- Summertime 2007

- Re: The Digest V1 # 830_7

- Altering the calendar

- 13 months a year

- Re: The Digest V1 # 828

- Rationalized calendars

- Re: large CF and MMC cards

- Revo Plus CD - Help!

Date: 24 Oct 2005 15:35:03 +0700
From: Karl Wagner <address truncated>
Subject: Summertime 2007

Out of curiousity, what happens in March 2007, when Saturday is March 31, and Sunday April 1. Does summertime start on this, or the previous weekend? BTW, I simply made a yearly reccuring entry to remind myself of the summertime changes, by selecting Repeat on Last Sunday of March and October, resp. They tried to decimalise the calendar during the French Revolution, but it didn't catch on... Unfortunately the moon doesn't adapt it's rotation to accomodate computer programmers ;-) Look at the history of the calendar, it's very enlightening, e.g. February is the odd month out in terms of days because it was the LAST month of the Roman calendar, thus suitable for adjustments - same rationale as Chris' idea of putting 'leap days' at the end of December! Regards Karl >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 thereforeit 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, byadding 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 ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ

Date: 24 Oct 2005 17:29:54 +0700
From: Prar <address truncated>
Subject: Re: The Digest V1 # 830_7

At 22:02 24/10/2005 +0700, you wrote:

>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?

My Netpad wouldn't work with an Integral 256MB MMC card. It could see the card and the data but refused to save anything to it.




PRAR

--

(Insert witty comment here.)

Date: 24 Oct 2005 18:08:46 +0700
From: Phil Aypee <address truncated>
Subject: Altering the calendar

Hi Folks,

Chris. (Handley), I’m sorry to disappoint you but the calendar has been altered before to cope with the changing length of the year in just the way you suggest.

The problem *now* is that any such action would effectively need to be agreed by politicians all over the globe. It certainly makes sense to change the calendar again - but it ain’t likely!

Happy days,
Phil.

“As I interpret the President, we’re now at the
end of the beginning of the upturn of the downturn.”

http://  http://aypee1.mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/index.html

Date: 24 Oct 2005 21:24:22 +0700
From: Bernard Hill <address truncated>
Subject: 13 months a year

Chris Handley:

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

If I remember correctly Arthur C Clark proposed this decades ago. I don't remember the name of the extra month but I remember the extra day was to be called Year Day and not have a month attached to it. Every 4 years (etc) you have  2 Year Days.


--
Bernard Hill
Braeburn Software
Author of Music Publisher system
Music Software written by musicians for musicians
http://www.braeburn.co.uk
Selkirk, Scotland

Date: 24 Oct 2005 22:17:47 +0700
From: Vlad A <address truncated>
Subject: Re: The Digest V1 # 828

> Cathy Roberts wrote on 22.10.2005 11:50:

> Reported corruption / insufficient memory

Cards occasionally do become corrupt (switching between platforms is one reason, discussed here a while ago, without any definitive solution if I remember right). In my experience, if indeed "a little" corrupt, the CF will rapidly become definitely unusable. Using sth like LF-Tools to defragment or Check-Disk (Essential Disk Utilities from Atelier - isn't it now free, btw?) to repair it is worth a try. Before that though I'd back everything up (on which occasion you might find some data is so corrupt it won't be copied and you'll get lots of errors). The only clean solution is to reformat the card and reconfigure it. If it's badly corrupt reformatting may fail a few times, you might have to reformat first in another machine, a computer or a a camera, then again on the Psion. I guess the sofware-specialists might have explanations, this is just my easy way out of such trouble (plus never switch the CF between platforms).

Hope this helps,

best,

vlad a

Date: 24 Oct 2005 22:21:29 +0700
From: Chris Cooper
Subject: Rationalized calendars

Chris Handley wrote:


>>
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 :-)

....

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

>>

Sorry, Chris, someone's thought of it before. I remember reading about it when I was a kid – and that's a _very_ long time ago.

I saw another suggestion that takes advantage of the fact that 365 days = 52 weeks + 1 day, but retains 12 months and four equal quarters. Each quarter consists of a month with five weeks followed by two with four weeks each. Again there'd be an 'extra' unnumbered day, to be stuck at the end of the year. Every four years there'd be an unnumbered leap day, which could go between June and July.

Best,

Chris

Date: 25 Oct 2005 10:33:38 +0700
From: Chris S Handley
Subject: Re: large CF and MMC cards

On 23 Oct 2005, Kevin Thorne wrote:
> 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.

Not too long ago I took the plunge of replacing my 1Gb Microdrive with a 2Gb CF card.  I can offer these observations & suggestions:

A real CF card is *far* faster than a Microdrive, and will give a massive boost to certain opertaions on your S7/Netbook.  Not least, after turning your Psion on, it will become responsive much quicker (say 1 second compared to maybe 5 seconds), especially if you have any macros run at switch-on.  I think Street & Route planner load much quicker, and certainly Browsing (Ctrl-G) the D disk no-longer locks-up the Psion for tens of minutes.

I have noticed no significant change to battery life (no more than 30 minutes extra), even with iBattery's graph.  This is probably because the Microdrive *was* very efficient with power, although I never used any Psion programs which heavily accessed the CF drive (are there any?!?).

FAT16 is already inefficient with files on a 1GB partition, so switching to a 2GB partition could waste your even more (perhaps several 100 MB!).  Therefore I recommend partitioning it into two 1GB partitions.  I recall that this has been discussed more than once on Psion Place, so you should have a search there for more specific advice.  BTW, you will need a PC (probably running Windows, preferably not XP) with a CF card-reader to partition the card.  Martin's PScience5 site also has a great article on this subject, particularly if you use Windows XP.

If you can't partition the card, you could buy SecureDrive, as this allows you to create one or more "virtual" partitions as a file(s) on the CF card.  Such partitions can be given a small cluster size, and so will be more space efficient.  But beware that you will need another Psion (or the Psion Emulator) to access such partitions, in the event of your current S7/Netbook dying.

The Netbook *may* not be able to handle (real) partitions above 2GB, and certainly FAT16 is limited to 4GB max.  And the Psion 5/5mx *may* not be able to handle partitions above 1GB.  But (at least) Windows XP can *only* see the first partition of a (removable) CF card, for some stupid reason.  Keep these facts in mind, when considering how you will access your files in the event that your S7/Netbook stops working.

Oh, and I highly recommend the Kingston Elite Pro CF cards - they are very fast, should stand many more writes than normal CF cards (before wearing out), and they are also pretty cheap if you buy them on-line.  Expansys & Amazon are a good place to start looking.  You may also be able to buy direct from Kingston too.

Regards,
Chris Handley

P.S.  I see that the last digest was sent from a Windows PC, as it had a winmail.dat attachment.  Does that mean the Digest's email-combining program has been ported to Windows?!  Or is there a more mundane explanation?


Visit the web page email.cshandley.co.uk for my address

(Hi Chris, we still use our Psions to prepare the Digest format. However, I use my windows pc to send the finished digest due to some ISP problems. Rgds, Dick Chatjaval).

Date: 25 Oct 2005 11:39:46 +0700
From: Larch <address truncated>
Subject: Revo Plus CD - Help!

Dear All,
My Opera browser has got corrupted leaving me up a gum tree because I have
lost my Revo PLus CD so am unable to do a re-install. If any kind soul has a
Revo Plus which has given up the ghost but still has the CD I would be
grateful for the opportunity to purchase it from them.
Regards
<address truncated>