friend Harald shares info on a pair of different ways to visualise your overall disk use. Of course with hard disk sizes being as large as they are you may not need these but if you have been thinking you really should do some housecleaning these should help. And both are free (though “SpaceMonger”:http://www.werkema.com/software/spacemonger.html may not be for much longer).

… and even more surprisingly they aren’t charging for it! Deloitte Consulting has provided the Internet community Bullfighter – an add-on for Word 2000 & PowerPoint 2000 (or later) which gives you a rough idea of a document’s readability taking into account its Fleisch index and the number of annoying corporate buzzwords embedded in it.

I have never understood why with all the advances there have been in browsers neither Mozilla nor IE has developed a proper database for managing bookmarks. If you have more than a few dozen bookmarks it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of them all. The “Keeping Found Things Found”:http://kftf.ischool.washington.edu/ project has discovered people can’t find sites they visited earlier but they seem to have developed a needlessly baroque way to deal with this problem. I have been using “Powermarks”:http://www.kaylon.com/ for several years and now have more than 5,000 bookmarks in a simple database which lets me get to any of them almost instantly. It may be the most useful software I have ever bought…

David Wilcox brings to my attention on Designing for Civil Society an article summarising the benefits of several different open source applications for activists.

Interesting and useful though the list is for some, I do think it shows a narrowness of perspective common to technically-proficient activists. It doesn’t talk about how difficult the software is for the group to install or maintain and doesn’t put much stress on whether there is a free hosted version of the software available (so an organization can just use it without having to install it or run their own web server).

The unspoken assumption of those writing seems to be that at least one person among the activist groups will know how to set up and maintain software and have access to a computer with an always-on broadband connection. Tut tut!

Alas this offer is limited (though there is no need to commit yourselves) and it only works if you either buy a voice over IP telephone or download the appropriate (free) software and configure it (something which I have found less than straightforward to do in the past). Nonetheless, this is clearly the future of telephony.

By coincidence, the “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/18/technology/circuits/18nett.html?ex=1387083600&en=b28df722ab69712f&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND has just reviewed “Vonage”:http://www.vonage.com/’s Internet to telephone service and says it works just fine. I tried the free Free World Dialup service with my parents and it kind of worked as well but my voice was a little broken up (probably because of my bad habit of running 17 programs at once on my PC.)

I hope France gets connected in a similar way one day – we only pay between 1 and 4p a minute (2 to 7 cents) to call my wife’s friends and family but it still adds up!

See “Free World Dialup”:http://www.freeworldialup.com/ for details.