Coherent Blahs

So, officially, the iPhone 4G is released, and according to Jobs, “it’s the biggest leap since the original iPhone”. But, where’s the beef?

Let’s see what iphone 4G brings us EXTRA:

1. Front facing Camera and videoconferencing: Well, it’s a neat feature, but not new. Android based Evo 4G already has a front facing camera, and Android has been supporting video chat for quite some time anyway.

2. External buttons, volume up and down, mute, front facing camera: Finally, FINALLY Apple realizes that that ALL soft buttons is not the best idea after all.

3.  Two mics for active noise cancellation: Heck, HTC had it for a long time. Even almost-obsolete Nexus 1 has this.

4. Gyroscope: Yes, this is definitely a new addition, and will be welcome by the gaming world. However, given it’s based on third party hardware, it’ll probably be on other phones within weeks. This is also an incremental addition, not really a “leap” I’d say.

5:  Retina Display: This, I think, is iPhone 4G’s biggest addition. But again, being third party, and hardware based, it’ll probably show up on other phones within weeks. This is also just an incremental addition.

On the software front, most of the stuff was declared with the iOS release, and Google had already upped the ante. Multitasking, Wallpapers were already there in Android.

So, let me ask again, where’s the beef… ahem… the leap?

Personally, I had expected WWDC to give us something better. Seems like Apple is now playing the catchup game, trying to sell front facing camera, multitasking etc. which have been on Android phones for some time now.

There are no MiFi mobile hotspots or free GPS navigation,  features already present in Android. Heck, with Froyo being deployed, Android users can now play all the games at Kongregate, watch all the videos (and not just the 75% of videos that Jobs wants iPhone users to watch), and do what THEY want, not what Jobs wants for them.

Related articles:

Showdown: iPhone 4 vs. HTC Evo 4G (wired.com)

We all have faced the dilemma of too many choices. From cereal to cellphones, choices are almost endless.
Jonah Lehrer of Frontal cortex had a piece in Science Friday about how our brain makes a decision given choices. The problem, however, is that our brain is only capable of holding seven such choices at a single point in time. And an even bigger problem is … advertisers know it.
Now seven is far from the number of choices available to a modern day man. Just look at the menu at a full service restaurant. It wasn’t a necessity when we were primates. But, we haven’t evolved fast enough to handle the choices offered to us today.
So, how do we beat it? How do we beat the cache size of a mere seven entries?
At school, we learnt a concept called bubble sort. The idea was, to find the largest (or second largest, or third) number in a list of numbers, we use an algorithm, where we need to look at only two numbers at a time, and compare them. Perfect!! Two, yes, that I can handle just fine.
To apply this in a real world scenario, this is what we need to do….
When presented with a plethora of choices, do not engage the brain to choose one among many. Instead, select the first TWO, only two, and make a selection. Once you have selected one, discard any thoughts about the other. Pick up the next and repeat the comparison process.
This allows you to worry about only two items at a time, still comes up with the best item.
Give it a shot next time when you feel overwhelmed by choices.

After my last Canon i960 broke down, got a Canon MX860 all-in-one. The first hiccup was finding the drivers.  There was no supported driver available for this at Canon USA support site. Strangely, there was a supported driver for Linux available at Canon Australia site.

Although the driver allowed me, with a bit of tweaking, both printing and scanning over wired and wireless connections, the print dialogs didn’t have all the necessary config knobs. This is due to missing functionality in the PPD file for the printer that has been distributed with the driver.

Google to the rescue. I found this discussion with the solution:

FYI, add this to /etc/cups/ppd/Canon-MX860.ppd 

and You can set resolution, quality and greyscale 

snip ------- 




*OpenUI *Resolution/Output Resolution: PickOne 

*DefaultResolution: 600dpi 

*Resolution 600dpi/600 dpi: "<</HWResolution[600 600]>>setpagedevice" 

*Resolution 1200dpi/1200 dpi: "<</HWResolution[1200 1200]>>setpagedevice" 

*Resolution 2400dpi/2400 dpi: "<</HWResolution[2400 2400]>>setpagedevice" 

*CloseUI: *Resolution 




*OpenUI *CNQuality/Quality: PickOne 

*DefaultCNQuality: 3 

*CNQuality 2/High: "2" 

*CNQuality 3/Normal: "3" 

*CNQuality 4/Standard: "4" 

*CNQuality 5/Economy: "5" 

*CloseUI: *CNQuality 




*OpenUI *CNGrayscale/Grayscale: PickOne 

*DefaultCNGrayscale: false 

*CNGrayscale false/Off: "false" 

*CNGrayscale true/On: "true" 

*CloseUI: *CNGrayscale 




snip ----- 

I had some problems with the newer releases of Firefox. And Google just enabled extensions for Chrome browser. Time to switch. And boy, am I happy!! It renders the websites much MUCH faster than Firefox, imported all my bookmarks, and most importantly, search keywords, from Firefox.

I did face one problem though. On my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS laptop, it didn’t support Java out of the box. Flash worked fine, but no Java.

However, found the fix pretty easily on the web. You need to do the following if you are facing this problem:

sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins

cd /opt/google/chrome/plugins

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so

Not all Emails are made equal. And some have the priority that they cannot wait.  Given that, I was looking for a way to filter out mails, and get a quick notification on some high priority Emails.
Since I have an Android phone, the best way for me to get notified is either through SMS, or through Google Talk. SMS costs money. So, I wanted the notification to come over GTalk.
My work Email resides on an Exchange server, and it has no way to filter an Email and generate a GTalk notification from it. So, I had to look for some client side solution.
Looking around the web, I found GTalk uses jabber as the underlying protocol, and I can use xmpp libraries to communicate with it.
(continue reading…)

I installed the wpTogo app on my phone, and now mobile blogging is a reality. This is my first post from Android!!!
So far, I’m loving the phone. It’s really really convenient to be connected all the time. Exchange sync with pushmail worked flawlessly. I’m getting the hang of the onscreen keyboard too.
T-Mobile dropped the donut update, and the performance is even better now.

YES!! I finally took the plunge and got the TMobile Mytouch (HTC Magic) handset running Android. So far am quite impressed by the handset, not so much with the T-Mobile service.

I still have my AT&T set, and at home, T-Mobile call quality is much better than AT&T. However, at my work at Juniper Networks, T-Mobile coverage is pretty bad. Inside the building, the data coverage always falls back to EDGE instead of 3G.

The silver lining is… TMo is setting up a tower very near the work building. So, hopefully this problem will go away.

Coming back to the handset, I like the feel of it in hand over Iphone (which feels much larger and difficult to operate using one hand).  The keyboard is a little sluggish, but hopefully that will be fixed with the Donut release come tomorrow. The phone looks super cool. I’m still getting used to all the features.

Apps that I added so far are:

Will cover some of them in later posts.

Now, this is really weird. I was searching for one place to get the list of all the states so that I don’t have to type it up for something I’m writing, and look what I found.

Look at the Sponsored Link section. Bing is putting Ads on Google!!! Huh!!!

I just got the Costco Magazine, and it clearly mentions that Mytouch 3G will be available in-store from August 5th. Even better, they will give you 35$ service credit.

Here is the ad from Costco Magazine:

Mytouch at costco

This was too good to pass: