Me, My Gym and Nike+

Because I’m a far lazy slob, and it’s high time I get my ass in gearYes, you’re right, we should totally rekindle the Zero2Hero movement. I just need to…, I paid my first visit in years to the fitness center yesterdayIt’s Palmfitness near Skt. Petri in Copenhagen.. Wait; wait, don’t go. This is really a tech-related post, just wait for it.

So I brought my iPhone, because that thing goes with me everywhere; and because despite the deafening music played by a live DJ (because that’s how the trendy people like to train, donchaknow), I was kind of hoping I could listen to some of my own music, or maybe even an audiobook.

I notice on the step-abdomenizer-leg-conjagulator-train-master-machine a wire with a plug that looks pretty much exactly like a dock-connector. “Hmm”, I think to myself, “that looks exactly like a dock-connector. I wonder…”, and plug in my iPhone. And sure enough, the touch screen turns into an interface through which I can choose my music or even play video.

That in itself is awesome (and the reason I need you to tell me what video podcasts you follow), but the coolest part is that it actually saves the workout data as a Nike+ dataset onto the iPhone. Go home, sync it and you’ve got your workout data right there alongside your usual Nike+ data (should you have any).

Aside from the fact that it’s a shame something like this has to happen on proprietary technology, it’s still very awesome and if nothing else extra incentive to get couch potato web-dev losers like myself down to the local gym.

I ♥ Tech

We were seated far, far away from our friends at the Depeche Mode concert (the sound was atrocious where we were seated, so I can’t honestly say if it was a ‘good’ concert, though it seemed pretty rockin’ down on the ground) this tuesday, and as we idled away, waiting for the old geezers to take the stage, we spent the time messaging each other, trying to get a visual in-amongst the thousands of people, because… Well, there wasn’t a lot else to do.

It struck me next day, that all we had to do was use Google Maps in our phones to send our locations to each other, and we would have saved ourselves the trouble. It wouldn’t have whiled away the time, but it would’ve been cool.

Consider; no more walking around searching for someone at the beach, in the park, at the concert, at that back-alley café, downtown club. They send you their location, bingo. Map, compass and directions always at the ready. It didn’t hit me until just then, but that’s a pretty wicked application of everyday information-age tech.

Update: Mr. Maber let me know that there even exists an app which makes it exceedingly easy to send your location in this manner.

A Joyous Microcosm

Or how I learned to stop worrying, and love Apple’s Time Capsule. Which, with the purpose of having you empathize with the effort it took to finally find a solution to my Time Capsule woes—a device I bought to rid us of previous problems, not to cause us new ones—requires a break down of our rather intricate home network setup.

A Time Capsule

Coming into the house we have a 20mbit tube, the router of which acts as a DHCP server and then goes directly into the 500GB Time Capsule under the TV, which is the backbone for the tethered part of the network as well as network entry-point for a 250GB HDD where I mainly store my music, its internal switch hooks up to the 1TB NAS, the media center Mac Mini (Godiva) running Plex and a wire running into our bedroom—to my workstation setup—where it connects to a 1Gbit switch, which goes into an old 802.11g Airport Extreme—which is also the print-point—and my MacBook Pro (Valkyrie), when I need the speed o’ teh wire. Right next to the Time Capsule, there’s an Airport Express, tethered to the Xbox 360Which is fucked for two reasons. One, the Xbox doesn’t have bult-in wifi, and I’m not paying the price MS wants for their wifi module, so it has to be tethered. And two, the Airport Express is only there because the Time Capsule does everything except Airtunes. Gee, thanks Apple. (Xuul) and a PS3 (Glortho) on wifi. And finally there’s a second Airport Express in the kitchen, again, simply for streaming music to the speaker there. Finally, aside from the consoles and the Mac Mini, there’s a MacBook Pro, an old Powerbook (Freya) and an iPhone (Monolith), plus various other devices from time to time.

Now, here comes the interesting part. I had been having some serious problems getting my money’s worth out of the Time Capsule up until this week. Not only did it suffer bandwidth degradation over time, but Time Machine would often have problems mounting the backup sparse-image on the Time Capsule (even if it was already mounted!)Check out the support forums; they’re flooded with people suffering Time Capsule woes. And not a word from Apple. I’ve had quite a few friends ask me about it as a solution to their problems, and I haven’t been able to recommend it to them, not least because of Apple’s lack of support for this unit. Not at least I can tell them what worked for me, but that’s hardly good enough., which was concerning, as I’ve come to rely quite heavily on Time Machine keeping my stuff safe. Needless to say, I was mildly annoyed that the two things I bought the thing for, speed and backup, weren’t working as advertised.

And I had tried literally everything I could think of. At the end of the day, I had the Time Capsule set up as a WDS main unit, with the other three 802.11g airports running WDS remote. WDS being necessary for bridging the ethernet ports of the airport expresses, and it wasn’t working as intended.

I had a sneaking suspicion that the g-units were what was bringing the network down in speed, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that since I really needed the g-segment. So it took me a little while, not being a networks expert, to figure out how to go about it, but what finally saved me was this:

I dropped support for 802.11g on the Time Capsule and instead tethered the Airport Extreme to the ‘backbone’ and set it up as a WDS main on its own 802.11g wifi network, with the Express’s hooking into it as remotes. Then I ditched support for g on the Time Capsule, and created an 802.11n wireless network, and set it up as 5Ghz (wide channels), and not 2.4Ghz, which is not only where our own g network is, but also a rather crowded frequency in our neighborhood.

Both wifi networks are on the same backbone, meaning I can easily stream music from my MacBook Pro to the Airtunes ports, control the MBP from my iPhone and otherwise go back and forth exactly as I please. And it’s fast enough for me to backup, serve music and even, for hobbiest levels, manage photos wirelessly.

Awesome.

On Google's Android

Steven Frank on Google’s Android:

A 34-company committee couldn’t create a successful ham sandwich, much less a mobile application suite. [...] For heaven’s sake: Find someone, ONE person, with a unique vision. Lock them in a room with some programmers and a graphic designer. Twenty people, tops. Change the world. Quit re-hashing the same old bullshit and telling me it’s new, exciting, or in any way innovative. #

A-thank you.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

I’m sure, if you run that through a decoder, it’ll spell out “Fuck DRM”.

Grats Kevin for standing up in the face of major legal issues, and grats to the digg community for leaving behind “Top 10 CSS Tricks”, “Digg Needs a Picture Category!!1” and all the other ‘oh yawn, here we go again’ stories that seem to drag Digg into the mud these days.

May 1st to 2nd, the night Digg got Dugg.

Update: Boing Boing is chronicling the exponential rise in Google hits, all now displaying the code; all of which leads one to think that perhaps this is the mass of consumers whispering in the ears of the entertainment industry: “Try to respect us as human beings, and not as potential criminals”. Or as I like to say: “Shove your fucking DRM up your own ass. Please”.

Need: Feed Filtering Service

Kataku posts nearly 45 entries a day! That is insane! Who the hell has the time to read that many entries?!

I need someone to filter through Kotaku and post the 2-3 news-worthy posts they have. And please, please stop posting about game-related paper craft. Nobody cares.

A shame really, as Kotaku, like Joystiq, which is also up there with 22 some posts a day! Newsflash: There can’t possible be 22 interesting things happening in the world of film every day!

Same goes for Whedonesque and the other top-posters, really.

Kotaku

Mac Mini Region-Free DVD?

DVD regions must die! It is ridiculous! I’m currently stuck, unable to change my Mac mini from region 1 to region 2, despite the fact that I have one of my five tries left. The fact that I even have this problem is idiotic, considering that I bought my DVD’s and I bought my Mac mini.

Neither are stolen or pirated, so why am I being bothered with this crap?

Anyway, does anyone know how I can break the law and put and end to this mockery?

High-Pitched Whine From Power Supply?

Recently I have noticed that the power supply for my Cinema Display has started emitting a high-pitched whine at night when it’s sleeping. It’s almost inaudible. Almost…

I have no idea what to do about this. I would shut it down on the switch, but that means turning off all the power in the bedroom (It’s an old building, one power outlet per room), and I hate not being able to simply sleep my computer.

I remember my old CRT monitor having the same problem, and it drove me nuts!

What the hell do I do!?

Step 1 - The CPC464 and CPC664

The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air.

I was 11-years-old when I got my first computer. Generously given to me by my maternal grand-father who was and still is himself something of a computer geek. It was an Amstrad CPC464 with a built-in tape deck and a green monochrome screen.

It had 4MHz and with 64K’s of RAM. I had no idea what the hell that meant, but I was overjoyed by having something as mindblowingly cool as a computer! I mean you have to consider that at this time in my life most of my creative energy went into circumventing the alotted cartoon-time pr. day by drawing up complex schedules for when to turn the TV on and off so that I would catch all of He-Man, GI Joe and that strange show with the rich kids who surfed and partied all the time…

I became a member of the local computer club and faithfully dragged the thing (which had no name, a tradition that I haven’t started using until rather late in my nerd life) back and forth every thursday. This was waaay before modems were even considered a possibility. I hadn’t even considered the idea of sending data down the phone pipe. With no networking of any kind, not even a simple parallel or serial cable to help us, most copying of games and programs (Bruce Lee and Harrier Attack!) was done using a standard tape recorder with a high-speed function on it. Sometimes it worked… Mostly not.

Probably about 8-12 months later I got my hands on an external disc drive which was just impossibly fast. I would marvel at how fast it was by loading up games from the tape deck, reset the machine and load them up from the disc drive and then compare the times… I wasn’t the smartest of kids.

Eventually I managed to get a new machine with the disc drive integrated instead of the tape deck, the CPC664. It was a lot sleaker than the one with the tape deck and the keys were colored grey and blue. Cool stuff!

The green monochrome screen remained however and somewhere along the line it either died or I lost interest in it for a while. At this time most of my friends were either sporting C64’s or Amiga 500’s. But because I was already an Amstrad man I saw no need to convert (not that I had the money). Today I wish I had had an Amiga, if for nothing else than the not-quite-so-sober late-night nastalgic talks with friends.

And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. For ‘a litte while’ computers passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, they ensnared another user.

Continued…

Thoughts on video and audio conferencing

In reply to an entry by Brian

“A long time ago it dawned on me that a computer needs a ringer like a telephone – completely seperate from the speakers, so you can use it for stuff like netmeeting and skype, knowing that it will actually make a phone-like noise on the other end of the line.”

“I guess the computer speaker could be used? I don’t know if it’s loud enough.”

I used video conferencing every day for 2 years for talking with Rikke (from Scotland to Denmark), and it soon occurred to me that the computer will never be, at least not in the current form, used for phoning by the average person. Or even by most geeks for that matter!

The ‘videophone’ has essentially been here for a long time, but nobody wants to sit down in front of a computer to use it. (Essentially it can be argued that you don’t want to sit down in front of a computer to browse the web, you just don’t know it yet…)

The alternatives are of course getting easier and better, AOL Instant Messenger">AIM and now also MSN Messenger have fairly good and easy to use video and audio features. But they still require substantial ‘training’ in comparison with a phone.

So really applying a ‘ringer’ to your computer to give in the same functionality as a phone is a bit backwards thinking. Rather the computer should be brought to fullfill the same function as a phone on the same terms as the phone. Partially doable with a laptop, but even that is still just a substitute.

For it to ever work properly you need a computer-phone which utilizes the Internet as if it was the phonegrid. It shouldn’t require any maintenance, but merely work at any given time. Pick up the phone and ‘dial Michael’ and shazaam. No more “Are you online? Is you webcam plugged in? I can’t hear you, can you hear me?! Sound is choppy, let’s try lowering the sound quality, say 4Hz?”. In my opinion it just isn’t a medium worth pursuing as anything other than a testbed for a proper hardware solution.

One can only hope that the ‘conferencing’ front has gained momentum with AIM, MSN Messenger and iChat on the move. Personally I’m still flabbergasted that this hasn’t been properly implemented in full yet. It’s at least 5 years late! And we’re still waiting for the first real step, a communications standard. Right now we’re merely heading into yet another, merely small-scale, browser-war.

Update: Slightly related and somewhat interesting story about the broadcasting of video using iChat.