No Such Weblog

This in today from EDRI's Andreas Dietl: Yesterday's Commission Contact Committee Consultation on DRM went badly for civil society participants, most of whom had been scheduled to speak in the last segment of the consultation. At the time at which the earlier slots were done, time for the meeting was up, and the last segment was dropped.

In short: No time for civil society, after the other participants had exceeded their allotted speaking time.

My old Palm Vx was about to give up, so I recently started looking for a replacement. I settled for a Tungsten E, the "entry" model of PalmOne's business series of PDAs.

I'm quite happy with the new toy so far: Migration from the Vx was smooth, it properly interoperates with Linux, and it's working well as an MP3 player.

Elements I don't like: Graffiti 2, and some aspects of the Palm version of RealPlayer. I have been using Palm's old Graffiti short-hand for years. Learning Graffiti 2 now is cumbersome, and in some cases definitely a step back. (Two strokes where one was enough with the old short-hand -- the character e comes to mind. Also, old-style Graffiti for E is often mis-read as a Q. Ugh.)

Realplayer (I use that as the software MP3 player; it's the one that was included) is rather bad at building playlists on the Palm -- but that's what you do when you don't use the Windows version of the software to transfer MP3s to the handheld. It's also lacking a "just play mp3s" version of the keyboard lock mode -- after all, the five-way navigation thing on the Palm is rather susceptible to being triggered by pocket fluff.