For $5 the Scanner Radio application available at Blackberry App World is cheap fun! It allows you to listen in to over 2,500 police and fire scanners, railroad communications, and weather radio broadcasts from around the world using your BlackBerry®.

A lot of the radio dialog uses 10 codes, a kind of shorthand you’ve likely heard used on TV shows involving police or fire. A reference to the meanings of these 10 codes can be found at the link here.

Here in Orange County, we’re able to pick up the Orange County Fire radio calls countywide. Unfortunately, police and CHP calls aren’t possible since those are encrypted channels.

The app has a free 7 day trial, so no reason not to give it a try. To get a sense of what will be available to you on your  BlackBerry®, head over to Radio Reference and listen in to those channels that interest you. Both the app and the online Radio Reference site are a great way to get a taste of radio scanning without the expense of actually buying a scanner!

Discovered Evernote and love it!

It is basically a service that allows you to collect information, links, files, etc in one place, all synchronized to the various devices that Evernote supports;

• Windows/Mac OSX
• iPod, iPad
• Blackberry
• Palm Pre
• Web Clipper

The windows client is a dream. Uses SQLite under the hood to maintain a local database of your stuff that is sync’d to Evernote’s servers.  The real beauty here is that all this stuff is available to you anywhere, from your Blackberry, your laptop, even any place you can get to a web browser. And because there’s a copy on Evernote’s servers, you have built-in painless backup you can get to easily to recover your data from a local crash.

Getting stuff into Evernote is easy;

• The web clipper let’s you send entire pages or parts of pages direct to Evernote.
• The Blackberry client let’s you send pictures and sound recordings, as well as locally produced notes direct to Evernote.
• The Windows client supports drag and drop direct into Evernote.
• You get a special Evernote email address that you can use to email anything you want added to your Evernote database.

Once the stuff is there, you can easily organize it with tags and search it with Evernote’s powerful search capabilities. I love this app,  I’m not all that organized, so having a place to just dump things and later be able to easily search and locate what I am looking for is a delight.

Highly recommended.

Now that I’ve upgraded my Blackberry Curve 8330 to OS 4.5, a nasty bug in Empower Mail Viewer PRO version 3.0.72.7 has raised its head.

• If an email has exactly one attachment, the menu function ceases to work when you are viewing the email. This has the side effect of making it impossible to do anything with the attachment.

An email to Empower’s support has yet to be answered. Googling the problem turns up other reports of Blackberry users on OS 4.5 having the same issue and same non-response from support.

Until this issue is resolved, I do not recommend spending your money on this product.