Meeting requests in Gmail

A number of people have sworn by Google Calendars as a great way to keep oneself organized. I had two problems in getting onto the bandwagon - I did not have that Android phone yet. And keeping Google calendar synchronized with my work calendar seemed such a chore.

Turns out the second one isn't such a big issue. Gmail gracefully handles meeting requests from MS Outlook and my Exchange servers.

Yes, there is no way of choosing which Calendar the meeting goes to, but hey at least it is now possible to have my work and life overlap again.

Now for that Android phone.

Android on my PC

The Android-x86 project is an interesting idea - to essentially port Android to run on the x86 platform (another name for most PCs out there). They publish the latest stable version as an ISO designed to boot and run PC hardware. Of course most of us may not have spare machine lying around. Thanks to the good folks over at UNetbootin, it is possible to take this ISO and create a bootable USB and try Android on your PC without having to install it.

A detailed step-by-step how-to is also available. It turned out to be as easy as it looked on paper - download the two files, run one, find the other and plug in a USB drive. A a couple of minutes later, I was running Android on my laptop.

While it did run, a couple of quick caveats. First of all, the stable release from the Android x86 is the Donut (v 1.6) build. This is two behind the current Android version and does seem a bit old. Secondly, support for the hardware in your PC is a hit or miss. The project, rightly so, focuses on netbooks and not all PCs. If you have the EeePC, you may be able to try the latest build from Eclair (v2.0).

In my case, while the PC booted perfectly, my 'Dell Wireless 1395 WLAN card' was not detected and I could not turn WiFi on. This severely limited my use for it, but it was nevertheless cool to run the same OS as my wife's phone on my PC. The ethernet card seemed to have been recognized, but who carries a network cable around these days?

If you have a spare USB lying around, this is definitely a fun way to see your quad-core crank through a mobile OS.

con

This has to be online.

Did you know DOS had device files? NO? You thought only *nix had that disease?
Welll, do this.

Create a folder called con on the root of your drive...

yeah yeah, in Dos or Windows boxen not *nix...

What was that again? you could not. Dont tell me you cannot create a simple folder in your drive?

You cannot even create c:\con on your computer and you are reading this?

okay, then go ahead and create c:\com1 or c:\prn

caNNot?

Mebbe something is wrong with your folders. Try creating a text file with those names. c:\con.txt or c:\prn.txt, or for that fact try creating c:\con.??? on your computer... failed?

well, here is the reason.

conning away the M$ bashers, this is sick and sad

~!nrk