I recently picked up a TomTom GO 700 from a coworker, and was pleasantly surprised to find that this little guy runs on Linux.  After a quick look around the web, I found a couple hacking projects that looked interesting.

• TomTom GPL Page: all the official GPL'd sources used by the TomTom.
• OpenTom: a custom kernel, a wiki full of detailed information, and other projects for the TomTom GO.
• TomPlayer: a multimedia player for TomTom based on gmplayer.

The GO 700 can use a cell phone, connected through bluetooth, to access the internet.  My phone wasn't in the list of supported phones, but with a little tweaking it connected and works fine.  Hopefully I can turn this brilliant device into a sort of "car-top"computer, complete with internet access, audio/video multimedia, and sync-able digital assistant applications that you find on most PDA's, with access to scheduling, email, etc, while on the road.

 

I'll be blogging about the daily grind of administrating the RainSoft Letters site at the RainSoft Letters Blog .  Topics like visible content addition, SEO, tracking, backend changes, CMS updates, and all the problems that come with it.

 

Does this mean there's some snazzy new blogging icons in the pipeline?  Of course it does!  Hopefully I'll have time to post a preview in the next few days, since this project has been consuming more than it's fair share of my free time.

 

I'd also like to add, I've had a good bit of experience with various blogging platforms, and Wordpress still manages to stay top.  If you're looking for simple blogging capabilities, they have quite the quality product.  From quick posting abilities, to easy post management, to templates, to CSS customization, it's all integrated rather nicely.

Since I've been spending a lot of time on Technorati lately, while working on the RainSoft Letters site, and I got tired of looking at the default profile icon.  So I whipped up a derivate of the Complex Labs flask logo, mixed in a little OS X Leopard "X" logo stroke, baked it on the background of this site, and then got bored.  Anyways, here's the result.  A little this, a little that, something to call an avatar.

Today I'm at the RainSoft 2008 Regional Spring Convention in Reston, VA, right outside of Washington DC.

 

This year, our region's convention is being held at the Hyatt Regency in lovely Resto, VA.  It really is quite lovely.

 

I'm here because the dealer I work for, thought it would be a great idea to have me create and manage the RainSoft online community.  Thus, I'm sitting in my hotel room, waiting to unviel my latest work, that I wish I'd had more than a week to build.  It'll be the first in many new RainSoft sites and projects that I'll be working on, and hopefully I'll have more development time on the next.

 

Letters to RainSoft is live, as of about 2am last night.