Running CoPilot 8 SatNav for Android

When I bought my Android phone (a HTC Hero) I wanted to be able to use it as a SatNav as well – to save me having to carry two devices around with me. The Hero has built-in GPS and as it runs Googles Android operating system it has the Google Maps application installed as standard. So that’s it then – well no, not really. If you have used Google Maps on a PC you will know that you can generate turn-by-turn directions from point A to point B and overlay this onto a map. Surely when you add a device with GPS that can track your location in realtime that’s all you need, well as it turns out that’s not the case.

I, Android

So I was in the market for a new mobile phone and being the geek that I am, it had to be a Smart Phone of some description – but which one?

The iPhone is the obvious choice for many but while it cannot be denied that it is a fantastic piece of kit but I really don’t like the fact that I’d be tied to iTunes, and therefore Windows/Mac! Add to that the fact that I’m probably going to want to write applications for the device and that I don’t know Objective C the learning curve to develop even simple applications is going to be quite steep. Then there is the licence restrictions on the use the the SDK and conditions for deployment of applications to the App Store – from what I can make out you have to use a Mac, which I don’t have. All in all, the iPhone is not an option for me.

Syncing my iPod with Ubuntu

In a previous post I listed some of the things that I still do in Windows that I needed to be able to do in Ubuntu before I could truly consider it to be my Operating System of choice – one of these was to be able to sync my music and podcasts onto my iPod Nano. Now as every iPod owner knows, these things are simple brilliant – but Apple do not provide a version of iTunes for Linux so what are we to do?

Well as ever the Open Source community has a number of answers and there are some fine iTunes alternatives out there. We all use our iPods differently and mine it mainly used for listening to Podcasts during my daily commute (about 40 minutes each way). I do have some music on the device but this is normally pretty static – when I get bored of what is on there I normally blitz the lot and start again.

Installing AtMailOpen Webmail Client on Hosted Server

I have a reseller account with my hosting provider which allows me to manage multiple domains (this being one of them) and also provides email services for each of them. The thing is that the two webmail clients it provides, Horde and SquirrelMail are [frankly] clunky and long winded to access – the latter being an issue with the implementation rather than the applications themselves.

To login I need to provide a full email address as the username (any you can see how long this domain name is) and a password. Then I’m presented with the option of loading Horde or SquirrelMail as well as enabling Auto Load the selected application. If I select SquirrelMail then I’m taken directly to my Inbox but if I select Horde then I’m presented with a ‘language selection’ screen which also contains a Login button. While SquirrelMail is a basic email client Horde also has a Calendar, Notes, Tasks and a News Reader – but they both look a little dated.

New Year Resolutions 2010

In my first post on this blog I declared an intention to learn non-Microsoft languages and technologies so that I was equipped to handle both sides of the fence (hence the blog title). During the last year I have been looking at learning PHP using Drupal as a platform for my development. This is progressing well and I have a few mini-projects underway – more about those in future posts.