2008 08 07 - Thu
posted by jack at 04:55 CET in / compute / blogging 
Some time ago, perhaps inspired by the daily comics-watching antics of The Comics Curmudgeon and Garfield Minus Garfield, I started a new comics-oriented blog. The premise of this blog is simple: Most of these so-called "comics" or "funnies" are anything but funny; Many of them can be enhanced (I'll stop short of saying "improved" or "made funnier") by replacing the last text bubble with a single stupid punchline. The results can be humorous, absurd, ribald, or scatological. See for yourself at Comics In My Pants. I've kept it going for a month now, dredging through the daily strips looking for spots where my punchline of choice seems to fit, at least syntactically. Enjoy!
2008 08 03 - Sun
posted by jack at 11:37 CET in / compute
Now that I've had my iPhone 3G for just over three weeks, I figure it's time for me to share some thoughts.
Anyone reading this probably already has some idea of the iPhone, just from the constant media attention, so I won't mention the most well-known features (touch interface, hi-res display, GPS) except in passing.
The Good
The web, everywhere. For years I've had phones that supported web-browsing in some form, first with GPRS and more recently with 3G. The problem was always the browser itself. The built-in browser in most phones often feels like a bad joke, like surfing today's web with Netscape 1.1, over a 1200 bps modem. Opera Mini changes the game considerably, providing a decent browser experience for almost any modern phone, but the fact that it's not integrated into the phone means that as soon as you click a link in an SMS or email, or do anything else that the phone considers an internet-related event, you are thrown back into the phone's caveman browser. With the iPhone, you're using Safari, which is an established browser with a great javascript interpreter, so it works well with most existing websites. So far I haven't seen any sites that trip it up, and I really don't expect to. The only drawbacks are the lack of Flash (which I do miss in a few spots; I can't play Scrabulous without it!) and Java (really only a drawback in theory, since usage of Java in the browser seems to have vanished from the face of the earth).
Pervasive contacts. Your contact database, imported automatically from Mac OS's Address Book (or Windows' Outlook, though I haven't tested), is readily available for applications to use, both built-in and third-party. For example, if I'm using the maps application and need direction's to a friend's house, I don't have to enter his address, since I can just pick it from the address book. Similarly, I've already got email addresses and phone numbers for most of my friends and family in my address book, so they're all just a few taps away.
Offloading resources. One of the working assumptions of the iPhone is perpetual internet access. This is put to good use in, for example, the maps application. Unlike most previous standalone GPS units or telephones with GPS, the iPhone doesn't need to be preloaded with map data, it gets it live from google just like your web browser does. This also goes for route planning, that's handled by google's servers instead of the phone itself.
The built-in speaker. This baby is surprisingly loud. Combined with talk-radio podcasts, you can convincingly reproduce the experience of listening to AM talk-radio on a tinny kitchen radio! This is actually more useful than I'd imagined; If it's placed on a surface a few feet away I can hear it even over the noise of babbling children, a running dishwasher, etc. Not a great hi-fidelity music listening experience obviously, but for talk podcasts or just to have some music playing in the background, it's pretty good.
The App Store. Being able to quickly and easily download software for the phone, both free and commercial, via a built-in application, is a big win. Sure, lots of the applications are similar to one another, and you sometimes sift through commercial apps that are bested by free competitors, but that's true of desktop software as well. If you buy any non-free applications, you probably won't need to break out a credit card, since the App Store will charge the credit card you've previously registered with Apple for either a .mac membership or iTunes Music Store purchases.
Some great apps. There are some great apps available already in the App Store, with more to come. Chief among these, perhaps, is Apple's own Remote app, which lets you control iTunes on any Mac or PC on your wireless network. For years I've envisioned smarter remote controls, that would actually be aware of the state of the devices they're controlling (instead of just blindly sending commands in response to button presses that may or may not be relevant at the moment, as current remotes do), and this is actually a step in that direction.
The "Bad"
Missing 3G features. The iPhone is missing some features that many people have come to expect from 3G phones, particularly MMS, video calls, and FM radio (not really a 3G feature at all, but something that many people expect in a modern phone in any case). For me, the absence of those features has no effect. I've been using 3G phones for several years, and during that time I made a video call once (to a friend in the same room, just to try it out), sent an MMS maybe once, and received MMS messages a handful of times (literally, I can count them on one hand). IMHO, video calls and MMS are actually mis-features, created by the telephone carriers as another way to charge high service fees. As for FM radio, well I did listen to it a few times with my previous phone, but now I've got 8 gigs of space to fill with my own music and podcasts! Who wants to listen to commercial radio when they can choose themselves?
The (truly) Bad
Some things just won't sync. At least for me. For some reason any apps I download straight from the phone aren't synced back to iTunes, so in the event of a full restore (see below) I am forced to manually download them again.
The Ugly
Full restore. I ended up having a problem where every app I had downloaded (including Apple's own Remote app) crashed right after startup, sending me back to the home screen. A bit of googling revealed the solution: Sync everything, and do a full restore. Ugh. That's the sort of thing that makes me hate Windows, where the general solution to any problem starts with "reinstall Windows", and it pains me to see this "solution" on the iPhone. Hopefully things will stabilize. On a plus note, the full restore was quite painless, if a bit slow. The only problem is that none of my third-party apps were synced to iTunes, so I had to reinstall them all. If I'd had any valuable data saved in any of these apps, then I'd probably consider that to be a much bigger problem.
The Battery. Oh, good gracious me, this phone sucks juice. I was aware that it would do so, I'd heard that many smartphone users need to charge their phones every day, but still. The speed with which that battery gauge dives into the red is truly frightening. I'm thinking forward a year or two when, if this battery deteriorates anything like my first MacBookPro battery, I'll be down to 3-4 hours of standby time, or maybe 15 minutes of actually using the phone before the battery is completely drained. Turning off 3G seems to help (and surprisingly doesn't seem to effect the speed of mobile surfing too much), and turning off wi-fi helps even more, but how fun is that?
In Conclusion
I think the iPhone 3G represents a milestone, of sorts. While I don't suppose that everyone, or even a large minority, will have an iPhone in the next few years, I do think that it raises the bar in many areas, and when other phones start reaching the iPhone's level of integration and internet capabilities, it'll be better for everyone. Rising tides and all that. In any case, if you want a sneak peek at the future of mobile telephony, buy an iPhone today.
2008 06 27 - Fri
posted by jack at 22:22 CET in / compute
Tech Sweden is abuzz with news of Telia's iPhone pricing plans having been released today. Unlike the AT&T contracts in the U.S., Telia's contracts for Sweden don't directly include unlimited data transfer. Also unlike the AT&T contracts, at first blush (and subsequent for that matter) the Telia contracts seem really pretty expensive, especially the iMaxi plan, which starts at about $150/month!
So, looking to maximize my bang for the buck, I worked up a little spreadsheet showing the monthly and total costs for the various phone models and plans.
- The figures in bold are prices straight from Telia's site.
- The figures in light blue are monthly recurring costs for the stated data amounts, and a second row for unlimited data amounts (arrived at by adding in the cost of Telia's 9kr/day "maxtaxa"; Note that this represents the maximum amount you'd pay in a month, assuming you blew past the free amount in the first day and kept using some amount of data transfer every single day of the month)
- The pale green figures show the absolute smallest total cost for each of the two models, and the pale purple figures show the smallest total cost for each of the two assuming unlimited data. Note that these all wind up being for 18-month contracts, so for comparison's sake I've included extended calculations for the 18-month contracts, adding a row for what you'd pay if you continued with a normal Telia "fastpris" account at 199/month, and another row that adds in that plus the "maxtaxa" to arrive at the costs for unlimited data.
- The dark green figures show the smallest total 24-month cost for each model, and the dark purple figures show the smallest total 24-month cost for each model assuming unlimited data.
- I haven't calculated anything around extra minutes or extra SMS, since I (and probably many other iPhone users) assume that data usage will be a much more important factor, and in my case I'm sure that I'll seldom use more than 100 minutes or 100 SMS per month.
Some interesting points pop out when looking at this. For one thing, the more expensive plans really seem disastrously expensive, especially iMaxi. If you're not planning on calling for 16 hours a month or sending 1000 SMS/month (who does that?) then those really seem like a waste. Even if you were using that much, it seems like the standard tariffs, combined with the iMini plan, would still be much cheaper. Again, for my anticipated usage I really don't care, but maybe someone who really is a big voice or SMS user will calculate these things.
Another thing that strikes me is that there is an interesting pattern to these numbers. If you look at the dark purple and dark green figures, the cheapest totals (for minimum and unlimited data) for each model, they both are for a 24-month contract. Compared to building an equivalent usage period by combining an 18-month contract and a 6-month "fastpris", they are just barely cheaper; precisely 200kr in each case. And that's all assuming that Telia's "fastpris" and "maxtaxa" will remain at their current levels for the next 18 months. If they get even just a tiny bit cheaper, or if another operator has a better deal for iPhone users 18 months from now, then the 18-month contract will turn out to be a better deal in the long run.
So, it seems that financially, whichever of the two models you're looking to buy, the iMini 18-month plan seems like the way to go. Again, things may be different if you plan on doing lots of voice calls or SMS, but I'll leave that for someone else to figure out.
2008 06 09 - Mon
Just in time for WWDC '08, allow me to introduce you to Twucket.
Twucket is a new Twitter client for Mac OS X that I am releasing as freeware. I created Twucket because I wasn't happy with any of the available ways to view my Twitter page. The actual twitter website is a hugely-rendered page, and requires you to go to the browser now and then to see if anything has come in; The standalone clients I tried were either wasteful of screen real estate, or didn't fit in with the overall Mac GUI, or contained ads.
Twucket suffers from none of those problems. Its interface is minimalist and small, it behaves like a normal Mac application, and it doesn't insert ads into the display. What it does offer is a compact, simple Twitter interface with a few features that Twitter users will probably appreciate. It uses a relatively small amount of screen real estate per message, so you can leave a small window open in a corner of your screen that is still large enough to show the latest 4 or 5 messages you've received.
I do have additional plans for future versions of Twucket, but today is the day for 1.0.0. If you're a Twitter user, please give it a try and let me know what you think!
2008 02 11 - Mon
posted by jack at 17:09 CET in / compute
Podcasts. Either you're listening to them, or you're not. For me, living geographically removed from the American mediasphere, podcasts are a great way to keep up with American and other English-language professionally-produced audio content, not to mention all the stuff that people are putting out there on their own.
It's a bit like having your own radio station, just full of stuff you actually want to hear, that you can listen to whenever you want. I've usually got my iPod half-full with a variety of shows; I don't listen to each episode of each show, but I've got a pretty wide span so I can pick whatever I want at whatever moment I feel like listening.
I don't often see people writing about what podcasts they're listening to, and randomly browsing podcast sites looking for good shows takes time, so it's not always easy to find the good stuff that's out there. Just for the sake for sharing, here are a few of my favorites.
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Le Show
- Harry Shearer, the voice of many of the Simpsons characters, and one of the co-stars of the classic film Spinal Tap (in the role of Derek Smalls, the one with the incredible sideburns/mustasche combo) gives us this weekly glimpse into the news, focusing on politics and entertainment, rounded off with a bit of sketch comedy. Satirical, insightful, almost always funny.
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This American Life
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Each week, This American Life picks a topic, and presents a handful of segments about it using interviews, short-story readings, or other forms of audio journalism. No matter what the subject matter, it always feels like an hour well-spent. Chicago Public Radio produces this (mostly-)weekly show.
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Undercover Songs
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This is one of the very first podcasts I ever subscribed to. Nuno Nunes presents a handful of covers, songs performed by someone other than the original artists. This is huge fun! Although the frequency of updates has declined steadily—first weekly, then bi-weekly, now basically bi-annually—the content is great, and you will always hear something new and unexpected.
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Savage Love
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Many people have seen Dan Savage's Savage Love advice column in the alternative press; I read it for years in one of the Minneapolis/StPaul free papers before moving to Sweden. Fortunately Dan has embraced this new digital age, and now offers a phone number where people can call in and record their questions, and he offers them advice, sometimes calling them back to get more info. Though the vast majority of the callers have problems and concerns far from my own life, it's pretty interesting to hear the concerns of bisexual grammar fetishists living in poly relationships with jesus freaks. If this sounds vaguely Jerry Springer-esque, don't worry, it's not.
Well, that'll do for now. If anyone else feels like sharing, don't forget to use the comments,
now less-broken than they've been in months!
