Jacob Christensen

I probably owe some kind of commentary on the year in Danish politics but for the moment you will have to make do with my reflections about the gadgets that were added to my earthly possessions this year.

As it is, they were not too many: Only a SonyEricsson C905 (that’s a mobile phone, in case you wonder), an iPod Touch and a SAGEM decoder/HDD recorder.

To be perfectly honest, I blame Nikolaj Sonne – and the fact that I bought the phone before the presentation of the iPhone 3GS or the Android handsets – for the phone. It’s quite okay for my uses, so I don’t really have any regrets here if the thing is viewed in isolation. Syncing it with a Mac works very well indeed. I don’t understand the pre-installed browser so I fetched Opera Mini. Not perfect, but okay. The operating system hasn’t screwed up. Yet.

The TV decoder/recorder does what I want it to. End of story. Well, mainly.

And then there is the iPod Touch. You see, as it was I bought it because I was interested in watching movies and TV shows when I was travelling and a big screen iPod seemed a practical device. It hasn’t happened yet, and I doubt if it ever will. Bad buy. In fact, a total failure. Not that there has been anything wrong with the iPod – except that my inner cheapskate didn’t listen to reason: I should have gone for the 64GB model.

That said, the iPod was a brilliant buy. You see, it lacks the phone functions but has just about everything else an iPhone will give you – and the iPod is a bit cheaper. So once you have access to a wifi network, you have full access to the internet. You know: Facebook, Twitter, browser, e-mail, the works. It even serves as a remote control for my AppleTV (Fanboi? Moi? No way…). I do wonder, though, how long the battery will last – my 2007 iPod Classic is still alive and well (which is slightly frustrating as I would like a 160GB model) but the Touch goes through more loading cycles. Other than that, it is one of the cleverest devices, I have ever seen or owned.

So: The winner and the loser of the 2009 contest is – the iPod Touch.

Bonus: The second best thing gadget-wise was installing Ubuntu Linux on the eeePC I bought last December. Ubuntu is much more potent and flexible than the stripped down system Linux eeePCs came with. And no: You do not have to be a software engineer to perform the operation.

Inspired by this post by John Quiggin and especially the following comments, I couldn’t resist revealing my true position in the OS Wars. Dropbox to the rescue:

I’m not sure if this is Mac 2 – 2 Others or UNIX 3 – 1 Windows.

No iPhone but an iPod Touch. Clever little device, but maybe I should have gone for the Big Kahuna (64 GB)?

My eeePC running Ubuntu Linux, originally uploaded by jacobchristensen.

Well, almost, but I’ve managed to install Ubuntu Linux on my eeePC – I have a problem with the webcam but for all practical purposes the thing now works like a charm. The main reason for going Ubuntu was that I wanted to update to Firefox 3 (security) and OpenOffice 3 (compatibility with Microsofts OpenXML format).

The bonus: Connecting to wireless networks is now much easier (!), and I’ve even managed to get my “3″ mobile broadband modem to work with the eeePC. Nice

Well, almost:

Here is the advice given to Henry Farrell who thought Apple gave computers away. They don’t, but he’s stuck.

And here is a list of Mac apps for academic tasks.

Bonus story: I always make a mess out of connecting my battered 2005 PowerBook, DVA to VGA adapter included, to the projector in the classroom in order to run Keynote presentations (usually, the PB just gives me a blue screen until I restart the thing). Last Tuesday this led one of my students to ask:

Isn’t that a lot of trouble for using a creative computer?

Well…

I have a CD stuck in the CD/DVD-drive of my computer. The really bad news are that the computer doesn’t recognise the optical drive. Looks like another trip to the shop – it will be the second major issue with this computer in eighteen months: The harddisk died last July after less than nine months of use.

Tell me which damned file is in use by which application! Either that, or give me a name, an address, and an appointment so I can slap the OS engineer responsible for this behavior, for a minimum of 40 minutes.

Andy Ihnatko, re: The 25th anniversary of The Mac. I can already see the line forming.

This time strictly for Mac-users: The new syncing function in VoodooPad 4 is a bit cumbersome to set up, but otherwise a really, really cool feature.

Ambitious, right? And if it hadn’t been because our secretaries wanted us to schedule meetings etc. in Microsoft %&€##! Outlook, I probably wouldn’t have tried getting this to work, but as we all know, secretaries rule the world.

The problem was – and is – that I use a couple of Macs as my main computers and with the aid of MissingSync and some tweaks in iSync, I’ve also managed to keep a Palm (!) and a mobile phone updated. Crossing the Mac-Windows line is a bit more complicated – I know, I know: I could splash out some money for the latest edition of MS Office/Mac which in some versions should (finally) offer full compatibility with Exchange (or whatever) servers – which is where Google (the company which wants to hold every possible bit of information about you) enters the field. Going all-web would be okay, if you (I) was online all the time, but then there would still be the issue of bridging two different calendar systems.

Anyway, I’ve tried out Google’s version of the Swiss army knife: Synchronisation applications for iCal/Mac and Outlook/Windows. The result? The good news is that I seem to be able to synchronise my office desktop (Outloook/Win) with Google Calendar, even if I received some odd warnings. The iCal/Google C link was a bit more tricky as a) I could get my Google Calendars onto iCal, but I couldn’t synchronise my existing iCal calendars onto Google.

And as a special message for Nick Aylott: No, I can’t see a to-do list in all of this. Which is kind of strange and which limits the usability quite a bit.

I got my iMac back from repair today. Apparently the harddisk had blown up (after eight months? Weird), so tonight’s job will be to restore the thing courtesy of TimeMachine.