A Sirius Walkman

With vacation here, it's time to play catch up on some of the stuff I've been wanting to play with for a while. And this was first on my list.
I've had Sirius, now SiriusXM Satellite Radio for the past couple of years and I love it. From Howard Stern in the morning to Bubba the Love Sponge in the afternoon and non-stop music in between, it really is worth the subscription costs in my opinion. I hate regular radio. But the one drawback to having SiriusXM is that your stuck with using either the radio in the car or your computer so there is not a lot of portability. Well, there is if you purchase the really expensive radio. But I've been using a third option for a while, the Pocket PC running Windows Mobile that I use to keep synced with Lotus Notes back at the office.
Like I mentioned before, one of the options that comes with your SiriusXM account is the ability to stream most of their stations over your internet connection to your computer. But I found a tool called StarPlayr for Windows Mobile on the website Geeks Toolbox, (registration required for the site to download), that allows you to use your Windows Mobile devices as a portable media player. As long as I have WiFi, I can listen to my favorites. A recent update to the application now give you album cover art as well as the lyrics to the current song. One of the prerequisites of installing the application requires installing .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Redistributable and that didn't go smoothly. Active sync wasn't working with the Pocket PC correctly so it didn't see the install for the device. I ended up installing the .NET application on my computer, browsing to C:\Program Files\Microsoft.NET\SDK\CompactFramework\v3.5\WindowsCE and copying the .cab files to an SD card and inserting that into the Pocket PC. Not knowing which file would work for what device, I basically selected the .cab's one at a time until I found one that would install.
So if you have SiriusXM and a Windows Mobile device, give it a shot!

SnTT - Nokia Intellisync 9 and Windows Mobile 6 Classic

One of the fun things I get to do in my day job is to manage our mobile device infrastructure. One of the tools that we use to allow folks to get their PIM data from Lotus onto handhelds is Nokia's Intellisync product. But one of the issues I am finding with Nokia's latest release is that it doesn't get along real well with non-cell phone devices. Seems that Nokia only wants to devlop their software to work with cell phone/Windows Moble based toys. But when you are trying to set up a cradless wi-fi enabled device like the HP iPAQ 110 Classic running Windows Mobile 6 Classic, problems arose.
In the past, we had pretty much only deployed Palm TX devices with the solution and upon installation, the servername field would be populated correctly buy the installation software and it was pretty much a done deal. It would work both at the office on the corporate network and at home using my wi-fi. Well, after setting up Intellisync on the Windows Mobile device, I was able to connect at work without a problem, but connecting to the server externally from home was not working. The connection settings in the software matched exactly what I had on the TX I keep at home. The TX worked, but the Windows Mobile would not. So in my playing around with it tonight, I tried different settings in the server name field to get it to work. As far as I knew, all I needed to put in the field was just the FQDN. Ex: servername.domain.com. So, I first tried the IP address instead. No luck. I then tried the server name with an http:// in front of it, still no luck. But then it occured to me that the connection is configured to use SSL only on the firewall. So, after putting in https://servername.domain.com, it connected right up. The Palm OS had never required it to be present in the servername field, but it appears that Windows Mobile wants it there. So the moral to the story is on Windows Mobile, double check with your network team on what ports are open to the device and configure the server name field to match.