Up on Flickr. Anita and I had a blast. We spent about 8 hours and saw maybe half of everything. -m

New gear, an Ooma VOIP box. I plan to post more technical details soon, but the short story is that you get a sleek little box that goes between your dsl or cable modem and your router, and you get unlimited local and long distance calling. For free. For life (or 3 years, according to the TOS). Check out the Flickr set of the unboxing experience.

WIth this, I plan to turn off my landline, to the tune of about $35 a month, and by not using our mobile phones for so much long distance, reduce the calling plan for another $40 a month. The one-time cost for the box set me back about $231, so I will be even in just over 3 months. (Only recently, these things were retailing for $599.)

How do these guys stay in business? I’ll write more about this too, but the short story is that bandwidth is really, really cheap, monopolistic efforts of telecom companies notwithstanding.

So far I’m really happy with it. The online Ooma Lounge isn’t as good as Vonage’s system–for one thing, you can only see voicemails, not any kind of call logs. But the features that are there Just Work. The documentation is short and simple but thorough. Setup was a breeze.

Have you tried Ooma? Comment below. -m

Thanks to chromatic for the link. Largely hidden,  largest app clusters of this particular platform can:

Control over a million computers and can deliver over a hundred billion advertisements per day.

However, “don’t be evil” is not a part of this particular platform’s strategy… -m

I have here a pre-release copy of Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother.

With permission.

In plain text.

Being read with the UNIX command less.

On an XO laptop.

And so far it’s awesome. -m

Amazon hosted a networking event tonight. They had me at free beer and a chance to look at a Kindle. Now that I’ve actually played with one, I can comment on some of its features for better or worse.

It’s heavier and more solid than it looks. With the little padded cover, it could pass for a physical book in most situations, and it would probably survive a drop to the floor just fine.

The screen does look great, even in the sub-optimal lighting conditions of a bar. I had to compare with the XO when I got home, and with the backlight off, I think the resoloutions are very nearly similar. However, the XO (without backlight) is fairly hard to read at indoor lighting levels, though in full sunshine it’s great. I don’t know how easy it would be to read the Kindle in full sunlight…

Page turning is annoyingly slow, and annoyingly easy to do by accident. The annoying part is that after pressing the button, nothing seems to happen for a second, then the page blacks out, waits another second, then displays the new content. I understand the technical limitations of the black flash (and the corresponding benefits–essentially zero power consumption to hold an image). But it feels like if it started working as soon as the button was pressed, it could cut the overall page change time in half. Keyboard entry felt slow and lagged as well.

Overall, the device didn’t feel usable to me. I somehow stumbled my way into Wikipedia and got to see the browser in action. I would love to see a touch-screen version.

Did seeing one change my mind about buying one? Nope. Still waiting. I’d buy this one at half it’s current price, an updated model for maybe more. -m

Does the MacBook Air make a good ebook reader? -m

I’m taking some time off from work to relax a bit. And just in time for that, my OLPC arrived. Check out the photoset on Flickr. It’s an impressive little machine, and I’m very happy to have got this instead of a Kindle. :)

-m

Or, why the Kindle cost $399 at launch.

What is Amazon’s most valuable IP?

How about a list of registered users who are guaranteed as willing to pay a premium price for a nifty gadget (I mean “service”) along with the exclusive privilege of buying more things from Amazon? Somewhere in Amazon’s database land, alongside all the details and purchasing history they already have for each customer, there’s a single bit called something like owns_kindle. Those bearing this mark are the ur-early-adopters, the loyalists, the customers with a vary large net future value. The marketers dream. Opt-in isn’t even an issue–what Kindle owner won’t be interested in special offers and exclusive deals for their special device? Where else are they going to go?

That one bit alone is probably worth another $400, making it the most valuable IP in terms of dollars-per-byte that Amazon holds. Even if they do a drastic price cut soon (and such price cuts will at some point be inevitable to sustain the market), even if they refund half of the difference to the early adopters, they will come away with super-sized smiles. -m

P.S. s/Kindle/iPhone/ and s/Amazon/Apple/ and this entire post still holds.

P.P.S. There is a pretty good play Apple could make here around an ebook reader. Tie it to the same wireless service plan that the iPhone uses, make books available through the iTunes store (including tons of Gutenberg/public domain content/creative commons for free), and put it on a very slick designed piece of hardware. But even in this case, it will initially sell for a premium price for the reasons above. Game on!

Where’s Project Gutenberg? One difficulty in launching an ebook platform is the lack of available titles. I keep hearing about 80,000+ titles, but expressed as a percentage of Amazon’s book catalog, it’s minuscule. There should be all kind of public domain titles ready to go on day one. And where’s the Creative Commons books?
There’s some public domain books to be found, but none are free. Take, for example, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a book (in paper form) sitting just out of arm’s reach as I write this, waiting to be read. If I had it on a device, particularly one with a good screen, I’d be more inclined to keep it, and dozens others, on hand in my backback and be ready to read at a moment’s notice. But no.

The problem is the the “we take care of the wireless delivery” part, called Whispernet(tm). It’s not really free, nor bundled in the service price. It’s bundled in to the cost of every media access. Is it fair to pay $9.99 for a New York Times bestseller? Sure. But it sucks to pay $1 for an A-list blog that’s free everywhere else, or to get literally nickeled and dimed for the privelege of “converting” and delivering your own content to your own device.

By the way, who gets the money paid for accessing, say, a CreativeCommons non-commercial licensed blog via the Kindle? Somebody should look into that.

I applaud Amazon for pushing to innovate in a space that badly needs it, but the financial model behind the wireless access encourages the wrong kind of things. Exceptions, like unlimited Wikipedia access (be still my heart!) still need to be hand approved by the gatekeeper. Information wants to be free, it doesn’t want to be a service, though that’s hard to see when the dollar signs get in your eyes.

Many folks are comparing this to the original iPod launch–remember, the huge klunky one with a tiny capacity, black and white screen, and a mechanical click-wheel? There’s some strong points of similarity, but stronger differences. For one, anyone with an iPod can easily rip their existing CDs, not to mention obtain MP3s from other methods (so I hear). There’s nothing like that yet for books.
Where’s the documentation for the new, proprietary ebook format? I don’t care about the DRM crap. I care about being able to create new content, or repackage existing content for which I have the rights, and for that, I’m having trouble coming up with a rationale for an entire new format. I would love to do some cool things with this platform. Perhaps I will some day, though my enthusiasm is somewhat lessened by the difficulties I would face getting anything cool onto the devices. -m

Amazon announced their ebook reader today, Kindle. Some of the earlier hype I’d read about it suggested that it would be not only a reading tool, but a writing tool as well.

Nope.

The obvious thing is the keyboard, an immediate non-starter for typing more than a few words. But if an external keyboard is possible, I could still live with it. For now, it seems like an OLPC would better serve my needs for an ultra-portable writing station. And for the same price, I get one and so does somebody else who need it. -m

If a free energy device (like this one) were really possible, simple economics would dictate that (as soon as patents expired, etc.) one or several would be found in every cell phone, iPod, notebook computer, desktop computer, appliance, automobile, airplane, house, building, and factory. That’s a lot of waste heat that would get dumped onto the planet’s surface, maybe even worse than burning-stuff-to-produce-greenhouse-gasses.

But if you have unlimited energy, it would be straightforward engineering to produce a large scale air cooling unit that would (beam|radiate|dissipate) heat into space. In effect, a planetary-scale air conditioner.

Remember when you were younger and you left a window open with the A/C on, and somebody said ‘what are you trying to do, cool off the whole outdoors?’ Finally an answer to that question. :)
November, National Novel Writing Month, is coming up. Could this be the kernel of a story? What other practical considerations would there be around free energy? Comment below.

-m

Still more mobile news. Yahoo! Go is shipping. No alpha, beta, gamma, etc.–the real deal. Give it a whirl. If your phone, like mine, can’t handle the awesomeness, you can visit the slick web-only version at m.yahoo.com. -m

I have an older iPod. I don’t go G numbers, but it’s 40 gigs and a black and white screen. The battery life is measured in minutes. Hmm, 40 gigs, same as the original Apple TV.

We don’t have a TV in the place, but we do watch movies on the computer screen. As long as you’re willing to plug in what’s essentially a portable hard drive, you can watch movies on any screen with a nearby FireWire port. Battery life isn’t an issue because the only time you use the iPod, it’s plugged in.

What do you do with your old iPod? -m

For the last several years, I’ve taken some time off around the end of the year to work on a special project. In 2004 I ported some of Rick Jelliffe’s code from Java to Python. In 2005, I made an editing pass over a novel I wrote the previous November during NaNoWriMo. This year was a little different. I:

• Worked. Enough stuff is going on with the day job that I couldn’t take a full week off.
• Got sick.
• Caught up on some homebrewing. Reorganized my brewery.
• Wrote. More stuff coming soon on xml.com.
• Pimped a babyswing. (photoset)
• Started reviewing WWW2007 and XTech papers.
• Started taking a video MIT class on differential equations. (If you have OS X 10.4+, fire up Grapher and try y’=cos xy, y(0)={-5,-4.5…5})

-m

Opera just released a version of their Mini browser for Treo. Here’s what the download and install process looks like.

• point your existing Blazer browser at http://mini.opera.com
• the page detects your device (a Treo 650 in this case) and offers a download link
• clicking the link starts a 100k download
• the phone offers to store the download in the “applications” area
• hunt through the ultra-confusing menu system that Palm has inflicted on users. Categories are “All”, “Games”, “Good”, “Main”, “Multimedia”, “System”, “Utilities”, Wireless Apps”, and “Unfiled”.
• finally I find it under “Unfiled”. Click.
• Error message “Missing IBM Java VM”: “Please ensure that IBM’s WebSphere Micro Environment Java WM is installed.”

In summary: Opera is great software, judging by the glowing reports all over the web. But installing mobile apps is a major pain spot. See also Daniel Raffel’s take on the confusing state of mobile development.

Hard to develop. Hard to install. We need to fix this asap. -m

The little one just turned a month old. Since I have a spare moment, time for some blog catch-up. A C|Net puff piece survey reports

More than two-thirds of respondents said that their data was most vulnerable on laptop PCs, while 40% chose “other mobile devices” (i.e. PDAs, mobile phones, wireless devices)

Mind you, this is just a survey of how repondents felt, not reporting any specific security issues.

Is data accessible through mobile devices at risk? Absolutely. What are you doing to secure your data? -m

Another example of a small, useful spec defined in a language humans can actually read and understand. It also seems incredibly useful to be able to print basic things without going through the multi-megabyte printer driver madness that everyone else seems to be going for. -m

I just have a feeling I’m going to need this some day. -m

Check this out. It’s a RAZR V3i, which has a show-stoppingly bad mobile browser built-in. (But overall, it’s still better than the ROKR!) Compared to the huge announcements from Apple earlier this week, this one comes in fairly under the radar. Could this be a trial baloon leading up to an official iPhone?
If this one supports replacing the browser with Opera, this might be a near-term option… -m

According to the authoratative site. Looks like the virtualization markup is getting interesting. -m

I don’t know if I hit a glitch in the system or what, but while I was making my periodic browser through the online Apple Store, I noticed a refurb iPod Shuffle for under fourty bucks. I was trying to wait for the next rev, but hey, I have more travel coming up.

I tend to lose (or have stolen, etc.) my portable devices. But if I lose this one, I’ll feel a whole lot less bad than if I lost a $400 one. :) -m

For a while, I’ve had an iGo Juice 70. They’ve really nailed the “universal” power adapter for notebooks. Input can be 120 volts, 240 volts, 12 volts (auto), or whatever you get on planes. Output is a series of pluggable tips that work well with 8 different models of notebooks, including everything I own.

The worst thing that can happen while travelling (well, not the worst, but up there) is having your notebook power adapter fail. On my recent trip, this happened…almost. The adapter would still light up, and the Mac would show as still charging, but the level of charge would in fact remain steady or even drop. Certain careful physical orientations seemed to help.

So I went on their web site, used their online support system, and got in touch with a helpful technician. He immediately shipped me out a new Mac adapter tip and cable. Problem solved. This is an example of how tech support should work. -m

Part of tech reviewing means dusting off a Windows machine again. I haven’t done more than check email or run Quickbooks online on a Windows machine since I was writing my book in 2003. Remarkably, Windows XP is still the latest desktop OS available. But it needs updates.

Checking my update history, I had 37 updates installed, with Windows Update insisting on installing three more things including “Genuine Advantage”. Reboot. Yay, now I’m advantaged. Apparently the main new feature in Windows Update is a five-minute “Checking for the latest updates for your computer…” screen. Next Service Pack 2, which has to be installed separately.

This is taking a while, so I have time to re-appreciate the nuances of the Windows UI. In the system tray, I see room for six icons, but only four present. (Clicking the little arrow, though, causes a wiggle, with six icons showing in the same space; after a second, another wiggle and back to four). All of the icons are blurry, two of them enough that I have no idea what they’re supposed to represent.

I couldn’t make stuff like this up, but it blue-screened 73 minutes into the ordeal. Unbelievable. On the bright side, it did recognize that the whole Service Pack didn’t need to be downloaded again.

As an aside, the crash tool suggested that I run the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool, so it’s possible the blue screen was hardware related. Amusingly, the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool is exactly 640kb. If you don’t get the tragic coincidence, post a comment and I’ll tell you. :)

The second run through installing Service Pack 2…blue screens again, this time with some USB error. Upon rebooting, a Windows Setup screen draws little dots for several minutes while “restoring previous configuration”, and the desktop warns me ominously that the system is in an “unstable state”, and that I need to go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and uninstall SP2. The uninstall program helpfully warns me that lots of programs, including “hearts” and “solitaire” toward the top of the list, might stop working, but I bravely press on.

Reboot again. 640×480 resolution, and all kinds of messages like “found new hardware — disk drive”. On the change resolution screen in Control Panel, the “OK” and “Cancel” buttons are off the screen. And another reboot to get networking set up again. At this point I’m three hours wasted, six reboots, and I have nothing to show but an even more unstable system and Genuine Advantage. Wheeeee! At what point does Microsoft throw the “rewrite from scratch” swich? The saga continues, check comments on this post. -m

I’m on the IT eqivalent of emergency life support for a few days. I returned to a DOA hard drive. If you’ve sent me mail in the last week or so, think about re-sending it. See the comments for the gritty details. -m