The Surgery

I just upgraded my email client from Thunderbird version 1.5.0.12 to 2.0.0.4.

At the time of writing this post, the new version had only been released for a couple of weeks. You can’t get this version by clicking “Help / Check for updates“, but you can download it directly from the Get Thunderbird website.

To the average user, there are a few subtle but very welcome improvements.

What is Thunderbird? Thunderbird is a free, open-source email client for Windows, Linux desktops and Max OS-X. The installer is only about 11MB and it’s easy to setup, migrate mail and address books from other applications like Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, and in my opinion has the best Junk Mail handling of any client-side email application.

The “Why I use Thunderbird” Diatribe. For many years I was a Microsoft Outlook user… Corporate/Workgroup mode at work, POP3 mode at home. I booked meetings, published journal entries, used the TAPI dialler in Microsoft Contacts and collaborated with the best of ‘em.

I was also employed for many years as a developer to write client-side and server-side applications for Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange, which may have clouded my judgement somewhat.

My love affair with Microsoft Outlook came to end after I saw Mozilla’s Thunderbird being used by a colleague. It’s simple, lightweight, costs nothing and does most of the things you need on a home email application. I was an overnight convert.

But there were some things I sorely missed in Outlook. We all have individual things we like, and particular ways we work with computer applications. I’m pleased to say that some of the features that I, personally, have been missing are now being included in Thunderbird.

So what’s new? This isn’t an exhaustive list of what’s new in Thunderbird 2. It’s a list of features I’ve noticed, that I’ve thought “Cool!”, “About time!” or “Hey that’s useful!”

• Privacy Protection / Remote Images. Thunderbird has always blocked remote images in HTML email, requiring you to manually click a “Load images” button if you trust the message sender. There’s a new link in version 2 at the top of the email form which says “Click here to always load remote images from… (trusted sender’s details)”. This is a great innovation and saves time when you receive regualr emails, from a newslist for example, which contain images. Clicking this link creates a new Address Book entry for the sender of the email, if one doesn’t already exist.

• File in Recent Folders. This is one of those features I lamented the loss of, moving from Outlook to Thunderbird. After reading an email, I always file it in a folder (unless I just click delete). In older versions of Thunderbird, you had to drill-down into the folder structure using the “File selected message” button, i.e. there wasn’t a “recent folders” list when you clicked this button. Now there is a “Recent Folders” option when you click “File selected messge”… a huge time-saver and good addition to the application.

• Move back one message / forward one message. Again, in Outlook the “Next item / Previous item” buttons were invaluable on the email form for quicly scanning your emails. In earlier versions of Thunderbird there were “Previous Unread / Next unread” buttons, but if you had “read” items in your Inbox these buttons were unavailable. The guys and girls at Mozilla have added “Go back / go forward” buttons to the email form, which make message navigation a bit more flexible.

I’ll post more new features as I stumble across them. In the meantime, have a look at the Thunderbird 2 Release Notes for a more extensive list of improvements.

I received a letter from Three a few weeks back. Seems they were happy to throw a new handset at me, for another two years of customer loyalty. Who was I to argue?

(Incidentally, hear my discourse about disposable technology with Graeme on Tech Talk Radio.)

After having a quick look at the handsets and plans on offer, I decided to upgrade from the $49/month plan to the $69/month plan, and get the “free” Sony Ericsson W850i.

This thread is primarily about my initial impression of the phone and some of its more interesting features. You would have already anticipated that the phone can make and receive calls, send text messages, store numbers and such things.

The First of two handsets. The staff at Three were very helpful and keen to sign me up for another two years. I unpacked my new toy as soon as I got home.

Here’s what was included in the box:

• The phone
• Manual
• PC Suite CD-ROM
• Handsfree adapter cable, which runs out to a 3.5mm in-line socket (cool)
• Handsfree ear-plug headset thingy
• Charger
• USB cable
• 1GB MS DUO memory card, already fitted in the phone — good that this is supplied by Three, to suppement the phone’s internal 16MB. The phone will support MS DUO cards up to 2GB.

Here’s what wasn’t included in the box, but would have been nice:

• A pouch, cover or protector of some sort … even a basic flimsy one would have been good
• A USB adapter so you can plug your MS DUO card straight into your PC. These are inexpensive, and I’ve already got one, but a lot of people would find one of these useful I suspect, especially if they’d never owned a Sony Ericsson.

Anyway I dropped in the SIM card, plugged in the charger and powered up the phone. It’s a WCDMA “3G” handset (not HSDPA) and operates on the GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 and UMTS 2100 MHz bands. My handset found the 3 network straight away and connected without any issues.

I copied the contents of my SIM card over to the phone memory, which worked a treat. (My last phone was a Sony Ericsson Z800i so details in the contact cards were formatted correctly.)

Everything worked as expected. Except the camera. I received a strange message when trying to start the camera, which said “another application is running”. There is an option to view running applications - I checked but there was nothing listed. After wasting considerable time I decided to do a Master Reset, which didn’t fix the problem either. After a phone call to 3 Customer Care I took the phone back and they exchanged it, no questions asked. The camera worked on the next one.

This “application is running” issue with the camera appears to be quite common, if you Google the error message. Maybe it’s caused by the carriers’ branding of the handsets? The only solution appears to be a return-to-depot replacement at this stage.

Speaking of carrier branding, the other strange thing is that there is no “power on” LED which blinks at you. That is to say, it’s there in the phone, but doesn’t do anything. So when you leave the phone in a dark room for example, you can’t find it by the blinking LED which should be working on top of the phone. You also don’t know if it’s turned on or off without picking it up and pressing buttons to make the display light up. A bit annoying.

Walkman Phone. Yes it really is a Walkman phone. Press the orange button below the screen and this accesses the Walkman controls. Opening the “My Music” folder, you can navigate tracks by Artist, Album, Track, playlist or online channels. For MP3 files, it gets all this information (as well as the thumbnail album-art image) from the ID3 tag in the file. Very cool. I like the interface.

I have noticed, however, on several podcasts which I am playing from the memory stick, that the phone gets about 20 or 30 minutes into the track before it simply stops with either the words “Failed” or “Playback Failed” in the middle of the screen. These same tracks play fine on my old JNC player and the media player on my PC. More investigation needed.  Don’t throw out your MP3 player just yet.

Supplied PC software. Yeah, whatever. Has Sony learnt nothing from dodgy social experiments like SonicStage? The phone looks like a USB storage device to your PC; just plug the phone in and use Windows Explorer or the Ubuntu File Browser to drag and drop files into the phone’s memory or storage card.

Supplied phone software. The current software version of the phone is CXC1250570 - R1ED001 - 060831.

The phone does have a very clever “Update service”, which allows you to take advantage of its internet connectivity by checking the Sony Ericsson website for software updates. Select this and the phone says “Searching for update” while it connects and checks the internal software version against whatever is current. Apparently my phone “already has the latest software”. (So much for fixing that MP3 problem with a software upgrade!)

There is also a reminder feature, which can prompt you once a month to check for software updates, or even check every time the phone is powered on.

Send to blog. This would be a tremendously useful feature, if only we knew how to configure it for something other than Blogger. There’s a context-menu item when viewing photos: click More > Send, and in addition to “Send as Picture Message”, “Send as Email”, “Send via Bluetooth” and “Send via Infrared”, there’s a “Send to blog” option. Awesome! Except it tries to connect to Blogger and set up a new Blogspot account.

After considerable Googling I have been unable to find where and how to change the settings behind this (otherwise) very useful feature. Any takers?

I have changed The Surgery’s Permalink format, and a few permissions problems on the web server that were bugging the hell out of me.

Click on the “My WordPress Installation” page for more details.

Crikey, what a truck-load of work over the last few days! Andrew has run away to join the circus, and taken Mark with him. So I will be hosting tonight’s episode of Tech Talk Radio on 3WBC.

In actual fact, Andrew and Mark have gone to Mt Gambier in South Australia, on special assignment for Tech Talk. I expect they will have a full report next week.

In the meantime, Graeme and I have been left to do the production work for the show. Andrew made it easy for us by setting up a lot of the pre-production last week. But I’ve never put a show together from the ground-up before. This has contributed to the workload… that is to say, if (when) I do all this again, a lot of the setup has been done and it shouldn’t take me nearly as long.

Graeme has been very helpful and will be working into the wee-small hours of tomorrow morning to get the podcasts done.

Then Andrew will return and normality will be restored.

Enjoy the show! Over and out.