YTechnology

I had briefly considered naming my company Yam Technology (Yam is my last name), but quickly realized how mistakenly popular I could become during Thanksgiving. "Can you send over a 50lb bag?" "Do you mash?" "Do you have recipes?" Yam Technology could also be mistaken for a large and serious agri-genetic concern, and it disturbed me that I could be thought of as growing mutant potatoes. So I settled for the more playful Y Technology. I spend a good deal of time with computer people and our collective sense of humor leans unambiguously on the dry side. Here's hoping your turkey isn't and your bottle of red is. Cheers!

It's the name of my company -- Y Technology -- and also a good question to pose now and then. I worked briefly at a company that used a hand scanner, partly for security, but chiefly as a time card. The technology worked well enough, identifying me correctly on the first attempt almost every time. The implementation, however, was flawed: the hand scanner stood between our desks and the restroom. It was company policy to scan in and out when you arrived in the morning and left in the evening, and also for lunch. This policy was later changed to include bathroom and cigarette breaks(!). It's no secret that some people don't wash their hands after using the restroom, which made slapping your palm on the scanning surface a good way to spread all sorts of germs. It was also a good reason not to eat lunch at your desk. The solution to this problem was decidedly low-tech. I carried around a small bottle of Purell Hand Sanitizer .

What's new in version 1.4: Added support for the new Palm TX Improved error handling for unknown devices Now you can power on your device by pressing the rotate button without rotating the screen When installing a new version of Rotate, the button would become disabled even though the "Enable Button" was checked. This has been fixed for hotsync installs. Beaming or over-the-air installations still requires you to disable and re-enable the rotate button. Download it at: http://www.ytechnology.com/rotate/download.htm

Here's what's available in version 1.3: Long Press Option. Hold the rotate button down for half a second and the underlying application will be launched. This is especially convenient for T5 users who don't have an "extra" voice recorder button. Online help. Download it at: http://www.ytechnology.com/rotate/download.htm Note that Rotate doesn't work on the new Palm TX , but I'm working on it.

My previous musings on coffee did have a Palm related point; they were composed using Think Outside's Bluetooth Keyboard . Folded closed, it's a slim attractive package. Fully open, it's a full sized keyboard -- the kind you usually find on a laptop. It is, however, missing the top row of number keys and that fakes me out. My fingers have "memory muscle" and since the keys feel like a full sized keyboard, I find myself off by one row when I type. Reaching for the "Tab" key, I hit "Caps Lock". Reaching for the numeric key "1", I enter "q". It took a little retraining and I still make typos, but it is still far far better than Grafitti 2, Grafitti 1, or a thumb board for writing anything more than a paragraph. I connect the keyboard to my T3 via bluetooth. I use "secure" mode, which requires a little more fuss to setup, but in today's times of eavesdropping, I see no other alternative. An infrared keyboard would ...

I don't always have time in the morning to make my own coffee. Sometimes, I go to Starbucks , although their naming convention for cup sizes -- tall, grande, venti -- is a bit pretentious. I also discovered that they have an unadvertised "short" or "small" size. Regardless, the cup is less important than the coffee inside, which happens to be quite good. But if you're ever in New York City , you can get an equally good (or better) cup – small, medium, or large -- at Oren's . In addition, you can buy coffee beans there; for those special occasions, they sell rarities such as Jamaican Blue Mountain , Hawaiian Kona, or Aged Sumatra. For your every day morning coffee, the Oren’s Special Blend makes a fine cup. While StarBucks offers a pleasant unhurried rest stop, often with WiFi, Oren’s is really coffee to go. Tip: For drinking at your final destination, ask for a flat top. For drinking while walking, ask for a sip top.

I started drinking coffee in college. It was more of a study aid than a beverage. Dark, aromatic, slightly bitter, I took it with half and half, along with a donut, or a cookie, or a piece of chocolate. The caffeine and sugar got me through the late hours. Today, I enjoy my coffee black. I care enough to grind the beans each morning and am rewarded with its sweet aroma. During brewing, I watch the first few pale brown drops drip into the carafe. I leave, but I am never really gone as the bouquet continues to flirt with me. Shortly, upon my return, I behold a full pot of liquid – hot, rich, and dark. When it sits in my mug, I observe wisps of rising steam. Looking closer, I note faint patches of oil on the surface. I contemplate the day ahead and take a sip. Within moments, anything seems possible.

Here's what's new in version 1.2: 180 degree screen rotation Option to autohide the grafitti area after rotation A soft reset used to disable rotation. This has been fixed. The 180 degree turn isn't as goofy as it sounds. It was useful to me when I had to show info to someone who sat across the table. Download it at: http://www.ytechnology.com/rotate/download.htm More details are written up in the readme.txt file. And remember, this is shareware. If you find Rotate useful, $5 will buy you a clear conscience. :-)

Rotate 1.1 is a minor update, but it addresses the number one request: allow the T3's voice recorder button to rotate the screen. You can download it here: http://www.ytechnology.com/rotate/download.htm Enjoy!

On my T3, whether Avantgo , VersaMail , Plucker , or an eBook , I usually read in landscape mode. When writing in Graffiti, I typically do so in portrait mode. And when I view my photos, well... that depends on the way the images were taken, and I end up switching between landscape and portrait modes more often than I like. The rotation icon on the blue bar is small, so frequent switching is awkward. Also, rotation moves the position of the rotation icon, and I need to make a small, but real, mental effort to find the icon in order to rotate back. What the T3 and the T5 needed was a dedicated hardware rotation button. A good alternative would be software that mapped rotation to a hardware button, but a cursory search of the web turned up nothing. I had planned to write the utility myself, but just never got around to it. Then I learned that PalmOne's new LifeDrive had just such a button and I was green with envy. Okay, I'm overstating my state of envy. But it did push me...

Back in September 2004, I was happily using the WiFi enabled Palm T|C. Then I dropped it. While the T|C survived many falls, this was the one that cracked the screen. I've owned several Palm devices and dropped them too, although not as often as I dropped the T|C, and more importantly, none of those falls were fatal. I suspect it was the T|C's relative bulkiness that brought out the klutz in me. I was annoyed with myself, but this was a good excuse to upgrade. Back then, my choices were: Repair the T|C for $125 Wait a few weeks for the upcoming Tungsten T5 for $399 Buy the soon-to-be discontinued T3 for about $325 While repairing the T|C was the cheapest option, I felt I would eventually drop it again. I also discovered that WiFi wasn't all that important to me. I do have a wireless router for my home office, and it was cool, if not addictive, to get email and browse the web within a 200+ foot radius. But beyond that, WiFi wasn't useful to me; I'm simply ...

When PalmOne announced their upcoming and much anticipated T5 , it wasn't news. What was news was the furious reaction toward it by elite and power users. At last count, there were 500+ comments at PalmInfocenter , most of them negative. What could engender such passion? Complaints weren't solely about specifications; barbs were also directed at marketing and price. The recurring themes include: no Cobalt no Wifi no metal shell at $399 too expensive not worthy of the Tungsten T flagship moniker While the merits of these complaints are debatable, the disappointment in the Palm community is real. And the good points to the T5 don't seem to assuage their hurt: tablet design large memory store (256MB) flash memory retains data even when batteries run down accessible as a usb drive The target audience for this device appears to be data-centric people: corporate users who have lots of Word and Excel documents, and healthcare professiona...

That is the question (I posed to myself at Circuit City). I had narrowed my choices to the WiFi capable Tungsten C and the compact Tungsten T2. Many favorable reviews have been written about both devices and you can read about them in Pen Computing and at PalmInfoCenter . For those of you with a bluetooth phone, the T2 springs to mind. For those who occupy a campus or hospital setting with WiFi coverage, it is the TC that is palpable. But there are those like me, where the decision is not so obvious, and I hope my experiences help you decide. The T2 caught my eye first. Although I don't own a bluetooth enabled phone, I may come to possess one in the future. I liked that the T2 was second generation which meant fewer bugs in addition to some nice enhancements such as a brighter screen and increased memory. And the features that made the original TT popular were still a part of the T2: compact form, built-in microphone, stereo headphone jack. But I kept wondering about the slide ...

Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? So went a recent conversation as I was using my wife's Treo 180. It turned out that the other party could hear me just fine. I couldn't hear the other end because the Treo speaker had died. If I closed the lid about half-way, just so, the speaker would come back to life, but this was a very awkward way to use a near state-of-the-art cell phone pda. I say near state-of-the-art because the Treo 180 has, remarkably, retained its value, being surpassed only by HandSpring's newer models, the Treo 270 and 300. The Treo line is among the lightest, easiest to use, fit-in-your-shirt pocket phone pda on the market. HandSpring kept the 180 current with a free GPRS upgrade - a fast, persistent connection to the internet that doesn't require an ISP. My wife doesn't use this feature, partly because the service costs extra, but also because she just isn't the type to surf the web on a phone pda. Regardless, it's nice to know GPRS is...

This September, the Star Trek television series debuts with Enterprise. I happen to like all the Star Trek series because it describes optimistically what could be in our future. It's not just about advances in technology, but also in medicine, philosophy, and the human spirit. Returning to the present, it reminds me how much work needs to be done to improve our society as a whole and in computing in particular. The late Michael L. Dertouzos, director of MIT labs for Computer Science, believed access to information should be as seamless as breathing, hence MIT's futuristic computing infrastructure named Oxygen. Details can be found on MIT's Lab For Computer Science website . An excellent article also appeared in the August 1999 issue of Scientific American . Basically, Oxygen involves eight novel technologies: a handheld computer, wall and trunk computers, a novel net, built-in speech understanding, knowledge access, collaboration, automation, and customization. The bind...

There are three words in the English language that end with 'gry.' One is hungry and the other is angry. What is the third word? So went the riddle. Pulling out my Palm VII, I tapped on the Merriam-Webster Palm Query Application (pqa) and searched for "*gry." Wirelessly, the pqa delivered not three, but only two words: "angry" and "hungry." Humph. Riddles shouldn't be taken literally. My wife and I were shopping at Crate and Barrel where she spied a book on cooking. "It would make a perfect gift for a co-worker," she said. Pulling out my Palm VII, I tapped on the Amazon pqa and searched for the book by title. A few moments later, I said "Look. It's cheaper from Amazon.com." She bought it at Crate and Barrel anyway, saying something about shipping charges and needing to give the gift the next day. During an eye exam, the ophthalmologist dilated my pupils. This blurred my vision and made my eyes sensitive to light -- effec...