Category: hoplessgeekery

My Next Cellphone

UPDATE: I found out that the enV is crippled too, to the degree that it does not allow file transfer. Screw that. It has a nice camera but eh. I first grabbed myself one of those LG Chocolates, a kind of mutant phone/ipod, slick and mysterious, but one day of use left me hating it with a passion. It was constantly doing things I didn’t want to do because of slips of the touch-sensitive interface. I took it back and settled for the LG 6300, a simple, unprepossessing phone, which I didn’t have to pay anything for after my outrageous discounts. I’m very happy with it so far.

END UPDATE

I just talked to my Verizon Wireless folks and found out that assuming I’m up to commit to two more years of service with them (I am), and I’m willing to order online rather than go to a store (I am), I can get some outrageous discounts. Apparently I’ve had my phone for 2 years and am up for a New Every 2 Program discount. (This sort of thing works better for us people getting on in years, because the years seem to fly by to us.)

I probably won’t drop the $ on it till after Christmas is over and done with, but this is what I want: the enV. Muchos thanks to Jason for pointing me in its direction.

What completely wins me over is the extremely functional Bluetooth stuff. Macs these days have bluetooth, but historically Verizon’s bluetooth offerings have been deliberately crippled. This one doesn’t seem to be.

There are a lot of cool things about the phone I could totally do fine without. But for a small investment after the discount, it seems to be a phone which will stay looking very good for a couple years.

Right now I have the Motorola V710, which is awfully nice, but I’ve always had terrible problems getting it charged. You have to balance the charger cord at some crazy angle to the phone to get it to connect, and possibly because of that, possibly for other reasons, charging is a very iffy business — it thinks it’s charged but dies quickly, stuff like that. This has persisted through two phones and four charger cords, so I’m pretty sure it’s not just that I got a bad phone or charger.

Anyway, looking forward to that crazy enV. Anyone with strong opinions for or against it as a phone drop a comment eh? I haven’t placed the order yet…

Aquamacs emacsedit

HollenbackNet – MuttOnMacOs provides a good solution (via this mailing list post) for anyone who wants to use Aquamacs as an editor for a command-line-based application. To wit: don’t use emacsclient directly; create a little script like this:

#!/bin/sh

# script to force Aquamacs to open in front of terminal
open -a Aquamacs\ Emacs
/Applications/Aquamacs\ Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/emacsclient "$@"
# Now make sure the focus goes back to the terminal when we are done
open -a Terminal

in a file called, say, emacsclienthack.sh, and reference that shell script instead of emacsclient itself. Makes things quite pleasant.