Among a lot of other interesting changes to his computer configuration, Robinson has lately given up his long-time favourite non-Microsoft email client Eudora in favour of Google Mail (Gmail). This change came after he started getting to know Microsoft Office Outlook at work and found that this program has some really handy features Eudora just hasn’t – most notably the calendar.
Robinson needs to stress that for a long time, he was determined not to get an electronic diary, as it’s just more convenient to write things down with a pen on paper than with tiny little keys on a Palm or Psion or how they call them. Having said that, in an office, where you’re a team and want to get your computer to remind you of tasks and appointments, and where you want to easily arrange meetings, having Outlook is really, really good. And once you start putting appointments down in your Outlook, you don’t want to keep copying them in your diary. So you make Outlook calendar your standard diary.
Robinson is a convinced OpenOffice user, so to buy Outlook, let alone the whole Office package, was out of question. OpenOffice does not have a ready-made calendar feature, so Robinson seriously considered for a few seconds to try and create a database in OpenOffice Base (the equivalent to Access). But then again, he thought why try to invent the wheel over and over again? Surely there must be something free out there already. And there was – it’s called Evolution. Robinson downloaded it, tried it, and found that it probably works better for Linux users or geeks who don’t mind tweaking around for a living. For Windows XP users who are just after something ready-to-use, this is not the right choice.
So Robinson surfed around a bit more – and eventually found the optimal solution – better than any software you need to install. Software depends on your computer not playing up – in the worst case, you may lose everything saved in the calendar or in the mailboxes. But Google Calendar takes the whole downloading, installing, tweaking and relying on your computer out of the equation. You just sign up and away it goes.
In Gmail, Robinson has even been able to receive appointments from Outlook and automatically add them to the Google Calendar. And it also sends out reminder SMS to your mobile phone of appointments you’re not meant to forget. So it really does a great job.
However, one thing Robinson has not been able to do up to now is to synchronise his mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson T610, with Google Calendar. For all non-nerds: To synchronise means to automatically copy the diary entries from one device to another. Once your mobile is synchronised, you can check when you have an appointment and when you’re free on your phone without having to have a computer with online access handy.
There is an online tool called GooSync, which should, in theory, synchronise your Google Calendar with this particular mobile phone (and many others). However, this requires the phone to access the internet through GPRS. Which is stupid, given that it might as well just hook itself up to the computer via Bluetooth and use the PC’s internet connection to communicate with GooSync. On Robinson’s current mobile plan, he’s not interested in using the phone’s own internet facilities and so far, he hasn’t been able to properly get the phone to use the PC’s broadband access. Any advice on how to do this would be highly appreciated…
Gees, this is Robinson’s first nerd post. This deserves an own category.
