Over a decade of avoiding planes.....

Beautiful sunrise.

Almost time to board.

San Francisco, here I come.

I'm headed to San Francisco to check out some interesting WebOS news coming from HP/Palm.  Stay tuned here for updates.  Here's hoping the warmer weather won't convince me to stay.

Google Priority Inbox Tip

I've been playing with priority inbox for the past few days, seeing if it fits into my email life.  I've always liked Gmail's spam filtering, but I still end up sorting the good email from the chaff - unimportant things that I still want in my inbox to refer back to later.  When I first set up Priority Inbox, true to the system's purpose, it began to categorize things that were important to me.  The one problem?  One of the ways Gmail determines what goes in the priority box is by looking at what/who you regularly respond to.  My inbox was just as flooded, with my various forum response alerts, Facebook alerts, and Google Group emails!

I decided to tackle this today, and clean up my email once and for all.  Lo and behold, it was easier than I thought.

If you haven't played around with Gmail's filters, it's well worth looking into.  My forum, groups, and alerts that regularly come in are now nicely sorted - and I was able to specify that none of them were to be flagged into my priority inbox!  Gmail makes it very easy to manage these unweildy email problems, and after a few minutes of fiddling with filters for my various categories, I have a nice, clean priority inbox that actually WORKS!

If your priority inbox doesn't seem to have your priorities in mind, try working a bit with your rules.  A few minutes spent perfecting a rule list can clean up your new, shiny priority inbox, and make sure that Gmail prioritizes the way that you do.

Cr-48 - First full battery test

I finally got around to giving my Cr-48 a decent battery test tonight.  I arrived at work tonight at 11:00pm and set up the netbook to handle my web and music streaming duties, opting not to plug it in.  My battery turned red, alerting me that I had just under 60 minutes of charge remaining at 6am.  That's 7+ hours on a single charge - and before I showed up here, it had already seen some moderate use at home.  Google has under-promised and over-delivered with this little unit.  I never feel that impending fear of running out of juice these days.

School and the Cr-48

As some of you well know, I am a student at a local university.  As most college students well know, classes are beginning to ramp up after the holiday break.  With my laptop confined to a docking station at home, with a dead battery and no true mobile life left in it, and a replacement still three weeks away, the Cr-48 will face its biggest task yet - being my primary school laptop for an online psychology course.  Will it rise to the occasion, and perform in my web-based classroom?  Or will I spend many a sleepless day catching up on schoolwork in my home office after a long commute home.  Only time will tell.

Also, in a completely unrelated twist, I've discovered that the Palm Pixi gets QUITE HOT when running the mobile hotspot app.  Taking the "hot" portion of that app name a little bit too seriously, aren't we Palm?

Cr-48 Touchpad - Growing on me?

I keep trying to use other laptop touchpads the way I use my Cr-48's touchpad when repairing laptops here at the office.  I found myself doing the same thing with my mother's touchpad the other day.  I think this thing is growing on me, now that I have the sensitivity and other settings configured just right.

I'm not switching from my Trackpoint anytime soon - I still miss it for my day to day usage on occasion.  But, for what it's worth, the touchpad on this thing is beginning to agree with me.

Cr-48 - Companion on a wintry day

The weather has taken a dramatic turn for the worse around these parts.  Unfortunately for me, I had to get to work.  On Monday.  In the snow.  On public transit.  Needless to say, I wasn't looking forward to my day.  Local public transit has a website that updates travelers on the status of any delays or reroutes, weather or otherwise related.  Attempting to access the Septa website from my beloved Palm Pre presented me with a bit of a problem.

Without the ability to scroll through the list in the alerts frame, finding out whether any of my buses are delayed is a bit of a problem.  ChromeOS to the rescue.

Thanks to my Cr-48, I was able to find out where my buses were detoured, and what time I should be expecting them, saving me from being stranded far from home in the cold.  Sure, any old laptop could do this, but the convenience of using my ChromeOS notebook - as my keyboard collected a fine layer of snow - was a welcome help.

An update on the 3g usage - I'm down to about 10mb now, after roughly 8 days of usage.  I'll probably be buying into the $20 for 1gb pay as you go plan from Verizon, at least for the next month or two.  I'm still getting a good deal of usefulness out of the unit, even playing some really intense games on the go.

All right, so its not Call Of Duty or anything fancy like that.  Still, catching up on my favorite MUD (and earning my in-game rent) during my commute has been fun, and kept my bandwidth down.  While connected to an SSH session, I use about 2mb/hr, which isn't quite as terrible as the normal forum browsing that has occupied my days up until this point.