look what turned up in a weather broadcast

http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/03/weat ... en-qr-code

Thats cool but I still hate smart phones.

I downloaded the application from the Android Market a couple of days ago, the interface could use some polish, but the widget works really well.

@GrayArea Why do you hate smartphones? They've gotten a lot more stable the last 2 years and provide a nice UI (and mine has helped me a lot keeping in touch with my friends in Chile via Twitter / Facebook / mail)

she prolly hates them for the same reason i do. regardless of how good/stable they become the physical fact that they're so small (more specifically the screen/keyboard) makes them rather impossible to use. I dont use my phone that much to begin with and I dont need to
be in constant contact with people on the go, so to me a "smartphone" is more of a "smallcomputer". and aside from the obvious advantage that you can access internet anywhere, i'd rather use my normal computer for all the computing tasks.
Note: only reason i have the android is cuz i got it for free, i would have never bought a smart phone anywhere in the near future, and perhaps ever. But smartphones are certainly good enough that its better to have a free one, than none.

The screen issue is a problem when trying to read normal websites on the browser, but things have gotten better over the years (the Motorola Droid has a nice resolution, or the HTC HD2 with its huge screen)

As Balmer said during the presentation of Windows Phone 7, "a smartphone is not a computer" and it's one of the few things I agree with him, I usually don't use my phone to write documents or read full websites, but to keep updated on Twitter / Facebook / whatever, and since I have mine I've used these sites a lot more.

As Ashley said today, maybe she hates them because in case of an accident or emergency a normal phone is probably more usable than a smartphone, but in general I don't want to be carrying a MP3 player, cellphone, PDA and camera on my pocket at the same time.

It does have a lot to do with usage, because I use my ipod touch to almost exclusively browse full webpages. I rarely play music on it or use it as a PDA. I'm not going to edit documents on it, but it is nice to be able to go to any site I want and know it will work.

for me one of the bigger usages i've found for it is using it to test my servers' global reachability.
by using the phone to connect to my site via 3g or another network I can test whether my servers
are serving globally. hehe.

Couldn't you just use a proxy? When I was doing it I definitely found serving webpages to be one of the more fun linuxy tricks.

you'd have to go into details of what you mean. note, my comp is my server, so im assuming i cant test accessing from other networks cuz if i disconnect (to connect to another network) then requests that go to my comp will fail since my comp will no longer be connected to my regular network.

Setting Firefox up to use Tor shouldn't change your general network settings, though I've never tested it out. You already have one solution though, so I suppose you don't need another