Relevant History

On NPR

Cyrus Farivar quotes me at the end of his latest NPR Morning Edition piece, "High-Tech Pen Makes Note-Taking Easier."

In my sound bite, I reveal that I like paper because it's harder for me to break paper than the screen on my Nokia N95.

I played the piece for my kids this morning before I took them to school. At the end of it, my son came up to me and said, "You know, Dad, you really do drop your stuff a lot." Gee, thanks kid.

[To the tune of Handsome Boy Modeling School, "The Projects (PJays)," from the album "So...How's Your Girl?".]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, media

The greatest achievement of my life

I now have a score of 2075 in Nintendo Wii tennis. My kids can spend the rest of their life in therapy, I can go broke, I can crash the car into a bus full of nuns and orphans-- none of that matters now.

via flickr

At this stage, it's not enough to beat the machine; you have to win decisively in order to even maintain your score. Which is kind of a pain, but if keeps you interested. A trophy would be nice, too. Even a virtual one.

[To the tune of Lee Ritenour, "Ipanema Sol," from the album "Rio".]

Technorati Tags: games, sports, Wii

Words to live by

 

Cool present

Tue 12/25/2007 07:02 12252007425

An excellent tripod for my digital camera. I married into a family with frighteningly good taste in gifts.

The Nokia is back

Just in time for Christmas-- my long lost cell phone arrived today, good as new. Now i need a titanium shell, a case made with carbon nanotubes woven into the fiber, or something. I don't want another thing dangling from my belt, but I want to send it back to the repair center even less.

After this most recent mishap, I wonder how long it will be before cell phones are made like watches. How long before designs and especially interfaces are standardized enough so phones can be built for durability

Phone update

$100 to put a new screen on the phone. Of course I said yes.

And today I'm listening to nothing but Zeppelin. The reviews make the concert sound incredible.

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "Ten Years Gone," from the album "Led Zeppelin (Disc 3)".]

Technorati Tags: N95

MOO cards are here

Got my latest set of MOO (I notice they use all caps) cards today. They look quite nice-- the company does excellent work.

I chose a mix of pictures that have worked well on previous sets, and some new ones from my last trips to England and Budapest. I think that while the picture Anthony took on Raday Utca is pretty amazingly archetypal-- and works really well in the narrow format of the cards-- I'm going to keep mixing up the images.

[To the tune of Radiohead, "Reckoner," from the album "In Rainbows".]

Technorati Tags: Moo

The phone is in the mail

I sent my broken Nokia 95 off today to be repaired. One of my colleagues described it as a "Brokia N95."

Sometimes I feel less like a professional and more like a camp counselor, or the cool uncle who lets you stay up late and play Grand Theft Auto.

[To the tune of Paul McCartney, "Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey," from the album "All the Best".]

Technorati Tags: N95

New phone is now... a phone

Friday afternoon I took the kids rollerblading at Stanford. On the way home, I stopped at the T-Mobile store and bought a prepaid SIM card for my Nokia N95. Mainly I wanted it so I could get a Fring account, and use the phone for VoIP calls; but I figured it would be nice to be able to use it as a phone if I really needed.

For the last couple years, I've carried around a cellphone, iPod, and digital camera. I don't leave the house without the first and last, and usually I've got all three (plus headphones, obviously). The more I spend time with the thing, the closer I come to believing that under some the right circumstances I could be happy carrying just one device.

Of course, specialized devices are probably always going to be better than combination devices. And as an MP3 player, the Nokia is definitely way behind an iPod: it has a much smaller memory, the sound quality strikes me as a bit below the iPod's (a tiny bit of persistent background hiss), and lacks the ability to handle all the playlists and so forth (not to mention the inability to play music bought from the Apple store). However, I can get a respectable seven hours' music on the 1GB micro SD card, and have loaded it up with songs that I like, but haven't listened to much recently (in smart playlist-speak, fulfilling all of the conditions: not played in the last 14 days, not played more than 30 times, rated with four or five stars, selected at random).

The camera is very good for everyday use, though I notice two issues with it: the latency is quite a bit higher than with my Canon digital camera-- about 7-10 seconds, compared with under 2 for the Canon-- and the night photography isn't nearly as good.

There's also no way to get a wrist strap on the N95, which for me is a significant thing, as for me not putting the wrist strap on leads to disaster.

The thing I'm using it most for is a mobile blogging device: basically, a digital camera with wifi. It's great when I know I want to throw a quick update up on the blog (though just why I want it immediately, I'm not sure), a quick post that I can follow up later. The speed is nice, but I do feel like it comes at a price: while the predictive typing is pretty good, even with it I don't seem to want to write anything longer than a couple sentences-- and obviously I'm not someone who's afraid of long posts. Still, I can imagine than when I'm on the road, it could be a cool thing: if I'd had this in Budapest, for example, I could have pretty much live-blogged every minute of the trip (there's wifi all over the place in Budapest).

Actually, I did do that, because I was carrying around my laptop and cell phone everywhere I went. And since it was a working trip, and I trust my ability to take really good pictures with the Canon, I'm not sure I would have given them up for a single, slightly inferior device-- inferior not so much in technical terms, but in terms of a couple specific performance criteria, and in terms of my ability to use.

I'll see if that changes with next year's travels.

Technorati Tags: blogging, camera, mobility, music, N95, phone

Trying predictive typing

I decided to try out the predictive spelling feature on my Nokia genius phone. Its pretty interesting. Normally, to spell, say, the word interesting, you have to push a total of 24 keys (i.e., 4 three times to type the letter i, 2 twice to type the letter n, etc.). Instead, you tap the following keys:

46837378464

The phone starts guessing with the first number:

i
in
got
inte
inter

And so on. It does a rather good job, too. Though it feels odd: you almost HAVE to not look at the screen as you type, and he you make a mistake the result is not a misspelled word but the wrong word spelled right. Definitely requires ignoring some familiar habits.