Fnord.

Via Blackberry cool, news that there’s now a Transformers game for crackberry!

I can’t help but think that the end of civilization is somehow portended here. What an amazing world we live in.

Via Rimarkable, the news that the Magmic Sudoku game is now free from point-the-bb-browser to mobile.blackberry.com

I never got addicted, but I suspect a lotta other ‘berry users will find this to be very good news indeed.

Free, real-time traffic info, in addition to the already-killer-features of Google local.

Essential. Highly recommended.

…but only if you have the multi-thousand-dollar Blackberry Enterprise Server. Sigh. Damn, I wish they’d release a 1-2 user version for amateur developers.

Go to http://www.google.com/talk/ on your PC, or http://mobile.blackberry.com/ on your Blackberry. Seems to work, though I had to log out and back in to see buddies I added from the web site.

A travel planner called GoSkip and a free promo game called RV pileup from the new Robin Williams movie.

There’s also this new push weather service but I can’t get it to accept San Diego as an address, so I dunno how useful it is.

The game is Texas Hold’em King 2 from magmic, and it’s free. Go to mobile.blackberry.com from your handheld browser, and download it over the air.

Like V1, it plays well and is a fun way to kill time on busses, standing in line, etc.

There seems to be no web-based download, so over-the-air install is the only way its free right now.

I got an unsolicited email from a vendor, to tell me about their new program Naggie. It uses the GPS on the blackberry to work with your to-do list, which sounds pretty cool.

Currently, the only BB with GPS is the 7520 from Nextel, so I can’t test it.

Website says that its free but may not remain so.

I am tremendously curious to see how people use the location data in a mobile PDA, and this is one step. For example, if you’re working construction, a to-do list that changes to match the job site would be pretty useful.

I’ve been having data loss issues trying to sync my blackberry with both the laptop and the work machine. Very problematic, and hard to resolve since the utility of the handheld drops greatly if its data is stale, missing or incorrect.

Anyway, I took a look around today, and found some interesting pieces.

Item one: SyncBerry, a $30 program for OTA (over the air, very desirable) sync. It says it talks to any SyncML server, which leads us to…

Item two: MultiSync, open source for SyncML. Not sure how to use this, but it links to…

Item three: The project formerly known as Sync4j, now called Funambol. Full syncml, explictily supports blackberry.

There’s also a half-item, a syncml plugin for multisync

Not sure how all this fits together, or if it’d work with Deban + OSX, but I sense an extended hack adventure in the near future.

UPDATED 10/24/06: Last one isn’t sync4j (text corrected), although they do use the same protocol. See comments!

I just attended a Sun talk on their open-source work and tools. One useful tidbit was a demo of Netbeans. This is a java-based IDE for java, C, etc. If you’re on windows, solaris or linux they also have a killer set of J2ME tools for writing, debugging and running J2ME apps, complete with GUI phone and blackberry emulators.

Sigh. I’ll play with it on Mac anyway, I still wanna get a mud client working for blackberry. Or maybe IRC. Fun stuff.

UPDATE: The dev tools and emulators don’t exist for OSX or Solaris. Sigh. Exceedingly weak, that.