Reed Me : mobile computing

The app that would get me to buy an iPhone...

reedme — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:51:34 GMT

I’m afraid to go look in the App Store, because it might be a real iPhone app and I might be kicked out of the ninja camp for talking like a pirate all the time. Doh!

Although, it probably wouldn’t be too hard to write one for Windows Mobile. I’ll add it to the long, long list of code that I’ll write Someday™.

South Park mobile business model?

reedme — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:30:14 GMT

Microsoft Details How to Port iPhone Apps to Windows Mobile

1. Write an iPhone app.
2. ...
3. Profit!

Heh.

I’ll read this later when the mobile app store opens and I come up with a killer mobile app to fund my retirement.

Or I stop waiting for Windows 7 phones to street and take a bite of the forbidden fruit. (Unlikely. My Samsung i760 still does everything I need with only a reboot once or twice a week.)

Credit to Code Project for suggesting step 1 in their newsletter today.

Future geek advantage? An inability to sit still?

reedme — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:08:00 GMT

Maybe I should stop trying to teach my children to sit still? Their hyperactivity is really just training for a future powering their own electronics with microbiomotion? Hrm.

Every heartbeat and every fidgety movement that a person makes while sitting at a computer carries with it a small amount of energy that could potentially be scavenged. However, harvesting this biomotion is challenging because so much of it is irregular. Now, for the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a nanogenerator can be driven by irregular, low-energy biomotion, including the tapping of a human finger and a hamster's erratic running and scratching. Technology Review: Harnessing Hamster Power with a Nanogenerator

Since carrying around enough hamsters to power my Xbox 3600 may not be practical in the future, maybe I should practice fidgeting more myself?

I wish we could start by “harvesting” the heat generated by our ICE power plants... if we could recover the heat generated by my 5.7L iForce V8 engine in the Sequoia or my 636cc wind-up toy in the Ninja, we could probably improve the efficiency of either quite a bit. I know the Ninja’s only starting to “warm up” and “get happy” when it reaches 200°F, so... I’m just sayin’.

Once we can turn biomotion into more juice than a nanowatt, it would be nice not to have to charge my phone anymore!

Live Mesh to the, uh, rescue?

reedme — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:50:38 GMT

One of my alleged New Year’s resolutions was to clean out the blogging back log. I have a bad habit of highlighting something on a web page, whacking the Live Toolbar button for “blog this” and letting my witty repartee rot in a folder somewhere in Documents. No more! I will have the “now habit” from henceforth… Mostly. It’s the end of January and I’m just now getting around to it.

Live Mesh is helping me by giving me a central place to keep everything, so I can blog whenever I’ve got a spare moment:

between meetings on the tablet (if my boss is reading this, I never do this during meetings – honest!)
lounging @ home watching some poor excuse for a TV show that the TiVo knew that I’d watch anyway (in all fairness I haven’t watched the show yet, but Kurtz was actually funny yesterday, so I linked it)
waiting for my teammates to rescue me after zombies had their way with my corpse in Left 4 Dead (my Xbox 360 game backlog is just as bad as blogging backlog, but I’m working on that, too!)
sitting in the garage on my motorcycle and wishing there was enough global warming to melt all this “unusual for the Pacific Northwest” snow and let me ride!

I really wish I’d meshed up my Windows Mobile phone two weeks ago… so that I wouldn’t’ve lost those notes and pictures when a keyboard malfunction (while entering the PIN) plus draconian security policy erased them all. Doh.

Live Mesh means that all my PCs have my blog post drafts from the past several years that never made it past The Censors™. Heh. Also, I can never claim to have lost a favorite link, either, now that they’re all meshed up.

How do I make a Mobile Tag for /dev/null?

reedme — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:11:17 GMT

I’m not going to say that the fact I broke down and joined Twitter in a moment of weakness today made me think of /dev/null... it’s probably just a coincidence. Meh.

A new tagging system? I wonder how much visual appeal had to the need for this instead of old-fashioned barcodes? If we can process these crazy tags on a mobile device, I’m sure we could do the same for bars.

Microsoft Tag - Linking real life with the digital world

Well, here goes nothing!

(No, that’s not a tag for /dev/null. It’s just a tag for this blog. Heh.)

Voice Command: FORMAT C: [ENTER]

reedme — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:40:55 GMT

Well, that’s how the joke used to go about Vista voice command... Apparently somebody thought it would be fun to actually implement something similar in their mobile o/s. On purpose or not. Heh.

The bug can hardly be called a security problem, given it requires access to the handset, but the fact that until the fix was issued today any G1 user typing a text message containing the word "reboot" would see their phone resetting is truly stunning... Google fixes world's most stupid bug • The Register

It’s hard to imagine why one would use the same editor/parser for text messages that is used for phone commands, or have a text sink that hooks in at the system level and parses commands out of all input, but... it’s funny either way. I love the Law of Unintended Consequences™.

As often as I have to reboot my own mobile phone, a voice command for doing this would save me from having to pop the battery off so often. <envy />

No. Yes. Zune!

reedme — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 04:26:05 GMT

As if I have to answer, but...

Every dumb yuppie poser has an iPod. Your parents and grandparents have iPods. Do you really want to be like them? Or are you a rebel, a hipster, the first on your block to have something different?
Zune's New Tune (Forbes.com)

No. Yes. Zune, Zune, Zune!*

Sara Itani (17yoa) told Forbes:

"I love it. It's better than the iPod Nano. The interface blows me away. It's more efficient. And the Zune software is really pretty. It makes iTunes look like a spreadsheet, honestly."

She said, "iTunez == Spreadsheet. Heh."

The subscription feature absolutely rawks! I didn't know that iTunez fell short in the regard... but that would've been a deal-breaker. I loved Urge, too, but the Zune no workie with Urge.

* With humblest apologies to the Mazda marketing team and the original, geriatric artist. ;-)

Fashionable PCs? How about...?

reedme — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:01:22 GMT

While I'm not opposed to sleek, sexy computing power, there are other priorities that I'd like addressed...

Typical consumers simply purchased their devices out of necessity, but the scales are beginning to tip with demand growing for hardware that performs well, but looks good at the same time. As the form factor of computers evolve to be more attractive, they are transitioning from being the eyesore in the bedroom to the centerpiece of the living room.
Microsoft: The future is in fashionable PCs (BetaNews.com)

I don't mean to go off on a rant here (with apologies to Dennis Miller), but... I'd like a PC that:

Really works like a pad of paper and a pen (i.e. won't boil my eggs if I happen to set it in my lap, if you know what I mean)
Can be viewed easily in direct sunlight (and doesn't require juice just to keep the screen on while I'm reading)
Have a startup time that isn't measured in parsecs, glacial cycles or prehistoric epochs (I was kidding about parsecs; I know that's a measure of distance. Inside joke for Star Wars fans.)
Has a battery life long enough work all day and get something useful done without recharging (Heck, my Windows Mobile 6 phone can't even do that!)
Has a walking around weight less than my mountain bike (I've had to carry my bike uphill to the office, trust me when I say my Tablet PC weighs less.)

Maybe I'm just jaded and still angry that my fully-charged Tablet PC ran out of juice during a team meeting this morning that was less than 90 minutes, but... I'd like my wifi-enabled, quad-core, bubble ink Tablet PC with a side order of terabyte flash storage to go, please. Hold the extra old-fashioned RAM, spinny hard drive thingy and the obsolete spare batteries, if you would.