On an optimization kick, I found SK Tools. It was able to find a free up about 12 megs of disk space, mostly by finding and clearing the IE cache. You could save yourself the money and just clear your cache yourself I suppose.

SK Tools does some other useful stuff though. Using its “Tune Up!” feature, you can tweak PIE to store its temporary files on your storage card, which will keep it from sucking up your fixed storage memory again. You can adjust the size of the font cache and other settings to tweak memory usage for performance, memory, or stability.

Lastly, there is a backup utility (with scheduling), a benchmark utility, system information page, and a registry editor.

The only real downside I can find is that the UI crams a lot of information into a tight space, and it suffers for it.

While I don’t think I’m willing to spend $13 on this tool (but I’ll let you know if I do), as neat as it is, its a pretty good bundle. I wish there was an open source tool like this.

After about a month and a half, my T-Mobile Wing has started to run out of free storage space. Whenever I searched the built in storage for large files, nothing ever turned up, but then I stumbled upon something: Missing Sync for Windows Mobile was putting all of my .cab files into /Windows/AppMgr/Install, regardless of whether I told it to put the cab on my storage card or not.

Quite a few of those cabs never got installed for whatever reason, so they were just sitting there, unused, taking us space. I just deleted them. So if you’ve ever installed cabs to your Windows Mobile device, but the program never got installed, check the /Windows/AppMgr/Install directory, they might just be sitting around taking up space.

I’m still on the quest for a good RSS reader for my T-Mobile Wing. Ideally it would be free and open source, but open source Pocket PC software seems few and far between.

Why aren’t more Pocket PC applications designed for finger based operation? The stylus is a huge time-waster.

I tried PocketRSS, but discovered that despite the fact that I didn’t think it was running at all, it had consumed 850+ MB of my storage card’s space! I have no idea how that happened, but I wasn’t having any of that for such clunky software. It was summarily uninstalled.

Next up, I decided to try Egress, by Egress. Its not open source, or even free, but it looked attractive enough on the website.

On first startup, I got an error message that \My Documents\Channels cannot be found. The dialog is not intuitive, but I clicked “No”, and tried to select “\Storage Card\My Documents\Channels”. For some reason, the same dialog popped up twice, so I had to select the same directory a second time. Also, while in the channel storage location selection dialog, the dynamic buttons at the bottom of the screen said “Home” and “Tools” but clicking them didn’t do anything. I found this problem repeated in many places through out the program.

Once installed, I got started downloading feeds and trying to actually read them. I liked the display, the formatting, and the colors, all of which were pleasing and easy to get used to. One thing which I found irritating was that the current article was always “opened” for reading. I would prefer to select a feed, press the right arrow to see a list of articles, and then press right again to see the text of the selected article. Up and down would cycle articles, left would go back to the articles, and left again, back to the list of feeds. You can close the currently open article by tapping it, but as soon as you press up or down to select the next article, that one opens. Also confusing is that while tapping the article opens and closes it, “clicking” with the center button on your navigation controls opens the article in your web browser.

If your a stylus person, you can scroll through the list of articles with the scroll bar on the side, but I try and do as much as possible without the stylus.

Egress does offer OMPL import, Podcast downloading, and a bunch of other features which all looked useful, though I haven’t tried them, and doubt I’ll get to it.

Overall, I thick I can recommend at least trying Egress, you might find its flow suits you, especially if you use the stylus.

I tried ADBWeatherPlus for a few minutes in my T-Mobile Wing, and I couldn’t get it set up. Maybe I’m not following the directions correctly, but the screen says ‘Add a location’, but when I try and add a location, I get as far as selecting the US, then Massachusetts, then my town. When I click ‘Next’, I get a dialog box that says something about “Fatal, no message”.

So I gave up.

Sitting in Anne Taylor waiting for Sharon, I was able to ssh to my Dreamhost account and then use lynx to download (and install) the wordpress mobile edition and mobileadmin plugins.

Now I can easily post from anywhere (And with Shozu, even photos) And iPhone and Win-Mobile users can read offthehill anywhere.

That should double my readership (2x Zero is still Zero)