Today I trekked across London for my last Cognitive Behavioural Therapy session. I suppose I could joke and say the thing I enjoyed most about those sessions was my half of cider and nachos with chilli at the boozer next door before I went in. In a way, that is true, I didn’t really ‘enjoy’ the CBT sessions, but crivens were they useful. Together with the other therapy sessions I had I worked out methods for dealing with the unpleasantness of paranoid schizophrenia and generally come to terms with my problems. Things are a lot better these days, and they’ll stay better. Good, eh?

A few days after updating the ROM on my totally brilliant Xperia X1 they released a new version (known as R3A). Bugger. I couldn’t be bothered to install all of my applications again. Therefore I was very pleased to see that someone had extracted the main update in the ROM, the camera software, and made it available as a .cab file one can install on phones with a previous version. The new camera software allows the flash to be controlled automatically and you can geo-tag your pictures. I found after installing the .cab file, (which is here) I had to restart my phone twice before I could set the camera options successfully.

I’ve been fine tuning my Xperia so it behaves and looks just as I wish. This is why I am not really interested in getting a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone, mine purrs for me. One of the things I thought might be fun to change is the taskbar icons. Turns out this is easy to do.

The first thing you need to install on the Xperia is SDKcerts.cab. Then, so the battery meter can display in 1% increments, you install this battery driver. Finally you need to install some icon files. The set I recommend vigorously is the Misfortune Taskbar v2.0. I like the battery meter especially. I thought this icon set was so good I made a donation.

A few websites are showing the follow-up phone to my Xperia X1. The bigger display and keyboard look an improvement over my X1, but how tempted am I really? I hate to sound like a bit of a luddite but I am not sure I would instantly upgrade. I’ve got my X1 set up just perfectly, it does everything I ask of it in a manner that I find pleasing. Windows Mobile 6.1 works just fine for me whereas I feel 6.5, with its supposedly improved finger-friendly interface, might change the user interface experience to something I find less to my liking. I’ll have to have a look at one when they are out, but I think I’ll stick with mine.

I was so impressed with Opera Mobile 9.5 on my previous and current mobile phone that I’ve been tempted to download the desktop version. I was very pleased when the beta of Opera Mobile 9.7 was released for download a couple of days ago as it promised some good new features. Here are my thoughts.

The big thing that Opera are raving about is Opera Turbo; this is server side compression of webpages to speed up transmission of them to phones with low speed connections. That ‘low speed connections’ qualifier is very important, as Opera state it will not make much difference on WiFi/3G/3.5G connections. How many people really surf the web on GPRS/EDGE these days? Everyone I know has a 3G phone and WiFi hotspots are fairly easy to find. At best this feature seems somewhat trivial.

At worst, it is a bad thing. In the beta you cannot download files if Opera Turbo is enabled. This seems somewhat crap if you ask me.

The only other thing that really vexes about the beta is that there is no support for the ad blocking urlfilter.ini file I mentioned a few days ago. I hope this feature is added in soon.

There are a couple of features I really like. Firstly it is very fast, both at downloading and rendering pages. The latter in particular is quick because the browser uses hardware graphics acceleration if you have a compatible phone. Zooming and panning a webpage is super speedy.

Secondly, the rendering engine, Presto 2.2, is extremely standards compliant. It scores 100% in the Acid 3 test which means it should be displaying webpages properly with no non-standard glitches.

It also has good AJAX support and the pages it renders look so good any Skyfire user will be green with envy. I am pretty pleased with it and have set it to be the default browser on my phone. All I hope is that they get ad blocking implemented once more.

Today is my last appointment with one of my psychotherapists. Psychotherapy has been quite amazingly useful; I have learnt techniques for dealing with all of the bad stuff and I am generally feeling much happier about life.

That being said, I am somewhat pleased the sessions are over. Not only is it good to be feeling in control enough to not need them any more, but also I cannot deny I found them slightly difficult. You may find this hard to believe, but I am a quiet chap really, so talking about myself was slightly uncomfortable. I like to think I engaged with the sessions well, but during them I felt hints of being slightly ill at ease.

I have a small gift for my psychotherapist, a book which is literature at its most literary. I have warned him in the past that you are not expected to totally understand literature, so he is prepared.

The partner purchased some staggeringly expensive sun glasses yesterday. Perfect timing, as this is what my phone says the weather is going to be like for the next few days:

After a few nights of really rotten sleep I took a sleeping tablet last night. OK, I got a bit less than seven hours sleep, but this is a great improvement over recent days. Even though my new attitude to going to bed has stopped me catastrophising bad sleep it is still a bit of a drag that it is so often rubbish.

One of the nice things about taking sleeping tablets is that I find I rarely dream, or at least do not remember my dreams. My dreams are routinely horrible, especially so when the weather is hot and the bedroom has the heat characteristics of a pizza oven. When they wake me up at weird times of the night I have to go and get out of bed for half an hour to let the unpleasant feeling dissipate.

I’d be nice if my sleep was normal, but second best is that it doesn’t bother me so much when it is dreadful. I am very pleased with myself that I have been able to improve my attitude about bed. Things are so much better these days, you know?

I was in bed playing a game on my Xperia earlier and someone texted me to ask about a philosophical term. I'd never heard of it. Rather than head to the bookshelves or desktop, because I was most comfortable in bed, I decided to use my phone.

I copied the name of the term, loaded Opera and pasted it into the search box. The wikipedia entry came up which I read. It mentioned a few books on the subject, which I looked up on Amazon, again using my phone. I then replied to the text message with a brief summary of what I had read and the name and price of the best book on the subject. All of this on a phone whilst laying around in bed. Modern technology is brilliant.

So, naturally, I am writing this blog post from bed on my Xperia just because it amuses me to do so. Lots of things amuse me...

One of the things I really like about Firefox is the Adblocker plugin. Such a thing would be even more useful for a browser on a mobile phone as it would reduce the amount of time taken to download web pages on a limited connection and save some of that precious data transfer usage on your data plan. A bit of digging has resulted in me finding such a solution for Opera Mobile 9.5 on my Xperia X1. Best of all is dead easy to achieve.

First of all, download this file (urlfilter.ini). Then, using ActiveSync or Mobile Device Centre, copy the file to the My Device\Application Data\Opera9\ directory on your Xperia. And that, as they say, is that! When you start Opera next time and visit an ad-heavy page all of those unwanted adverts will not show up. Brilliant, eh?

Latest bit of software for the groovy gadget. This works fine on my Xperia X1 but I am sure it’ll be alright on other Windows Mobile phones. You install this .cab file, restart the phone then go to Settings and you can see the SRS control panel which allows you to make great improvements to sound quality on your phone. Makes a serious difference.

There are all kinds of wonderful gems out there that people have written for Windows Mobile. Over the past couple of days I’ve been playing with Webcam for Pocket PC.

This is a tiny program which runs in the background whilst you are taking pictures and it will automatically upload pictures as you take them to an FTP server of your choice. It’ll also take pictures at particular time intervals and upload them. I’ve been finding it quite amusing to have a free webcam running on my mobile phone.

You can get it here.

This morning I was giving a briefing to an advertising company on behalf of a schizophrenia charity I am a media volunteer for. It went well. Since I was in the area I thought I would drop by one of my favourite galleries: Contemporary Applied Arts.

I walked in and popped downstairs, there was no one to be seen. Then my eyes drifted to a brilliant Rupert Spira bowl (although it was not as brilliant as ours) and I dropped into ‘art appreciation mode’. I groaned with pleasure and said, “Ooohhh beautiful thing, beautiful thing.”

A muffled laugh came from the dark depths where I know their store room is followed by a voice, “Hello David. Nice to know you approve of what we have on the shelves.”

Nice to be recognised, I suppose, especially if it is for being deeply appreciative.

It is worth dropping by there, they’ve got some top Rupert Spira stuff in and a few really deeply lovely Sarah-Jane Selwood bowls.

A month or so back I was talking to one of my psychotherapists about things that could distract me as I lie in bed and so not have obsessive thoughts. I said that being a wine and food type would lend me to being distracted by smells, and he suggested I try some incense.

Now, I’ve always thought incense is a bit crap. People who use it are… how can I put this?… not quite as ultra-rational as me. I’ve associated it with people who think sloppily. However, I thought I’d buy some and give it a go.

Much to my surprise, I love it! The incense I’ve purchased does smell surprisingly good and it has a positive effect on my mood. Last week I had twenty quid’s worth of the stuff delivered and I’ve been really enjoying the new aromas I got.

The stuff I got came from a leftist-shite online merchant, holisticshop.co.uk. I had been informed that Nippon brand incense was the stuff to go for. My favourite aromas have been ‘Comfortable time’ (lavender and rosemary) and ‘Calm night’ (vetiver and chamomile). The packets of incense come with a little ceramic holder for the burning stick, so buy a box or two and you are all ready to go. You might be surprised, I was.

A few pounds/dollars is not so much money to be frittering away each week. So I’ve been buying games for my Xperia X1.

PDAmill are selling some fun games for a few dollars each. The two I’ve tried are the adventure game Arvale and the 3D space combat game Anthelion 2. OK, they both run at VGA resolution rather than the WVGA that the Xperia can manage, but that is not such a chore. They are both perfectly distracting in my quest to fart away days. Pretty good games if we are honest. $2.99 really is pin money, not even a pint’s worth, so even if you only play the games for a couple of hours before you get bored (I’ve played them one hell of a lot more than that) that is good value entertainment.

PDAmill also has games for the iPhone. The iPhone is a phone I admire, but I don’t feel the need to own one. I really love my Xperia. In my endless quest for the great gadget (the entertainment value of new gadgets will never be defined or reached) the Xperia X1 is that which tickles my unmentionables in the most satisfying manner (so far).