- Psion (SiBO) Agenda

- Battery life

- start with psion (and stop)

- Re: laptops

Date: 16 Nov 2006 09:09:04 +0100
From: Phil Aypee <address truncated>
Subject: Psion (SiBO) Agenda

Hi Folks,

Chris (Kantarjiev), the emulator is not always reliable under Windoze (actually it usually won’t run).

But PC agenda by Chris Hartley may suit. It reads SiBO Agenda files, is dated 1999 and runs on Windoze 95, 98 and NT.

Oh, and it’s free.

It may run on later flavours of Windoze. If you want it and can’t find it, eMail me.

Happy days,
Phil.

http://uk.geocities.com/philadkinsp/index.html

Date: 16 Nov 2006 10:09:15 +0100
From: Franco.Cozzani <address truncated>
Subject: Battery life

Hello everybody,

Chris Holly wrote:

"Nick, i am hardly an expert but I have a few batteries around me including a hefty Li-Ion on my electrified bicycle. My understanding is the Li-Ion batteries don't have the memory effect that others do and prefer not to be "totally" discharged. Rather, they like to be topped off and will last longer than if they are repeatedly run out all the way and recharged. Ni-cads have the memory effect and have to be discharged periodically and recharged fully."

I did hear the same advice about both Li-ion and previous MnHi batteries, but I am not fully convinced.
My experience:
On my defunct MC 218 (= Psion 5Mx) I circled rechargeable MnMh AA batteries for 3 years, getting better performance by at least occasionally descharging them fully. Since the psion did not work at such low voltage (and be careful about saving files to a CF drive when your battery gets below 50%), you can use a simple flashlight.
The instructions from Apple on my Macbook (here I go again!)do recommend not only to run periodically the battery down until the Macbook goes to sleep, but to leave it in that low voltage state for about two hours and then charge it fully up and leave it still on the mains for a few more hours once the led indicates it is fully charged. My Mac has of course a Li-ion battery.
Although less specific, I seem to remember that Toshiba recommends something similar for its Windows laptops: I used a Satellite for about two years before my little girl got it (my wife got the older PC from our girl and my family looks now like an Apple commercial "Hi, I am a Mac, Hi, I am a PC!) And I did notice a (moderately) better battery life on the Toshiba if you run the battery down and charge it fully up, say once a month.

I understand very little about modern battery electro-chemistry and expert advice on the Digest would be mostly welcome.
However, it is clear that modern batteries take in topping-up charging much more happily that older NiCd, and do suffer very little from memory effects.
But they are still batteries, and still need an occasional conditioning every now and then.

Kind regards,

Franco COZZANI
Brussels

Date: 16 Nov 2006 11:41:59 +0100
From: Vlad A <address truncated>
Subject: start with psion (and stop)

> Bill Fuggle wrote on 15.11.2006:

> It's a great regret to me that there is still no genealogy prog for symbian > devices.

Yes... I still use it and find the Apple Calendar app not so smart, but synching would be great and I'd like to be able to sync Data and Contacts with some denomination of phone manager on Mac. I had a solution for OS 9.

Does anyone have simple solutions? It's been discussed here before, I believe?

best,

vlad a

Date: 16 Nov 2006 13:38:16 +0100
From: Ian Chapple
Subject: Re: laptops

Steve,

>>Couldn't let this pass without comment because one of the great strength of OS X is its versatility. Without even looking sites such as Versiontracker I can list Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Camino, Opera, Omniweb, Opera, Shiira, Mozilla Suite & Sea Monkey. I realise that one or two of these are variations on a Gecko theme but then I have excluded all the text browsers such as Lynx and also the Windows and X11 browsers that can be run on an OS X machine using the built-in X11 or applications such as Crossover Mac.

I guess it *may* even be possible to run PsiWin under Crossover Mac.<<

I've never heard of most of these programs, but I'll pass them on to my wife (just in case).

Simon,

>>Ian - have you looked at www.laptop.org<<

I had heard about the "One Laptop Per Child" laptop, but had not seen this website. It looks very good, although they do say that it won't be available for general retail....

Chris,

>>Bad (?) news I'm afraid:  The new Internet Explorer 7 (which is basically mandatory) is unlikely to be much better than Firefox, because IE7 is now designed to be "standards compliant" too.  And when those sites are fixed to work with IE7, then they'll likely work with Firefox too.  So a Mac should now be as good as a Windows machine, for web browsing...<<

I guess a lot of the problems are caused either by websites sticking rigidly to the W3C guidelines and style guides, which most browsers don't, or by diverging too far from them.

>>Mac OS X *is* better than Windows XP for security - you need only look at the massive changes that Microsoft have made in Windows Vista, to see how poor XP was.<<

I'm sure you're right about Mac OS X being more secure, but I'm also sure that if Mac OS X (or Linux for that matter) had a significantly larger market share, we would hear a lot more about their security flaws...

>>Whether Vista is better/worse than OS X for security is debatable, but Vista has a hell of a lot more annoying "security requesters" (for example in the preview version of Vista I tried, renaming (or was it creating?) a folder required answering *four* security requesters!!!  They better fix that in the release version).<<

This sounds like that old joke about Windows powered cars ("Click Yes if you are sure that you would like to change gear")...

Cheers, Ian.