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Receiving weather satellite images with Softrock

hpux735 — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 22:13:00 +0000

One of my first NOAA APT satellite images! (click to learn more)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) manages a few satellites in low earth orbit. There are three actively transmitting APT signals at the moment, NOAA15, 17, and 18. Each of these satellites passes overhead a few times a day. I’ve been interested in learning how to receive their signals for a while now, and I’ve finally succeeded!

A bit ago, I bought a “SoftRock” SDR (Software Defined Radio, read the excellent 3-part article by Bob Larkin at the ARRL site.) receiver kit from Tony Parks. (A note about his site, he puts a few kits up for sale a few times a month, so he’s almost always sold out.) I think SDR is really, really interesting. I don’t want to get too bogged down in the details of it, because it’s not the point of this post, but I’m going to briefly discuss it. Basically, the idea is that you want to have some minimum amount of electronics to deal with the antenna; letting your computer handle the rest. This can take a variety of forms, but the simplest is the QSD, or Quadrature Sampling Detector.

Source: Gerald Youngblood's article "A Software-Defined Radio for the Masses, Part 1." Click image for source

It sounds complex, but it’s quite like using a strobe light to look at a spinning wheel. The bright light of the strobe “samples” the world at a given interval. If it strobe rate matches the speed of the wheel, the wheel appears still. Stretching the analogy a bit further, imagine that information is written on the wheel. Using the strobe you can read it, even if it’s spinning. While that is an awful analogy, but the idea is that we can sample the radio signal at (nearly) the same frequency as the carrier of our desired signal. When we do this, the signal we want magically appears at the output. If we’re using AM (or its derivatives such as LSB or USB) we can even listen to it directly. It only gets a bit more complex when we consider the quadrature part. Quadrature just means “90 degrees out of phase.” Using another copy of the radio signal, and a sampling clock in quadrature, we can cancel out some noise and interfering signals. Sorry for the tangent, if you read this far (without falling asleep), I recommend you read the linked articles at the top of this paragraph. The math isn’t too hard, and it’s sooo powerful!

Softrock Ensemble Receiver (click image for source)

This isn’t an image of my SoftRock, it’s a slightly different version, but I don’t have an image handy. It’s a really easy kit to build, and it’s fairly inexpensive. More than that, it’s really easy to use. Once it’s all setup, you just attach it to your computer, power it, and install the antenna!

Once you’ve attached the receiver hardware to your computer, you need some software to use it. This is an image I took of a very well written SDR program on the Mac called DSP Radio. On the left side of the spectrum window, there is the live radio spectrum coming from the satellite. The green box around it represents the bandwidth of my software radio receiver. In a traditional radio, this bandwidth would be set by a filter circuit. Most communication radios only have about 15 kHz of bandwidth. This makes them unable to properly receive satellite weather images. Traditionally, you would have to build or buy a specially-built satellite receiver. With SDR, I can move a slider to scale the bandwidth way, way up! In this case, I’m using about 37 kHz of bandwidth! Notice that there’s all this empty space on the right, this is radio spectrum that I’m receiving, but there’s nothing there. Maybe you can notice the shadow of the satellite data on the right; this is an “image.” These images are the bane of all radio designers. The true test of a receiver (other than sensitivity) is how well these images are suppressed. In this case, they’re suppressed rather well, notice how bright the lines are on the left compared to the right.

Signal flow from RF to weather image

The DSP Radio program takes the signals from the Softrock through the audio input of the computer. When you have something tuned in through its interface the demodulated signal appears at the audio output. I’ve been recording these signals as well as passing them to another program called WXtoIMG. This program is not great, I’ll be honest. It’s barely maintained, and you can tell it’s an ugly cross-platform mess. To even get it to work is tricky. But, what it does, it does well. The image at the head of this post was generated using it. When I made that image, I literally had to connect the audio out of one computer to the audio in of another. I’m not sure how I’m going to get around that issue. It can accept data in the form of wav files, provided that they’re linear PCM sampled at 11,025 Hz with at least 16 bit samples. The problem is that the nice political boundaries, lat/lon lines and ground image comes from the program. It does this by computing the location of the satellite and where on the earth its photographing. It has to decode the audio in real time for this to work, which means that I can’t use an audio file. For you to play around with, if you wish, I’ve included a sample wav file. It starts before the satellite pass and ends after, so if begins and ends with static.

NOAA15-baseband.wav (large file warning: 28 MB)

The included audio can be used to create the image below. I used WXtoImg to generate it, though the open source WXAPT could be used under Linux. This image was taken when the satellite was traveling south-north, so I had to flip it vertically and horizontally. On the right side of the image is the A channel, which is visible light, and the left side is the B channel, infrared. Normally, these channels are reversed left-to-right. The stripes and color bars help the decoder line up the image and adjust brightness, contrast, and gamma. (Right-click here to download full-size image: 2080 x 1260 pixels)

(lightly) processed image from NOAA 15 audio file

My next step is to write some shell scripts on a Linux box to automate this whole process. My goal is to have a page that has the latest satellite image and an archive available at all time. But first, I have to write a post about the antenna I built to receive these signals. Stay tuned!

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How to get a job after the Singularity comes

Robert X. Cringely — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:13:43 +0000

That young man with the waxed mustache and gallic countenance is my son Cole, age seven. We’ve been studying division, going on long walks with Sadie the dog, and thinking about walking together all the way across the USA, which would require by our calculation 138 days of walking with no days off. This has made Cole very sad because he’s done a further calculation and concluded that he is unlikely to have 138 consecutive days available until he’s well into his 20’s and by that time he figures I’ll be dead.

Kids have a thousand ways of breaking your heart.

Sentiment aside, Cole might well be correct. He’s a busy kid and I’m an older father. When he is 25 I’ll be 76. And while I don’t expect to be dead at that age, Cole quite pragmatically looks at my father — Grandpa Ray, who died at 70 — as a pretty good predictor. Cole actually thinks about this stuff.

And it has made me do some thinking, too, like what advice I can give Cole and his two brothers should I be unable to guide and protect them as long as I have been planning to?

Our society, culture, and economy have turned to quagmires all at the same time. Nothing is as it was nor is anything even like it appears to be, so how does a seven year-old prepare for the future? “What will you be when you grow up?” is a much harder question than it used to be.

There are near term and longer term implications to this question. In the near term how do we creatively respond to jobs going overseas? In the longer term what happens if Ray Kurzweil is correct and the Singularity rolls along in 2029 or so and humans suddenly become little more than parasites on a digital Earth?

The easy answer to this problem has been the same since the 1960s — become Paul McCartney. But how many Beatles can the world sustain?

My friend George Morton has a daughter (I know nothing about those — wrong datatype) facing the same quagmires as my sons, so here’s a synthesis of our thinking.

Remember the old Robin Williams joke about his son’s future: “Hello Mr. President” or “Do you want fries with that?” Career planning at this point probably requires a combination of serendipitous opportunity plus being curious. This in turn requires an educated mind that allows for serendipity to play a large role in discovering opportunities and staying just outside of your comfort zone.

We start with a Catch-22: You can’t get a job because no one will ever hire you. Now what are you going to do about it? The answer is of course everyone works for themselves, there are no employees, and everyone is just a subcontractor.

There are two times this really sucks — when you don’t have a job and when you see your current job going away. Many of us are in both situations nearly all the time. I know I am.

How do you educate yourself to deal with the changes in your business knowing that whatever you do is going to be replaced by a computer sometime in the future? First concentrate on the structural parts of any enterprise that are likely to never go away, computers or no: 1) finance; 2) marketing; 3) production or service.

The key change in any industry is the delivery method. Change the method of distribution and you change the business model. iTunes destroyed record stores, digital cameras destroyed Polaroid and Kodak; the list goes on. The key change was distribution.

Look, for example, at what’s happening to Electronic Arts (EA). It was pinball versus Pac Man, then PC’s with retail distribution, then Internet distribution, now smart phones. Every time the distribution system changed so did the price point, which is now down to 99 cents. EA still doesn’t know how to build Angry Birds. iTunes changed the distribution system for users and developers so now it doesn’t look good for EA at 99 cents.

Note on my EA crack from an EA employee — “Battlefield 3, an ‘old school game’ retailing at $60 just broke records and sold 5 million copies DAY ONE. FIFA 12 did 3.2 million end of September. There is plenty of life in the old dogs yet.” I’d note, however, that they are old dogs.

Change like this is rapidly coming to every industry. Talk to book editors, as I sometimes do, and hear the terror in their voices. What if books simply go away?

Getting, keeping or making that future job starts with understanding the distribution system and your place in that process. And to survive even mid-term the key is to position yourself as the linchpin. Your knowledge has to be critical to the success or failure of the process. That would seem to call for specialization but specialists often don’t see the ball even coming. You need a broader view.

But not an MBA. Those will go away. So will MD’s, CPA’s, and even CCIE’s, replaced with new acronyms for new certificates, so be ready to get a new label every few years.

Where you live counts as much as anything else, too, so position yourself in a city that has high serendipity. Any kid living with his parents in Palo Alto can get a job today simply because he already has a place to live. No skills required.

If you want to be in finance, going to Alabama is not going to help you develop the next big financial idea, but Boston, New York, London, Chicago will. If you want to play with new business opportunities in IT, you get the picture. So for an education; are you going to a school that helps you to develop serendipitous opportunities for your lifetime?

Go to a second or fourth grade teacher or even a high school guidance counselor with these ideas and they think you are crazy, but that’s part of the problem — the educational establishment is as reactive (and sometimes as reactionary) as any other government agency. They have no better ideas than we do what to do with our kids.

Jaron Lanier once told me that you can have enough money, enough power, but you can never have enough experience, so I plan to give my kids as much experience as they can handle, keeping in mind the fact that even post-Singularity it may still matter more who you know than what you know.

Live in the coolest place, I tell Cole and his brothers. Have the coolest friends. Do the coolest things. Learn from everything you do. Be open to new opportunities. And do something your father hasn’t yet figured how to do, which is every few years take off 138 days and just walk the Earth.

Mona Simpson’s Eulogy for Her Brother

John Gruber — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 19:35:55 +0000

Heartbreaking and beautiful.

★

10 cool things you can do with Wolfram Alpha and Siri

Erica Sadun — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Siri’s dictation key surprise

Jim Dalrymple — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 21:15:19 +0000

Gary Ng:

After you’ve added the Emoji keyboard, or any other keyboard, you’ll notice Siri’s dictate key beside the spacebar changes from dark to light grey. What’s up with this change in colour?

I would never have found this.

∞ Permalink

Introducing myPlex

elan — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:29:51 +0000

So a few months ago, we were all sitting around at Plex World Headquarters, in that fourth story corner office with the long mahogany conference desk and wraparound window that was just starting to let in a magnificent sunset. The new Roku was hooked up to the flatscreen, running Angry Birds, and I was trying to get a handle on the controller. For some reason I kept launching the birds backwards, and after a particularly violent swing, I knocked over Darrin’s beer. “Uncool, dude”, he said, wiping up the Deschutes microbrew.

From the corner, Scott raised his head from his iPad, flicked an imaginary piece of lint off his shirt, and asked the room “So what do you all make of iCloud?”

“As long as it can store my Golden Eggs, I think it’s the most brilliant thing on the planet”, I replied, sending a boomerang bird shooting straight up into the air.

“Seriously, though”, Scott continued, “if Apple is doing it, it must be brilliant. Or different, or something”.

Those words stuck with me, and over the next few months we all worked long hours, behind the multiple levels of biometric security at the Plex Technology Lab. And now, we’re finally ready to reveal what we’ve been working on.

The Plex cloud services – we’ve called them myPlex – are designed to do three things to help make your lives easier:

1) An incredibly easy way for you to access your media remotely. One of the most common support questions we get involves connecting a mobile device to media stored at home. It’s a tricky process, and we’ve worked to make it ridiculously simple. Once you’ve created a Plex account (and if you have a forums account, you already have one), you simply sign in on the Plex Media Server, and on your Plex client (e.g. iOS or Android), and you’re done. Super easy, and super awesome. Even if you have multiple Plex Media Servers in multiple locations, and multiple mobile devices, myPlex keeps track of everything in order to give you a seamless experience.

2) A universal media queue. How many times have you run across a video and thought “I’d love to watch this on Plex later”? Or perhaps your aunt (the one who always sends you a birthday card with your name ever so slightly misspelled) forwarded you a YouTube video about cats that’s actually funny, and you want to watch it on your TV. Well, we’ve implemented a nifty bookmarklet that lets you save web videos (and soon other media as well) to your myPlex media queue. This queue is available on all myPlex-enabled clients, with all the features you’re already familiar with (stop on one client, resume on another), and on-the-fly transcoding when needed (say, for example, for watching that Flash video on your iPhone).

We support over 100 sites at launch (many thanks to Ian, Mike, Sander, Pierre, and others!), and the coolest part about it? The technology behind the media queue is based on our popular and powerful Plex Framework, which means that it’s easy for anyone to write one, usually in a few dozen lines of code. Oh yeah, and there is an API as well, for easy integration with third party software.

3) An easy way for you to share your personal media with friends. In this day and age, we generate huge amounts of personal media, our digital legacy of 0s and 1s. And now that you have them beautifully organized in the Plex Media Server, wouldn’t it be nice to share all your kid’s soccer videos with his grandparents? We’ve made it incredibly easy to share via the myPlex web site. With zero additional configuration, any myPlex-enabled client can browse and play the shared media.

All of these new features imply enhancements to the clients, and we realize that many of you are eager to hear about updates to the mobile and desktop clients. Stay tuned…

The Definition of “YOU”

Drops — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:37:41 +0000

Apple apparently has begun to enforce a new rule when it comes to submitting new apps to the app store. You can no longer make an app for a client and submit it under your own developer account.

This is of consequence for two kinds of apps:

apps that are truly owned by the client of a contractor
apps that are owned by you but are branded or contain content under license from a third party

Often there are contractors who published apps under their own account because that saved the client from having to go through the process of establishing a paid Developer Program account.

Label

Buy an ad here

Readability

For the first kind the situation until now has been possible that your client would not have had to have a paid developer account. Until now I’ve only had clients ask me to set up an account for them if they wanted or needed to have their name show as the seller of the app in iTunes. Basically out of vanity, from the point of view of the contractor, because having to deal with a new developer account for each client was a bit of a hassle.

The second kind is less obvious. Say you make a Coca Cola Snowglobe app but plan to publish this as yourself. You cannot – any more. Apple now would require you that Coca Cola has a paid development account with them and you have to submit it through this. Which would be fine if Coca Cola indeed is the owner of the app and you where contracted to make it. But what if you licensed the branding from CC and plan to sell the app through your account?

These new rejections (with reason “Program License Agreement”) refer you to the iOS Developer Program License Agreement, a copy of which can be viewed in your membership center, under “Your Account” and “Legal Agreements”. There it says in section 1.2 under “You”.

“You” and “Your” means and refers to the person(s) or legal entity (whether the company, organization, educational institution, or governmental agency, instrumentality, or department) using the Apple Software or otherwise exercising rights under this Agreement. For the sake of clarity, You may authorize contractors to develop Applications on Your behalf, but any such Applications must be submitted under Your developer account.

When I tweeted about the responses ranged from outrage to approval.

“This is correct in my opinion!” – Doug Diskin

“Makes sense to me. The app belongs to the client. What would previously happen if they choose a new dev for updates? new app.”- Jamar Parris

“Why were you publishing them under your account in the first place? it’s their app; they should publish it.” – Dave DeLong

“Bad luck. I wonder if it affect licensed content too, e.g many branded dictionary apps are licensed despite appearances. Not all clients want to create their own dev accounts.” – Andy Roberts

“You’ve caused quite the stir in my office.” – Zaid Choudhary

“Why only get one $99 dev account when they can get at least two at twice the profit?” – Lee Sibbald

“Ah so like if I develop an app for target, apple will balk at it. Interesting.” – Jerel Rocktaschel

“Bastardos!” – Anonymous

“Considering you don’t have to pay for uploading apps I think it’s the least they can expect from devs. It must also cut down on brand fraud. I knew someone who would prefix his apps with Facebook because it supported Facebook!” – Richard Warrender

“Ok, so effectively if company A wants an application, it has to be published by company A’s developer account?” – Chris Ross

“My issues with them dictating third party business relationships aside, I agree with this one as a practice.” – Randy

Don’t get me wrong, I am not damning Apple because there are good reasons for this new policy. One is that generally it is next to impossible to transfer an app from one developer account to another. So removing it from one and submitting it on another makes it a new app. The other reason is that a corporation might want to change contractors or move the development in-house at some stage. The reason of vanity is also still valid, who wants the developer’s individual name to show as the Seller?

If you are actually the owner of the app but only licensed the looks or branding from a third party then you might find yourself doing the rejection tango. You will have to argue with the review team (or the higher authority the App Review Board) that the app is actually yours and that you are not just a contractor for it. You will – of course – have to produce the licensing agreement to prevent the problem of potentially infringing third-party-rights… but this is a different story.

Forrester does a 180 on Macs in enterprise, finds most productive staffers are Mac users

Mel Martin — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:30:00 +0000

Visualizing Android Fragmentation

John Gruber — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:59:24 +0000

Michael DeGusta:

I went back and found every Android phone shipped in the United States up through the middle of last year. I then tracked down every update that was released for each device - be it a major OS upgrade or a minor support patch — as well as prices and release and discontinuation dates. I compared these dates and versions to the currently shipping version of Android at the time. The resulting picture isn’t pretty — well, not for Android users.

This took a lot of effort, and his resulting infographic is striking. Many Android phones ship on day one with an old version of the OS and never catch up at any point. Fantastic work. Pretty good analysis too:

In other words, Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one. Then again, all of this may be ascribing motives and intent where none exist — it’s entirely possible that the root cause of the problem is just flat-out bad management (and/or the aforementioned spectacular dumbness).

★

Steve Jobs: The World Class Asshole Who Dented The Universe [Walter Isaacson Biography Review]

Leander Kahney — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:15:01 +0000

There have been a lot of complaints on Twitter that most of the best bits of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs have already leaked. After reading sundry blog posts, news stories and tweets about Jobs’s life, is there anything left to read in the actual book?

Yes, there is. There’s plenty. Although the arc of Steve’s story is generally well known, Isaacson has added a ton of new detail to even the most well-trodden stories from Jobs’s life. Trouble is, a lot of it is about Jobs mistreating people.

Walter Isaacson’s book is an unflinching biography of a manifestly great man. But it’s not a fun read. In fact, sometimes it’s a lot like being locked in a room with a borderline sociopath. Powering through Isaacson’s bio will give you unique insight into how Steve Jobs changed the world, but it’s not necessarily a comforting one.

Steve Jobs’s life was a great story with a near mythic arc, and Isaacson captures it well. Although running to more than 600 pages, the book moves at a fast pace with a great eye for detail.

For the lay reader, it’s an excellent overview of Jobs’s life. It doesn’t gloss over any of the big events, nor does it simplify them. Isaacson is perceptive and original. Topics like the creation of the first Macintosh, already written about exhaustively, are made fresh thanks to new comments from Jobs or insiders like Bill Gates.

There are also a million new anecdotes, some of them very funny. Jobs paid the legendary designer Paul Rand $100,000 to design a logo for NeXT and a business card for himself. He declared the logo “great”. But he fought with Rand over the placement of the period in the “P.” of Steven P. Jobs on the business card. It was too far to the right for his liking.

But it’s a difficult and exhausting book. Jobs was a world-class asshole. He was a selfish, self-centered man who heaped abuse on everyone around him. After a few hours, the catalog of tantrums, tirades and put-downs wears thin. You may have huge admiration for Jobs’s accomplishments, but it can be hard to hear in detail how the sausage was made.

Yet understanding and being familiar with the ways that Jobs could be abusive is key to solving the great puzzle of Jobs’s life: how did a borderline sociopath build teams that are so creative, successful and loyal?

Most people are socialized to be nice to others, to value friendship or feelings over the interests of the corporation. Jobs turned those priorities on their head. When asked why he was so nasty, he said it made the company better. “Part of my responsibility is to be a yardstick of quality,” he told BusinessWeek. “Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

Creating an environment of excellence is one of the book’s major themes. Jobs firmly believed that the world was made up of A Players or bozos, and that A Players make a company great. He spent a lot of time weeding out the mediocre so only the A Players remain. When an organization grows, as Apple did explosively over the last 15 years, it was in danger of becoming flooded with B an C Players. Allowing a few of them in would be like opening a crack in a dam, Jobs reasoned. Soon the whole place would be flooded with crappy staff.

He was brutal about it. At one point, he decided to lay off most of the staff that worked on the Lisa, the unsuccessful precursor to the Macintosh:

“You guys failed,” he said, looking directly at the Lisa team. “You’re a B team. B players. Too many people here are B or C players, so today we are releasing some of you to have the opportunity to work at our sister companies here in the valley.”

Jobs was even cruel to his old friend Steve Wozniak, who, after he left Apple, hired the company’s outside design firm to work on a universal remote he had created. Jobs forbade it, but Isaacson defends him:

Jobs’s action was remarkably petty, but it was also partly caused by the fact that he understood, in ways that others did not, that the look and style of a product served to brand it. A device that had Wozniak’s name on it and used the design language as Apple’s products might be mistaken for something that Apple had produced. “It’s not personal,” Jobs told the newspaper, explaining that he wanted to make sure that Wozniak’s remote wouldn’t look like something made by Apple. “We don’t want to see our design language used on other products. Woz has to find his own resources. He can’t leverage off Apple’s resources; we can’t treat him specially.”

Isaacson concludes that Jobs’s victims were the necessary casualties of a campaign to change the world. He is probably right. Few people have had a career as big or as influential as Jobs, and for those privileged enough to take part in it, this was the price to pay.

Like many before him, Isaacson allows Jobs to get the last word. The book concludes with a lengthy statement, written by Jobs, assessing his own life and career. The last passage deals with his motivations.

“It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge.” Jobs said. “A lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow…. That’s what has driven me.”

Driven Steve was, but it’s not often that well-rounded human beings change our world. As Jobs himself said in Apple’s Think Different campaign, it’s the crazy ones. Reading in detail about the ways in which Jobs was crazy can be difficult, uncomfortable, even deeply sad, but once you read Isaacson’s biography, its hard to imagine how Steve could have dented our universe any other way. Steve Jobs was a great man; he just wasn’t a great human.

★ Pragmatic Books and Dropbox

Gabe — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:03:16 +0000

I’m not sure how long this has been available, but Pragmatic Books now offers automatic syncing to Dropbox. That means my Dropbox account will always have the latest version of my Pragmatic books.

I really like the Pragmatic model. They offer print on demand copies of their works as well as early access electronic versions. The books are very high quality and always well written. I only wish that the videos I’ve purchased could also be synchronized with Dropbox for offline viewing and streaming to my AppleTV.

My eBook purchases are always valuable to redownload through the Web site. However, my current copies could be out of date so I must remember to go get the latest versions.

However, once I configure Dropbox syncing, a folder is created in my Dropbox account

And after a bit of a delay, all of my eBooks are on all of my devices.

★ Omnifocus and GTD [Link]

Gabe — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:33:33 +0000

Interesting deep-dive on an OmniFocus use case by Andrew Miner

AirPlay TV

(author unknown) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000

iMessengers Be Warned

BenBrooks — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 15:11:23 +0000

Chuck Skoda:

If you send a text to multiple iMessage users, anyone who responds inline will have their message sent to everyone. I previously thought this was an issue with people having “Group Messaging” enabled in Settings→Messages, but apparently this functionality comes standard with iMessage.

He brings up a couple of good reasons why this is a less that ideal situation. I haven’t noticed this personally, but that likely has to do with the fact that I never am involved in multi-party messages like this.

The second point he brings up on privacy though is something that I have never thought of, and is in the same vein of why I hate people that send mass emails with the recipients all in the “to” field instead of BCC’d.

∞

Cities don't die (but corporations do)

Seth Godin — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:35:00 +0000

In modern times, it's almost unheard of for a city to run out of steam, to disappear or to become obsolete. It happens to companies all the time. They go out of business, fail, merge, get bought and disappear.

What's the difference?

It's about control and the fringes.

Corporations have CEOs, investors and a disdain for failure. Because they fear failure, they legislate behavior that they believe will avoid it.

Cities, on the other hand, don't regulate what their citizens do all day (they might prohibit certain activities, but generally, market economies permit their citizens to fail all they like).

This failure at the fringes, this deviant behavior, almost always leads to failure. Except when it doesn't.

Ecosystems outlast organisms.

Introducing a thermostat Steve Jobs would love: Nest

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:40:18 +0000

Can gorgeous design, learning algorithms and millions in venture capital funding make a simple home thermostat as coveted as the iPhone? If anyone can achieve such a lofty goal it’s Tony Fadell, the former chief architect at Apple, who led the development of the iPod and the first three versions of the iPhone, and who left Apple two years ago to start connected thermostat company Nest Labs.

While Palo Alto, Calif.-based Nest has been operating for about a year and a half, has 100 employees, and funding from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures and Al Gore’s investment fund, it just came out of stealth on Tuesday to reveal its smart thermostat design and energy efficiency ambitions. Nest says the thermostat is the first “learning thermostat” in the world. It will be available for $250 in mid-November, and can save 20 to 30 percent in a home’s energy consumption.

The idea behind Nest

Fadell explained to me in an interview that he and his wife (who led human resources for Apple) decided to leave Apple about two years ago to spend more time with their young children, and basically retire. But you know how that goes for the ambitious, young, Silicon Valley types. While designing a green home in Tahoe, Calif., Fadell became hung up on the lack of options for a thermostat for the home — they were expensive, not smart, ugly, and basically “crap” says Fadell. And like all good entrepreneurs he thought to himself: there’s got to be a better way.

That option ended up being getting back on the Valley treadmill, and creating one of the most ambitious greentech ventures I’ve seen to date. Nest has raised tens of millions of dollars (they wouldn’t disclose the amount) from high profile venture capitalists including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, Al Gore’s investment group Generation Capital, and Shasta Ventures.

While other companies are targeting the smart thermostat market (see my article on The next home energy battleground: the smart thermostat) like Opower and Honeywell, Radio Thermostat Company of America and EnergyHub, and EcoFactor, Nest is the first company that has created an end-to-end smart thermostat service, which offers the software, a gadget and a data-filled website. Fadell tells me that everything that the consumer touches has been designed by Nest.

That’s why it has 100 people and have raised a lot of money. The team building the learning algorithms includes Yoky Matsuoka, the former head of innovation at Google, and machine learning expert while Stanford Professor Sebastrian Thrun is an advisor to the company.

How Nest works

What will stand out most to energy nerds like me that look at a lot of thermostats, is the unique design of Nest. The thermostat’s form is a simple circle, with a ring on the outside and a single button, that controls the entire interface. Like the iPod and iPhone, Fadell wanted to make the device intuitive and simple to use and he says for the Nest system to work “it needed to be a coveted, cherished object that sits on your wall.”

In contrast, a major problem with most thermostats is that only two out of five are programmable and of those that are programmable, only 6 percent are actually programmed by the owners, says Fadell. Most thermostats are confusing, boring, or just not smart enough to keep the home owner’s attention.

The Nest thermostat, on the other hand, is supposed to learn your energy consumption behavior and program itself, and then automatically help you save energy in a convenient way. Once installed, the thermostat takes about a week of hardcore learning to recognize the standard way you heat or cool your home, and then recommends settings that are slightly more efficient than what you already do. It also automatically turns down the thermostat at times that are convenient to you. The device also continues to do lighter learning of your behavior via pattern recognition and your manual interaction with it, throughout the life of the device.

The recommendations and energy efficient mode appear to the Nest user as a leaf on the interface, giving direct feedback on energy choices. But the automatic control of heating and cooling will likely have a bigger impact on energy use. The Nest thermostat has five sensors — temperature, humidity, light and two activity sensors — and the activity sensors can notify the device to turn down the heating and cooling when no one is in the house.

The Nest thermostat also has a feature called “time to temperature,” which shows the home owner how long it will take to heat or cool the home. Say, you set the thermostat for 75 degrees, the Nest interface could read, 75 degrees in 25 minutes, letting you know how long it will take. The idea behind that feature is that most people set a thermostat like an accelerator, says Fadell, increasing the temperature or cooling way above or below the actual desired setting. But giving the user more feedback can help curb this problem — think of it like seeing how long a download of a file will take.

In addition to the thermostat device itself, Nest has created mobile apps and a website to be able to remotely turn up or down the thermostat, and also to give far more detailed data about home energy use. For example, you can log into the Nest website and see how much money you’ve saved, how many times you’ve turned up or down your thermostat.

The smart grid and Nest

The Nest thermostat also has Zigbee and Wi-Fi chips, so that it can connect with both your home broadband connection, and also other Zigbee devices like a smart meter, or smart appliances. Fadell says that thermostats are installed only every decade or so, so when the smart grid is fully deployed he wants the Nest thermostat to be ready.

Other companies like Opower and Honeywell are using a smarter thermostat as a way to connect with and control the smart energy home. While a lot of companies have focused on fancy dashboards that can monitor and control a home’s energy consumption, these devices haven’t really caught on, and smarter thermostats seem to be a better way in.

However, Nest is one of the only companies that is directly targeting consumers for its thermostat. Nest plans to sell its thermostat at Best Buy, via building specialty channels, and through its website. Fadell tells me the company wants to “connect with the iPhone generation where it shops.”

But at the same time that Nest is going direct to consumer, the device will clearly have a utility play, which the company is being quiet on right now. Like EcoFactor’s smart thermostat service, I could imagine utilities could work with homes that have Nest installed, to collectively curb energy consumption during peak grid events. This type of service is called demand response, and the saved energy per household helps utilities manage their grids during really hot summer days. Since the device also has ZigBee installed it could potentially connect with utilities’ smart meters, too.

Nest says that home owners can save 20 to 30 percent on their energy bills, which is one of the highest estimated ways to curb home energy use on the market. In contrast, mailed detailed energy bills from Opower are helping home owners cut around 2 percent. EcoFactor says with its similar thermostat service (but no designed gadget) it can get home owners to cut their energy consumption by 17 percent. If Nest actually takes off, utilities will be interested in working with that double digit energy reduction, though I’d like to see that 20 to 30 percent reduction validated in larger real world customer deployments.

My impressions

I think Nest is one of the more ambitious, and cool, ideas I’ve seen in the greentech space. The Nest thermostat is also beautiful and the idea is game changing on its own. However, I’m not so convinced it will work (I want it to! Prove me wrong!). I just don’t know if people will spend $250 on a thermostat, particularly in this economy. You can buy a connected, digital, programmable thermostat for $50, and $100 on the high end.

Also while Nest includes detailed instructions on how to install the thermostat (including a Nest screwdriver), installing a thermostat is actually kind of confusing. I’ve tried to tinker with some of the newer connected thermostats, and usually I end up wishing I hadn’t tried to do this myself — it involves circuit breakers and electrical wiring. Nest says it will offer Nest-approved installers, if people don’t want to install it themselves. Maybe the Best Buy Geek Squad will be able to help with this.

At the end of the day, it will take an army of Nest-inspired early adopters to convince the rest of the country and world to adopt Nest. Silicon Valley will probably rave about it, as they should, but will the other 99 percent of the country get on board with a $250, do-gooder, smart thermostat that’s as pretty as the iPhone?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Photo Stream Pitfalls

Stephen M. Hackett — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:50:06 +0000

Chuck Skoda get his list right, but he left out a few things, in my opinion. All in all, I like Photo Stream — mainly as a way to quickly see photos I’ve already sorted into albums that might not be on my iPhone. That said, I think the system needs some clarification:

In iPhoto (and I assume Aperture), the Photo Stream is one endless set of photos. ~~It is impossible to tell what’s been imported to iPhoto’s local library already.~~ I would love for iPhoto to offer to delete images from the stream once they’ve been imported — just like it does when I import straight from my iPhone.
iPhoto doesn’t make it clear that the Photo Stream is a temporary storage location. iCloud will only keep 30 days worth of photos (or 1,000 images). ~~After that, they’re gone. Even though they looked like they were in iPhoto. I imagine some people will lose some images before they figure this out.~~
Thirdly, there’s no way to view these images online. Why is there not a simple photo app at icloud.com?

Update: Go read this. Sorry!

Photo Stream Conundrum

BenBrooks — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 19:09:10 +0000

Dave Caolo on one of the biggest annoyances of Photo Stream under iOS 5:

What’s worse is that you can’t delete such throwaway photos from your Photo Stream with an iDevice. Instead, you’ve got to visit icloud.com and click “Reset Photo Stream,” which nukes the lot, good and bad. That’s why I’ve started using Camera+ again for tweeting pictures.

During the developer betas this bugged the crap out of me — I hate(d) not being able to delete photos that don’t “belong” in the Photo Stream. Because of that I completely get where Dave is coming from, but I must admit that having used it for so long I decided to not worry about it — that’s done wonders for me.

I bought an iPhone with tons of storage because I don’t want to have to think about such things as which photo app to use for each scenario I find myself in. To me, it’s worth the price of admission.

Sure, it’s a couple hundred bucks more for 64GB, but that’s a couple hundred bucks that means I don’t have to worry about such things as space for Photos and circumventing Photo Stream. It’s a couple hundred bucks that gives me all the convenience in the world and none of the hassle.

The ability to delete photos from the Photo Stream was a popular thing to file a bug report about during the betas and Apple still chose not to enable it — the problem is that if you delete a photo from the Photo Stream, should that photo also be deleted from all devices that downloaded it? And if so, then what do you do when a user wanted that photo to stay on a particular device?

So Apple went the Apple way: make it painful for edge cases and perfect for the average user.

∞

∞ Things I don’t like about the iPhone 4S

Jim Dalrymple — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:18:22 +0000

I got nothing.

Summer in the Panic Kitchen

Neven — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 20:13:17 +0000

It’s been a super-busy summer at Panic, so we’ve made sure to fuel our software-development efforts with a steady regimen of freshly prepared office meals. We hope to do one of these every month, and we’d love to inspire your own office cooking adventures. Any questions? Ask away! And now, our tasty tetraptych:

Ramen.

No one doesn’t like ramen, right? Propelled by a mild case of bummed-outness at Portland’s general lack of awesome ramen houses* and the publication of the first, ramen-centric issue of David Chang’s Lucky Peach magazine, we figured we’d take matters into our own hands and cook up a big batch for the office.

We stuck to the Momofuku recipe from Lucky Peach as much as possible, skipping the noodle-making itself. (Yeah, we know it’s kind of important, but we wanted to have a bit of breathing room. And, Uwajimaya sells totally nice fresh noodles.) Armed with a big bag of chicken necks and backs, we gathered around the office stove for a whole day as the ramen broth reduced, all five gallons of it. Les made shredded pork on Sunday while I slow-poached eggs in their shells; this is a super-handy method for when you need fifteen poached eggs at the same time.

This was an extremely porky dish, so we served up vegan and pescatarian alternatives for Garrett & Mike: cold sesame noodles with black radish, and the same topped with an egg and dried anchovies (my favorite).

Nobody didn’t like it! A very fun – if exhausting – kitchen adventure.

* Since then, the brand-new Southeast joint Wafu has blown our noodle-socks off. On the West side, Shigezo is pretty good.

Miso Corn.

Continuing our Momofuku run, we noticed how darn sweet and tasty the corn was this August. I had previously postulated that the Roasted Sweet Summer Corn from the Momofuku cookbook was their most bang-to-bucky recipe. Simple: cut a bunch of fresh corn, roast it in bacon fat, add miso and butter, then top in a South-meets-East fashion.

Les handled the corn, pre-grilling it briefly to add some char. We then split it between our two largest dutch ovens. (Did we mention it’s tricky to cook for fifteen?) For toppings, we went with the shrimp from Momofuku’s Shrimp’n'Grits, more poached eggs, a bit of green onion, and a few slices of my dad’s homemade, home-smoked sausage. That stuff is my own personal bacon.

Garrett and Mike enjoyed a butter-free, tempeh-topped version. Everyone went nom nom nom. The best part? We ended up with an enormous quantity of corn husk and silk. You do not want to throw this stuff away; instead, make a stock of it. It’ll taste of sweet, sweet summer. To make ours portable, we reduced it for three days until five gallons turned to one dark, rich, syrupy quart. This can be diluted to use as stock or you can add use it to make corn ice cream, America’s best-kept ice cream secret.

Bao.

Momofuku, take three: pork buns. We were looking for things that could be assembled and served fairly quickly once we’re at the office Monday morning (the usual setting for Panic Kitchen events). The buns themselves took a bit of work, but as predicted, our Monday prep was fairly mellow.

Dave joined Les and yours truly for a marathon Saturday of kneading, waiting, and rolling – lots of it, hoo boy. We ended up with exactly one hundred buns, covering every flat surfaces in our office kitchen. If you go bun-making yourself, clean out every table, desk, counter, and shelf you’ve got – you’ll need them all. Les was on pork duty once again, bringing in a simple pork-belly roast, and a version glazed in Cherry Coke. The former was served with hoisin sauce, Dave’s garden-grown cucumbers, and green onions; the latter, with pickled mustard greens, ground peanuts, and cilantro. Beer went well with both.

The buns contain milk, and it’s pretty much impossible to make fewer than thirty. Thus, the vegan option this time was coconut-rice cakes with Chinese-spiced roasted eggplant and shiitakes, and a papaya salad.

Would we do this again? Probably, and probably only on this scale.

Bánh Mì.

We’re big fans of Portland’s beat and cheapest Vietnamese-French-sandwich spot, Best Baguette. For this lunch, we wanted to see if we could best them at what they do best.

Les is still probably bummed that we didn’t attempt our own baguettes; my feeling was that we could never match – let alone beat – a professional bakery at this. We capitulated and bought our bread from Best Baguette, at approximately $0 or so per person. Our starting point for the recipes needed here was Viet World Kitchen. I took the weekend to pickle the daikon and carrots – more than twice the amount we ended up using, it turned out – and make the mayo. Les porked it up again, steaming a big batch of Vietnamese meatballs. Think about how crazy bánh mì really is – French bread topped with french mayonnaise, jazzed-up, chopped-up Italian meatballs, and Asian pickles. Did we mention it’s all served with iced coffee? We got a few cans of Vietnam’s favorite brand, Trung Nguyen, and Vietnamese-Nestlé sweetened condensed milk.

Pescatarian option: the classic sardine bánh mì (my favorite). Vegan: lemongrass tofu, miso mayo.

In the end, Greg declared Les’ meatballs better than Best Baguette’s. Sweet, sweet victory!

Mobile Orchard iPhone Development Course

tony.jensen — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:39:35 +0000

For quite some time, I have been looking for an iPhone development course to take. I’ve looked at Universities and local training companies and never quite found what I was hoping for.

While using CrashPlan, I saw an ad for a new iPhone development site called Mobile Orchard. Let me just say that no other site has ever made it to the top of my “must read” category in Google Reader so fast. When Dan Grigsby, the guy running the show over there, said that he was offering an iPhone workshop, I got excited.

Twenty-four hours after he announced the course, I asked to be part of it and was told that it was already full. Apparently, there are others looking for quality iPhone development training! I made the second iteration of the course which was offered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I live in Denver, Colorado and didn’t think twice about making the trip. It also gave me a chance to see my parents in Albert Lea.

The course what everything I had hoped it would be. Fifteen participants who all yearned to learn.

The biggest takeaway for me has been the many small, focused examples that we coded that can now be used as a code cookbook. That is easily worth the price of admission. Being at the class in person and being able to ask questions as the topic comes up was invaluable. Most of my learning has been spent online through podcasts and, of course, the Standard iTunes U classes which require listening and do not allow for discussion.

By the end of the second day, I felt as though I could actually do this. Yes, I have done development for many years. Yes, I pick up technologies and languages quickly. The issue has been having to code after the four kids head to bed and not knowing what to focus on. Now I can pick a task or two each night and make it happen.

A big thank you to Dan for being a good teacher and mentor. You imparted enough self-confidence to me that I know I can do this and am excited to be on the path to iPhone development.

17″ Unibody MacBook Pro

tony.jensen — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:02:45 +0000

The new machine has arrived and it is beautiful. The 26″ external monitor goes well with it. Today I also spent the $99 to enroll in the iPhone Developer Program.

Getting ready to do actual development!

Unibody MacBook Pro On Order

tony.jensen — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:48:26 +0000

In order to develop applications for the Mac and iPhone platforms, an Intel-based Macintosh is required.

Mine is now on order.

The choice of computer was easy… the 17″ MacBook Pro. The choice of monitor was difficult. I finally chose the Vizio 26″ monitor and picked it up at my local Costco.

A big thanks goes out to my cousin Andy for being my sounding board through this process.

Learning Cocoa: The Beginning. Again.

tony.jensen — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:59:50 +0000

It is time to start documenting for other people’s benefit the challenges of my learning Cocoa. And so it begins… again.

Last week, I made the payment to be an ADC Select member. The coolest part about that so far is the shirt I received in the mail. All black. On the front in not-to-small lettering it says “I  CODE”. Short, sweet and to the point.

I have been a programmer for as long as I can remember. Playing with the Timex Sinclair 1000 and the TRS-80 jump started my desire to make these machine do things.

Jump forward to today after more than a dozen years coding in the corporate arena. As much as I enjoy helping businesses decrease expenses and increase revenue by delivering a quality product, those products have not been beautiful. What I would really like is for the outside of my products to be as beautiful and good looking as the inside. The Macintosh and the iPhone have stolen my coding heart in this area.

So I am out to learn Cocoa and more generally, development for Apple platforms.

There are a lot of ideas swimming around in my head regarding products that I would like to create. Right now they are all things to make my own life easier. If they help others, wonderful. If not, fine. They will help me get up and running.

My first step is walking through the newest revision of Aaron Hillegass’ book “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X”. My local library purchased it for me and I am starting the exercises.

Wish me luck.

Learning My Mac: Selecting Text

tony.jensen — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:34:52 +0000

There are a number of people in my life that are learning how to use their new Macintosh computer. I have decided to pull together some of the tips that we talk about for anyone else who might be interested.

Our computers are supposed to help us be productive and one of the most common tasks on the computer is communicating with others. Communication takes the form of emails, instant messages, word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and any number of other types. Communication on the computer usually involves typing.

There are easy ways to select a sentence, to delete words and to navigate a document.

The arrow keys move you around. If you hold down the shift key while you arrow, the text is selected. If you want to select a word a time add the option key (shift-option arrows). In order to delete a word at a time, hold down the option key and click the delete or backspace key depending on which direction you want to delete in. The option keys says “do the next action to the entire word”. The command key says “do the next action to the entire line”. Below is a table to show the basic keystrokes.

I want to…	Modifiers to Hold	Keys to Press
Select one character	Shift	Arrow
Select one word	Option-Shift	Arrow
Select one line	Command-Shift	Arrow

Delete one character		Backspace / Delete
Delete one word	Option	Backspace / Delete
Delete one line	Command	Backspace / Delete

Cross Platform Applications

tony.jensen — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:17:23 +0000

Sometimes life is not as simple as we would like it to be. In my ideal world, I would use one machine for all of my tasks, it would always be with me and it would always be connected to the internet.

In real life, I work on at least three computers and a phone from at least three different locations. There are Windows machines and there are Macs. I still want access to all of my documents no matter where I am. What is the solution?

Here is the table of applications I use on a daily basis.

	Macintosh	Windows	Windows Mobile 5 Phone
Email	Mail.app	Thunderbird	WM Mail
Tasks	RememberTheMilk.com, Google Docs	RememberTheMilk.com, Google Docs	RememberTheMilk.com, Google Docs (view only), Jott.com
Web Browsing	Firefox (BonEcho )	Firefox with iAqua theme and extensions Greasemonkey, Add Bookmark Here 2, Download Status Bar, DownloadThemAll!. Greasemonkey scripts Google Docs Download, Scroly Poly, Auto add to Google Reader.	Pocket IE
Bookmarks	Firefox bookmarks via Google Browser Sync	Firefox bookmarks via Google Browser Sync	A few selected links in my favorites list
Web Credentials	1Password. Firefox passwords via Google Browser Sync	Firefox passwords via Google Browser Sync. Waiting on my.1Password.com.
Address Book	Address Book	.Mac Address Book	Contact list
Calendar	iCal		Phone calendar no longer syncs in Leopard.
Blog posting	MacJournal (reviewing MarsEdit)	Scribefire	Jott for article ideas.
Instant Messaging	iChat	Meebo	ebuddy (Meebo doesn’t work on my WM5 Pocket IE)
Documents	Google Docs and Spreadsheets	Google Docs and Spreadsheets	Google Docs and Spreadsheets (view only)
RSS Reader	Google Reader	Google Reader	Google Reader
File Transfer	Transmit	FireFTP
VNC Server	Leopard Screen Sharing and Vine Server (OSXvnc)	TightVNC server or UltraVNC server
VNC Client	Chicken of the VNC, Screen Sharing	TightVNC client	Mocha VNC

Creating A Country Called VoIP – VoIP News

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 04:26:02 +0000

One step closer to being able to call any VoIP number from any other VoIP number. Bring it on!

The revelation at the recent eComm2008 (Emerging Communications) Conference in Mountain View, Calif. attracted surprisingly little attention. In a presentation, Voxbone SA co-founder and CEO Rodrigue Ullens described a plan to provide VoIP users with real phone numbers. Calling each others’ numbers would let the users talk to each other for free, no matter what VoIP service they used.Creating A Country Called VoIP – VoIP News

http://www.voip-news.com/feature/inum-effort-032408/

Future Journalism

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:47:28 +0000

Techdirt: Is Twitter The Future Of News?

When the UK experienced its largest earthquake in decades, the story was covered first not by the BBC or a traditional wire service, but by a twitter-only news service called BreakingNewsOn. And that service, run by a 20-year old Dutch student named Michael van Poppel, got its leads directly from Twitter users in the UK who were surprised by the quake and made Twitter posts about it.

A good look at what journalism could look like in the future.

Building Beautiful Software

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 21:43:55 +0000

Shawn Blanc » The Daniel Jalkut Interview

There is a tendency within Apple to strive for perfection. Nobody laughs at you if you try to make something flawless. This is different from many other software businesses, and was dramatically different from the few little software-related jobs I’d had before.

This quote from Daniel resonates with me. I have a similar passion to build beautiful, well-designed software but have yet to be part of an organization that values that beauty in software development. It is wonderful to know that these type of people and organizations exist.

Free items are valued higher than the item itself

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:35:26 +0000

Techdirt: How ‘Free’ Has Even More Value Than People Think It Should

Having two Hersheys kisses and the big Snickers bar providers more chocolate than three kisses and the small bar — but the impact of “free” got them even more interested.

Google Sites is now live on Google Apps Team Edition

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:00:18 +0000

Google Sites Now Live To Collaborate – GigaOM

It is a simple and easy way to build a website where you can share information with your team, including files, calendars and presentations. You can put content from other Google products, including YouTube, Google Calendar and Picasa.

There is debate on how used a user-friendly wiki product will be. I am firmly in the “If you make it easy, they will come” camp. Certainly more features, like an embedded site map in the navigation column, will come over time. This is already useful to me for a non-profit that I have set up on Google Apps Team Edition. It is interesting that this is the first product from Google that is exclusively available on Google Apps Team Edition.

New MacBook and MacBook Pro models

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:07:59 +0000

New MacBook and MacBook Pros now available – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Unlike the very minor updates in November, this refresh features across the board speed bumps, bigger hard drives, more stock RAM and for the MacBook Pro, a few new features sure to make every Apple fan’s mouth water.

Drool!

David Weiss on Finishing

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:36:47 +0000

David Weiss: Finishers Wanted

Stick to your task ’til it sticks to you;
Beginners are many, but enders are few.
Honor, power, place and praise
Will always come to the one who stays.

iPhone lackluster social networking skills

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:48:08 +0000

FORTUNE: Apple 2.0 The iPhone’s secret blindspot, revisited «

Apple (AAPL) missed a huge opportunity with the original iPhone because, at a fundamental level, Steve Jobs doesn’t understand social networks.

An insightful post on how the iPhone could have been, and still could be, the most robust social networking device in existence.

Whistling lamp posts in New Zealand or Traveling to discover the unexpected

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:09:33 +0000

Rands In Repose: It’s Windy in Wellington

I’ve no idea whether this was intentional design or not, but when the wind hits them just right, I swear the cylindrical holes in the lampposts whistle. In unison.

Mobile Broadcasting is finding a foot hold

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:51:28 +0000

The Jeff Pulver Blog: The Qik PSA: American Idol winner Jordin Sparks in Ghana Speaking out Against Malaria

My friend Jim Long (@newmediajim) is carrying his Nokia N95-3 with him on his trip this week, traveling with President Bush and his entourage around Africa. Earlier today Jim caught up with American Idol winner Jordin Sparks in Ghana and captured what she had to say about helping to stamp out Malaria (“Malaria No More”) and shared his interview live on Qik for the world to see and then instantly available to be shared and available on demand.