New Phone
For the first time in my life, I now possess a so-called smartphone. It was free with my family's new phone plan and it is highly awesome. The actual phone if anyone cares (not directly relevant).
A few things are exciting. The most boring of which is it has greatly increased the efficiency of my procrastination. Now instead of jumping willy nilly between blogs, I set up my phone to look at the RSS feeds of each one, and only check to see if there is an update. Opera mini is amazing and gives me decent web surfing speed even though there is no 3g here. This whole internet in a phone thing is either dangerous or good for me. Haven't decided yet.
However the main thing that is exciting is that it runs Symbian OS. Previously, phones I have used have been utility devices. However, Symbian is open source, and as a result has a bunch of freely available programming tools. Especially relevant to me is that it has support for Python (my programming language du jour), including hooks into the GPS system. I find this most exciting, because I have long harbored dreams of writing celestial navigation programs. The freedom to tinker is a liberating feeling. Even if it's missing a few python features.....
A few things are exciting. The most boring of which is it has greatly increased the efficiency of my procrastination. Now instead of jumping willy nilly between blogs, I set up my phone to look at the RSS feeds of each one, and only check to see if there is an update. Opera mini is amazing and gives me decent web surfing speed even though there is no 3g here. This whole internet in a phone thing is either dangerous or good for me. Haven't decided yet.
However the main thing that is exciting is that it runs Symbian OS. Previously, phones I have used have been utility devices. However, Symbian is open source, and as a result has a bunch of freely available programming tools. Especially relevant to me is that it has support for Python (my programming language du jour), including hooks into the GPS system. I find this most exciting, because I have long harbored dreams of writing celestial navigation programs. The freedom to tinker is a liberating feeling. Even if it's missing a few python features.....