Cool stuff I did with my phone, part #1

For everyone that knows me, I love technology. For those of you who don't know, I love technology. It's true. We can do things today that weren't even imaginable 15 years ago. And nowhere is more greatly apparent, than in our mobile phones.

I own an iPhone. Now Apple fanboy I am not, but this post isn't about the merits of one smart phone platform or another. In fact, many of my posts will be about getting around the arbitrary restrictions Apple sets. That said, I happen to think the iPhone is one of the most amazing and slick pieces of tech we've got around today. And since I like to tinker, you could say that I haven't left well enough alone. Here's one thing I've done with my phone:

Create a whole house music system

 Now, if you own an iPhone, you probably use iTunes...maybe against your will. This utter monstrosity, this utter offender of memory (on my system, it's using 162MB of memory, plus 4MB for AppleMobileDeviceHelper, and another 4MB for iTunesHelper...I swear, has there ever been a program in history that needs more help than this?) is an annoying example of trying to cram Mac design onto everything. But still, you might as well get some use out of it.

The Apple Airport Express. This 99 dollar box has something of an identity crisis. It can act as an access point, and a USB print server, although it never manages to inspire on either of those fronts. Where this blindingly white square shines is in the 3.5mm headphone jack on the bottom. You either run a cable to some speakers or your audio receiver, have it join your wireless network, and then, WHAM, you now have a little white box connected to your audio system.

But in addition to this fancy shiny plastic thing now umbilicalled right between your sound machine, the next time you fire up (simmer up?) iTunes, you'll notice (or maybe you won't, Apple has a ridiculous habit of changing one tiny thing and excepting you to notice) that there is now a selection box with a speaker icon that says "My Computer" and selecting it now offers you a choice between the speakers on your computer, and the newly attached Airport Express. If you select the Airport express, iTunes is now playing through whatever you've connected. Neat huh?

So great, you've now got an Airport Express connected to your living room Audio system for parties, and connected to a pair of spare computer speakers in the bathroom (singing in the shower is amazing with musical accompaniment) and one for the balcony too, for good measure. You've no doubt figured out that you can select multiple speakers and distribute music through the whole house at once. Super, but all you've really got is a jukebox that you have to keep plopping down at your computer to use.

Enter your iPhone. Thanks to a neat little free Apple app called...get this, "Remote" that you can get on the App Store. You download it, fire it up, enter a code into iTunes, and as long as you're connected to wifi, you can control your iTunes monster. It'll show you what's playing, including cover art, let you control the volume, and select which speakers your sweet sweet tunes come pouring out of.

You've now built yourself a whole house music system, controllable from anywhere in your house, that rivals custom systems with names that end in -tron and X and cost thousands upon thousands of dollars, for a few hundred bucks worth of smooth plastic boxes and some cables. And if you don't have an iPhone, you can do the same thing with an iPod touch. This system will never fail to impress at parties, and lets you mingle instead of DJ. Plus, I wasn't joking when I said it makes showers AMAZING.

State of the tech: More ISP nonsense

::Sigh:: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Spanish-ISP-Aint-Gonna-Let-Google-Ride-Their-Pipes-For-Free-106816

To summarize, a Spanish ISP wants Google to pay when its customers access Google. Customers already pay for internet access, but they also want money from the servers on the other end.

When are ISP's gonna get that they have nothing to offer? Let me explain: Once upon a time, your ISP provided you with many thing, including email, web space, gopher access, newsgroup access, and finally, HTTP access to other servers. These days, your ISP provides you nothing but a pipe to the places that actually provide content, like Google. I'm sure many of you know people who entirely use Google's services for everything, and it doesn't matter where they get their internet from. In the user's eyes, they're paying buckets of money so that they can get to the Googles and Facebooks out there.

If the content providers all banded together and consolidated their clout, they could have the ISPs quaking in fear and BEGGING for Net Neutrality. My proposal is this: All the major content providers make a pact that if any ISP demands payment for their customer's access to them, they ALL completely and immediately block the entire ISP. Suddenly, the 60 bucks a month their customers are paying doesn't do anything. They can't get to the stuff that they want. No Google, no Myspace, No Facebook, and to the customer, no internet.

Surely then they will simply access all the quality content and useful services that their ISPs provide...ohh wait, they don't have any of those things. The real power isn't in the hands of the ISPs, who could easily be replaced with another provider. DSL is cable is FIOS is 3G is Wimax, and the tight monopolies are waning. The real power is in the hands of the people who could decimate your subscriber numbers overnight with a routing change.

Musings on being tired

Have you ever stopped to consider the state of being tired. I...have. Lets list and rate them:

1. Exhaustion: The kind of tired you get when you've been without sleep or very little sleep for extended periods of time. You can't think, you're on edge about every little thing, and you just wanna shove anything that stops you from sleeping. This usually happens when you're in the middle of the day at work or school. Can lead to emotional outbursts, small nervous breakdowns, and car naps.  Rating: 0/10. Nothing Worse
2. Panic Tired: The kind of tired when you've been up all night dealing with a huge project, a bad fight, a panic attack or something else, when it's so late that eventually the drowsiness lets you know that even though it's 5 am and you have to be up and alert in 3 hours, you might as well give up and let it overtake you. Rating 1/10. There's a little relief at finally being able to stop, but you know when you wake up, you'll be facing number 1
3. Lets Just Get This Over With Tired: The kind of weariness that comes when you know you've gotta up for work in the morning. It's late, and you're having fun, but you know you gotta sleep. May lead to desperate zero hour attempts to continue doing what you're doing, getting up to "get some water" and grabbing the controller again, denial, or screaming fits: "I DON'T WANNA GO TO BED, I'M NOT SLEEPY" Rating 4/10. Once you finally get in bed, you realize it's not so bad, and let dreams carry you off to sleep
4. Just 5 More Minutes Tired: Entirely a morning phenomenon, when you wake up, only dimly aware, and immediately must curl up and get more sleep, alarm clock be damned. May lead to: Broken timekeeping devices, falling asleep cuddled up to your spouse, naps in the bathtub, and "Cough Cough sorry boss, I can't come in today bad case of the Galloping Consumption" Rating 9/10 if you get to indulge, 2/10 if you cannot, which leads to:
5. Morning Sickness Tired: Also, entirely a morning phenomenon, a milder version of number 1, that will be gone by the afternoon, with seemingly no ill effects. Symptoms may include: an insane desire for coffee, completely dazed look with accompanying intellectual uselessness, "Yes, your ass looks huge in those pants!," and that feeling where you wake up in the parking lot and have no memory of driving there, which can only mean you slept drove to work. Rating: 2/10 Scary beyond belief, and may destroy relationships and Starbucks...es
6. Long Day Tired: You've had a looong day, literally. This usually occurs after you woke up at 5 am in the morning and it's now rolling up on 12:30 am. You realize that you simply have been awake for too many hours, and that it's time to sleep. Not necessarily a desire to sleep, only to end the day. Rating: 5/10. Easy to accept, not hard to get to sleep, goes down like room temperature water
7. Worn-Out Tired: Comes after a day of intense physical labor, you may not mentally be prepared for bed, but your body insists, right now. You crawl into bed with some trepidation, but by the time your aching arms hit those soft cottony pillows, you realize there's no place you'd rather be. You'll be asleep in no time, so don't even bother putting on the TV. Rating: 7/10 This is stuff dreams are made of!
8. Friggin Sweet Tired: You wake up, and are groggy beyond belief, and you'd really like nothing more than to fall back asleep, but you've got something AWESOME to wake up to. Maybe you're on vacation and you've got a hike first thing with columbian coffee that arrived on a donkey instead of a freighter. Maybe you're on your honeymoon and soon your spouse will awaken to ::CENSORED FOR THE CHILDREN:: Whatever it is, your excitement cancels out the tired, and even the tiredness itself doesn't begrudge your lack of indulgence, "Go on man, this'll be choice, you'll have time for me later!" Rating: 8/10 Surfs UP!
9. Warm Fuzzy Tired: An odd phenomenon, usually occurs after long productive days where you know you'll get plenty of sleep, like Saturdays. You've been relaxing for the past couple of hours, but it's getting late, and there it is, like a warm hug, your body reminding you that you're tired. There's no insistence, it doesn't force you to fall asleep where you are, just a subtle reminder: "You're tired, you should get some sleep" You'll look back on your busy day, know your sleep will be rich and deep, and slowly stop what you're doing and prepare for bed. When you finally hit the mattress, it'll be just the right temperature, cold in the summer, warm in the winter. The last thing you'll do before you drift off with a smile on your face is happily sigh. Rating: 9/10 This is too rare, and exquisite, almost nothing better!
10. Ohh, it's Saturday Tired: Entirely resembles #4, until that golden moment when you realize that it's Saturday, and you don't have to get up at all. Never in the recorded history of Man is there an event which will take you faster from utter despair to complete elation. The satisfaction that you don't really have to get out of bed is tempered and refined by the thought that just 30 seconds ago, you knew you were going to have to rise from your cocoon. Rating: 10/10 Total perfection, beauty beyond belief, better than sex!

Now if you guys don't mind, I'm going for a catnap, right...now.

Ebooks are dying, here's why

Ebooks are dying, here's why:
Engadget: Hachette Book Group also pulls away from Amazon
This is just the latest in a trend that I say is dark for the future of ebooks. More and more publishers are pulling away from the amazon e-book model with the argument that "We should be allowed to set our own price, and ebook companies should have to sell it for what we want." The issue isn't really about if Amazon's pricing model is fair (it probably isn't), but about how much pricing control publishers are demanding.

"Big deal," you say, let the publishers set their own prices. That would be well and good, if the publishers KNEW what they were doing. The publishers envision a world where ebooks are roughly the same price as hardcovers, and then slowly move down in price, till they're roughly the same as a paperback. Seems fair, right? Wrong. This isn't a distribution costs arguments, anyone who knows publishing knows that physical costs make up very little of the cost of a book. This is about the fundamental model of ebooks.

When I buy an ebook for a kindle, I'm not really buying a book, I'm indefinitely renting a book. Sure it's attached to my kindle account, and you can download it again and again for as long as you have the account, but you don't really own the book. You can't move it to a different company's device, you can't loan it to a friend, you can't sell it, and you definitely can't donate it to a library.

If the publishers want to move toward a "We create the book, we set the price, and you buy the product" model, AND charge the same amount as a physical book, they need to make the experience just like that of a real book.

Ebooks can be saved, here's how:

In order to make the ebook worth the same as regular books, we must be guaranteed these three things: independence, the ability to lend and sell, and the ability to create virtual libraries. I'll explain each in depth.

Independence:

• Merchant Independence: I should be able to buy an ebook from any store (and with the publisher model, it wouldn't matter which store) and have it work everywhere I am. Books I buy from Amazon must sit alongside books I buy from Apple
• Device Independence: As long as I don't have more than one copy being read at once, I should be able to read it on my Kindle, Nook, Ipad, Iphone, Cell Phone, Mac, PC, and whatever else can communicate with the licensing server.

Lending and Selling:

• Selling: I should be able to sell a book to another individual, a used book store, or whoever I want. Once I've entered the account name of the party I wish to sell to, my ability to read the book disappears forever, and all my personal copies are locked and deleted. They then become sole owner and have the same rights as the original purchaser.
• Lending: I should be able to lend my ebook to a friend, for a set period of time or forever. Once I've lent my book, I lose the ability to read it until my friend returns it to me, or I choose to take it back. Once it returns to me, my friend can no longer read it

Virtual Libraries:

• Libraries must be allowed to receive donated books
• Libraries must be allowed to buy books from the publisher, with the intent to lend them to their patrons, with the same rights they currently have.
• The library must be able communicate with the license server, and lend its books out on a time limited basis.
  

What's all that mean? In summary, an ebook should act in every way like a regular book, just without paper. Once these things are guaranteed, I wouldn't have a problem following the publisher model or paying the same price as a physical book. But until then, ebooks aren't worth the same price. Pick one: cheaper ebooks, or equal rights