deh ipwn
So according to last post I got an iPhone--affectionately referred to as my ipwn. This is also apparently ironic because of my new job in Micro$ofts Premium Mobile Experience (PMX) group. Sweet. Irony is fun. My relationship with my ipwn has been mildly rocky, and as with all Apple products I own, they infuriate me by announcing a new one not long after I get mine--the UMTS iPhone is due out in July. Meh. Back to the topic at hand: the top five things jduv loves/hates about his ipwn.
Love (from least to most awesome):
The Camera and Photos application. One thing Apple definitely did right was in their design of most of the applications on the iPhone. The photo application is loads of fun to show off, and even play with when you are bored. The camera isn't half bad either.
Landscape view. Turn your ipwn on it's side and it landscapes the current application you are using--in most cases. How cool is that? Now if they could only make it work for the SMS application so I have bigger buttons to type with.
The sleek design. Face it. The iPhone is down right sexy. From it's sleek aluminum design to it's uber cool but mildly annoying touch based interface.
The Maps application. This little guy has saved my butt many a time--for I am known to get lost often. It will even use GSM tower triangulation to figure out where you are--haha take that GPS.
The Phone application. Calling someone is as easy as poking their name in the phone app. You can't get any simpler than that. Plus it's pretty. It's also easy to accidentally call someone, so I have to make sure the phone is locked before it goes into my pocket.
Hate (From least to most annoying)
Edge is slow as hell. Being a former Danger employee I have been spoiled by the backend transcoading that the Danger Service provides for interweb surfing. This makes for an impatient jduv when surfing facebook on his ipwn. Fortunately the UMTS version of the iPhone will fix this issue--if you want to spend the cash to upgrade and deal with even crappier battery life.
Audio Quality. Sometimes it's hard to hear people, but hopefully its a speaker issue and a decent bluetooth headset will fix this problem. The AT&T network doesn't help either =/.
Battery life. My old HTC 3125 would go for around 2 days without a charge. If I turn on wi-fi then I can guarantee a dead battery in less than 8 hours. Okay, so that is to be expected since wi-fi chip sets are power hogs, but my battery life still maxes out at 1.5 days on strict edge browsing and a talk time of less than two hours. Pathetic.
Dropped calls. This irritates me. It has only happened two times, but both during key points in a conversation I was having with the lady and with full radio service. Not good. Of course this could be easily blamed on AT&T (strike two guys...).
Random lockups. Nothing is more encouraging when your in a hurry than a nice hard lock followed by a pretty blue screen. Oh, we aren't talking about Windoze. So far deh ipwn has locked up completely at least 2 times, and most times it's Safari's fault. The radio has also died once or twice, requiring a phone reboot to get it to work again. Looks like Apple's "it just works" mojo isn't exactly working for this product in some aspects.
So the conclusion is, I like my ipwn, but it's a love/hate relationship. There are things it does that it does better than any other product in the market, but it's full of shortcomings as well. I must say that I don't have a problem with the touch keyboard--I thought that would be at the top of my "hate" list. I have gotten used to it and I'm pretty darn fast on the little sucker. I do, however, hate the little text suggest box. It never guesses correctly when your texts are mainly in l33tsp34k.
Lastly, for whatever it's worth, utoob is good fun when you forgot your laptop, are bored in a meeting, and on corporate wi-fi. =D
Attention World: I have Defected
Welcome to the first post from my MacBook Pro. I'll try to make it as shiny and hyped as Apple's products are. Warning, contrary to my current theme this post is in fact, not green. If anything, it's a total waste of power given the servers required to run my wonderful website.
I'm not quite a Jobs fanatic yet, but I have to admit the interface on this big guy is pretty amazing. I even have a terminal. I also don't understand the adamant PC users who tout that Macs don't have any good software. They must not be looking in the right places (ahem, Google) because I have found more than I can process in the past couple of days. Some of them cost a small amount of money but are totally worth it like SuperDuper backup, and others are all time free favorites like VLC.
Anyway, I took the red pill. I'm about to see how deep this rabbit hole goes. Too bad for the MacBook Air though. I can't justify paying 2k for a computer that is totally inferior to my already beefy MacBook Pro.
An Experiment in Tone
Playing guitar is an interesting hobby. It's intriguing to watch how people approach different facets of playing. For example every person has their own opinion on what the "perfect" amp and the "perfect" guitar setup is; even down to the seemingly irrelevant things such as which guage of strings to use. The naive guitarist--often young in his or her playing ability--often doesn't think of things such as body wood, pickup height, action, string guage, and neck wood. At one time, I was the naive guitarist. My focus was on sounding like someone else: Metallica, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Joe Satriani, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, Foo Fighers, my list of musical phases is quite long. These days I have focused more on building my own sound; much of which requires a decent chunk of investment captital, a rock solid resolve when things go wrong, and the will to experiment.
Physics is a wonderful science because it is applicable to nearly every physical thing in life. Since I'm a nerd (ahem, see blog categories) I like to apply science to random things in life. With that said, many of the rules of physics can be applied to a guitar to help explain the characteristics of the instrument. For example, electro magnetics are the key to how pickups work. The body mass of a guitar can and most times will color the tone of the guitar. The type of woods involved when you build the guitar will color the tone of the instrument--energy, or the vibrations caused by the strings travels differently through different types of wood. Tightness of the neck and bridge relative to the body of the guitar dictates string sustain. The applications are many.
Why all the preface? Recently I have been tweaking the Telecaster that I have "borrowed" from a good friend of mine. I added new pickups--a Lollar P90 at the neck and a Lollar Telecaster Special at the bridge, changed the bridge out to a Wilkinson, and rewired some of the electronics. Needless to say my first attempt was good, but not perfect. The P90 was very dark and muddy, and the bridge pickup was bright and ice picky. After posting on my favorite forum, I received some suggestions on how to fix the problem. So I followed those suggestions and the gutiar gained some new life. Unfortunately, it was a little too bright. Next, I ordered a custom bridge with stainless steel saddles from Callaham Guitars. Not only did that bridge fix the typical intonation problem that Telecasters with vintage saddles are afflicted with, but it darkened the tone just enough to where I am happy with it.
I used to believe that a guitar simply is, a guitar. There is no coloration of tone because of the materials. I was totally incorrect in my thinking because I was thinking only in terms of electronics. The microphonics of a pickup is more nuanced by the tone and vibrations of the body and bridge than I had previously thought. Who would have thought that the tone of the guitar would be quite darker with a bridge that is simply .25mm thicker? Who would have thought that stainless steel saddles would add some snap to my pick attack? Who would have thought that the guitar would have picked up an additional second of body sustain and an improvement to the overall bendability/playability of the strings due to the tightness of the bridge relative to the body? Not I. I am a nonbeliever no more. Components matter.
So, I believe I am finally finished with tinkering with this guitar. It's tone is now truely righteous in my eyes. Were I to do anything else, it would be efforts to kill the 60 cycle hum that all single coil pickups suffer from. In any event, this endeavour has been very rewarding and quite fun. Every penny spent was well spent in my eyes, even for the pieces that I didn't use or switched out. I love this hobby, and I must say it's quite less expensive than some others =D.
PSP you complete me
I have been spending copius amounts of my free time--and certain relatively short "bathroom breaks" at work--playing with my new toy: a Playstation Portable. Chang hooked me up with the value pack from Target: $169 for a Silver Slim PSP, a game, a Family Guy UMD, and a 1GB memory stick. The game, Daxter, sucks. I like platformers as much as the next guy, but the cheesy lines all throughout the story make it unplayable. Since Daxter sucked and a PSP without any games is basically a paperweight--oh but what a sexy one--I bought Final Fantasy 1 Anniversary edition. It's a superb remake of the original, and I'll review it sometime after I'm finished.
The new slim PSP's have some advantages over the older "big bertha" PSP's. First off, they are lighter and slimmer. Before you curse me for stating the obvious you must realize exactly how much ligher and slimmer. The answer is, well, a lot! Chang and I compared his old school PSP to mine, and the slim PSP feels 50% lighter* than the old one and is around 5mm slimmer. Next advantage: a TV out port. It needs a proprietary cable, but still a pretty cool feature. Last and most important is battery life. The slim PSP has a handicap in this area because the battery shipped with it is actually smaller than the original PSP battery, but Sony is going to be shipping backplates for those who wish to use the larger PSP battery with the slimmer system.
I'll probably stick with the regular old battery. If I'm playing this thing longer than 5-6 hours a day then I probably need to lock it away in a drawer and mail the key to Uganda. It charges via USB so I'll always have a some sort of charger with me since every portable electronic device I own does the same.
The old PSP's appear to be built a bit sturdier than the slim ones, but I'm not planning on using mine as a hockey puck any time soon. My new toy should also be able to play nicely with my PS3 creating a combination that is composed strictly of 100% WIN. Any compatible games I download on the PS3 can be transfered to the PSP. Looks like I may need a bigger Memory Stick =D.
*The actual specification is 33% lighter, but human hands are never good judges of weight 
.
IP -> Gmail
Something I have been meaning to do for a while is figure out how to get my machine to email me my IP address. Behold!
w3m http://www.whatismyip.com -dump | grep "Your IP Is" |
gawk '{print $4}' > /tmp/ip;
mailx -s "IP Address" jduv@gatech.edu < /tmp/ip
As usual since the format of my blog makes viewing long scripts difficult make sure the first string of commands is on a single line. The first line points a text based WWW browser called w3m to http://www.whatismyip.com and dumps the contents to a grep call for the string "Your IP Is." That in turn is piped to gawk for formatting and dumped to a file called ip in the /tmp folder.
Then the next line dumps the contents of that file to a mailx call with a subject of "IP Address" and then mails that to my email address. A cron script and simple filter inside Gmail later, and I have daily updates on what my machine's IP address is. Forget paying 30 bucks a month for a static IP!
