2007 October | Signal to Noise

The Boss Loop Station RC-2: my review

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This isn’t exactly a new product, but since I invest in a Boss RC-2 loop pedal, I figured I’d share my thoughts with you. The RC-2 records short recordings from an instrument input and then plays them back as loops so you can play or sing along with them. This makes jamming solos over top of a chord pattern very easy.

In my case, I used the RC-2 with my acoustic guitar, a Takamine Martin knock-off, circa 1980, with a Dean Markley pickup. Recording the loops is no sweat–the pedal provides a kick-snare timekeeping beat to help you line the phrases up correctly so that they loop without stuttering. You can store up to eleven phrases this way and the play them back. Phrase playback has its own volume control, though you’ll still need to adjust your main instrument volume apart from the pedal, since no input trim is provided.

Generally, I had only intended this for one-shot loops, for live performances where it’s just me and my guitar. But I’ve had a hard time getting the one-shot loops recorded and playing back during performance of a song. It’s just a lot to manage, and I haven’t gotten used to it yet. For $170 new, this pedal is fun, but I haven’t decided if it’s a keeper yet.

Have a little SIP of Leopard (or don’t)

I would’ve installed Leopard on release day had my Macbook Pro and I not been tied up working on a special project yesterday. But now thatÂ I have some spare time andÂ can pick up Leopard from retail this afternoon, I’m a little weary.

Friend and fellow Mac user Andy Abramson reports that once he installed Leopard, all of his SIP software quit working. No Sighspeed, Gizmo Project, or even Eyebeam. When first reading Andy’s post, it sounded like the Leopard installer mangled his local firewall settings, but I don’t think so any more. It’s definitely SIP-related as Andy pointed out, but iChat, which is communicates using SIP, appears to be immune.

Once I get Leopard rocking on my Mac I’ll dig into this as well.

Cell phone spam is killing my routine bigtime and newsflash: AT&T SUCKS.

About two weeks ago I began receiving calls from “Private No.” on the Nokia phone I’ve been using. At first I thought nothing of it, until these calls began to increase in frequency. It peaked a couple of days ago, when I received 55 such calls in ONE DAY.Â Â I know the fundamental spam-resistance technique: don’t answer it.Â Of course, sheer morbid curiosity got the best of me. I had a few words in mind for these mumbling, non-English-speaking nimrods that keep leaving me indecipherable voicemails.Â These voicemails sound like people talking in the background as opposed to actually talking to me.

So when I answered the call, the guy said some crap I couldn’t understand and managed to stay with me on the call for all of about 8 seconds before hanging up.Â When I’m in a meeting and I get 12 calls in a row, I look like a dweeb. I have to do something to silence my ringtone, so I dump the incoming private calls to voicemail. The other option would be to turn off my phone, but I just can’t afford to do that.Â What’s worse, when these morons go into my voicemail, they’re paging me and leaving me voice messages. The SMS page notifications I receive as a result incur SMS usage, which equals $$$ out of my pocket, sucks my phone memory, and creates a REAL nuisance. We’re talking 20 – 30 voicemails and 20 – 30 text messages every day.
Now here’s the real crap of it: AT&T says they “cannot block private calls”, period, end of story. How idiotic is that? Privacy management out to be the hallmark feature of a usage-based system like AT&T’s cell phone service. This is why companies like Iotum, GrandCentral, and TalkPlus are getting so much attention. They allow you to manage *more* of your own privacy than the cell phone companies do.

Problem is, I already use one of these services and I’m still getting Private No. calls, because the spamming caller isn’t dialing my GrandCentral number–they’re dialing my direct cell phone number. I cannot change my cell number because many of my clients use it to get a hold of me. My number is already on the national Do Not Call list (I registered it even though I shouldn’t have to since it’s a cell). Automatic callback to the private number doesn’t work.
It dawned on me that I should be able to turn my private call ringtone to silent with no vibrate, but as it turns out, this phone won’t let me do that either. So I started investigating call-blocking add-ons for the Symbian OS that runs on my phone. Haven’t been able to find anything yet.Â Any Symbian lovers out there know of a good solution?

New N800 GPS video how-to online!

This video, which I made for my brethren over at DownloadSquad, show s how to implement Maemo Mapper with Google Maps for GPS tracking and mapping. View the video at YouTube.

O’Reilly too late to the VoIP party to be a major influencer?

With the shutdown of the Emerging Telephony blog, the subsequent shuffle of O’Reilly telephony guy Surj Patel over to GigaOm, and the poopoo-ing of the E-Tel conference, one must wonder, did O’Reilly miss the bus on VoIP?Â There were so many other large publish-promoters in the VoIP sector before O’Reilly really threw their hat in the ring–TMC, PulverMedia, and so on.Â I remember when Switching to VoIP was published. Many people asked me, “What took so long?”Â So my assumption is that these strategic moves by O’Reilly are an indicator that the publishing giant was too late in establishing the firm as an authority in the area.

Just noticed something cool about the Nokia N95

It has stereo speakers.Â Don’t know how I didn’t notice this for so long. But even my Spirit of Radio ring tone (courtesy of iTunes’s “Convert to MP3″ feature) plays through in stereo. Neat!

Actually, Skype needs to resume innovating

So there’s been a lot of hubbub about the shakeup at Skype, what with Zennstrom storming out and eBay’s executives apparently ready to bend over and take a huge charge to write off what they view as a poor investment in Skype.Â Then, we’ve got all kinds of folks watching the proverbial sky falling as suddenly, the sticker shock we all expressed when eBay bought Skype to begin with finally sinks in: eBay got snookered.

Or did they?

Skype did what nobody else could do. They built an always-on network of basically useable VoIP nodes at a very low cost, with some clever, secretive engineering, and a nice tight package that sold it to the nerd crowd. Gizmo couldn’t do that; neither could Google Talk; neither could Yahoo.

But before we call the curtains for Skype, we need to re-examine what Skype’s position and technology actually DO for eBay. First of all, Skype-in-Java should’ve been implemented eons ago in order to give eBay a fluid web-delivery mechanism for their voice network. This would’ve enabled Skype for all eBay users (a HUGE market reach), even those that don’t have the native client installed on their PCs. Secondly, Skype has the potential to be the ultimate social networking platform, a place from which innumerable commerce opportunities can sprout. Yet we don’t see Skype at the centerpiece of anything resembling Facebook or MySpace. Rather, we see MySpace (and soon Facebook) attempting to render their own pathetic attempts at instant messaging. Skype, WHERE ARE YOU?

It became obvious sometime in 2005 that minute-stealing isn’t the end-all-be-all of Skype. Saving people a penny per minute on long distance isn’t a survivable business model because it relies on the assumption that the long distance system is always going to be the grave-robbing racket that it is today. When international LD rates disappear altogether in favor of unlimited data access plans, Skype’s business model goes up in smoke. Seriously, wouldn’t you rather talk on your cell phone than on Skype?

So Skype needs to look at the ways it can meaningfully interact with other web technologies in order to benefit people. Simply dissolving the distance barrier in order to further drive a drop in LD rates (which is what Skype is causing today)Â isn’t going to work forever. It’s time for Skype to start working in the eBay framework. It’s time for Skype to go Java. It’s time for web developers to start using Skype as a de-facto method of voice and video communication.

Yes, it’s time for Skype to become ubiquitous. That means Skype needs to return to the drawing board and get innovation back at the front of its mission objectives.

Truphone, iPhone, and the new Newton: What it all means

Apple’s market position is as enviable as it is challenging right now. They’ve got a huge chunk of the laptop computer market. They’ve got the lion’s share of the digital music industry and a formidable piece of the video-over-Internet market. Their PC sales continue to rise despite a generally stagnant PC industry, and their iPhone has performed as well as could be expected. And that’s saying nothing about their software divisions, which are monetary bovine in their own right.

Last week TruPhone announced a product for iPhone. For those of you sleeping under a rock, TruPhone makes a VoIP software add-on for cell-phones which provides cheap, SIP-based Voice over IP calling, allowing you to circumvent ridiculous international long-distance charges (Europe) or silly ‘free calls after 9′ minute packages (North America).Â But TruPhone really hit a home run when they became the first to enable VoIP calling on Apple’s iPhone. Previously, Apple had been mysteriously quiet about the lack of Voice over IP on the iPhone, this despite its inclusion of SMS-compatible iChat (which is a VoIP tool on Mac) and a robust digital camera (which would make for great video-over-IP experiences).Â So TruPhone’s VoIP-via-iPhone introduction was significant.

But iPhone’s developer ecosystem (or lack thereof) is filled with well-documented pitfalls, and TruPhone’s product may be as much of a hack as it is a development that Apple endorsed in its “sure developers can do that” attitude. Problem is, Apple has already broken things people created for the iPhone, like bricking, by releasing software updates. I would hate to see TruPhone’s product get broken when Apple’s AT&T exclusivity expires and they’re free to implement VoIP for themselves.

Then, there’s the much-rumored new Newton. The old Newton, as you’ll recall, was a crap circus. Like all the early PDA products (or should I say all PDAs period), the Newton was extremely well intentioned, well designed, and well, useless. So much has changed, though, and it’s got me wondering if a modern-day Apple ultramobile could be a successful product for Cupertino.

And I think, based on what we’ve seen with the iPhone, that the new Newton probably doesn’t have the brightest outlook. One reason the iPhone has been so successful is because of all the things it doesn’t do. Apple purposefully made it easy to use by eliminating non-essential functionality like VoIP-over-WiFi. A Newton isn’t going to appeal to the same people who truly benefit from the no-nonsense approach of the iPhone because it will be more of a hacker’s tool akin to the Nokia N800. Serious computing tasks will still take place on a Macbook Pro, and one-touch tasks will still take place on the iPhone. Somewhere in the middle, we’ve got this UMPC marketplace that still, somehow, seems to be solving problems people don’t have.

I think this is what his Steveness was referring to five or six years ago when he said Apple wasn’t interested in the PDA market. After all, PDAs had to become mobile phones before consumers finally became interested in them in droves… And Steve already has that angle covered with the iPhone.

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Teddy Wallingford, Rock and Roll CEO