After much changing of settings over a period of time, it was bugging me for weeks, I finally managed to enable wifi internet sharing and that was a huge relief. I had expected the Airport set up to be a breeze but it wasn’t as I had to make small changes to individual, tucked away settings, prior to it finally working, changes that a novice like me would have never been able to work out without a bit of lucky checkbox ticking.

Setting up was simple. I basically followedthese instructions…….you have to scroll down a bit to find them on the page. This has made the attached hard drive accessible on my laptop. I spent ages trying to work out how to access it until I realised that it shows up as the base station name in any finder window and not as the hard disk’s name…doh. This has several potential benefits. Firstly, I can in theory (but not in reality – see later) try out Time Machine for backups, secondly I can access everything on the hard drive without having to plug it in and thirdly, I can use other backup solutions and set scheduling if Time Machine turns out to be awkward.

So, having set up the whole thing I eagerly headed over to Time Machine preferences and things appeared to be in order, the app recognised the disk to be used and started the backup procedure only to stall almost immediately…….an error message telling me that the disk could not be mounted despite it being recognised. Time to start again and redo the whole thing but no joy again, same error message. I searched around on various forums…’shorten the disk name’ being a frequent answer so I did but it was still not working. An hour later, having tried various other possible solutions, I just gave up. It’s disappointing but not disasterous as I can put plan B into operation and give Super Duper a run out for backups. There is a free version which does the basic stuff whilst the paid-for one adds scheduling and incremental backups, which appeals.

Later on that night came the big experiment. A full HD clone via SuperDuper over wifi to the shared disk. Kick off was 8.25pm and by bedtime, 11.45pm, it had only done about 20% of the clone backup. My goodness, it is painfully slow. So slow in fact that I decided to abandon the idea completely. The next day I bought a 500gb external Iomega drive (which comes pre-formatted for mac), disconnected the other drive from Airport and reverted to basics. The good thing about the Iomega drive is that it is huge and that it supports Firewire for faster data transfers. It’s also plugged into the MacBook Pro which makes backups a hell of a lot less time consuming. Next step was to repeat the HD Clone exercise. Started at 4.45pm and was finished by 6.05pm which is a tad more acceptable. All future incremental backups should be much quicker. Crikey, wish I’d never bothered in the first place, sometimes all that wireless stuff sounds good on paper but in actuality, can be a pain.

Here are the good bits…..it installs a conduit for you into Missing Sync for Palm, auto-installs the db and palm prc file and then transfers everything across very smoothly. Oh, and it has a nice icon. Here are the bad bits…it has no category support although it does follow your deskptop filtering system, it doesn’t support the treo keyboard so if you type, for example “l”, it will not jump to all entries starting with that letter and you cannot edit existing entries or add new ones either. If you press the “menu” key nothing appears as an option…nothing! And it costs $12.95 which is way way too expensive for what is basically just a reader application with no editing scope whatsoever. I would also imagine that with Palm disappearing down the plughole it will not receive much developer support either in terms of new features.

So, to sum up, the desktop app and iPhone app are superb whilst the Palm version is distinctly mediocre but does a job.

Here’s the RSS link again too…

- mobile post

One nifty feature of BlogPress is that it saves drafts and lists them seperately as “drafts”, making them easier to find. It does seem a bit buggy in that the written part of the post can disappear for a bit and then luckily reappear fairly quickly.

Updated – well it sort of works okay although the image us not where I wanted it to be although at least it’s not about a foot high.

- mobile post

Oh dear. Our recent good run came to a crashing halt as we lost at bottom of the table Hamilton, our second defeat of the season to them. They must wish they could play us every week.

What a chance we wasted to close in on 3rd place as the two teams above us both drew. Typical AFC this season.

Manager Jimmy Calderwood seemed pretty hacked off in his post match interview and no wonder, after 4 straight wins in the league we should have picked up something from this less than daunting venue.

Is this for real? If so it would surprise me if it has any phone capability. If it is smaller and less featured than the 3g version it would be cheaper than the current model which raises the obvious question….would Apple want another cheaper phone to compete with the more expensive 3g one? Would their partner carriers? It wouldn’t make sense as Apple doesn’t do competition between their own models. they like there to be a clear gap between all models.

If it is radio equipped I can only assume they would sell it themselves, without any carrier involvement, and that it would sell for a price higher than you can currently get a contract 3g one. That price would also be higher than the most expensive iPod Touch as they would not want to pitch it in the iPod Touch range for fear of hurting sales of that range.

A £200 nano iPhone with say 16gb of memory would likely decimate sales of both the 3g iPhone and any iPod Touch so it is likely to be specced with a relatively low amount of memory to differentiate it further from those models. Say it was available for £200, had 16bg of memory and was unlocked, who would then buy a 3g iPhone? Unless of course it is going to replace the 3g model?

Just my opinion.

MacJournal

(I did a test post from it and it worked just fine, uploading this post quickly once I had configured set up properly)

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With the forthcoming Palm January event I have been trying to rack my brain thinking of something fairly revolutionary that Palm could (and would need) to come up with to get everyone’s juices flowing with anticipation. I think most people would speculate that the next gen palm devices will be of a biiger screen design and that the much loved qwerty front facing keyboard is going to disappear. There’s not enough room for a treo like keypad on an iPhone or HTC HD like device without making it huge. If Palm are aiming at the media-centric market then a bigger screen is becoming a pre-requisite too.

Palm have been so quiet over the past 12 months you have got to think they have been working extremely hard on something, the new o/s obviously but in todays crowded smartphone market they really need to bring out something that gives them something different to offer. And, if they are not going down the keyboard route then it might just be what the linked post is speculating. It would just all make sense to me. After all, Elevation saw something they liked enough to pump amore cash into Palm just recently and nobody else on the market has a satisfactory hand writing recognition tool at their disposal. It also fits in with the bigger screen for multimedia scenario as a device with top notch hand writing recognition built in wouldn’t need it.

Could this be what Mr Ed has up his sleeve ready to show all us doubters? He needs something pretty spectacular after all and this fits the bill as it would be not so much revolutionary as evolutionary and could take smartphones to the next level. It’s not like Palm would have been starting from scratch either having used graffiti for many years and it was okay-ish for most users. Taking it to the next level though is an exciting thought and anywhere on-screen writing would be great. You would have to think too that having taken so blinking long to get this out means it has been nicely fine tuned. Nobody else out there has this at the moment and this could be the next big thing. Married to a  new o/s that has been re-designed from the ground up to take advantage of that feature, Palm could be back in business.