In Search of Updates

Why I'm running ethernet in my home

2011-06-30T11:34:00.002-04:00

Wireless:


64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=30 ttl=51 time=86.784 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=31 ttl=51 time=115.341 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=32 ttl=51 time=104.645 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=33 ttl=51 time=81.736 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=34 ttl=51 time=90.551 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=35 ttl=51 time=71.943 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=36 ttl=51 time=32.487 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=37 ttl=51 time=76.986 ms

Ethernet:


64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=146 ttl=51 time=18.077 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=147 ttl=51 time=21.553 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=148 ttl=51 time=18.745 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=149 ttl=51 time=18.092 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=150 ttl=51 time=18.556 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=151 ttl=51 time=18.921 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=152 ttl=51 time=18.135 ms
64 bytes from 128.32.136.9: icmp_seq=153 ttl=51 time=18.109 ms

(ok, there are other reasons; gigabit wirespeed instead of the 50Mbps common on wireless networks (I didn't actually measure mine). Finally, my printer has ethernet but no wireless; by running cable to it and the WAP, I can print from anywhere in the house! :) Really, though, the latency and consistency are what I appreciate.)

Letter to AC Transit's Talking Buses

2011-05-20T10:45:00.002-04:00

Hi,

I understand you're piloting a program to have the buses make more announcements along their route. I would like to offer feedback and my opinion of the system.

I have only been riding the transbay buses recently, and I can understand that the use case for a transbay commuter bus is different than a local bus. Take my comments with the appropriate context, and understand that they are specifically geared towards the transbay bus experience.

First, constructive feedback:
* the announcements are too loud. The transbay bus in the morning is a quiet and relaxing experience. One of the great benefits over riding bart is that serenity. The announcements are loud and jarring, especially in a bus filled with half-awake and silent people.
* the announcements are inappropriate for the physical bus and pattern of activity. Nobody gets off this bus except when it arrives in San Francisco. Despite the fact that nobody is getting off, the bus tells us all to use the rear doors repeatedly. It doesn't even time the announcement adjacent to when we are arriving at a stop - we'll be driving along the freeway and be told to exit through the rear doors. That just doesn't make any sense at all. To top it off, the bus doesn't even have rear doors! We all exit through the front door when we arrive in San Francisco.
* the announcements are too frequent. By the time we arrive in san francisco, every passenger has heard the same announcement multiple times. I can understand that in an environment where people are boarding and disembarking on a continual basis, frequent repetitions of the message make sense. That is not the pattern of use on the transbay buses.

Second, my opinion:
These messages are annoying and unnecessary. We live in a world where we're constantly being told "it's not safe" and "be careful, coffee is actually hot." Airports and BART stations are already inundated with mindless notifications about how cameras are not a guarantee against criminal activity, about how everybody's out to get us and we must be constantly vigilant; do we really need to hear this while we're on buses as well? Can we not restrict the drone of noise that nobody listens to anyways to places of transit instead of the vehicles themselves? Can you imagine boarding an airplane, only to be told every 10 minutes throughout your flight that your seat cushion can be used as a floatation device, and tampering with the smoke detectors is punishable by law? It would drive even the most dedicated travelers to insanity.

I applaud the sound systems in modern buses and trains that clearly announce the intersections or stations as they arrive. It is a vast improvement over the crackly PA systems into which drivers used to mumble place names. I appreciate it as a local, and I'm sure that visitors do so ten times over.

Playing an announcement asking passengers to exit through the rear doors when arriving at a stop with a crowded bus makes a lot of sense. Put systems in the bus to understand when it's full and when we are approaching a bus stop, and only play the announcements when appropriate. If the announcement only comes when it is appropriate, people may actually listen.

But I beg you, for the sake of sanity and personal responsibility, please remove repeated announcements telling me to be aware of my surroundings and to be suspicious of my fellow passengers. We don't need even more fear mongering in our current society.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you take my comments to heart. Though I'm sure a minority of passengers actually write you to give you their opinion, I can tell you that every time the announcements come on my ride in yesterday and today, I saw people wince, grimace, grumble, and express their exacerbation to their fellow passengers.

-ben

Make the topic always visible in Linkinus Simplified style

2011-04-13T12:54:00.001-04:00

Every time I upgrade Linkinus, I lose the setting to make the topic of the channel always visible. In the Simplified style, it's not yet adjustable from within Linkinus.

Edit ~/Library/Application Support/Linkinus 2/Styles/Simplified.lnk2Style/Contents/Resources/js/settings.js, set pin_topic to true, restart Linkinus.

Officially In Shape

2010-05-02T12:07:00.003-04:00

After yesterday's outing, I think I need to declare myself officially in shape. I rode my bicycle up to the Little Farm in Tilden Park, then ran out the fire road into Wildcat, with a small figure eight through the Tilden Nature Area.

Total distance: 14.2 miles
Clock time: 2:20
Moving time: 1:56 (I was distracted by some mayday dancers)
Bike ride up to the Little Farm: 2.45 miles in 18 minutes
Run: 7.5 miles in 72 minutes
Bike ride back home: 4.25 miles in 26 minutes (I took a different route, going by the merry go round)
Total elevation gain: 1762 feet

Wildlife seen:

Wild turkey
Maypole dancers
Bunny rabbit
Bird Photographer
Squirrel

Whee!

(track comes from a Garmin Oregon 450. Image comes from Google Earth. Labels come from Jing. Obsessive behavior comes from Ben)

Undiscovered Features - Nikon D300 setting b4

2010-03-13T12:23:00.003-05:00

I spent some time wandering through the menu on my Nikon D300 the other morning, and came across a feature I had missed or forgotten about when first exploring the camera. This camera and the control UI continue to impress me.

The camera, like so many others, has 4 main modes:

P - Programmed auto (fully automatic)
S - shutter priority
A - Aperature priority
M - Manual

On the Nikon D50 (and many others) there is only a thumb dial on the back of the camera. Depending on whether you're in S or A mode, it controls the shutter speed or the aperture. The D300, on the other hand, has both a thumb dial on the back of the camera and a finger dial on the front.

When in Manual (M) mode, the thumb dial controls the shutter speed and the finger dial controls the aperture. This makes sense; both controls are exposed. The little bit of genius that seems so obvious is that the assignment of shutter speed and aperture to each dial is consistent - when in A mode, the finger dial still controls the aperture (and the thumb dial does nothing) while in S mode the thumb dial controls the shutter speed (and the finger dial does nothing). This allows you to form a tight mental mapping of thumb=shutter, finger=aperture, and if you happen to be in the wrong mode, the wrong dial just won't work, providing additional feedback about the state of the camera. Genius.

I nearly always stay in A mode, which means that I control the aperture and the camera will automatically adjust the shutter speed in order to maintain a correct exposure. When that exposure isn't correct I can under or over expose the picture by holding down the exposure compensation button (right next to the 'ON' text in the picture of the front) and spinning the thumb dial. This takes coordination, often requires looking at the body (instead of continuing to look through the viewfinder), and if I forget I've changed it, will adversely affect future shots. But it works. (The other method of adjusting the exposure is to use the AE-lock button on a darker part of the frame, then adjust the composition, but I find that's less predictable.)

Enter the Custom Settings Menu item b4: "Easy Exposure Compensation".

This control has three settings:

On (Auto Reset)
On
Off (default)

When you turn b4 to On or On (Auto Reset), it enables the other control in S and A modes. When in S mode, the thumb dial still controls the shutter speed, and if you change it the camera will automatically change the aperture in order to maintain correct exposure. However, if you adjust the aperture manually (still with the finger dial), it will have the same effect as the exposure compensation button - adjusting the aperture to under or over expose the picture.

Even though you are in S or A mode, you are always able to control both the shutter speed and the aperture! If you adjust the 'right' one (shutter speed in S, aperture in A) it will keep the exposure level correct. If you adjust the other one (aperture in S, shutter in A), it will adjust the exposure under or over.

Setting b4 to On has exactly the same effect as using the exposure compensation button. Using the On (Auto Reset) has one additional benefit - when you turn off the camera the exposure adjustment resets to normal. I have my camera set to On (Auto Reset).

I am in love with how this makes the process of getting your exposure just right that much easier.

Frame the picture, choose the right aperture for the desired depth of field
Take the picture, see that part of the subject is slightly over exposed
Increase the shutter speed two notches and take the same picture (yay! perfect!)
Turn off the camera and everything resets so your next picture isn't under exposed.

Brilliant!

I love the apple store.

2009-09-04T13:45:00.002-04:00

I know the apple store is efficient and they've spent a lot of time streamlining the experience. Know what? They succeeded.

I went in there today, knowing what I wanted. I had an old laptop battery to recycle and I wanted the family pack upgrade to Snow Leopard. I started a timer when I walked through the doors of the store. Nobody was available so I wandered a bit inwards. Pretty soon, someone came up and asked if he could help me.

When all was said and done and I was walking out of the store, I stopped the timer.

00:02:45

that's hot shit.

The Poor State of Online Banking Passwords

2009-03-09T10:34:00.006-04:00

It's been time for me to change my passwords for a while. I believe in good password security, but I also know that I need to have a sane number of passwords if I will have any hope of remembering them. To that end, I have a couple of different 'category' passwords. I have:

secure financial password - used for banking sites and the like
secure non-financial password - used for sites with secure login that are important, but not financial. flickr, for example.
insecure password - used for mailing lists, http-only logins, throw-away sites
personal password - laptop unlock
work password - all things employer-related
PGP key passphrase
ssh key passphrase

That list is already longer than a coherent memory can handle, especially since all my passwords are more random than not (such as Hm.t8U%$[1]). So I keep them in a PGP-encrypted file just in case.

Anyway, the time came to change them, and I started with the laptop, work, then secure financial password. pwgen is a godsend, btw. The laptop and work email changes went fine, and I started in on the financial passwords. I was using pwgen -y 9 to create candidates (mixed case, numbers, and symbols, 9 characters long) and then fiddling with them a bit, adding or removing characters, changing one here or there. I came up with a good candidate and started changing passwords.

Then I came to Discover's website. "Sorry, that password is invalid." it says. What company in their right mind uses some password hash so broken that it can't handle punctuation in the password?! I mean, seriously! Are you having people hand-transcribe them or something? Maybe I shouldn't use confusing characters like 1 vs. l either, huh? Idiots. Anyway, I change it around, strip out the punctuation, and add a character to make up for it. Alright, carry on.

A few more go by and then comes American Express. Here are their requirements (straight from their website):

Contain 6 to 8 characters - at least one letter and one number (not case sensitive)
Contain no spaces or special characters (e.g., &, >, *, $, @)
Be different from your User ID and your last Password

WTF is up with 6-8 characters?! Really? What, are you using some archaic version of crypt that still only supports passwords of 8 characters? ... wait a minute. IT'S NOT FUCKING CASE SENSITIVE?!?! Amex, I know you're all old-school with your 'only rich people use amex' and the whole no-limit amex black cards thing but it's not cool to be old-school with website security.

Last in the set of FAILed banking sites comes Smith Barney. They also prohibit symbols, and add one more requirement. Your password must start with a letter. Why, oh God of Security, Why?!?!

Ok, fine. Now my list of passwords has increased yet again

standard financial password
financial password with no special characters that starts with a letter
short alphanumeric password for broken sites from the last century

::sigh::

Why is it that the web sites for which security should be the highest priority are the slowest to adopt (what seem to me to be) standard password / passphrase heuristics? A good password should be at least 6 characters long (recommend at least 8 and preferably 10+) and choose 3 of the following:

have lower case letters
have upper case letters
have numbers
have symbols / punctuation

Note - I said 'choose 3 of the following'. If you always require all of them, that *also* reduces the space of the password set! (of course, any restrictions reduce the password set, but choosing three at least encourages good password choice.)

p.s. Can I tell you how hard it is to find the 'change password' link on some of these websites?! OMGWTFBBQ! I should just give up. But I won't. I'm kinda stupid like that sometimes.

[1] Note - not an actual password of mine. pwgen ftw.

AT&T and "Multimedia" messages

2009-01-27T16:28:00.005-05:00

[UPDATE 2009-03-23] Apple announced on their iPhone 3.0 preview page (http://www.apple.com/iphone/preview-iphone-os/) that the iPhone 3Gs will be able to send MMS. Thanks!

I am absolutely dumbfounded at how incredibly poorly the iPhone handles picture messages.

You'd think it was common knowledge that in 2009, people with picture phones like to send picture messages. There have been ads forever telling us to snap a picture and SMS (or rather, MMS) it to our friends. Why, then, is it not only impossible to send a picture message from an iPhone, but so incredibly difficult to receive one?!

OK, I don't know why it can't, but I can accept that my iPhone can't send picture messages. It's stupid, but whatever.

I don't know how many of you have received an MMS from someone on an iPhone, but here's how it goes:

get a text message ("I sent you a message you can view within the next 7 days") with a URL, a login and a password

tap the URL to load it in Safari

forget the username (it's something like dc394he0m)

go back to the home screen, load the text app, read the username again (because remember, you can't copy or paste on an iPhone either)

tap the URL again, curse because the first half of the username you remembered is now gone

fill in half the username

go back to the text app, look at the username again

don't tap the URL but instead go back to the home screen and then into Safari

fill in the rest of the username

repeat for the password (actually easier to remember like far4back)

finally get the picture someone sent you.

Come on, iPhone, AT&T. You can do better than that.

Netflix, Tivo, Troubles and Triumph

2009-01-18T21:04:00.002-05:00

When Tivo and Netflix announced their alliance, I rejoiced. It is fantastic to browse through a list of movies, choose one, and have it magically show up on your TV. Well done.

Except...

We tried to watch Empire Records, and the sound and video were several seconds apart. Bummer. I tried it on my laptop, and it was just fine, but we wanted to watch it on the TV.

So I called netflix! They have an 800 number on their contact page with 24hour support, and the website lists how long the hold queue is! That's pretty cool. The wait was only a minute, so I called. It was actually less, and the woman who answered the phone asked me the right questions, put me on hold for a moment, and then told me that it was a known problem and the video would be re-encoded. The Tivo gets its videos streamed from a different set of servers from when you watch the movie on your laptop, so it's not uncommon for one to be broken and the other work.

So while it kinda sucks that the video we wanted to watch was not working just right, I'm quite impressed by the availability and quality of 24hour phone support.

So Boo. Yay! Boo. Yay!

Off to watch something else...

Flying the Bay Area

2009-01-18T15:58:00.002-05:00

Golden Gate and Marin Headlands, originally uploaded by maplebed.

The weekend before returning to the frozen wasteland that we call Boston (and having to shovel feet of snow), my coworker CG took me for a nice flight around the bay area in his little 4-seater Grumman. Man, what a trip. This picture says more than I ever could.

Why does RCN cable suck so very very much?

2009-01-13T21:44:00.002-05:00

Ok, lemme start with the story.

Christy and I return from the Wonderful West to find that our Tivo is unhappy and our cable is broken.

I call RCN (which, incidentally, has this fancy caller-ID routing system such that I can't call their 800 number because it routes me to the California office, which was merged with a different company, so I always call some random branch office and transfer into the main system) and talk with the least helpful customer service rep ever. Talking to her was like pulling teeth. Every little scrap of information I wanted I had to ask the question in like 3 different ways before she would give me any useful information. She suggested no resolutions to my problems, and instead forced me to ask about this thing and that thing and so on until I finally got the info I needed.

It boiled down to this: RCN switched from analog (or analog + digital?) to digital only on Jan 6th. (Did they tell us? No. Our cable just stopped working.) While our Tivo understands analog cable, it needs a cable card to understand digital, so I need to either drive to the local RCN office or schedule an appointment to have them deliver a card and install it.

OK, that's not so bad. I found their local office was in Arlington and they could send out a technician on Tuesday. After thinking about it for a while, I opted for the ($15.99 installation fee + $49.99 visitation fee) technician to come out and install the card (since driving in the icy frozen wasteland that is the East Coast is scary). I called them back and they scheduled an appointment from 11-2 on Tuesday.

Well, Tuesday rolls around and the guy shows up at 1pm (within the window! Hooray!). Whoops! Nobody told him he was installing in a Tivo. He doesn't have a multi-channel cable card, but he does have two single-channel cards, which Tivo claims will work just as well. Except that they don't. One card only sees the even channels and the other card only sees odd channels. Anyway, the cable guy winds up spending nearly 2 hours futzing with it, testing the cables, removing splitters, poking at this and that, until he finally leaves and says "I think everything works. If it doesn't, you should call Tivo first."

I guess it's working... I mean, I think Tivo is successfully recording two shows at once, without the evenness or oddness of the channel making a difference.

There's one thing though. Now it takes a full 3 seconds to change channels. You press the channel change button and it takes just under one second to switch to the next channel. That's normal; there's always a bit of a delay between pressing the button and the TV switching. But then you get a solid gray screen for a full 2 more seconds before the picture shows up. What's up with that?! I heard one coworker today say that with analog cable they send the whole feed and the client box chooses which channel to view, but with digital cable, it only sends the one channel you're watching. When you switch channels, it sends a signal up the wire and the central host send you a different channel. That makes sense to me, but really kinda sucks. It makes channel surfing a PITA.

In addition to the 3 second delay, half the channels in the lineup just give me a solid gray screen. But since I always get a gray screen when changing channels, I wait something like 5 seconds before I realize the picture isn't actually ever going to come and go on to the next channel. This part makes channel surfing a Royal PITA. It's like they don't want me to even bother watching TV anymore.

Anyway, the whole experience has been pretty frustrating and overall reinforces my dislike of cable companies and the whole state of our interactions with large media companies. Why is it that we value a market system in which you will make more money by treating your customers worse? It screams of back room deals and lobbying and regulatory systems that prohibit any disruptive small business from even having a snowball's chance in hell of actually being able to threaten any of the big media conglomerates.

Oh well.

So RCN made a change to decrease the bandwidth they use and increase their ability to transmit more (useful) data over the same cables. What's the net result?
* I wasted time on the phone with their customer support
* Their employee wasted 2 hours working on my equipment
* My service is worse than it was before they started

You could argue "Well, you have an old TV so the fact that the quality of digital actually is better is lost on you." Ok, well, if I had a better TV I would have already been using the digital signal. Since it doesn't matter, I was using the analog signal, which was giving me better service. So the change doesn't matter for some customers, and makes the experience worse for others. To me, that seems like a net negative. Oh yeah, RCN saves some money. Hey, maybe they'll lower their prices since their costs are now decreased! Yeah right, fat chance.

Dear RCN. You wasted my time and made my TV experience worse. I hope you're happy.

Jailbreak iphone 2.2? FAIL! I HAZ SUCCESS!

2008-12-16T00:39:00.006-05:00

I'm sad. I'm doubly plus ungood sad. I can't jailbreak my phone after upgrading to the 2.2 firmware. It seems apple's trying to throw a wrench into the plans of all those people that want to use their device beyond its intended and approved preconceptions.

Two ways apple is disrupting the flow:
* After upgrading to Mac OS 10.5.6, you can't enter DFU mode
* If you're using one of the new Macbook or Macbook Pros, you can't enter DFU mode

I am luck enough for my work to let me use one of these shiny MBPs (they really are awesome), but I'm sad they've broken my phone.

Oh tethered internet, how I do miss thee!

Another interesting bit - after upgrading to 2.2, not all of my applications are showing up. I don't know if it's actually true, but I use the Categories app, and I wonder if some of them haven't had the 'hidden' bit set and I'm unable to unset it. Amusingly enough, one of the missing applications is 'Settings.' Oops.

[UPDATE 2009-01-02]

I finally wound up doing a complete restore and not using the backup. After this, all my apps came back - something in the backup was preventing them from showing up (I presume the 'hidden icon' attribute that Categories had set).

However, the big news is that unibody macbooks can jailbreak iPhones! Many thanks to all those who put in hard work to make this happen - my phone is now once again jailbroken. Hooray!

New iPhone SMS alert!

2008-10-26T20:36:00.004-04:00

Last week, Pathfinder and I were both getting distracted from what we were doing when either of our phones paged. There's really only one SMS alert tone that I find acceptable, and that's "Glass". Unfortunately, I guess I'm not the only one that considers most of the others useless. The big problem I have is that I need something to ring twice, especially if I'm sleeping and need to be woken up (yay nagios). Others of them I just won't hear (Bell and Chime), they sound too much like AIM (Tri-tone), or they're just plain ugly (Horn and Electronic).

So, thanks to the wonder of jailbreaking, I made my own, a nice Japanese Bell. There are a bunch of guides out there on the net that tell you how to make an alert suond, but surprisingly I can't find the one I used anymore. Short story - open your sound file in iTunes, change it to AIFF format, export it, rename the file to sms-received#.caf (where # is 1-6) and scp it to your iPhone at /System/Library/Audio/UISounds/sms-received#.caf. It will replace whichever sound is indicated by #. (I replaced 4, the Horn.)

Now Path and I will never be confused again! (unless of course, he reads this post and is so enamored by this tone that he installs it too. That will never happen.)

Oh, while looking for the replace-your-sms instructions, I came across this site that tells you how to increase the length of the vibration that your phone does in addition to the tone when you get an SMS. (of course, since I'm not on windows, I can just scp the .plist file over and edit it directly. Saves a lot of steps...) The only thing I chose to do differently is make the settings 0.4s on, 0.1s off, with 1.5s duration so I get three short vibrates rather than one long one.

nike+ipod does not promote healthy exercise

2008-10-25T22:08:00.001-04:00

A while ago I got the nike+ ipod gizmo. I like it. I usually go by setting a time limit for my run, and I really appreciate that it tones down the music and says '10 minutes' or 'half way' and things like that. Plus, with an arm band and an iPod nano, running to music is great.

But I've got beef with it (nevermind that it doesn't run on firefox), and there is no effective place to give feedback.

You all know what they say about a healthy workout, right? 7-10 minutes warm up, 15+ minutes keeping your heart rate above 120bpm (adjusted for age), and 5-10 minutes cool down, right?

The warm up part is easy - just don't run so hard until you get going. But when you're running with the nike+ setup, there is no way to effectively include your cool down period. Ok, let's think about this.

You could tell nike your run is 60 minutes and just stop at 50 to cool down. Well, aside from time, nike+ keeps things like average speed, and if you actually want to know what your average speed was, including the cool down period in there screws it up.

You could just run your 60 minutes and then cool down after on your own. Well, ok, you certainly can, but when you "finish" your workout, it stops the music! It's not at all obvious how to get back to the same track and pick up where you left off, not to mention not really wanting to poke a bunch of buttons when you're all hot and sweaty.

Every exercise machine in the gym does it, why do Nike and Apple not include any cool down period in the nike+ setup?

We'll just swap that out.

2008-10-23T23:46:00.000-04:00

I borrowed Q's iPhone two days ago and realized that the button felt different. Mine was sorta stiff; it didn't click and you had to squeeze the iPhone in order to get the button to register. I just figured that was how it was until I tried Q's phone.

I went into the apple store and gave it to one of the folks there. "Does this feel right to you?" I asked.
"No, man, that's weird." came the reply. "Here, try mine." He pulled a phone out of his holster and handed it to me. Nice easy loose 'click' every time I hit the button. SO much nicer. "Come on back here, let's see what we can do."

He led me to the back of the store and one of the folks at the Genius bar was available. "Yeah, that's pretty broken." he confirmed. "We'll just swap that out. Do you have time to stick around for a bit? I'll get you a new phone."

30 minutes later (it took a while to register and restore the phone from the backup on my laptop) I left the store with a replacement. No mailing it here or there, no questions, no hassle. I signed one form that said I had replaced it and that was that.

I'm impressed. Thanks, Apple.

There's a flip side to this story. It was a slow night; the store was empty and employees were wandering looking for someone to help. Despite the lack of a crowd, while I was there, two other folks came up to the genius bar with issues with their iPhone. For one person, nobody could hear him talk. The other couldn't charge her phone. It seems they're replacing a lot of these phones. I wonder how many phones they swap out on a busy day?!

Bass River, High Tide

2008-10-16T21:50:00.001-04:00

Bass River, High Tide, originally uploaded by maplebed.

My first iPhone upload. Not sure how much I like the interface, but we'll see.

Location based alarms

2008-10-15T09:27:00.000-04:00

I found what may actually be a useful iPhone app - iComing. It's a location based alarm - when you arrive at a specific point (or within X distance of a specific point) it takes an action. Actions are one of nothing, poke Twitter, send an SMS, make a phone call, or ring a sound.

Uses:
* When I get within 5 miles of the train station, SMS my ride and tell them I'm here.
* When we arrive at the hotel, call my SO and tell them we arrived safely.
* When I get to my stop, wake me up

Location aware apps are the future - why is this only available on jailbroken phones? Why does apple cripple the iPhone (non-jailbroken apps can't run in the background, so location alarms only work if you do nothing else with the phone) and prevent the Glorious Future?

Inscidious Product Design

2008-10-11T00:22:00.000-04:00

You've all heard the stories. I just want to add one more to the list.

I bought the extended warranty for my Blackberry - 2 years instead of one. When does it die? 2 years and 2 months after purchase.

Seriously.

Well, at least I got an iPhone out of it.

blog format test

2008-07-08T12:57:00.001-04:00

playing with blogger