Tue - March 16, 2004

Apple rocks



So, the keyboard on my imac was acting up (the escape key didn't work) - unrelated to the orange juice that i spilled on it a week ago of course. Cough.

Anyways, I called apple yesterday at about 2:00. Explained that the keyboard was wanky. They said "Ok, we'll ship you a new one."

It's now 9:54am and the new keyboard just arrived. Just over 12 hours! And, pull the shipping label off the box the new one came in to reveal a shipping label to return the old one. Prepaid and all, just drop it off at airborne (officemax) and it's done. Apple rocks.

Posted at 09:55 AM    

Tue - February 24, 2004

Cheap Stuff



If you need USB hubs or memory readers (compact flash, smartmedia or MMC), macresq has 'em cheap. $6.99 for the readers if you have the coupon codes. *Cough* Check em out.

Posted at 12:16 AM    

Thu - January 15, 2004

poor pc users



So, having helped Kate set up her digital camera on windows, I must say again how nice it is to just be able to plug such things in to a mac and have them work...

Posted at 11:46 PM    

Wed - January 14, 2004

eesh



100meg photoshop documents do not make imacs happy. Poor imac. I think I heard it wince.

Posted at 01:03 AM    

Wed - January 7, 2004

macworld



A macworld has come and gone and I haven't purchased anything. Nor have I gotten worked up about wanting to purchase something to the point of planning my scheme for acquiring said thing.

Has something gone wrong?

Is there trouble afoot?

Nah. And of course I'd love a 42U Rack filled with g5 xServe's and an xRaid, but my pocketbook is short about $330,000 at the moment.

The new iLife is fantastic. I'm looking forward to each and every updated. I'm just hoping that I'll buy a new mac before too very long, so I may hold off on purchasing iLife. Who knows.

The new Mini iPods are very cool as well, but I already have an iPod. So I don't need one of those.

All in all, it was a good keynote. Folks are upset, of course, because apple didn't do whatever they expected apple to do. More encouraging is the fact that Apple is in a solid place right now. 700k+ ipods sold in the last quarter, 30 million songs downloaded, getting close to 2million per week. Lots of switchers. Solid future. A good time to be a shareholder? We'll see.

Posted at 01:13 AM    

Tue - December 30, 2003

The Nokia 3650



So I promised some thoughts on my new phone. Here goes.

I picked up a Nokia 3650 during finals. The real reason for doing that was that my Siemens had real issues with wind noise and dropouts.

This phone was really grown on me. Initially I was excited by the reception but found it a bit confusing and counter intuitive. The more time I've spent with it the more I've grown to appreciate it.

The good:
Bluetooth works flawlessly, and it's about 4x faster than the Siemens. It syncs your address book pictures back to OSX and the Calendar application is much better than the Siemens. At this point I'm just holding on to the palm out of fear of detachment.

Being able to add any Series 60 software is terrific. Games, utilities, everything. Having 64+ megs of usable storage is really nice. It makes it easier to feel OK using the camera and camcorder features.

Reception is terrific of course, and the sound quality is pretty good. The incoming sound isn't quite as good as the Samsung S105, but using the bluetooth headset it doesn't matter. I also like that the bluetooth headset can be used for all of the phone's audio, not just calls.

It's got a ton of features I haven't even come to understand yet. But it's ok.

The bad: It's big. It falls into the category of BFP (Big Darn Phone). For comparison, here's the Nokia next to my previous two phones:


So anyways, it's a good phone. Get one!

Posted at 11:45 PM    

Sun - November 16, 2003

To reiterate!



I was at a coffee shop today doing some reading. It was so bloody nice to have my laptop constantly connected to the net, courtesy of my cell phone. Googling for terms I didn't recognize and such. The germans rule!

Posted at 03:28 AM    

Thu - November 13, 2003

T-Mobile Rules!



So, T-mobile recently changed things around such that now I get unlimited data included with my cell phone plan. What this means is, whereas I used to pay $3/mo for a total of 1 megabyte of data, I now pay $0 month for infinite megabytes. Good deal!

More importantly, this means it's now feasible to use my cell phone as a connectivity device for my laptop. With a few clicks in OS X, my laptop talks to my cell phone (wirelessly over bluetooth of course) and my cell phone relays data to/from the net, at the speed of a 56k modem. That might not seem stellar, but it's plenty for email and a quick google search when you're in the middle of nowhere (or in a restaurant or whatever).

This makes me feel very cool! I just hope t-mobile understood that people would do this sort of thing if they stopped charging an arm and a leg (or, $0.40 per meg) for data. Hizzah!

Posted at 09:33 PM    

Thu - October 30, 2003

siemens!



Wow. Sneakily obtained firmware for my phone fixed my bluetooth issues. And I thought siemens had stopped supporting this phone. Hizzah!

Posted at 09:28 PM    

Sat - October 25, 2003

LobsterMonkey?



Lobstermonkey ? What clever mind thought this up? (it was only $5 for the domain, I couldn't resist, and isn't my art great?)

Data recovery yesterday went well, I'm glad we recovered what we did.

So, working on a plan to move the parents to macs. It's a secret though, shhhh!

You see, I'm very concerned about their future security on windows, since I don't have access to parts/software/support for them. There must be a better solution, yeah? I guess we'll see.

Panther (OS 10.3) is out officially now. I must say, it's very terrif. The only real problem I've run in to is with the palm software causing permissions glitches, but palm admits that it's a problem, and I worked around it by installing as root. Everything else works great, I love expose and the new finder... nothing to complain about thus far!

Posted at 12:57 AM    

Thu - October 23, 2003

Blog Weirdness



Yeah so, for whatever reason my blog is a bit confused. The calendar thingy on the right isn't working it would seem. I'll deal with it eventually...

Update: Ooo, found the magic "fix blog" button in iBlog! Yay!

Posted at 02:01 AM    

Tue - October 14, 2003

Touched a G5



Was at compUSA the other day. They had a dual 2ghz G5 setup... that's such an amazing machine. I really think that m school... things... would be... betterish ....... must... have... g5....

Posted at 09:05 AM    

Wed - October 8, 2003

Closer to the ultimate device



So, having used the magic of bluetooth for a couple weeks now, I've got some thoughts about where we're at on my path to the Ultimate Pocket Device(tm).

First off, I still think the Ultimate Device is about 3 years off. Maybe a little less, maybe a little more, but I don't think there is too much play in either direction.

Where we're at / Where we're going:
Bluetooth is still in infancy. My phone is, for example, Siemens' first attempt at a bluetooth phone. The only manufacturer on their second generation is Sony-Ericsson, but their first gen devices (the t68i for example) was so lacking as an actual phone ... well I think it's safe to say they're still figuring stuff out. My phone still has bugs relating to bluetooth, requiring a reboot every couple days and such. Anyways, it'll be another gen or two to get the functionality completely stabilized. The computer side of things work beautifully - I haven't had any trouble syncing with iSync/iCal.

Hand in hand with bluetooth is PDA integration. I think the S55 has pretty decent organizer features. I could come very close to totally replacing my palm with just my phone. T9 text input does a great job 90% of the time. I think the next step is what I'll call "adaptive T9" - I want the phone to learn what combinations I use more frequently, especially in the case of names and things that it doesn't have stored. I shouldn't have to teach it, it should learn based on my input patterns. I doubt this is very far away. Once it's implemented, I think we can say goodbye to Graffiti on the palm. The calendar display on the S55 could be a little cleaner, but in some ways it's actually better than the palm calendar. To do lists and address book stuff are fine. Voice memos replace the memopad on the palm.

Obviously phone-PDA integration will be the first to reach near perfection. The next step is to get the rest of the digital devices in there.

MP3 player / digital camera will come together. I don't mean the craptastic VGA only digicams that phones like mine have. I mean a 4+ megapixel camera with a realish lense that can take a decent number of shots. At the same time I want iPod functionality. I think putting a 20gig (or thereabouts) harddrive in the phone will be the solution. Store mp3s and digital phones on there. I don't think that's too unreasonable to expect, but it would also be possible to do a few gigs of solid state storage.

My concern then is how to sync large files. Bluetooth is sloooow - it's designed to be slow though. 802.11 is better, but still nowhere near firewire. Eventually we'll probably reach something like a very short-range wireless firewire. Not in the near future though. It'll probably mean we end up having to plug in the phone over firewire / USB2 to sync mp3s and digital photos, with the option to use bluetooth if you have the patience. That way you could do the iTunes/iPod style sync when you needed to update music (every few weeks for me) and stick to bluetooth for swapping a single song / picture.

GPS integration is obvious and we're pretty much there already with some phone handsets. Addition of a harddrive / large SSS will mean better mapping.

Are there other devices? Sure. I'd love to be able to record DV quality video, but that's just silly to expect at this point. Give it another 10 years. Thoughts?

Posted at 02:00 AM    

Tue - September 30, 2003

Bluetoothy!



So, I got ahold of my phone yesterday. Also got the bluetooth dongle and the jabra headset, so I'm fully equipped. Thoughts?

Bluetooth + OS X is amazing. I plugged in the dongle and was ready to pair with my phone right away. Not even a reboot. Told iSync to sync and it did. Didn't have to do any configuration or anything. So, my phone now has the same address book and calendar that is available on my iMac, powerbook and palm. That's very very slick.

The phone itself I would rank as "pretty good." The quality of the device, the screen, the buttons and such aren't as good as my Samsung S105 (the phone it is replacing). I like a lot of the menus and such better though. Much more feature rich obviously. It's actually smaller than the S105, even when the S105 is closed. It's better than my Sony T300, Motorola V66 and Nokia 59xx though. I'm considering a "transition" phone as I wait for the manufacturers to really get bluetooth functionality figured out.

The bluetooth headset (jabra bt200) is nice. One push of a button and I'm talking on it, doing voice dialing, whatever. It's very comfortable to wear in the ear, and I can get about 20 feet from the phone before the noise gets bad. It sucks outside though, where even a bit of wind overpowers it. But, I knew that when I bought it - it was worth saving the money over all the other brands. Plus, it's far sexier than any of the other brands and it feels like a fashion accessory.

Downsides of it all? I'm bummed (but knew it going in) that I can't have the phone paired with both the headset and the computer at the same time. Apparently there are only a couple phones available, none available here, that can do that. They have multiple bluetooth chipsets inside to do it, which sounds cost and space prohibitive. Anyways, hopefully someone will figure it out in the future. The only other bummer is that I'm not getting onscreen notification of incoming calls, even when my Mac is paired with the phone. It worked for a while yesterday, but I think went away when I updated the firmware on the phone (to fix a really weird incoming call bug). Hopefully either Siemens or Apple will fix this in the future.

So, to end, here's a picture taken from the phone's camera. This is on the "small" setting, which is designed for using as pictures that pop up when someone calls you (IE, "Steve" calls and you see a picture of Steve).


Posted at 03:05 PM    

Sun - September 28, 2003

UPS grr!



So... the phone is still locked in the apartment office. Great. Maybe an update tomorrow.

Posted at 11:57 PM    

UPS

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