I was feeling strongly that $10/month for entertainment is enough since I may probably only watch 2-3 movies a month, sometimes less. So if I do pay per view on iTunes / amazon / youtube video rental, I should not have to pay more than what I was used to pay for netflix. In fact I had canceled comcast (an outrageous $100/month for internet and tv) many years ago and found that I was fine with using netflix and other sources and did not miss TV at all…

And while consumption wise I was right, content library wise I was not. Multiple times I knew exactly hat what I was not able to find would have been available on netflix. And I missed the user interface that allows me to browse, drill down on actors / directors / genres, and discover new movies.

So I paid for amazon prime, just to discover that the free instant view was only for a subset of movies, and that even the ones I was then still willing to pay for where not available when I had something specific in mind.

Long story short – I reactivated my netflix account for streaming only ($8/month) less than 2 months after I had quit and probably will turn on the 1 dvd out per month for a total of $15/month once I find more movies that are not in the streaming lib (already had the issue a few times).

Now get the movies that are DVD only into the streaming library please!

PS: Tempted to buy an $100 Wifi-enabled BlueRay player with netflix+amazon+youtube interface…  so far I just connect my macbook to the overhead projector in the living room

- android mobile phone customers pay $5 per mobile phone to microsoft because of software patents they bought. Microsoft has their own windows mobile system and has contributed NOTHING to the android infrastructure, yet we have to pay them when we decide against their product?
- microsoft was at least temporarily stopped from selling microsoft word because of XML patents. XML is an industry standard. How could you possibly punish them for finally using standards instead of proprietary methods that keep competitors out more?
- patent cartell buys nortels patents for billions of dollars, smaller competitors that are not in on the cartel will suffer. What does the SEC have to say about that? Apparantly nothing. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nortel-announces-the-winning-bidder-of-its-patent-portfolio-for-a-purchase-price-of-us45-billion-2011-06-30
- study shows that software patents are detrimental to the industry as a whole. What a surprise.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1868979#%23 with similar results already expected in 2008: http://researchoninnovation.org/dopatentswork/

And still I get ‘software patents are necessary to incentivice innovation’. No, they are just a means to keep smaller inventors from succeeding and feed a multi billion dollar litigation and cartel building machine. Software patents need to be abolished.

G2 has arrived

The good:

- super fast delivery from t-mobile. I ordered it on the 4th and was able to select it for a plan upgrade. It arrived on the evening of the 5th. This time t-mobile got the launch process right, perfect user experience.

- compared to the G1 its very fast – feels like the Nexus One, but with a physical keyboard.

- android 2.2 with gmail supporting more than one google account is a plus, but a nicer mail app comparable to what apple does could be better…

- H instead of 3G is noticably faster. According to speedtest.net I get about 2Mbps download, and 1Mbps upload on average. That is more than my $40/month AT&T DSL… mhm… maybe I’ll cancel AT&T’s DSL, add a line to keep using my G1 as a phone and leave the G2 at home as an internet hotspot? But I’d miss the speed on the road then…

- did I already say it was fast? So not just from a network standpoint, but also from a cpu standpoint, working with the web browser, firing up navigation etc does no longer invoke a half a minute wait as on the G1…

- picture quality is actually better than I first thought! See photo below…

The bad:

- keyboard does not have number row and stuff in non-qwerty places, and so it is a lot more cumbersome to type on that the G1 that had a real qwerty keyboard.

- While it is real cool that the gallery on the phone now includes photos from picasa and other sources (I really like that actually) it also appears to be much slower to bring up a picture in full resolution than expected?

The ugly:

- in-call volume is very low. I was able to make phone calls directly from the handset with the G1 that I cannot make anymore with the G2, i.e. from a bus or car… with the speaker it is fine.

I’ll post more as I use it more

…posting everything in german and in english. Because I noticed that being fully immersed in an english speaking country, I mostly think and formulate my posts in english. But that is not my mother tongue. And as I now make the extra effort to also translate to german I refine what I meant to say and translate that back to english. So my experiment will be to alternate in languages. One post will be formulated in english and translated to german, whereas the following will be formulated in german and translated to english. While I blur it a bit by refining both as I translate, I think reading it later will be interesting as it shows how the origin of language might make a difference in writing styles…

…and maybe it will only serve somebody to refine their english / german skills, which already might be a success

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Michael

For that I did some google research first, and most people recommended an extra (free) software called superduper that allows to clone out the existing installation onto the (external USB chassis assumed) new harddisk before swapping the two out for each other. This was a good tip, as it made sure the cloned disk was also bootable. The process took about 5 hours, using an external usb drive bay device which I picked up for $25 over lunch at Frys.

Since I had a fairly new macbook pro 15″, it was very simple to replace the existing drive, a 5 minute job.

The first impression after swapping out the two drives, was that I almost doubled my read speed, very impressive, however then also the problems started: hangs with the colorful beachball waiting for some timeout before the app would react again.

Especially using slideshows with iphoto now provokes the problem. A disk test with the diskutil claims the drive is fine.

Turning off the motion sensor that autoparks the drive via pmset was not the solution to the problem, so I turned it back on.

This is very annoying, and I have spent hours researching all the different speculations of people on what it could be. The root cause turns out to be that the EFI upgrade to allow 3Gbps SATA speeds that apple rolled out in support of their SSD’s does create this problem for normal SATA drives that support 3Gbps. Some people seem to be able to downgrade from EFI 1.7 to 1.6 to fix the issue, and some report it does not work for them.

Others mention ftool from hitachi’s support website, which allows to disable the 3Gbps / SCC support, which was turning out to be the fix that works for me. Of course the boot image you download is useless when booted on the intel mac, for some reason the keyboard is not working, and attaching an external keyboard did not help either.

The PDF with the documentation for ftool of course only talks about how to use the tools interactive menus, but I suspected there must be a way to use it with command line parameters instead.

So I ended up copying the iso-boot image to a linux machine, mounting it, using ‘strings’ on the ftool.exe executable to discover that the command line parameters I want are: ‘/ALL /SS LOW DISABLE’.

Since you can’t just mount the iso read-write and modify it, I had to use a different opendos boot floppy image that that fits into the floppy boot area of a cdrom, and then recreate the iso with mkisofs. This caused me quite some grief and after 2 hours of trial and error between trying to get real work done  and 4 coaster cdr’s later, I finally got it to work. Funny enough the keyboard works when booting that opendos image, but only until you start ftool, then the menus again are not navigable.

And after typing it in, it adjusted the drive firmware settings and it all works now !

A dd read/write of a 10GB file about in the middle of the platter performed with about 64MB/s write, 73.6MB/s read. Not too shabby, I think the 5400 rpm drive I had in earlier was reading with more like 40MB/s.

Finally live is nice again, iphoto presentations play without interruption, and I can stop worrying about it all.

After having lived with the shortcomings of the G1 and comparing to that for a while, I feel that I really just want a hardware-refresh of the existing G1 phone and not the new droid nor the N1.

I want to have the faster cpu, more RAM, better camera (led flash, light sensitivity) and faster USB read speed (12MB/s instead of 5MB/s) of the N1 but I do not want to give up the hardware keyboard of the G1, the hardware buttons of the G1 (accept call/home/back/hangup). I actually love the slide-out keyboard design, it allows me to switch to real typing mode real fast.

The droid hardware keyboard is a joke, it is worse than the on-screen keyboard in terms of accuracy.

I love htc’s special usb cable that allows me to connect any headphone as well as my car stereo to it, with a microphone on the connector plus a button that allows me to skip mp3 songs and accept calls mostly hands-free while driving.

The G1 is a pretty good smartphone, just the cpu and ram deficiency makes it painfully slow.

I even like the form-factor, fits well in my pocket.

Can I just get a hardware refresh instead of a new broken design please?

Michael

What I don’t like on Nexus One (N1) compared to my G1

Overall I am less excited than I thought I would be and will probably hang on to my G1 until I get something drastically better.

After hacking up a proof of concept for the iphone (thanks John for your awesome iphone JSON flickr tutorial and xcode example for download) and thinking of how to do the same for android without duplicating effort, I realized that it would be nice to be able to have some kind of middleware that allows me to create and populate native gui components without code duplication.

One such middleware is phonegap which requires you to write your application in javascript and html, and allows accessing phone specific features through javascript calling the middleware. It then is bundled as a native application that can be submitted to the app store for purchase and can run completely offline once downloaded, unless the programmer chooses to access remote resources. Their initial focus seems to have been allowing access to smartphone specific features like the address book, vibrate and sound, gps location and such, but there also is code in there to use native gui components as well.

I have two problems with the approach:

1. development of javascript – while palm pre developers might tout this as an advantage, I find javascript development and debugging rather tedious and would prefer writing my code in java or objective-c and be able to run it through a full control debugger on my desktop before deploying it to the simulator. I know about and am actively using firebug, the javascript debugger for firefox, but a lot of the bugs I had to deal with were incredibly hard to hunt down and rather than the debugger it was the forums and interacting with developers on #extjs chat, as well as using jslint and manually analyzing code, that helped me figure out a root-cause, workaround or fix.

2. performance – developers report that the phonegap version of their app appears to consume more resources rather than less compared to a remotely hosted javascript app, accessed through the mobile devices web-browser. Apart from the overhead of having to parse javascript at runtime, developers sometimes need platform specific knowledge and implement different than for a web-application, i.e. iphone onclick events being much slower from the touchscreen than ontouch events.

The advantage on the other hand appears to be that it is relatively easy to add new mobile platforms to phonegap. So far they appear to have iphone, android, blackberry and some nokia platforms covered, with palm pre being on the horizon to be added beginning of next year.

And according to phonegaps website, there are already several real-world phonegap powered apps in the marketplaces of both the iphone and android.

Thoughts?

“Well, there it is. My first sale. And my first positive feedback. I sold a print titled “Daybreak at the Lake” this week and the buyer loves it. (For that matter, so do I!) I’m putting a bit of effort in up front to get some traffic into my Etsy site, and hopefully that traffic will amount to more and more sales. If was great fun to post things to flickr and get all the feedback there, but actually producing something that someone will have hanging in their home is a whole new thing. If you haven’t visited yet, stop on by http://jmaz.etsy.com/ and see what’s up on the block. Thank you! JMaz”

Here is the photo he is refering to:

Congratulations, Josh!

I used to run Fedora 9 on a toshiba laptop to work on the train while commuting. Every so often I would have forgotten to charge it, and then it would shut down before I could do anything useful. Very annoying, compounded by the fact that the estimate of runtime tends to be wrong, so by the time it warns you that it will shut down soon, and you scramble to find the power supply to connect to, it will shut down right in front of you while you try to plug it in.

So yesterday was one of those mornings, my macbookpro had run out of power over night and was in hibernate mode. I noticed right before I was getting ready to get out the door. I connect the charger and get everything else ready and then disconnect and go after about 10min. Once in the train I open it up and am surprised to see a full 1.5 hours of runtime, and sure enough I can work all through my commute and have plenty of power left when connecting it back to power at my desk. Yay!

2. The powerful apps!

I created some tunes with Garageband, it is real fun and the loop database that comes with it is amazing for somebody that just starts like me. Anyways, so I wanted to share some audio mp3 on facebook with my friends, but facebook does not like uploading mp3, it only allows videos. So I drag and drop some photos out of iPhoto onto the iMovie app, and add my audio as a background song. This is done in minutes, and I am uploading the video to facebook…

3. safari detects network up and reloads tabs.

A typical thing I do is open up a bunch of tabs with the news websites so I can read it in the train while offline. When I command-click on the links to further stories they open up as ‘network disconnected’ in the additional tab as expected. But unlike what I am used to with Linux + Firefox, I don’t have to find the ‘reload all tabs’ menu item once I reconnect to the network – it automatically reloads the tabs…

4. apple remote control

Its a simple thing but so effective – be it itunes used to DJ at the party, VLC to watch a movie, or my iPhoto presentation, I can always switch around and adjust volume from the small remote while sitting on the couch. Very nice.

5. X applications – while I am certain that professionals do the right thing when paying $$$ for photoshop, I think I can do most of what I want to do with GIMP – and it works really well, just like I know if from Linux.