As my regular reader will know I have a bit of a thing for gadgets. I am tempted to buy a new one, the Toshiba TG01. There are a few things that tickle my fancy about this phone: a 4.1inch 800x480 screen, a 1GHz CPU, a whizzy GPU and an accelerometer plus all of the other features of my current Xperia X1. However, it does not have a keyboard, it has an onscreen one.

The partner has constantly been going on and on to me about how I should be buying an iPhone as he likes his so much. One of the reasons I’ve given is that I don’t like onscreen keyboards. I also think the screen on the iPhone has a pretty ropey resolution. When I had my Nokia N800 internet tablet the first accessory I got for it was a Bluetooth keyboard. I briefly had an HTC Touch Diamond and didn’t really like it as it had an onscreen keyboard and even the larger one it came with that was designed for its high resolution display was poor.

Before all of these I had an i-mate Jasjar (a rebranding of the HTC Universal). OK, it was a brick, but I loved its high resolution display and its keyboard. Why did I stop using it? Because I knackered it installing custom ROMs. Ah well…

So has technology moved on far enough for onscreen keyboards to be useful? Some people think so, maybe I should give them another try. One of the good things about the TG01 is that it has USB host capabilities and Bluetooth so if I really want to type a lot I can attach a keyboard.

One of the things that strikes me about phones like the TG01, and I would include the iPhone in that list, is that they are mature, convergent devices. They are phones, media players, gaming devices, internet tablets, navigation tools, cameras, PIMs and work tools. Little, connected computers in your pocket, basically. Speaking as a superannuated toddler I remember when such things were science fiction.

I read this with much hilarity. What next, swearing a lot makes your knob get bigger?

I really like the music of Neil Hannon, aka The Divine Comedy. He has just released another album, called The Duckworth Lewis Method, which is themed on cricket, which is timely as the England - Australia series, known as The Ashes, is currently underway. There are some good poppy songs, and a few which are quite funny. Well worth getting. Get mp3s here or buy the cd here.

For those who don’t know what the title, The Duckworth Lewis Method, means then allow me to enlighten you. Duckworth and Lewis were two statisticians who worked out a method of determining who wins a limited-overs cricket match when it is cut short (normally by rain).

I got back from my holiday yesterday evening. I neglected to take pictures, foolishly.

It was a really great holiday. It was fantastic to taste some top wines, enjoy some great food and see my friends when I am actually properly happy. Being happy makes one hell of a difference to how one can enjoy a holiday.

Tomorrow morning I am off on holiday for 12 days. I will not have a regular (or affordable) internet connection so updates, and hopefully pictures, will come on my return.

For the past week or so I’ve been playing a lot of K-Rally from Infinite Dreams. This game is very much like Supercars I played on the Amiga (or Battlecars on the Sinclair Spectrum, come to that) only with better graphics. It is a 3D racing game viewed from above in which you can drive as dirty as you like and are armed with missiles and mines. Brilliant mayhem fun. It has several play modes and you can build up a character along with way with enhanced cars. It is hard enough to be a challenge, but not made impossibly difficult. What is fun is that you can have it loaded within 10 seconds of activating your device, race for a minute, then quit the game with your progress intact.

I’ve exchanged all the money in my account into Euros, I am burning across France for nearly two weeks starting on Saturday. So, the stage is set, no cash. Then: I get an email telling me one of my favourite websites www.teddybearfriends.co.uk is having a sale. Bum holes, no cash…

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?