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The New Flash(y) iPod

In Paging Jennifer Beals Mr. Gruber says that an iPod without a display is just silly. (I’m paraphrasing here…) What he doesn’t know is the new iPod will be using a display that utilizies Spin technology.

That’s right, the new iPod will display information by being rapidly spun in the air by the earbud wires. I know it sounds ridiculous, because it is. Wait. that’s just the leaked story, the real story is that it will project the display onto a flat surface just like that atomic projection clock at your Mom’s house, where you can lie in bed at stare at the time slowly changing while being displayed on the ceiling. Wait. that’s just the leaked story, the real story is that there will not be a Firewire port, USB 1 or 2 port, or even some special new dock. The new iPod actually comes tuned to your brainwave patterns and will be controlled (only by the owner) using thoughts and brainwaves. It will respond to your mood, and what you are thinking. (“Hmmm, I’d like to listen to The Clash” or “That Dawn and Drew Show is funny!”) The fact that it can only be controlled by the owner’s brain will also lower the risk of theft. Oh, also, it won’t actually have a hard drive or flash memory, it will just use the audio stored inside of your brain, talk about DRM‘d music!

Now folks, I must have made hundreds… ok, dozens… well, at least a few posts on Apple’s iPod audio player, and even though I do not own one (yet) don’t you think I’m probably right this time?

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Fun with SVG Graphs

[Editor’s Note: If your browser does not support SVG images, you should be seeing PNG images instead, which will not look as good as the SVG versions. If you don’t see any images, let me know what browser, version, etc. you are using. It seems some of the popular browsers out there don’t “do the right thing” hmph!]

[Editor’s Note Part 2: Seems that RSS 2.0 can’t handle the <object> tag properly? At least that’s what the validator tells me. The Atom feed seems ok though…]

I’ve been working on some simple graphing utilities in Perl to create SVG graphs… Here’s a few samples…

graph

Our cost for phone service seems to have gone down.

graph

Local utilities continue to rise. Ugh…

graph

We’re spending less on food, well, most of the time. ;)

I like the fact that these are very simple, showing just the trend and not going into details like month, amount, etc. In fact, to create one of these just takes the following: 

perl ggraph2.pl "Phone" "44 54 50 53 44 41 43 53 42 42 44" >phone.svg

Run the script passing in the name you want on it, and a string of numbers space separated, and output it to a file. It’s still a bit fragile, and only does some basic normalizing, so wacky things will break it, but it’s a start. Like all other quick little hacks, in the hands of the guy who wrote it, it “gets the job done” while users would break it in less than 10 minutes and start yelling.

I really like SVG. It reminds me of the old days of plotting out graphics on the Apple ][+ and that’s a good thing! It’s another one of those “edge technologies” I keep hoping will finally catch on big one of these years…

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Jabber 4Ever!

I needed a Jabber (oops, I mean XMPP) client for Mac OS 9. What? Mac OS 9? What am I doing, some crazy time-travel experiment?

No, I stopped working on my time-travel experiments in the year 3042, but anyway… I didn’t have to look far. I just looked back to August 2000 when I last mentioned Jabbernaut.

Sure Jabbernaut is no longer being developed, but lucky for us it’s open-source, so it’s still available. Oh, lucky for us it’s hosted at SourceForge, so we can actually download it. (Though I’m sure I have a backup on CD… In a box… Somewhere…) And most importantly, we are lucky that the Jabber protocols have not been changed for silly reasons over the years. Open-source, open-protocols, they’re good things… Do you think a 4 year old version of AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, or MSN Messenger would still work today? (It might, I don’t know for sure, this isn’t one of those rhetorical questions, I honestly don’t know!)

If I haven’t mentioned it recently, I’m a big fan of Jabber (I mean XMPP!) It’s another one of those “edge technologies” that I keep wishing and waiting for to just take off. Next year will be the year it does. I’m sure of it. (Right Apple?)

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Olympus Rides Again!

There have been no photos posted recently. This is due to the death of our digital camera. Countertop. Children. Floor. You can put the pieces together…

So we never quite got around to replacing it, I mean, isn’t the cost of technology supposed to go down? It never seems to, you just get more for the same price. A good Mac will always cost around $2000. Six years ago that got you a 233 mhz PowerMac G3 with 64 MB of RAM, and today you still pay $2000 but now you get a Dual 1.8 ghz PowerMac G5 with 256 MB of RAM. Six years from now you’ll get a 20 ghz PowerMac G8 with 2 terabytes of RAM, and you’ll pay about $2000… (Ok, the numbers might be off, but you get the idea…)

Anyway, I was secretly hoping the upcoming holiday season would help out with this problem, when a friend of mine gave me an old Olympus camera to use. I mean, how often does someone give you a $1000+ camera? Well, when it’s 6 years old! ;) (I should add a sidenote that this friend is the same one that I got my old Wallstreet PowerBook from, and it too was state-of-the-art in 1998. Thanks Friend!)

I’m not complaining, I’m quite thankful actually! It uses SmartMedia cards (of which I have about 5 or 6 now, some from the old Olympus, some from the Rio 500.) It’s a huge camera! It’s not gonna fit in your pocket unless you are a kangaroo. No matter, I can again take pictures! Of course with the 8 MB card it seems to hold only 4 images in “Super High Quality” mode. I’m hoping it can use the 64 mb card I have…

The test images seemed a little soft… Hey, just think of the Dischord inspired photos I can take now – Flickr here I come!

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More New Phones

We got new phones for the house last year, since we started using caller id, and I picked up a dual-handset (two phones, one home base, one recharging station) from Uniden fairly cheap. One still works, but a few months back we noticed that one of the phones seemed to not be transmitting sound when you talked, so people would call, we could hear them, and the could not hear us, they’d get frustrated and hang up. (It was actually sort of amusing… “Hello? Hello? Ok, I’m hanging up now!”)

I eventually opened up the broken one and found the microphone had come loose, and since it did not seem like a fun soldering job, it was time for new phones. (I don’t want to knock Uniden, as the phones did take a good deal of abuse in the form of falling, dropping, etc. and our old Uniden phone is like 10 years old and it still works ok.)

Nonetheless, I had heard good things about Panasonic phones, and picked up the aptly named Panasonic KX-TG2344B. Again a dual-handset model, but this time, it’s got neat features like intercom between the handsets and the base station, speakerphone, (easy to use) phonebook, and I’m sure other stuff…

Let’s hope these last a while…