Too Lazy to Fail

Apparently my new firmware has Microsofts Voice Command built-in. Which means that I can say “Call Tracie” and it will call her. Other commands include “What is my next appointment?”, “What is my signal strength?”, “Read messages” etc.

Now all I need is an equivalent that is scriptable, and I will be able to rule the world through my bluetooth headset.

I’ve seen some of you poking fun at people with bluetooth headsets, and I’ve joined in from time to time, but I think I only did so because headsets were the popular thing to hate, like the 9mm or Pokemon.

It started last night. I was looking for a piece of Windows Mobile software I had been telling my uncle about, and along the way found a bunch of shiny new freeware playthings for my AT&T Tilt. One of them locked up my phone. Hard. So hard that I had to do a wipe of the system memory. Normally this is not a big deal since you’d have a backup of your contacts, etc on Outlook where you last synced the PDA. But I don’t have Outlook. I also never got around to getting one of those nice programs that backs up your contacts to your flash card.

So I uh, guess now’s as good a time as ever to do those firmware upgrades, huh?

Long story short, I found a program that tricks your phone into playing an MP3 over a bluetooth headset. I’m not planning to listen to the White Stripes over a mono bluetooth audio signal, but it seems like a dang handy thing for listening to audiobooks while doing housework or (maybe?) sitting at my desk at work. When a phone call comes in, it reads the name of the caller, and I press the button on my ear to pause the audio file and pick up the phone.

That’s a neat capability, but it’s not worth buying the $35 headset on its own. So why did I swallow my pride and get one? I suppose that the best way of putting it is that I have a certain technology fetish: a pipe dream that nobody is likely to make happen for me any time soon, but which I’ll still spend unhealthy amounts of time fantasizing about.

My tech fetish started way back in middle school when I read the Ender’s Game series (by the way, the first book is great, don’t ruin it by reading the rest unless you’re a diehard fan with low expectations). In the mostly bland sequels to the first fantastic book, an accidentally created artificial sentience named Jane communicates with Ender via a small device in his ear:

Jane is first introduced in Speaker for the Dead as an advanced computer program. She is extremely complex, capable of performing trillions of tasks simultaneously, and has millions of levels of attention, even her most unaware one being much more alert than a human. Jane is hesitant to reveal herself to humanity, because she knows that she is the epitome of humanity’s fear: an intelligent, thinking, computer program that cannot be controlled. She decided to reveal herself to Ender after she found out he wrote The Hive Queen and The Hegemon. She also “remembered” he was the only student to pass the Giant’s Drink, one of the many Fantasy Game situations.

A jewel in Ender’s ear allows both of them to communicate and for her to see and hear everything from Ender’s vantage point. She helps Ender with many things. For example, in the very beginning, she contacts an orbiting ship and pays $40 billion for it and the cargo. Ender’s reliance on Jane becomes obvious when she no longer helps him; he must ask Olhado to help him with his finances but Ender doesn’t even know what his own password is.

It continued when I recently read Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which featured a logistics computer that became self-aware and was nicknamed Mike:

In Robert A. Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), the character Mycroft Holmes is a self-aware computer system entrusted with running the life-support systems, communications, payroll and many other things, in a penal colony underground in the Moon or “Luna”. Mycroft eventually sides with characters inciting a revolution to free Luna, and is instrumental in their victory against the Lunar Authority on Earth.

In both these books the friendly omniscient computer helped the protagonists by being their eyes and ears, handling things for them and allowing them to effectively be in several places at once. The computer was awake and alert when its human friends were asleep or distracted, it had a perfect memory, and access to a vast network of rapidly available public knowledge.

Why can’t we have something like that now? I mean, yeah, we’re not quite ready for sentient computers. But surely some clever scripting, some speech recognition, and some synthetic voice work could be combined to give a human being quick answers to specific queries, driving directions, email/SMS notifications, and access to news and weather. Maybe one could click one’s earpiece, say “What’s Jena Six?” and have the computer retrieve and read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry. Then one could choose to have the computer continue reading the info, or tag it for later listening, or tag it for later browsing in front of a proper terminal, or have it brought up on the screen of the PDA so it can be read without messing with navigating to the proper page.

So I’ll continue to listen to my podcasts between answering calls on the silly button attached to my ear. You can mock me, but I’m afraid that this is the price of progress. We got used to people flying through the air and being able to call up information about the War of 1812 in under five seconds and being able to propel a multi-ton hunk of steel and dead dinosaurs just to go get ice cream. So come on, tell me that a small headset in public is all that crazy.

Now I’ve discovered that IHOP will let you camp out the entire afternoon, stealing electricity, on merely the promise of buying something later. Unfortunately, this IHOP’s wifi is password-protected. I would crack it, but I don’t think there’s anyone using it to get the traffic needed for the number-crunching.

It’s just as well. By breaking the AT&T Wireless TOS and tethering my phone to my laptop, I can have near-broadband speeds anyway:

I’d been planning to shut off the $20/month internet access on my phone, but it’s just so darn handy once in a while. The problem is that, while Memphis has glorious 3G coverage that gets me the low-latency, high-speed wireless documented above, Jackson is still stuck with regular GPRS that would see those speeds cuts about 95%.

I’ve started my write-up of the first night at Rangemaster’s Level III course, but there’s more that needs doing. I have about 2.5 hours before I must leave my sweet House of Pancakes for the class, so maybe I can get it out by then on this midget keyboard.

The good: The computer is about the size of the plastic covers that Disney used to ship their VHS tapes in, or the size of a small hardback book. The power supply is small. 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU, 1G of RAM, 120G hard drive, 9″ 1024×600 screen for $350.

The bad: Screen and keyboard are small, which is fine for me, but for my wife the touch-typist makes the computer nearly unusable. 3-cell 2200mAh battery is lacking and can only power the device about two hours. There’s a little fan noise. The shiny case is a finger-grease magnet.

Other thoughts: It’s exactly what I wanted and didn’t get with traditional 12″ laptops: The ability to carry a computer with me everywhere in my Tactical Man Purse. Great for times like these where I’m stuck someplace for an hour or two with nothing to do.

I’m actually typing this from a Wendy’s in Memphis. I’m set to meet Squeaky at 3:00 across the street, but my famously poor navigational skills cause me to show up way to early for everything out of fear of getting lost. Did you know that fast food places will let you camp out basically forever as long as you buy something? Mmm. Lemonade.

Randy Pausch was a Computer Science professor at Canegie Mellon who was diagnosed in 2006 with terminal pancreatic cancer. He passed away last night at home, with his family.

Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people!

If you never got to watch the Last Lecture, I highly recommend that you find an hour this evening to give it a watch. Great stuff. Pausch will be remembered.

Dear Apple, Nokia, and Palm:

I don’t really care which one of you wins a page-loading speed contest when the winner still takes longer than a low-end computer on dialup would take.

I mean, really. 21 seconds? You may have gotten away with that in 1995, but in an age where I can get a 10 Megabit connection $50, this looks kinda silly for technology that’s supposed to be the latest and greatest.

I love my AT&T tilt, but the only connectivity I need for it is for Google Maps and email.

End of the line for CompUSA.

Consumer electronics retailer CompUSA said Friday that it will go out of business after the holidays following sale of the company to Gordon Brothers Group LLC, a restructuring firm. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

Called it:

Circuit City, at least in my area, wasn’t able to differentiate enough to prevent hemorrhaging of customers when better prices and selection came along, and seems to exist nationally only as a shell of its former self. CompUSA appears to have held on longer, perhaps having a business model that allows for a comparable selection of consumer electronics, plus a greater corporate appreciation for the geek hobbyist (who desires to build his own computer from components) than Best Buy. But when was the last time you heard of someone building a computer from components bought from a retail store? The online retailer has taken away one of the last advantages CompUSA had, and now it dangles by a thread in the shadow of Best Buy.

“Based on changing conditions in the consumer retail electronics markets, the company identified the need to close and sell stores with low performance or nonstrategic, old store layouts and locations faced with market saturation,” is equivalent to saying “We can’t compete toe to toe with our competition, but we hope to survive by being everywhere that they aren’t.”

Which is the desperate plea of a doomed business model. I declare Best Buy the winner of the consumer electronics war of the previous ten years. We’ll see how the Best Buy vs. Wal-mart vs. The Internet war of the next decade goes.

I just figured it out. Ubuntu is an African word that means “Holy crap, I can’t figure out how to configure Debian!”

(Also means: Great trouble-free windows replacement on an underpowered freebie laptop when installed with Xfce as the default desktop environment.)

If it seems boring, just humor me and wait for the demonstration at the end.

Behold, the Trackstick II GPS logging device:

The Trackstick records its own location, time, date, speed, heading and altitude at preset intervals. With over 1Mb of memory, it can store months of travel information. The Trackstick is the perfect tool for individuals looking for a way to track anything that moves. Use it for recording the exact routes you take when hiking, biking or vacationing. Record the location of everywhere you went, import pictures and other information into Google Earth™ to offer an entirely new perspective of your journey. Includes GPX photo stamping feature for adding your favorite photos to you own maps.

The little doodad operates for about a week on two AAA batteries. The applications are many, with anyone from suspicious lovers to company fleet managers able to keep a log of the device’s movements (and stops) that can be downloaded to a computer an overlaid onto a map.

As PDB exclaimed when I showed him: We really do live in the future!

From Scott Robbin:

If you’re a Wordpress user, and have the slightest grasp of HTML, then at some point in your blogging life you’re sure to have flung an insult at the built-in WYSIWYG editor that comes with Wordpress. While it suffices to accomplish the most minor formatting tasks, like bold, italics, and strikethough strikethrough, much is left to be desired.

Sure, there are keyboard commands to perform other standard formatting norms, like underline, but to the Wordpress noob these are non-intuitive and a bit wonky to use.

To those who have, or are thinking of committing WYSIWYG Hara-Kiri…..wait!!! All hope is not lost. That is to say, Wordpress 2.1 has a little trick up its sleeve: an Advanced Toolbar.

To activate another bar with some finer controls over the editor, Windows Firefox users can press Alt+Shift+V, Windows IE users can close the dozen popups in the way, then press Alt+V, and Mac Firefox users can press Ctrl+V.

Give it a shot. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you a full refund.

Well, Les Jones scooped me, so instead of a full-on reporting on the craziness, I will embrace and extend.

AOL allows users to select a password of up to 16 characters, but ignores all characters after the first eight. So if your password is “password\#)$8;-^” and someone tries breaking into your account with password “password” they’re in like Flynn.

But it’s even worse than Les thinks. Not only does AOL’s password hash ignore anything past eight characters, but it also ignores all non-alphanumeric characters. Furthermore, it applies the eight-character rule before throwing out special characters. Oh yeah, it’s also case-insensitive.

Thus, your hyper-paranoid password of mY_p@$$w0rD30uBI can also be entered as…

mypw.

It’s bad enough that AOL is often used by those without a firm grasp of information security, but to further hobble then by turning effective passwords into weak ones is incredibly insensitive. Now that it’s been exposed, expect to see some security changes in the next AOL client.

After being given some cash for Christmas to buy a new phone, I picked up a Siemens SX66 PDA/Smartphone. One of the things I wanted to be able to do was play MP3 and video files, and to do that I needed memory. For under $30, a 2GB Secure Digital card appeared at my doorstep. Soon after followed a couple of 1GB microSD cards, which are finally small enough that the “I could swallow this!” claim is credible.

First, a picture to show you how truly tiny these new cards are. Note that my hands are thoroughly average-sized.

What you’re seeing above is the microSD card at the tip of my finger, and a rather curious reader underneath. The microSD card fits into the reader, which fits into a USB port like so:

The microSD card cost me a whopping $10 with $3 shipping, though now you can find a $10/free shipping deal about once a week if you look. The PNY reader is apparently very hard to find. I happened to find it on eBay when I was looking for small USB readers, and after a pitched bidding war, I acquired it for a scathing $18 shipped. Considering I’ve not seen another one anywhere in the months since, I’m glad I spent the money. I certainly hope that we’re just on the leading edge of the production for these, so that we can see them on the market for the two or three dollars that I’m sure they could be sold for. If they are for some reason discontinued, then I’m just glad that I got mine before you got to it. You can have it for $50. Hah.

A size comparison:

If you happen to be looking on eBay for a reader, AVOID the “T-Flash Micro SD” reader at the top of the above picture. Mine was defective out of the box, and even if it had worked, the fragile microSD card protruded halfway out of the reader for no good reason, just waiting to be snapped in twain.

I’ve since sold the phone that I bought all this memory for (to a missionary who was leaving the country soon and couldn’t afford the inflated phone prices in the field), and I’m saving my pennies for an upgrade. While I had the phone, one application that worked very well for me was carrying the 2GB card in the phone with all my normal files, and then keeping the microSD card in the inside pocket of the phone holster. On the microSD card were up-close pictures of every single card in my wallet. This way, if my wallet was stolen, I could retrieve proof of my identification, as well as customer service numbers to report the credit cards as missing. With the SD card, I could display those images adequately on my PDA screen. If my phone was also stolen, the USB adapter meant that I needed only to find a working computer. It was an arrangement that provided some peace of mind, and I’m looking forward to having it again when I replace the phone.