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I have been using Eudora as my mail client since 1995, except for a couple of years when I used Claris Emailer. This week I made the switch to GyazMail.

In 2006 Qualcomm announced that there would be no more development of the original Eudora client. I have on and off been looking for a replacement ever since. It is not easy to find a good replacement for Eudora.

Eudora does so many small things just right, has really fast search, can handle any amount of mail with ease and have settings for everything.

The AirTel GPRS (EDGE) service on my iPhone that I wrote about earlier is working well but a little slow. Something like 60 Kbit/s down and 40 Kbit/s up at best. For Twitter and some e-mail on the iPhone it’s ok but when connecting a MacBook via tethering it’s to slow.

I checked out some of the 3G offers like Reliance NetConnect and Tata Photon+ and they are about the same price as similar services in Europe. People tell me they work great, when you have coverage. Here in Kerala, only Trivandrum and Cochin has the service at all from what I can tell and even there the coverage is not stellar.

The shop staff recommended Idea NetSetter instead. Slower that the 3G options but very good coverage. Idea GPRS (EDGE) has higher capacity than AirTel I was told, and that is indeed the case.

Airtel in India has a nice offer with unlimited GPRS (actually EDGE in cities) for 474 Rs. (€7) per month for pre paid accounts. Perfekt when you like me are traveling for some time in the country and want to have a mobil Internet connection. GPRS is not the most speedy connection when you used to 3G but it’s surprisingly ok I find.

You can of course also get 3G connections in India, but only in the bigger cities and they cost more.

Whenever possible I use iChat or Skype to call people and I urge people to call me the same way.

There are a number of reasons for this but the number one reason is voice sounds quality. My fixed line phone sounds bad, my mobil phone sounds horribel. All mobile phones sounds horribel!

I paid hundres of Euros for an iPhone and pay hundres of Euros every year to my carrier. Why does it need to sound so bad?

My mother has a hearing loss and needs hearing aids. She can’t use mobile phones at all. Fixed line phones is possible for here to use, but no more than that. With iChat on her iMac there are zero problems, it’s like sitting in front of here.

I have made my way through a substantial list of automation software over the years. Currently I’m using the following three:

• LaunchBar from Objective Developments €24.
• Keyboard Maestro from Stairways €28.
• Typinator from Ergonis €20.

I just got back from Göteborg (in south west Sweden) where I have been teaching Drupal to the developers and designers of Xelera Communication.

Xelera build and designes webb-sites, e-commerce solution and does Internet marketing. They have become interested in Drupal and wanted me to kick-start them. I had sessions on Theme building, module development, multisite installs and site building with CCK+Views.

I’m really disappointed with some of Apples decisions lately.

Why is Apples iPhone locked to a single carrier? Why is there no real third party apps for it? And what’s up with ringtones, why should I need to pay one more time for a song just to play it when someone calls me?

Bye bye CD player. I enjoyed listening to my Thule CD player a lot and I’m sure the new owner will enjoy it also. My new setup however sounds even better and I have all my music at a touch of a button. Lets call it progress.

I have had a Apple AirPort Express for some time. The interesting function is that it can stream music from iTunes to the stereo, something Apple calls AirTunes.

Connecting it to my amplifier via the analog line out works well but the sound is not Hi-Fi quality. To get that you need to use the optical digital out to a DAC.

After having enough RAM, extending your screen real estate is probably the best productivity enhancement you can do. Apple has supported dual displays on Macs since the late 1980s and nowadays even Windows can do it.

I have used dual displays with some of my older setups but that was some time back. The prices on flat panel displays are very low now so there are really no reason not to get one.

I recently bought a 19” HP LP1965 display that cost me around €250. I picked this modell because it got decent reviews and had a number of features I was looking for.

The first Internet application I ever used was Fetch, a FTP-client for the Mac. This was in the early 1990s, before the web. The IT-staff at the University showed me how to use it for downloading shareware and freeware from Info-Mac and other places.

The first version of Fetch (Wikipedia link) was released 1989. When we are talking about Internet applications that is maybe not ancient but certainly very old.