- Battery options for Netbook, large CF and MMC cards

- Re: Psion hell

- Yearly repeats at the end of the month (and a crazy idea!)

- End of EU summer time soon, P990,

- Re: Netbook batteries

- GPS positions

- Re: End of EU summer time soon

Date: 23 Oct 2005 16:42:36 +0700
From: Kevin Thorne <address truncated>
Subject: Battery options for Netbook, large CF and MMC cards

Reply to Peter Rand:
Subject: Battery options for netBook/7Book?

Peter, I'm not sure if I am correct here (perhaps another Digest reader will know for sure) but I believe a larger standard slide-in li-ion battery for the Psion 7/neBook was or still is available, giving something like 2200ma hours or approximately 10 - 12 hours continuous use.  I think it was
designed for the Netbook Pro but also fits the 7 and EPOC netBook, despite having a higher capacity.

To Steve Litchfield:
Steve, I was about to purchase a 2GB MMC card for my 9500 when I read on your excellent 3-Lib site that there are issues with the 9500 trying to use these large cards.  Can I ask if you know what these issues are?

To all:
Does anyone have experience of using CF cards greater in size than 1GB in their S7/netBook?  If so, any problems?  I use a 1GB IBM Microdrive with no problem (except it is a bit power hungry being a real mechanical disk drive) but with CF cards being so cheap now I thought I might get a 2GB CF card for it as I could do with a bit more storage and of course, being solid state my battery life should be greater.

Regards
Kevin Thorne

Date: 23 Oct 2005 17:43:26 +0700
From: Keith Clarke <address truncated>
Subject: Re: Psion hell

Thanks, Tony, for Psion Travel Modem advice. I tried changing these settings where they differ from Itamar?s, but still no luck. By process of elimination, I wonder whether the modem has gone wobbly, so now have a Psion card and adaptor coming from eBay. Fingers crossed. I feel my Psion days are numbered if this doesn?t work ? a sad state of affairs for someone who has stuck in there all the way from the 3.

<<re IR modem settings
I never understood what these entries mean but these are the settings
I use with a netbook and I think I have used them with S5s and Revos. My settings are not exactly the same as  Itamar Engelsmans but here
they are.>>

Date: 23 Oct 2005 18:55:09 +0700
From: Chris S Handley
Subject: Yearly repeats at the end of the month (and a crazy idea!)

Hi all

I just thought that I'd share a little discovery I made about our Psions:

I have occasionally wanted to make an Agenda entry repeat at the END of the month.  If you set it to repeat on the 4th week of that month, using "Monthly by days" or "Yearly by day of week", then it will occasionally fail, because a month is slightly more than 4 weeks long, and therefore it will occasionally have 5 occurances of my chosen day.  For example, this month has 5 Saturdays & 5 Sundays!

What I discovered is that if you set it to repeat on the 5th week of the month (for a month that happens to have 5 of that day), then Agenda was designed with this in mind, and it will handle months with only 4 occurances, by putting it on the 4th week of that month.

So if you want to make something repeat at the end of the month, you just need to look back in the calenda by a few months (or few years if repeating once a year), to find a month where the relevant day occurs 5 times, and then use that as the point which you repeat from.



On a related note, we could get rid of all these kinds of headaches, by adding one more month to the year - 365 days divides very nicely by 13, giving exactly 4 weeks per month.  Well, OK, one month in the year would have to have 29 days (or 30 in a leap year), but if we put that extra day at the end of December, then I doubt that anyone would complain - and probably they'd not even notice!  Think of it as "decimalising" our calenda :-)

So if you had some kind of event happening once a month on the first Monday, you would know that each event was separated by exactly 28 days (except when a new year was started).  Calculations based upon days in a month would be infinitely easier - such as those how much you get paid a month!  And computers would be able to handle date calculations (such as done by Agenda) with far less bugs, and incidentally making the poor programmers life much easier!

I've never heard of this suggestion for adding an extra month to our year, but it really would make sense...
---
Chris Handley

Date: 23 Oct 2005 21:02:35 +0700
From: Itamar Engelsman <address truncated>
Subject: End of EU summer time soon, P990,

Answer to: Steve Hodgson

Re.: End of EU summer time soon - It was neither the Palm nor the Psion that let you down. Your problem is that this year October has got 5 Sundays and the rule is that summertime changes the last week-end of October and not the 4th.

To All:

Re. P990 - As I am currently traveling I could only have a short peep at the websites concerning the new phone. Any ideas anyhone about this new upcoming model of Sony Ericsson ?  I noticed that one opinion said the cange to UIQ 3.0 is like th change from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, ie a huge difference. Is this also the opinion of the expert members of this digest ? Will the existing programs be (easily) converted to the new Os or not, opinion of the expert programmers on this digest ? It would be interesting to hear some views about this new phone.

Best regards,
Itamar Engelsman
London, UK

Date: 24 Oct 2005 07:34:00 +0700
From: Chris Pulster <address truncated>
Subject: Re: Netbook batteries

> I recently heard it mentioned that there are replacement slide-in > battery packs for Psion netBook/7Books that you can load with
> alkaline or NiMH rechargable batteries.

There are no such batteries, sorry. I am selling original Psion Netbook spare part batteries. These are full rechargable batteries, only the 
closing lid is missing (remove it from your old batterie). Please chek 
the picture and you see what you get:
http://www.pulster.de/ index.htm?d__netbakku_s__Netbook_Wechselakku628.htm

Price is just 49 EUR.

Christoph Pulster

Date: 24 Oct 2005 09:59:37 +0700
From: Eric Lindsay <address truncated>
Subject: GPS positions

>   The Digest    Sat, 22 Oct 2005    Volume 01  :  Number 828 > From: Chris Malcolm <address truncated>
> The phone system knows which local cell transceiver the mobile phone > is currently using. In cities this can locate you to within a mile or > less, but it varies a lot since it's a function of cell density. In
> the country it could be within a dozen or two miles.

If you have a Telstra GSM phone and send an empty SMS message to a 
certain number in Australia, you get an automated response with your 
lat and  long, plus a map reference if in a major city.  Where I 
live, in a country area with only one cell tower in range, it got 
within 400 metres in one direction, 800 metres in another, despite 
not being able to triangulate (they probably excluded national park 
areas).  I was impressed.  This system has not been officially 
released.  I imagine they will eventually release it commercially for 
Pizza delivery and taxi pickups.

Date: 24 Oct 2005 10:01:08 +0700
From: David Steer \(Plus\) <address truncated>
Subject: Re: End of EU summer time soon

Steve Hodgson,

>My repeated Psion agenda entry that marks the end of BST appears to have
>let me down for the first time! This is one of the more complicated
>entries thst I _was_ able to transfer to the Palm and is set for the
>fourth sunday of October i.e. 23rd October this year.

>I had the whole family geared up for a change this morning only to find
>it was still officially Summer albeit a very wet one.

Oficially the change from BST to GMT is the last Sunday in October.  In most years, the 4th Sunday would work, however, this year there are 5 Sundays in October!  The same goes for the change from GMT to BST, it is the last Sunday in March.

Some time ago I wrote a program to automatically change the time BST <=> GMT.  IT seems to work reasombly well.  It is free from www.pocketiq.com and is called PsiWallpaper.  It also can change the wallpaper displayed on the system screen.

On the Agenda front, I use Hol5 to generate the entries in my Agenda and it does the job very well.  I don't have a web address for the app, but you might find it on Martin's site.  If not e-mail me direct and I will send you a copy of the install file.

Regards
David