I have three devices on my desk that connect to my ears, and my mouth in some way:

• My desk phone. This currently has a plantronics headset hooked up to it, on a "qd" connector.

• My iphone, which may be docked or undocked. My iphone has the ability to send music down the dock connector, but calls can only go out the top connector, or over bluetooth. (This is the subject of a different rant).

• My computer, which makes noises out a pair of speakers, as well as over headphones via the classic "the speakers go mute when you plug in headphones" answer.

Every one of these devices has a microphone as well.

What I want: The ability to connect one pair of headphones, and have all the sound, from all devices route through it, and out to the sources of my choosing, without plugging and unplugging more wires than the one headset that at the end of the day, I take home with me, at the volumes of my choosing.

For my sound-in sources, I just want the ability to route them to the devices in question, with no real amplification other than attenuation to the level those devices expect.

I basically want the windows "Volume Mixer" but for physical devices (which may not all be standard 1/4 inch connectors, or standard impedance levels).

• Perhaps such a device would be mixer-like, with either physical sliders or virtual ones (i.e. touch a button to select an input, then drag a virtual slider, on the device).

• Perhaps it would have an API to set rules such as, say "if there's noise coming in the phone connector, mute the other sources", or "drop computer volume (i.e. the level coming out the connector) to 20%" or even "set the computer's volume level to 20 percent (as in, the volume control in the OS) or even "run an applescript to tell the iphone or itunes to stop if they're playing".

• Perhaps the device would also appear as its own USB sound device, so with a standard pair of shitty headphones and a standard shitty headset, I could get the benefits of sound-out-my-speakers, but skype-in-my-ear.

• Perhaps such a device would also be bluetooth capable, so if I were wearing an a2dp headset, all sound could be sent to that.
  Perhaps if bluetooth capable, it would also pair to the iphone and accept calls that way.

• Perhaps such a device would even just come with a small dongle that's not a2dp, but something higher-quality, that you just plug your (non-wireless) headphones into, and clip on your belt, and roam around.

I would love a device like this for my home. I would love a device like this for my car. I would love a device like this for my office.

...if we can raise a million dollars to Reboot Shadowrun, I'd give $100 toward development of a thing such as this.

So, you have a smart device like an iphone. When you connect it to your mac, it helpfully offers to sync all your photos over, then prompts you to delete them from the phone (presumably, this assumes it's like any other dumb camera, we fill up the 4m flash, we dump it off, we're done). Separate to this, is the "photo stream" which is a totally different, cloud-like stream of all photos you've taken on all devices that syncs to everything, over the last 30 days.

You can have photo albums on your phone, that you add items to (for example "covers of books I need to buy" for those of us who use the thing as a second brain).
But the photos will be synced over and deleted, with no indication of which library they were in. There's no preference that says "only sync photos in the main camera roll (which is really "all photos -- so the preference would have to be "don't delete photos that are in some other album")

You can also create albums in iPhoto, which you can then tell itunes to sync -- but you CANNOT add new photos to those albums without connecting the phone to your computer.

In iphoto, you can't seem to drag items into an album, nor is there the "click to tag" interface familiar to the iphone.

If you add a "photo stream" photo to an album, does it simply disappear from that album after 30 days? I don't know. It's totally non-obvious.

You also cannot simply manage the albums on your phone, FROM your mac.

This is really stupid.

So I admit to having started playing Words with Friends. The app for iphone is a piece of crap.

The big annoyance? There is, near as I can tell, no way to log out, and no way to mute the sound. You can mute the sound when it's actually foregrounded, but you can't shut off people's ability to send you moves while you're, say, sleeping -- and have your phone at full volume because you need to wake up if the network is down.

Thusfar, the only "mute" I've found is to delete the app, then reinstall when you want to play again, which definitely feels like the wrong answer.

Three and a half years ago, I wrote this rant about the lack of value the iphone holds for me.

It's now three and a half years later, and I own one.

My geek friends will ask "Why not android?". Somehow the odd issues my friends had experienced with Android OS, coupled with the spectacularly shitty battery life my friend Jeff has gotten from his Droid 1.0, have soured me.
Buying an android phone seems very much like buying a mattress to me: all providers have their own individual options, with individual hardware and individual plans. It's rather hard to compare apples to apples (no pun intended).

As for why I went to Verizon, a spectacularly shitty customer service experience at the AT&T store has me deciding that I'm done here. I'm going to finish paying off the netbooks to keep the early termination fees down, but after that, we're through.

I bought one because a friend visiting from out of town had no service, so I figured it was a good way to both try one, and give them a way that they could have a local number. Verizon gave me 14 days to cancel, and during that time I tried very hard to embrace the experience to see, if at all possible, if it would suck little enough to switch over.

During the same time, my old, trusty, Sony Ericsson p800 was finally developing signs that time might be nigh for it: more random crashes, and the spectacular failure mode whereby menu options would simply DISAPPEAR off the screen, and the menus would renumber as though this was normal.

However, I wanted to re-touch on the major reasons that I hadn't bought one till now, and cover the use-cases where my ten-year-old phone might still be superior.

My original complaints (again, the original post is linked from the first sentence of this post):

1) No tethering. Well, it seems Verizon allows this over a cable, bluetooth, or wifi, and while they will actually charge you for the privilege, they will also give you another 2G of data to use, which can also be used by the phone.
I consider this a fair compromise.

2) Useless bluetooth, which didn't support things like bluetooth keyboards, or file syncing. This has been fixed, as well. Here's an apple technote that details it.

3) No ability to sync via wifi. Fixed.

4) No tactile feel. Well, I still don't have this with an all-glass screen, but Siri makes up for a lot of this. I'm also investing in this to cover my need to SSH into systems. (And siri's not so useful for typing unix shell commands).

5) No IRDA. I had complained about this because it restricted ways in which you could share data with other non-apple devices. In the past few years, data networks have become a lot more prevalent, and virtually no new devices come with IR support. Assuming you still want to use the IR for actually controlling your home media center, there are options.

6) No voice dialing. Yeah, I think with Siri this one's more than fixed. And then some. In spades.

7) Lack of ability to make calls over wifi (with your own number). Well, this was originally written when AT&T was the only option for an iPhone, and when in places like NYC, they just plain sucked and you couldn't actually get voice service. I'd still like to see verizon offer a nanocell option, that I could use at home, but at the moment there's not much use case for it since I'm in an area that doesn't suck.

8) Lack of input options. Well, the onscreen keyboard is much more adaptable now, as is the bluetooth keyboard I'm getting, and the inbuilt ability of "just say what I want to write" is pretty much a killer of this complaint.

9) The Jail. Oh, it still exists, and it still pisses me off quite a bit, on both my iphone, and on my ipod nano.
More on that in part 2.

10) Non-transcribed voicemail. I'm getting around this with simulscribe, but I'd really love to see it as an option, and I suspect it's only a matter of time before you can have siri itself transcribe your voicemail. Also, no app for phonetag? Boo.

So yeah, almost every major issue's been resolved to some degree. However, there's a new class of annoyances, more minor than before.

1) Itunes still sucks. Apparently, you can sync your music collection with only one computer at a time.
Additionally, itunes can only sync with one iPod at a time. If I have all my music on system "A", and synced to my ipod, I cannot play those songs on computer "B". Even if I "authorize" my computer as a second machine, I can't seem to play the songs on the ipod directly through my computer. I must "transfer the purchases" which requires eating the same 8G of HD space over and over. The ipod is effectively an external drive, why can't I use it as such?

1a) Oh, and apparently Mac-formatted phones can't be read by windows machines, but windows-formatted phones can be read by macs. Why then, are all phones not shipped windows formatted?*

2) There are gaps in the feature matrix. Despite the iphone being the most expensive device, there are things the ipod nano can do, that the iphone cannot.

2a) For example, the nano has a pedometer (which I use) that's based solely on an accelerometer. The iphone's, on the other hand, wants either a nike sensor in your shoe, or wants to use a GPS. And there's no simple "start counting my steps" option. By the way, the GPS-based-pedometer? Kinda useless on a treadmill, which is how I do my walking.

2b) The nano has an FM tuner. Which, I understand, with the iphone I can just stream audio over 3g -- but at the gym, where the TV's are broadcast over FM, the nano has the option I need. So it would be really nice to just have two checkboxes in itunes that tell me which device to sync which songs with. The "workaround" here seems to be to resort to having to manually copy files to at least one of my devices.

3) The in-vehicle options kind of suck. With my old phone, I could dock the phone in the car, and it basically became part of the car. It would mute the radio to take calls, the cradle was solid and bolted into place (and docking it was a simple, fluid motion). Apple makes no "official" car kit, and as this guide points out, the iphone only routes calls over Bluetooth or the Headphone port, not the bottom dock connector.

• Which means even though I'm docking my phone, with a wire, in my car, I have to use a radio link that's subject to interference.

• I also don't want to have to have a separate accessory to keep a battery charged on when I'm effectively stationary within my car.

3a) In a car, specifically, I want an option that lets me push actual buttons to do things without having to slide or swipe. It's only a "handsfree" phone if I can do everything -- EVERYTHING -- that phone needs to do, without touching the phone. Yes, I can tell Siri to go to next track, or whatever, but for base functions, I may resort to using this thing and mounting it somewhere near my steering wheel, and routing it through a cassette adapter.

4) Siri isn't listening full time. She listens when you raise her to your ear and talk, or when you push the button.
But I'd love to be able to give it a "keyword" to answer to. The argument here is that this will deplete the battery.
My counter-argument is that the times when I'd like it to do so are only going to be times that I have it docked: when it's on my desk or in my car.

5) Siri sucks as a GPS. I can ask siri where I am, and I can ask her "how do I get to San Francisco", but while she'll give me directions, I must manually key in each turn with a series of "next, next, next". I strongly suspect this one will be fixed soon, and I'll eventually have an interface where siri slowly fades the music, and speaks over it, and brings things up to speed.

5a) Siri's still lacking on a few things, questions that have "simple answers". "Siri, how far is it to redwood city?" Literally means, I'm asking a question that you can answer with a number, without displaying something onscreen. Or "Siri, how long will it take to get to redwood city." Also strongly lacking are things like "Siri, please redial the last number that called me" or "Siri, list the last three incoming calls." Anything I could answer with google's unit conversion should also be siri-fied. (Siri, what's 32 degrees celsius in fahrenheit?) The ability to say "Set sleep timer" and have it actually be the sleep timer, or the ability to set multiple timers. The ability to say "raise volume" or "lower volume".

5b) Location-based reminders still suck. You can say "remind me when I get to the office to do X" but not "remind me when I'm near a grocery store, without adding the grocery store as a custom address to YOUR info.

6) I strongly suspect alternate siri voices are coming too (for a premium price, I'm sure.).

7) Finally, the classic apple problem: The fact that I have to wait two years between devices if I want the newest, shiniest, without paying full price. At least, however, it seems Verizon lets you trade in your device and gives you some value for it. I just plugged in my phone's numbers and found it's worth $272 -- where retail is in the $600 range.

Let's see how things go from here. That keyboard has shown up, and I'll be writing a review for it shortly.

I don't know what set me off on this web search today, but I somehow became fascinated with the fact that in the movie "Jurassic Park" there's a point at which a breaker has to be manually "primed" like some sort of pump. This felt like some kind of crappy scriptwriting to me, to make the procedure seem overly elaborate in the race against time. Here's a relevant clip:

In doing the search, I found a forum post where someone wanted one for their home.

Now if you look at the clip above, while the big "park systems" buttons are clearly constructed mock-ups, the fine writing and detail on the main breaker itself looks a little too real, especialy around 0:45, you can see it has extra carefully-labeled buttons, and internal moving parts.

As it happens, it's a real thing. And in reality, it works exactly that way. Now, the big ratcheting handle, isn't priming a pump, it's actually a ratchet that puts tension on a giant spring.

Unsatisfied, I had to find the exact thing. As it turns out, it would appear to be a Westinghouse (Cutler-Hammer) SPB-65 (or another model in that line).

So two things amuse me.

First, that the movie got it Exactly Right. It's probably the only realistic thing in the movie, but there it is.

And second, that breaker, new, retails for about $15K. For ten seconds of screen time.

Clearly, they spared no expense.

It was the weekend of September 23rd. I was in Seattle, a new town to me, for a convention. But I had other plans. I rented a car (a Crown Vic with all-leather interior), and drove the hour+ north to Bellingham, to see my long-time internet friend ravynwolf . Me, her husband and I spent the day hanging out and experiencing a city that was new, fresh, foreign and breathtaking to me. The entire time, I was astonished by its beauty, and the way nature seemed that much closer.

The entire time, I was wishing someone close to me were there with me.

When I headed home, around midnight, I tuned in a local radio station, and happened to hear a live music concert: it was Lady Gaga doing live renditions of most of her album, for the "IHeartRadio" debut, live in Vegas. At one point, Sting came on stage and sang "Stand By Me" with her, as she retold how many people in the music business had been cruel and cold, and Sting had been genuine.

She dedicated her song "Hair" to a Jamey Rodemeyer, who was a victim of bullying and had recently committed suicide.

And the crowd loved it. Driving through the pacific northwest, I shared in that.

All the music, everything, the scenery around me, felt real in a way that nothing else did, and at the time time, surreal and dream-like. Cruising in my couch-on-wheels through the darkness, I teared up.

And for weeks after, I tried to find a recording of that concert, to be able to explore these feelings some more. To evoke feelings brought about in my mind, by a series of sounds. Because I've hardened a bit, and being able to feel things -- is good.

I've found both a cut of that song, as well as a recording of the original concert in its entirety, on the kind of site where the MPAA and "the copyright holders" would have you believe you shouldn't download from. Because they own the content, and they would control your ability to feel what these things evoke.

Fuck them. I'd highly recommend anyone give it a listen. Here

In playing with wikipedia recently, I noticed that one of my favorite local bands had no page, so I attempted to re-create it. Upon looking, I discovered that it had been previously deleted in 2007, citing that they weren't notable, according to the guidelines here. It's a few years later, and they've gotten some press coverage (time will tell if it's "enough").

I've gone on an article search for them, including finding a few relevant items, but if anyone wants to help, please feel free. It's wikipedia after all.

I've always (well, not always, but you know what I mean) been a "3xl shirt wearer". It's the size I'd readily identify as: not able to do everything a normal person does, but not so large that it requires special efforts. Most cons I go to have their shirts in 3XL. The "shirt sites" like teefury, shirt woot, and the rest, are hit or miss. And even the shirts put out by the bands I love, it takes a special request to get. In short, it's a minor inconvenience, but there's still a *decent* selection.

In tee shirts, 3xl is the size that actually fits me, not being so tight as to show my a-cup breasts or various other body features, but even at that size, when I sit, my tee shirts to roll up from being stretched across my belly.

So, when I did my little wardrobe upgrade, a few months ago, I naturally assumed that "shirts are shirts", and got 3x in many of those. Over time, I've noticed that my button-down shirts go on pretty reasonably at the beginning of the day, but as they stretch and adapt to my body, by about mid-day, I've got a decent amount of slack, in the chest area. Also, the shoulders on 3xl button-down shirts are a little broader than my own.

So, today, while doing a shopping run to use up some coupons I have at my local big-and-tall store, I tried on a 2XLT of a button down I already own in 3X. While down below the pants-line, it seemed a little snug (but not so snug as to cause puckering in the buttons; from the neck to the midsection, it seems a lot better than what I had.

Ergo I picked up a few shirts I already own, in a new size, and then, in a stroke of awesome, the store manager allowed me to trade out the shirt I had worn into the place (which I was wearing for the first time, and hadn't washed) for a 2x.

On the same note, it seems that at least some pairs of pants (as I discovered while having a bunch altered) are at least a size too large on me.

So, whether I've lost any weight or not, there are some new numbers that I'm a bit more comfortable with. Which in turn makes me want to lose a little bit more. Which is something.

I've been fighting depression, for the past few days, mainly due to factors I can't control. I'm alone at home for at least the next few weeks, and while I normally have been doing okay with my privacy, it's setting in badly.

I've had a few negative encounters with a few people, and looking back, I can only view them as "social fail". Trip-ups where I said or did the wrong thing, and haven't been able to adequately recover. I'm beating myself up, perhaps, more than I should. But perhaps just enough.

The house has been on a slow drift toward chaos...I've been letting the dishes sit, letting papers sit unfiled, my car's been a mess. Projects have been feeling unfinished.

Work feels the same. Nothing gets driven through to completion. Even when there's significant progress, things get stuck for weeks or more at the 90 percent mark.

The only thing I can do here is drive the change. I'm about to have some coffee, and then I'm going to get this place, this gorgeous place that made me so happy, cleaned up.

So, I haven't posted in a while, and I figured I'd take a few moments to share a back and forth with Phil Broughton, better known as "Herr Direktor" of Funranium Labs. Funranium makes a rather excellent little drink: a cold-brew vacuum extracted coffee, from really good beans. Phil calls this brew Black Blood of the Earth. This is a reference to the movie "Big Trouble in Little China". You can read more about the product at His Site

I ordered a case of the stuff recently, and after trying small doses for an extended period of time, decided to email my findings, as well as some notes about my own unique physiology to him. While some might deem the information I provide to be an "overshare", I have a legitimate interest in the chemistry involved, and feel the info provided is requisite to explain the scenario adequately.

He replied less than 24 hours later, in equal depth and volume. I've removed the "quoted" portion, as well as sanitizing the email address.

All in all, I'm extremely satisfied with this purchase, and if you come to my Thanksgiving Thing (which is perhaps the subject of my next post), I'd love to share some with you.