Category: Gadgets

Two brief items about time and my recently completed circumnavigation.
For years, my timepiece of choice has been the Citizen Skyhawk. It’s a solar-powered marvel, with only one flaw: its multiple city feature doesn’t accomodate the Indian time zone (IST=UTC+5:30). When I was at Hyderabad Airport last week, I stopped by a watch store and asked if, by any chance, Citizen now had a watch that could handle Indian time. They showed me a Navihawk: an earlier design, no longer sold in the USA ((Or at least not available through the Citizen store at Amazon.com.)), without solar power, but with full support for IST. ((Curiously, it still doesn’t support other half-hour zones, like Newfoundland, Tehran, or Adelaide.)) I bought one in a heartbeat: highly recommended for those who visit India regularly.
The Navihawk was a success; the iPhone less so. I disabled data roaming on my travels, for all the well-documented reasons; I also found that very few of the roaming carriers would send out the signal needed to automatically set the time. This shouldn’t have mattered: the iPhone allows you to set the date, time, and time zone by hand, so everything should just work. Unfortunately it doesn’t. Despite my best efforts, the “World Clock” and “Alarm” features of the Clock application were totally confused. I had planned to rely on the iPhone’s alarm function, and so I hadn’t bothered to pack a separate alarm clock. Eventually I worked out that the most reliable (but awkward) technique was to use the count-down “Timer”.
I’m really surprised at how buggy this part of the iPhone software is. I can only assume that Steve Jobs has never travelled abroad with his iPhone. Please fix it, Apple.

How obvious is this? Package up a 250GB hard disk, a four-port USB hub, and a USB Ethernet adapter into a nice, small package (something like the latest Iomega “Silver Series”, slim enough to stick in your pocket – about 5″ x 3″ x 0.5″ and 7 oz.), with a captive USB cable designed to slot into the MacBook Air. External power option, in case we want to coddle the MBA’s battery. Give it a MBA-style brushed metal finish, and price it at $200. Who’s going to do it first? ((This neat unit is awesome, but a bit too big.))
Of course we still need Apple to fix iTunes, so that you can sync a subset of your full library onto a MBA, just like you can with an iPod or iPhone.

Nearly four years ago, I wrote a blog piece about a smartphone application that I really wanted to see. How do you handle an important mobile phone call when you’re in a meeting, or in the audience at a show of some kind? Obviously your phone is set to vibrate only (isn’t it?!), but ideally you’d like to check the caller ID and either send the call to voicemail or answer it and ask the caller to wait while you leave the room, and do so completely silently. Smartphones all support rich media services, so all you need to be able to do is manage the telephony subsystem from within an application that can play back a pre-recorded “please hold” message.
Each time a vendor releases a smartphone SDK, I read the specs in hope, and each time I’m disappointed. This week Apple released the iPhone SDK, and I signed up and read the docs. Disappointed again: there’s still no access from applications to the telephony subsystem. Oh well: the iPhone is still a stunning device, the SDK has a ton of really cool features, and the developer tools are outstanding ((Watch the Apple video and check out the remote debugging and profiling features.)) , so I think I’m going to write a few apps for it. Of course this means I’ll finally have to break down and replace my PowerBook with a MacBook Pro; the tools all require an Intel-based Mac. Apple has some great refurbs at around $1,650 ((Less with my Amazon employee discount.)) for the 15″.

Oh well. In spite of this, my new HD DVD player still upconverts regular DVDs really nicely.
🙁

It’s been a wintry Christmas Day here in Seattle, and so my cunning plan was to curl up in front of the TV and watch all three Lord of the Rings DVDs, back to back – the extended versions. Unfortunately when I turned on my DVD player, it emitted a ghoulish death-rattle and refused to work. So I logged in to Amazon, ordered myself a replacement ((I wanted a decent name-brand unit, and it turned out to be only a little more to get an HD-DVD player. So I did. I know that this may be a future Betamax, but never mind.)), and settled down to read philosophy texts on my Kindle. Along the way I talked to family and friends, by phone or Skype. ((I always use Skype to connect with folks back in England.))
Speaking of Skype, I just received email telling me that my old “Skype Unlimited” package was about to expire, and urging me to sign up for the new “Skype Pro” package. The email and web materials do a lousy job of explaining the relative merits of the various plans; surely they couldn’t be hoping that I’d follow the path of least resistance and sign up for the most expensive option?! Since my present Skype usage is 40% Skype-to-Skype chat, 40% Skype-to-Skype video, and 20% (prepaid) calls to England, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to go “Pro”.

[Repeated from my Amazon.com review.]
It’s a long way from the Dreamcast to the Wii….
The Nintendo Wii was the first game console that I didn’t buy to play Soulcalibur. Back in the day, I bought a Sega Dreamcast Console just to play the original Soul Calibur. Then Soul Calibur 2 came out on the PlayStation 2, so I bought one of those. Next came Soul Calibur 3, which tried to add some RPG elements and wound up being a step back. Oh well. Then earlier this year I bought myself a Wii on the strength of its immersive sports games. And now, to my delight, we have Soulcalibur Legends on the Wii. This should be the ideal platform for a sword-fighting game, right?
The original Soul Calibur games were all about best-2-of-3 timed head-to-head swordfights in a variety of closed arenas. This game pits you against single and multiple opponents in what look like open RPG-like settings, but they still seem to be relatively episodic. You move with the nunchuk and fight with the controller, which works OK; I’m still getting the hang of the way that moving the joystick and moving the nunchuck itself interact. Spinning 180 degrees is essential, but tricky.
Above all, this game is going to be a good workout. No more sprawling in front of the screen, button-mashing your PS2 controller. You play this game standing, moving, feinting, jabbing, slashing. This is going to be fun – energetic fun.

Stephen Fry captures the essence of the iPhone:

In the end the iPhone is like some glorious early-60s sports car. Not as practical, reliable, economical, sensible or roomy as a family saloon but oh, the joy. The jouissance as Roland Barthes liked to say. What it does, it does supremely well, that what it does not do seems laughably irrelevant.
The iPhone is a digital experience in the literal sense of the word. The user’s digits roam, stroke, tweak, tweeze, pinch, probe, slide, swipe and tap across the glass screen forging a relationship with the device that is like no other.
“But I don’t want to ‘forge a relationship’, I just want to get the job done,” you say? Well then, you know what? Don’t buy one. And stop reading this. You’re only doing so in the first place to lend fuel to your snorts and puffs of rage. Allow us our pleasures.

(If you haven’t bookmarked his blog, do it now. You will not be disappointed.)

Some years ago there were stories of RFI mucking about with garage door openers. Now we have the “Satanic car key”. As we rely more and more on wireless replacements for mechanical systems, there will be lots of opportunities for “interesting” distributed systems failures…

Stranded motorists in Kent were forced to turn to Ofcom after a rogue car’s central locking system took possession of other vehicles in the same Gravesend car park. More than 12 cars at the Parrock Street car park in the comfortable yet earthy Medway town decided not to open or start on Tuesday, the Beeb reports. […] The regulator’s boffins said they eventually traced the problem to “a small family car [that] was intermittently sending out signals blocking other fobs in a 164ft (50m) radius”.

How much do you think it costs to gold plate a MacBook Pro?

I love Norm’s so-simple-it’s-elegant laptop stand. I’m not worried about the heat from my laptop damaging my desk (which has a glass top), but cooler is definitely better. Unfortunately it looks like the kind of thing you’d need a workshop to build, especially routing the channels in the bottom of the box to accomodate the aluminium strips. Hmmm…