Dreamsmademe Blog

This whole month I had been hectically busy with office stuff. No chance even to play with my new Treo beauty. My eyes strain staring at the screen, lack of sleep all that adds to the fun. Oh.. Boy, I am really having a time.

So no blog post until I finish with my projects. Have fun :-)

Getting videos on the Treo is much much easier than you originally thought. Watching movies on the move is fun to kill the time.

The process of getting DVD content:

1. Step one would be ripping a DVD movie to your PC as VOB files that is easy and straight forward.

I use DVD Shrink for that and it will take 15/25 mins depending on the movie length.

2. Then resize it to Treo's 320X320 screen as AVI/ MPEG4 movies.

Using PocketDivxEncoder this will take another 20-40 mins

The resize process gives you an additional bonus of a full DVD movie being shrunken roughly to 250MB in size. So you can put a full movie even on a 256MB SD Card.

Then copy the movie to your SD Card, if you have a fast card reader that will help.

Bingo! now you are all set to watch your favorite movie, documentary in a cab or a train or a plane or in your favorite weekend hideout.

I use TCPMP Player to play movies on the Treo.

This is awesome. Actually getting a VCD done from a DVD to watch in a VCD player is more of a tedious process than this.

With merely just over two days of use I realized my lovely new Treo is more than what I bargained for. Cool!

With the exuberant exotic number of software titles from basic memo to barcode reader utilities available for Palm OS, such a compact device which is combined more processor power than my early old Celeron 300MHz Windows PC. It is truly an engineering feat.

Here's that best extracted from my Treo experience!

SMS has come to age! Email too!


SMS Chat Just like Yahoo! Chat.

MP3s,WMA and OGG playback is a whisk just like in Winamp.


Or if you prefer iTunes flavour instead.

Full length movies MPEG4, AVI or 3GP and H.263(HDTV) at your disposal.

(OK I agree it’s a shame to play DVDs in this tiny screen)
Still I can hype and wow my friends regardless. The screen’s physical size (4.5X4.5cm) is roughly the size of these images appear in a Windows 96DPI monitor but has double the resolution (320X320) where as these images are 160X160. So it is one of the crispiest, if not the best, LCD screens you can find these days.

Famous Palm PIM applications and a thousand add-ons.


Palm OS applications glore!

(With of cause additional Treo only utilities for a mobile.)

See the things that I can do with that tiny little blinking LED!


Basic but always ready digital still/ video camera, audio recorder and imaging apps.


Upto 2GB(yet) tiny-winy SD storage cards.


Tiny but very usable full function keyboard.


With full keyboard 70 combinations. QuickLaunch an application or number is snap.

Hot swappable battery just like any other mobile phone. But to your knowledge until this day Palm OS needed continuous flow of power to retain its memory, even on general computers as you know it, unless you save and shutdown after what you do. Palm users know a Palm OS is just like your ordinary TV set that you never have to wait until it boots-up or save anything. You always can pick up from where you left off. Plus, if you may, now you don't even have to HOTSYNC it. Its called some geek NVFS (None-Volatile File System) which retains wahtever you do even the power goes off. I am sure Windows will be made this way someday.

GPRS/EDGE enabled quad band global GSM phone plus a PDA. No more carrying two devices and their chargers and connectors along with you. Single beautiful solid unit. More over you can switch the GSM Radio ON/OFF regardless the PDA so it can easily be used in flights or near sensitive electronics.

So I am having fun with may new Handspring PalmOne Treo 650
Wow! Just as its long name Treo looks like the ultimate digital Nirvana I've been waiting for.

Excited? Want to have one? Yeah, I was once too :-)

Last week I truly felt like I was being upgraded.

I was upgraded from one time all the wonderful Sony CLIE-SJ33 PDA, Nokia 6610 mobile phone and Apple iPod to Palm Treo 650 Smartphone.

I have been waiting this baby to come for nearly 6 months. First I tried to get it down from US but various issues popped up. So I ordered it through the local vendor (more expensive though) then he too got stuck with his consignment for nearly over a month at the customs for it's being a communication device which never heard of by Sri Lankan customs.

Finally the long wait is over. Now the cool new Treo 650 is in my proud  possession.

Once its in my hand it almost felt like a phone, not a PDA or a mini computer which is more likely. The form factor is just right. Built for solidity, the capacities of the Palm OS, combined global GSM phone, it is practically an extension to the hand. A miniature laptop on the go.

From basic phone call functions to SMS,MMS,GPRS,EDGE to the Net, MP3,AVI,MPEG4 to all the capabilities of Palm OS software titles available to date.

I am truly wowed! Kudos to Palm Inc. for making such a wonderful piece of electronics brain when Nokia dominates for the smartphone throne.

Well, This is surely gonna keep me busy for the weeks to come. Learning and playing with it will surely distract my schedules. Yes! I love gadgets and this experience is heaven given.

Read more about Treo here. I've gotta go to play with it!

PC World magazine has published an article about the best technology stuff in year 2005. I am happy the choice 1 and 2 have been my choice too. Glad that Plam’s Treo 650 made it up to 10. Gmail and Firefox is one of the best things that happened to improve my web experience.

Read the article here.

Two years back when I got my DVD home theater system no wonder I got totally addicted to the quality of the movies which I get the chance to watch in DVD format. Crystal clear sound and near perfect picture leaves VHS and VCDs were a thing in the past.

But for a while good DVD titles were scarce here in this part of the world. Then later I got introduced to one of the video parlors in Nugegoda area which had some decent collection of DVD movies for rent. He too had run out of movies or rather I watched all he's got over the last year or so.

Then lately my player was just lying idle most of the time.

So this is a very timely thing that our office guys have come up with a office DVD Club. We've got nearly 100 good movies at the moment. We collect some membership fees and out of per rental basis we can increase the collection over the time.

The good thing is now I can cut down my trip to the video parlor and keep the movies I borrow for a while to leisurely watch them. Bingo!

So here are the few good movies I recently watched from our collection.
 
The Flight of the Pheonix
The Notebook
Paparazzi
Biotechnical Man

I wish you all a peaceful suba Wesak season!

I don't know exactly when but probably in somewhere year 2001 I started using Opera, a minority web browser which was one of the pioneers to introduce the wonderful tabbed browsing experience to the masses.

With growing concerns of computer security, lack of standards, viruses, spam, scams (even my credit card was exposed one time), popups, exploits, crashes and the sheer slowness of Internet Explorer made me to look for alternatives. I tried everything else on earth and finally settled with Opera which was the only viable alternative I could find at that time.

Four years went by. It was a good browser. Opera's small single folder installation, fast page retrieval, popup blocking, prune to browser hijacking and tabbed browsing were the features I liked. It was light years ahead of IE which made me to use it and promote it to couple of other people too. But Opera wasn't without glitches. The default installation was daunting for a newbie. It has rendering issues with secure sites. None of the banking sites I use works with Opera. So occasionally I had to switch back and forth to IE. Anyway my computer was happier without malware so I was also happy until recently.

And then came all the wonderful gMail and blogger.com from Google Inc. which I got virtually addicted overnight. Problem again, NONE worked well with Opera so back to square one finding a better browser for my everyday use.

Surprisingly at the same time Mozilla Foundation released there infant beta version of Firebird (Now called Firefox) So I decided to give it a try. It had almost all the features of Opera and probably a better page rendering style. Honestly I liked it. Using gMail and blogger.com was a snap with Firefox. All my banking sites work fine with it. So from last November I was again switching back and forth to Firefox and Opera.

Suddenly I realised I no longer need multiple browsers. Firefox works fine with all the pages I throws at it as yet while Opera does not. It has proved me it's better than Opera in page rendering. So I was wondering why the hell I keep using the both which forces me to maintain two set of bookmarks.

May be I was sad to let go OPERA. It is like letting go someone you closely knew. Anyway now it's time, So goodbye, farewell My Opera. From now onward I am gonna stick with Firefox. See the screenshot. It can easily be skinned like Opera or originally like Safary.

Now the browser wars back on track again. IE is too combing armed with a tabbed version soon.
Whoa! It's Wonderful Wild Web all over again!

Read more here:
Modern Browser Wars
A new Internet Explorer version is coming

Strangely while I talk about SONY’s problems in the last two posts. FORTUNE magazine has come up with their own story for SONY in their 4 April 2005 issue. I haven’t seen this and just got hold of the mag copy. Seems my notion is on far with FORTUNE’s gadgets writer Peter Lewis. He has some interesting comments about PlayStationP and yet another format debate over UMD (Universal Media Disc). Should go and read it.

Here are some clippings. Courtesy of FORTUNE Magazine.

SONY's dismay continued.

Years back when I got my SONY CLIE SJ-33 it inspired me to see a future about to come which I nowadays witness. I can't believe if some tech savvy person headded the SONY R&D division why he couln't see these directions for their CLIE PDA line's future.

The CLIE gave me the first sense of a digital converge device which I want to own someday.

• It had 320X320 65K nice screen
• Palm OS as a leading OS for handhelds
• The basics to handle pictures and multimedia
• Basic but good quality mp3 and  ATRAC3 player
• Nice Palm's PIM suite for businesses on the move
• Promising gaming platform with games like Bejeweled
• And basically all the software titles written for Palm OS

This inspired me of a combined device like today's Treo 650, Apple's iPod and SONY's own PlayStation. All are equal winners in their own markets. But SONY made no effort to come up with CLIE successor while PalmOne and Apple now leads the gang. The opportunity is surely lost for SONY to developed such a cool device based on the CLIE series. So obviously with no promising future direction they had to discontinue it.

They could have made the CLIE, the Walkman, the PlayStation and integrate Treo and iPod it to be the killer device of our time. They had the design skills, Palm OS knowledge and the PlayStation, CLIE, VAIO, Walkman and all in their cards. But today CLIE which I jot down these writings is a dead product.

Instead now rivals of SONY having their party in full swing.

• Treo and the HP iPaq leads the PDA clan.
• Apple iPod, iTunes, Creative Nomad and Samsung clan leads the digital music and designer ends.
• PalmOne, Symbian, Nokia and the  Microsoft Pocket PC shines in the smartphones end.
• Canon, Kodak and Nikon shines in the digital camera trade.

All are doing well but once a mammoth SONY is nowhere to be seen in the gadgets industry unless the PlayStation. Soon Microsoft's XBox outwit it too. No one inside SONY was smart enough to figure out the future they lost for the last decade. Now nobody calls their name for well known technology or cool devices like Walkman anymore. But as a consumer I don’t lose anything. I’ve already gotta iPod and soon gonna own a Treo 650. Sad but Goodbye SONY!

If I were heading SONY I would have long gone to exile and do some peanut business instead. Shame on them.