I’ve been a long time Windows Mobile (Pocket PC) user having had various iPAQs and mobile devices over the years. I recently treated myself to a new HP iPAQ 614c Business Navigator in doing so I wanted to load some software and games on the device. I’ve built up a nice little library of the best (in my opinion) software available for Window Mobile.

There is a LOT of freeware out there for Windows Mobile, however you could spent months trying stuff out, installing, un-installing etc. So what I’ve done is collated what I consider to be the best software, utilities and games available. I’ve kept the list all freeware and opensource, enjoy…

Essential Windows Mobile Freeware

Special mention needs to go to Pocket PC Freewares, which is my main source for software.

Well not blogged for ages so time for an update.

I finished Bioshock a few weeks back, in the end despite the difficultly spike (more on that later) I thoroughly enjoyed the game. I found it to be a totally absorbing experience, the environment, the pacing, the audio, the whole design was head and shoulders above most FPSs

So that difficultly spike, well in hindsight I should have just wandered past the particular Big Daddy, got myself tooled up and tackled him when I was stronger. So in fact the real issue was not a difficult spike but rather the game never told you a few key facts. Firstly you don’t have to fight them, they wander the levels so you can fight them at anytime (or not), secondly Big Daddies totally ignore you unless you attack them. In fact the game tries to tell you the exact opposite, with the first Big Daddy encounter being mandatory and Atlas informing you you’ll have to kill them in order to survive.

Still looking back on it Bioshock was an amazing game, and I’m really looking forward to the sequel.

Finger on the pulse of gaming as ever, I’m playing Bioshock about 10 months after everyone else. Heck what can I say. it was a bargin.

So depending on who you talk to; Bioshock is either the pinnacle of next-gen FPS gaming with a intelligent and well told story and stellar visuals or a over-hyped, repetitive, badly thought out pile of dung. Quite a Marmite game this one.

Firstly, the art style and graphics are astounding. I’ve been playing for 2 days and I still spend a significant amount of time just gawping at stuff. Not only is it pretty - lots of games do pretty, but it’s a cohesive, designed and interesting kind of pretty. The art-deco styling and 1920’s future-retro feel to everything is breath of fresh air compared to the tedious brown/grey/biege grrrrritty style that seems so prevalent in gaming now. The story is different from the run of the mill too, I’m getting quite drawn into the world they’ve created.

It also has probably one of the best intros / opening sequence I can think of, it really does have an amazing start. Can you sense a “but” coming? Yeah so here it is, shortly after the opening bit it goes downhill like a shot. The problems for me started a few hours in when I encountered the first couple of Big Daddies (the heavily armoured, diving suit clad mega bastards that are on the games cover). It’s a difficulty spike; correction it’s a difficulty spike of mountain like proportions. I understand they are supposed to be hard and feared but they just take the piss. To cut a long, teeth grindingly annoying story short I had to drop the difficulty down to easy. Fighting the same enemy repeatedly for over 1 hour and not progressing is not my idea of fun.

Now on easy difficulty things are fun again (yeah remember that’s the reason I play games - fun) but the challenge has gone. Gone as in totally; it’s now so easy a blind gibbon with no thumbs could play the game. Come on guys strike some balance here!

A Big Daddy - bane of my life

I’ve been unhappy with the old Picasa Wordpress widget for some time. I didn’t write it, I merely fixed some of the bugs. One of it’s failings (in my opinion) was that cached all the photos locally on your server, which required you to mess about with directory permissions and resulted in a copy of all the pictures sitting on your server.

I’ve come up with a new version, this fetches the photos dynamically from Picasa and has a few other new features. I use this widget myself on my blog, over on the left you can see it in action (Random Pics)

Feature Summary:

• Specify a list of albums to display photos from, no messing with RSS feeds, just enter the album names
• Choose your photos from your most recently uploaded
• Choose the thumbnail size
• Chose how many pictures to display

Download - Wordpress Widget Plugin for Picasa Photos 1.0

If you are installing this plugin and you are not familiar with the process, please refer to the instructions over at Wordpress.org. Also this plugin is designed to show photos from your Picsasa web albums, not the photos you have locally on your PC.

I’m an out and out geek, I hold my hand up and admit it. What can be more geeky than printing your own t-shirt designs with retro gaming stuff?

I’ve only done 2 so far but I’m pretty chuffed with the results.

That’s Jet Set Willy & the end of level 1 boss from R-Type (in case you were wondering)

I feel like such a nerd doing it, but it beats paying 30 quid for a half arsed design with something mind-numbingly predictable like Pac-Man or Space Invaders on. Yawn.

I used the transfer kits for dark fabric, from Rymans http://www.ryman.co.uk/T-Shirt-Transfers-227.asp
And some mega cheapy plain Primark T-Shirts; 2 quid a time, insane price…
I also picked up some transfer kits for light/white t-shirts but I’ve not played with them yet.

Another gadget for the Google Desktop, this one brings your Outlook tasks onto your desktop. You can interact with your tasks, add new ones and mark finished tasks as complete.

NOTE. Google are planning on removing the mechanism used by this gadget to communicate to Outlook. This means this gadget is no longer supported or updated by me. And in a future release of Google Desktop this gadget will stop working all together. Nothing I can do about this guys.

Download - Outlook Tasks Google Desktop Gadget v3.5.1 (more…)

This is a new Google Gadget. Bit of a cheeky one, as this is a clone of my Net Meter gadget, but with a different way of presenting the information. The gadget shows a pair of dials to indicate the upload and download speeds, and has a kinds shiny Vista Aero look to it. I could have made this a part of the my original Net Meter gadget as an alternative display mode or something, but in the end decided to make it a separate gadget.

Download - Net Meter Dial Edition - v1.6.2
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