I am Chuck

I used to have an Audiovox PPC 6000 and one of my biggest complaints was how slow the thing was. It did just about everything, but I had to soft reset it pretty much daily under moderate use. Once I got over my most recent gadget craze, I sold it and went back to my trusty Samsung A520. About 6 months ago I picked up an HTC 4000, running Windows Mobile 6. It’s a bit lighter, more well thought out and does everything. Bluetooth, Wifi, Media player, email, 2.0 MP camera, Micro SD and the list goes on and on.

Surprise surprise, it started running slow after heavy use. You can optimize the on-board memory use or use the micro-SD card to load programs or store data, but I still couldn’t seem to get it to run really fast. Enter Mem Maid. This is easily the best utility I think I’ve ever used. Bar none. It gives you the ability to clean out and compact your RAM at the click of a button, it can be scheduled to run nightly and clean up all your temp files, fragmented files, memory, old notifications, close running programs etc.

Since I picked up Mem Maid, I can recall 1 time I had to reset the device and that’s only because my wife tried to drown it by accident! Speaking of the scheduling, I run mine at midnight and it’s sitting right beside me here restoring my memory…waiting….waiting…553.34 KB freed up from unwanted stuff. It even has built in optimization profiles based on usage. For $20, that’s a helluva bargain IMO.

Anybody who owns a PDA definitely should give this tool a look.

Now this is cool. Brando’s USB micro SD card reader is about the size of the tip of your thumb. I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. I can carry a bunch of data, my Linux distro and even a Mojopac image of my home PC on my 4 Gig micro SD card in my PDA. Well, either all that stuff or 1 Dream Theater MP3!

It’s a shame they’re out of stock (at least when I checked last). I definitely have to get one of these and then I’ll post an update on how such a small simple device that costs $11 can bring so much joy!

The biggest joy I have in seeing this format war come to an end is that my news reader, My Yahoo page etc etc can finally post news about SOMETHING ELSE.   I don’t know how many articles have flooded my inbox over the recent months but in the end Blu Ray wins out, we can all rejoice and proceed to throw eggs at George Lucas’ house until he puts Star Wars out on Blu Ray.

DailyTech – Toshiba Officially Surrenders in HD Format War

I recently updated my template for my blog (thank you Joern Kretzschmar) and started using WordPress’ bookmarklet feature to post quick news from sites I like to visit. I didn’t want these bookmarklet posts to show up on my homepage and here is a really simple way to accomplish it. If you’re not technical, don’t worry, it’s really simple. continue reading…

Thanks to Adam Walker Cleaveland for this cool WordPress plugin. I use this on the right rail of my blog and it works great. It’s very simple to install. Simply add the plugin, enabled it and copy a line of code into your template.

Adam has all the detailed instructions and the plug-in is available for download on his site.

Last week my wife went out to get some groceries and left a 10-pound bag of potatoes in my trunk.    I was wondering what that rattling around was, I usually dispose of the body right away…..er…..nevermind.

Fast-forward to this week and we take the now frozen bag out of the trunk and cook up some yummy mashed potatoes.   Unfortunately my wife put my PDA beside the frozen potatoe bag on the counter and this morning when I got up, it was swimming in a pool of brown water!  Good thing it wasn’t plugged in.

Anywho, after I removed the micro-SD card and drained the water out of all the other crevices, everything still works great albeit it does have a nice raunchy potatoe smell to it.   Oh well, it works so no harm done…so far!

First my digital camera, now my PDA.  I’m hoping she’ll destroy our 6 year old DVD/Home theatre system next!