I opened Google Maps and saw that the blue dot showing my location wasn’t as accurate as it has been in the past. Here is a good example. Check out the image at the bottom of the post. The blue dot shows where the GPS thinks I am. The purple pin is where I actually was. It is almost like the iPhone has reverted back to basic cell tower triangulation, which is what the first generation iPhones use on the EDGE network.

I have found a few references in the Apple support forums about issues in the 3.1.2 firmware causing problems in the GPS.

I have also found a few fixes that rely on disabling certain services on the iPhone, rebooting, etc. The only thing I have not tried is a full restore of the iPhone back to the factory settings. I guess that is up next.

Anyone else having this problem on their iPhone 3G or 3GS?

When I switched to Mac as my main development environment, I stuck with Firefox over Safari because of the available web developer tools that I relied on like the Web Developer Toolbar and, later, Firebug – among others. But as new versions of Firefox were released, I was noticed it getting more and more sluggish.

When social media started to trend upward, I briefly switched to Flock, a Firefox-based browser that hooks into many services like Flickr, Twitter, and more without the need for plugins. But it was always a version or two behind the latest Firefox release, so that didn’t last long.

About 2 months ago, I switched to Google Chrome as my primary browser and haven’t looked back. Sure, I will occasionally need to open up Firefox to bug check something or because specific sites do not work properly in Chrome (it is beta, after all), but 90% of my browsing is now done in Chrome.

I like the snappiness of it and the quickness of opening the app and rendering pages. I also like that if one page crashes, it doesn’t crash the whole browser.

Google Chrome recently announced support for extensions. As of right now, this is only a feature on the PC version, but you can use them on the Mac version if you are brave enough to run their dev channel release.

So, if your browser has been giving you fits lately, give Google Chrome a try. You may find yourself a new default browser.

First, login to your Google Voice account. Then go to the Settings screen. Next to the phones you have associated with Google Voice, you will see a link that says Activate Google voicemail for this phone. Click that link.

You will be asked to verify the phone number. If it is a mobile phone, you will also need to select your carrier from the drop-down list.

After you have done that, click continue and you will be given a specific number to call from the phone you want to associate to your Google Voice account.

Once you have done that, you should get a confirmation screen and/or message on your phone saying that the association process is complete. Here is what it looks like on my iPhone.

After that, go ahead and make a call to test it out. When the phone switches over to voicemail, it will ring once, play your recorded greeting, and let you record your voicemail. Within seconds, it shows up in your Google Voice inbox and transcription comes in within a few minutes.

And that pretty much does it.

A few caveats to make note of. If you are associating your iPhone with Google Voice, you will loose the Visual Voicemail features. If that is important to you, then you may not want to go through with this. On the flip side, Google Voice will send you an email and, if you so desire, an SMS whenever you have a new voicemail. That may balance out the lack of Visual Voicemail.

If you are just in love with Visual Voicemail and decide you don’t want your phone associated with Google Voice, it is easy to deactivate the service. Just visit your settings page and click the deactivation link. You will go through a process similar to activation by dialing a number into your phone.

UPDATE: If you are getting a new Google Voice account, make sure you know the difference between getting a number from Google and associating an existing mobile number with your account. The features are limited if you don’t get a Google number first.

Turn off the music. If you go into the iPhone settings app, you can control the volume of the background music and the sound effects. I have turned the background music off. That helps especially with the rockets that get dropped in front of you. You can actually hear them get fired from somewhere in the distance. This usually happens when you are on the building before  the bomb drops. This will help you plan your jump better to dodge it.

Know your speed limit. The farther you go in Canabalt without hitting an obstacle, the more speed you build up. Soon, you are completely jumping over buildings. I try to keep my speed down by hitting a box every now and then. It especially helps when those bombs try to drop in on you.

One note about slowing down too much – if you get to slow on a collapsing building or going through an office, you may not have enough momentum to make it to the next rooftop.

Any other tips you are using to get the best score possible?

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Canabalt will be one of those games. The concept is simple enough – you are running and jumping. There are robots attacking the city, buildings are falling and being hit with bombs, and you are running and jumping for your life across rooftops, over collapsing buildings, and through high rise offices.

Canabalt was originally developed as a flash game. The original flash game is still available to play for free on their website. It was ported over to the iPhone about a week later. It features low-key, pixel-style graphics with a greyscale color scheme. As you run across the city skyline, you encounter obstacles like boxes, office chairs, rockets, and office windows. There is also the occasional building that crumbles beneath your feet.

The objective of the game is to run as far as you can before you smack into the side of a building or get vaporized by running into a bomb. My high score so far is 5750m (assuming the “m” stands for meters).

If you get a high score that you think is respectable, you can share it with the world via a Twitter post. You can also adjust the music and sound effects volume if you wish. Those are found under the iPhone settings panel.

The price for the game is $2.99. While I know its only $3, I could stand to see a little more bang for the buck. It would be nice to be able to pause the game and pick it back up later. It would also be nice to see some social connectivity come into play, maybe via Cloudcell or OpenFeint, so you can see how you rank against other players. It also shows your high scores as “New Player” rather than offering a way to enter your name or initials or something more personal.

I have also had a few glitches where the game would glitch at random, ending the game immediately while not crashing the app. My friend Chris Harrison actually had the game crash and show him that he ran -8m before he hit a wall and tumbled to his death.

So, just to recap, Canabalt is an awesome game that could use a little more stability and a few more features.

Get Canabalt in the App Store.

I can still remember getting my first skateboard. I was in 3rd or 4th grade, and it was a cheap Nash skateboard with the loosest trucks I have ever seen. It was purchased at a Toys ‘R Us in Shreveport, Louisiana, on a trip to visit my aunt, uncle and cousins who lived there at the time.

Yes, I was a skateboard punk growing up. I moved on from that cheap board and saved up enough money from my paper route to drop about $100 on a green Alva Chris Cook deck, complete with Trucker trucks and Peralta Cross Bone wheels. Instead of the standard black tape on the top, I went with neon green, and my dad helped me cut it up like zebra stripes. You could see that thing from a mile away in the dark.

A few years later, the Alva board was showing its age and I bought another new deck. This time it was a Steve Steadham deck with Gullwing trucks and Hosoi Prototype wheels.

I can recall the details of these decks only because they are hanging on the wall across from my office, a reminder of a simpler time I guess. Anyway, the big draw to skateboarding for me was the artwork on the boards. I would spend countless hours copying off designs that I saw in magazines like Thrasher and Transworld. Decks that still come to mind some 20 years later are the Roskopp Santa Cruz, the Vision Gator Hypno, and the iconic designs of the Powell Peralta boards, like the McGill Skull and Snake or the Caballero dragon. And of course, the infamous Tony Hawk Iron Cross.

Tony was an icon of the late 80’s skate culture – along with Mike McGill, Steve Caballero, Lance Mountain, and Christian Hosoi among others. I remember it being a big deal that he was in Police Academy 4, even though it was really a minor role. A friend of mine had a Tony Hawk, but I never could seem to get my hands on one.

The other day, I saw on a friends twitter stream the hashtag #thth. Tony Hawk was doing some sort of worldwide scavenger hunt. He would send a package to volunteers all over the world, and they would hide them somewhere in their city and send out clues on how to find the package. I started following it just out of curiosity – and the slight chance than one of those packages would land in Birmingham. Then the tweet went out.

I knew exactly where it was – Regions Park in Hoover. But I was in downtown, and it was 5:00pm – rush hour. It would take me at least an hour to get there considering it was raining as well as the normal traffic congestion. So I brushed it off and figured someone else would get it. Then, after I got home from work, I saw a second tweet go out – Hint #2 – with a picture of the stadium. My house is a lot closer than downtown and I was about to head out to get some dinner with my son, so I thought “what the heck – lets swing by there and see if its still there”.

When I arrived and started walking towards where the package should be, a man got out of a car and asked if I was looking for something. I mentioned #THTH to him and he motioned me over to his car. Apparently, Tony Hawk had enlisted the help of hundreds of volunteers around the world. These packages were shipped to them and it was up to the volunteer to find a place to hide it and relay the clues to find it. This guy had put it back in his car because it was pooring down rain and the box was getting wet.

The box contained about $100 or more worth of Quicksilver gear – a backpack and some shirts and a hat. It also had an autographed Tony Hawk Birdhouse deck. The shirts I can’t wear. The hat is not my style. The backpack – I may use from time to time.

The deck is going on the wall of my office, a nice addition to my other decks.

Why Wait?
I am usually a latest technology kind of guy. If something new comes out, I gotta have it. But with the iPhone, it was serving its purpose just fine. Sure, Edge is a much slower network than 3G, but I rarely used EDGE. Between the hours of 6am and midnight, I would say that I was on WiFi for at least 90% of that time – either at the house in the morning and evenings or at the office during the day. The only time I was on EDGE during the week was when I was driving – a time I wouldn’t use my phone anyway.

The additional cost of the 3G data plan had a little to do with my decision not to upgrade, but not much. As everyone else started upgrading, it almost became a badge of honor to still be one of the few using the original iPhone.

Why Upgrade?
So why did I upgrade? Well, about 3 weeks ago, the top 20-30 pixels of the touchscreen on my original iPhone stopped working. This is affected the area where the top menu bar usually sits for the browser, email, and lots of other apps. Since I use my iPhone for email (probably more than for making calls), this immediately started to annoy me. I was having to turn my phone every which way to be able to do simple things like create a new email or navigate from my Gmail account to my work account. I just couldn’t take it.

One thing that helped my decision to upgrade was the $100 Apple gift card that had been in my wallet since Christmas.

So, I have upgrade and been on the new phone for about 3 weeks now. I don’t know that I would have upgraded if I didn’t have to, but it is definitely nice to be on a faster phone with a faster non-wifi connection speed. The GPS functions are nice too. They have come in handy in some cases of using Maps and also let me play Gowalla, which I will write about soon.

The video features are nice, although I haven’t really taken too many of them. It would be nice to have other upload options rather than YouTube. I know the recently launched Flickr app allows you to upload video to your Flickr account from the iPhone.

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What I did for this presentation was use my slides to show the general idea of what I was talking about, and then just talk about it. I was able sort of let the information flow, rather than worrying whether I mentioned each point that was on my slide. To prepare for the presentation, I basically wrote 5 pages of rambling about SEO and Analytics. I wrote it in the same sort of style I would use if I were just talking to someone one on one. Then, I went back through and pulled my main points out and created slides for them. I had my notes handy as I was talking, but I don’t think I even looked at them once.

I think the talk went pretty well. I got some great compliments via Twitter and appreciate everyone that came to hear me ramble on.

The slides have been posted on SlideShare, although they may not make much sense if you weren’t at the presentation.

That alone is enough of a reason to be there. But it gets even better. Esra’a Al Shafei was recently announced as the closing keynote for Saturday. Esra’a was scheduled to be a keynote speaker at Social South, but had some last minute problems with her visa. Those were cleared up the week after Social South, and a local company has paid her way to come to Birmingham to talk about her MideastYouth.org site, which is built on the WordPress platform.

In addition to Matt and Esra’a, a great lineup of speakers will be talking about ethical blogging, setting up a dynamic site in WordPress, interactive branding and more. Some of the speakers scheduled to be there include Wade Kwon, Mitch Canter, Tammy Hart, and Dougal Campbell. I will also be speaking about essential SEO and analytics tips for wordpress sites.

Registration is still open as we are approaching the 150 attendee mark. That is more than doubling the attendance from last year’s WordCamp. Make sure you are there.

That has all changed with this redesign. In addition to blogging more often, I wanted to tie in my various social networking activities like Twitter, sharing links with Delicious, music with Last.fm, and so on.

There are still a few pieces of the puzzle missing in this design. I need to add the comments back to each post and also work on some static content like an about page, archives, etc. I will also be posting notes in the coming days on what I did in this redesign and what tools I am using to implement some of the features.

So stay tuned – there is more to come.