Posts from — October 2007

Follow this link to Google Maps, then try to find places you’ve lived in the past by zooming in (and not turning on any of the navigational aids). My current residence was very easy, but finding Bethlehem, PA and Avon, CT were rather challenging. There are some useful strategies that make the task manageable. Enjoy!

Another update in the iPod saga…

One of the things that I didn’t like about the iPod Touch was the fact that it didn’t include the maps and email apps for no good reason (er, ahem, “business reasons”). With a little bit of quite easy hacking, I was able to install those apps along with a bunch of 3rd-party applications.

Since the iPhone and iPod Touch are so similar, you can literally copy (some) apps from one to the other. Maps and mail were the only ones I really wanted, but there’s a lot of other interesting stuff to play with. Once the system is unlocked, you can installed lots of core unix stuff, such as an SSH server, a surprisingly polished terminal app, programming languages, web servers, etc. I have no need for some of those right now, but it leaves the door open for a lot of cool things. If they didn’t have an annoying signed music database, I’d be able to make it sync via the wireless network automatically whenever I got home. That’s how it should work in the first place…

The Google Maps app for iphone, which I hadn’t used before, is quite awesome. Highly recommended.

I’m waiting for my gmail account to get IMAP enabled before I put the account on the ipod. Hopefully the wait won’t be much longer…

A short video about how Gmail blocks spam:

.. complete with a shout-out to Google OCR.

I finally experienced an earthquake in California. There was a 5.6 magnitude earquake west of San Jose tonight while I was working. There was a fair amount of shaking for a brief amount of time, but not so much that anything fell over in my office.

Many thanks for all the music recommendations. I’ll try to track some of them down later this week. More posting
coming tomorrow.

I typed this on my iPod… I’m getting better with this keyboard.

For those of you keeping up with my iPod adventures, here’s a world-changing update:

After a few days with the iPod Classic, I decided to return it and switch to the iPod Touch.

My main reasons for the switch were:
- It turns out 16GB of storage isn’t as restrictive as I had expected
- The promise of an API for the touch and iphone will make the device more useful in the future.

First, negatives:
- Lack of google maps and email applications is frustrating. I’m hoping this will change once the API is out.
- It’s a lot to pay for a relatively small amount of storage.
- It’s not easy to change the volume if you’re not in the music app, and you can’t change the volume at all without looking at the screen. They should add a button for this.

Despite all this, I’m very satisfied with the device so far. The interface is, as I’d imagine you’ve heard, really good. The interactions with the touch screen are amazingly easy to learn. When I got in my car to use my touch screen GPS, I started flicking the screen to scroll like I would an ipod, eventually realizing that it wanted me to use a scrollbar, which suddenly seemed primitive (what are we, Amish?).

The screen is very vibrant and is fine for many types of video, plus cover flow looks really cool on it. The web browser is quite usable, though I tend to only use sites that have special mobile versions (gmail, google local, facebook, etc). The web browser would be far, far more useful if it had Google Gears built-in so that apps could work offline, but maybe that’ll change sometime too.

Someone suggest some music, I’m stagnating a bit.

GABE & MAX’S HOW TO GET THE DREAMLIFE OF YOUR DREAMS USING THE INTERNET

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPsUmhqncAg

I can’t stop watching this video, it’s so beautifully awkward.

Hey, bing bong! You’ve got your emails!

This is a grueling week. Posting (and life) will resume on Thursday or Friday.

Hopefully some interesting stuff is in the queue…

Girts got a remote-controlled small helicopter from woot.com tonight. Here’s the box:

It’s the “smallest and lightest” according to the outside of the box. On the inside it had another sign (sorry for terrible image quality):

“POSSIBLE LEAST OF WORLD”

I assume this was supposed to be something about how tiny the helicopter is.