Pocket OSX

Well, after spending two weeks with my new iPhone I am ready to add my voice to the thousands of ones already out there talking about the new Apple device.

Pros -

The UI is super slick and the touch aspect of it and the huge screen make all the other "Smartphones" I have owned look lame in comparison. The browser on the phone while still having issues is still by far and away the best I have seen so far and used as well. The heuristic touch get s easier to use over time and the heft of the phone while heavy seems just about right. I no longer carry my Nano with me when I go to work, just the iPhone plus I have pretty much stopped using the Archos as well, we shall see when I go on the road.


Cons-

The big one is being locked to one carrier, which I have never loved even when they ran under their old name. Also the fact there are no third party apps for the phone is a huge issue. Right now I don't really consider the iPhone a smart phone though, you can't extend the functionality with third party apps like you can with the Symbian, Windows Mobile, or Blackberry phone OS. Until that changes for the most part you will see it as not a true smartphone. As it stands now, its better than 90% of the multi-function phones on the market. The last 10% would be to allow third party apps on the phone an a SDK to allow development plus not restricting it down to one carrier.

Apple has finally dipped its toe into the phone market and its close to being a pocket computer all on its own. I will be interested to see if the google phone will be fact or fiction because I see that as the only one that may have a chance against the iPhone itself.

As Laptops outpace Desktops and people are looking at more and more functionality in our phones how long before the phone replaces the laptop as the device of choice especially for the mobile business warrior. With the iPhone, I have just replaced a cell phone, PMP, and an MP3 player in one shot plus I can check e-mail on it at will. How long before I can VPN with my phone into the corporate network or store my documents on my phone and dock it at work so I don't have to lug around a full laptop?

San Francisco

Every time I visit San Francisco, I enjoy the city so much. Like Seattle, its right no the ocean but has such a great vibe to it as well. The hills and the fact that you can get around without a car is one of my favorite things. Right across the bridge is Murin county and the hills of Northern California. I took a few snaps on top of Knob Hill when I walked up from the downtown area.

The city always has had good food and plenty of things to do at about any time of day or night. The weather was just about perfect with it being in the low 70s during the day and the low 50s at night. I was there for business so I did not to enjoy my time as much as I wanted to.

In the end it was a great time just to get to go back and spend a few days there. I hope I get to visit it soon. There are more pictures on my photo site as well if you want to take a look -

San Fran Pictures

Ouachita Moutains

Well took a little trip up into the Ouachita Mountains which on the eastern edge of Oklahoma and Western edge of Arkansas. The highest point is Magazine Mountain which is in Arkansas at a mind numbing 2133 ft above sea level.

At least though it gets up a little bit and there are some pretty good roads to ride as well. It seemed a little cooler as well at that elevation, I forget, there is a formula for every so many feet above sea level the temperature drops a few degrees. In the end it was a nice day, with just a little of 800 miles round trip. The mini hog sipped fuel and I managed to squeeze about 54 mpg out of it for the whole day. I will be back that way hopefully soon as soon as I have the chance again. You can catch a good bit more of the pictures I took at my photobucket album -
Ouachita Moutains

Road Warrior Tools

Well, I am getting ready to head out on a 10 day, Multi-City trip for work and for fun. 3 days in Newark, NJ. Then three days in Richmond, VA. Finally, five days back in Atlanta. I figured I would share what I normally take on the road with me, this is the latest version.

1. Archos 404 PMP(Personal Media Player) - It carries all my shows ripped off the Tivo that I want to watch while I am away and don't want to use the slingbox(works well on the plane)

2. Casio Exilam camera, full metal body and pretty tiny as well. Just picked it up so not too much miles on it yet.

3. 1st generation iPod 4gb Nano - It has been with me the second longest. It has far outlived any of my other MP3 players by miles. I have had it survive a Texas rainstorm in the from pocket of my motorcycle jacket so it has a thunbs up from me.

4. Nintendo DS Lite - For when you want to waste some time on something other than watching TV you can whip this badboy out and play a few games of what you have on tap. Mario Bros usually stays in the DS slot. They also have a browser out fo it now as well but it does not do flash so no YouTube

5. TMobile Dash - My personal phone which has all the usual smartphone goodies on it such as Wi-Fi, EDGE (No 3G though), and all the power of a Windows Mobile 6 smartphone. The one really kewl thing is watching the home TiVo over EDGE or Wi-Fi on the thing. If they came out with a BB verison, I might just get rid of the Dash though, it eats waaay too much battery.

6. Crappy Verizon LG work phone - Nuff Said!

7. iBlue GPS hockey puck - Can pair up with the Windows Mobile phone and using either Google Maps or Windows Live can give me GPS location and directions if I want them.

8. All the various cable and charging devices I have to carry. The only two that need something really special are the Verizon phone and the DS. The rest have at least USB cables and they can be charged either off the laptop or the little white apple brick which has a slot for USB. It pretty much works with everything I have had so far.

9. Crappy Work Laptop - Nuff Said!

Apple TV First Impressions

Well, I got my Apple TV on Friday so I figured I would lay out my impressions of it like most everybody else is doing.

So far I like the design of the device and the simplistic nature so far but the whole annoying as hell "Everything must be in iTunes" crap is really annoying as hell. I know the basic excuses as to the why of it but still, the fact you have to cram everything into the iTunes library.

So the first thing after making sure that it would boot up was to void the warranty and rip it apart to enable SSH on the device plus make a backup copy of the HD in pristine condition. After that was done it was a simple task to put everything back together and start loading all the plugins from all the various places. First was to make sure that I could play Xvid and Divx content from another location on the Apple TV so I pulled down those codecs plus the info for the ATV files plugin. That way I could have another option in finder called files that would be under the Movies folder that I could place other files such as Xvid and Divx files via SSH on the AppleTV and play them from there.

Also I enabled AFP on my old Media Center Mac, my Mac Mini so I could mount afp via my external HD and stream files over the network and so far it works like a champ. It does not play any of my .WMV files but it plays most everything else.

So final words on it is that its a great device but only if you worship iTunes totally, but otherwise hack the box and enable some more cool features on it so you can really use the box to its full potential.

Surfin' From Home Anywhere!

OK, have you always wished you could surf from work or a hotspot just like you could at home? Do you hate the stupid web proxy crap that many places seem to install to keep the kiddies safe? Well now there is a way around it, and while not totally easy or quick, it is worth it in the long run.

For this you will need the following -
A high Speed DSL or Cable Modem Connection at home
A PC that is always on
A USB flash drive
A copy of Firefox Portable and Porta PUTTY
A copy of VMware Player
A copy of VMware Appliance Ubuntu Image for your proxy machine.
Usage of a free DNS service such as DynDNS

Once you have these components, we can move onto the first step.

First download and install the VMware player on your home PC or if you have a Mac you can use the Beta VMware Fusion player.

After that, you can get the appliance image for the Ubuntu Edgy install and copy the files down to your PC. Make sure to let them machine create a new UUID as well. when you login for the first time, you will get a chance to run through the config script for everything. Take the defaults for most everything in the script. The machine by default is set to DHCP so you should not have to worry about that. You will need to know the IP address for poking a hole in your firewall.

After you are done with initial config and reboot, you will log back in and issue the command "sudo su" which will put you into root mode. From there you will need to run the "apt-get update" command and then the "apt-get upgrade" followed by "apt-get install ssh" to install the SSH server which is what you will use to tunnel your browser through. After its done rebooting, then you should be ready for the next step.

Now, you can will need to poke a hole in your home router/firewall for the SSH session. SSH uses encryption for its sessions so all your traffic through the tunnel back home will be encrypted. You can use the default port of 22 which is usually allowed by even the most anal of DSL and Cable Modem providers. Worst case you may need to to use port 23. You need to know the address of the Ubuntu Server machine and map the port to that IP address.

You will need some way to keep track of your home IP address. By using a service such as DynDSN, you can give a hostname to your home machine so you don't need to know the IP. You will install the software(they have mutiple versions for XP, OSX, Linux, etc....) to associate your home machines external IP with a DNS name. Once you have this done you can move onto the next step.

Now you should be ready for the next step which is loading the Porta PUTTY and the Portable Firefox on your USB key drive. After you download the files , you can pick the USB drive as the location for the install files. I usually create an apps folder for all my USB flash drive apps. Install the two program s under there.


Run the PUTTY app, then create a session for your home machine. Put in the DNS name you used and make sure the port is the same that you used on your home firewall/router box. Under the SSH settings on the right under Tunnels, you will need to put in a port of 8080 as the source port and mark it as dynamic. Once that is done, save the settings for the session. You can test at this point bu opening the session. You should see a dialog box for the certificate for the first time so accept it and after that you should not see it again. Log in with the ID you logged onto the box from the VM console and if it works you are 95% done.

Next run the Portable Firefox program, this will be a little slower than your normal browser but it leaves no files on your PC, its all on the flash drive. Go to > Tools > Options to open up the window. Under there, you then select the advanced tab and the network tab under there. Click the settings button under connections and make sure the radio button for manual proxy connection is selected. The only one you need to fill in is the SOCKS connection field. put in the address of 127.0.0.1 and port 8080. Once that is done, you save the settings and you should be ready to surf through your proxy.

What this does is tunnel your browser request through your local machine back you that Ubuntu virtual machine back home so you bypass all the settings for the firewall or proxy server where you are. If you go to speedtest.com and run a test it thinks you are running from home because your HTTP sessions are coming from your home DSL line. Your program is on your USB drive so no history file to clean up or worry about on the local PC, you pretty much only have to worry about keyloggers at this point, but as long as you don't go banking, you can do pretty much anything without worrying about web filters. Just make sure you run the PUTTY session first for the encrypted tunnel.

Hopefully this will be helpful, I do hate web proxys they are usually all wrong or over paranoid.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Well Apple rolled out its new offering yesterday, the iPhone. The press is all over this thing, Apple fans are salivating and the stock price of Apple is up. But to me that is not the REAL story. I have owned multiple "smartphones" over the years, from Windows Mobile, to Symbian OS, to RIM's Blackberry (My current phone is a Pearl). For years now, picking a smartphone is like picking the lesser of two evils. You had to decide what you wanted most in your phone and that based your choice. Blackberries did e-mail, Windows Mobile did MS apps well, and Symbian operated with multiple OSes pretty well. In the end, the UI on the devices were either horribly painful or had a steep learning curve.

Now to me where the Apple iPhone is unique is not that it does everything but Julianne fries, but in the new UI. For 98% of the worlds population not only was a smartphone unnecessary but the pain of learning the hand held device was usually a long and annoying process. I have know people with a high level of computer literacy give up just on the aspect of how long it took to get a level of functionality out of their "smartphones". No way would I ever give one of these things to a non-techie, they would scream in frustration over the interface. Once again, just like the iPod, the user experience and ease of use with the touch interface seems to be the focus. When someone gets frustrated with a product or how hard it is to learn it, the first thing most geeks think is - "how dumb can that user be?". But many times but not all the response should be - "How dumb can the company be who designed this crappy UI?"

We are now seeing companies who have been specialized in one market dipping their toes into multiple areas. If someone would have told me back in 1992 that Microsoft would be in the game console market I would have laughed and called that person a fool. Same thing for Apple and a cell phone. The digital convergence market is beginning to move with the speed of a freight train. People (myself included) want their data whether it be music, movies, TV, documents, web pages, friends, games, etc all at their fingertips. Whether its on their big screen LCD HDTV, or on their cell phone or even on their laptop as well. They want to seamlessly move from one platform to another and not have to worry about compatibility or how hard it is to set up or will it work with this other system. Companies are now see this trend and wanting to give you that option all in house. MS and Sony are a prefect example of this with their Xbox 360's, PS3's. HTPC's, Vista, you name it. Another abstract of this is Google with their applications being web enabled for everything, you do not need to have a specific hardware platform, you just need a web browser on whatever device you are using. In the end its about one stopping point for all your data and a familiar interface.

Just like the iPod where the interface was slick, smooth, very intuitive, and easy to use; if the iPhone can generate that level of customer comfort with the device and is that easy to use then Apple will have a killer product. Instead of going after that 2% market like almost all other smartphone companies that make convergence devices, Apple is going for ALL users. In the end, if your customer can not use your product its not that the end user is stupid its the UI that is broke.