Category Archives: fun

iPad Data Plans Nice, but where’s the tethering?

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All iPads are unlocked and use GSM micro SIMs, so you can use a carrier right away if you have data. No contract: you activate the service directly from the iPad and can cancel any time you want without an ETF. iPad has built-in 3G. Data plans normally cost $60 a month for a laptop. 250MB of data per month is $15 (less than the usual $35). $30 for unlimited — a much better deal. AT&T is providing the service.

Come on AT&T, I still can’t tether my iPhone according to your terms of service!  Brutal.

How to save Windows Mobile

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Among Blackberry, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, Microsoft was the earliest player in mobile computing and smart phones, so why have they failed in this area?

With Windows Mobile 7 waiting in the wings, it occurred to me that I just don’t see people using Windows Mobile devices that much any more. In fact, at work, we’ve seen a shift from WinMo to Blackberry and iPhone, with the exodus split about 60/40 in favor of Blackberry. The market share shift has been swift and decisive.

Now I know this isn’t exactly news, but I was trying to figure out why.  Microsoft correctly foresaw the mobile market as being the next big thing for them and the software industry, and they had very early foresight that mobile was going to sweep our eyes away from our desktops in a major way. They had the timing right, but their solution is, and has been, inadequate.

The Value of Ecosystems

One key difference between Microsoft and Apple is that, while they both offer end-to-end ecosystems (Microsoft with XBox, Apple with iTunes/iPhone/AppleTV), they seem to use their ecosystems to different ends.  I believe Apple’s tightly-integrated iTunes ecosystem was primarily driven by the “digital paranoia” of the record industry in the early 2000′s, and it may not have been Apple’s idea to provide such a closed environment. But, in the end, consumers seem to prefer the “just works” ecosystem over the “bring your own interface” approach. For this reason, Microsoft can be seen to have failed at establishing a clear content-to-consumer delivery model based on Windows Mobile.

What’s worse, the Zune, which could have been a great launchpad for a simplified, stylus-free version of Windows Mobile four years ago, exists on yet another Microsoft island, limiting its value to the consumer. Rectifying this problem by bringing the ill-fated Zune line into the limelight of the Windows ecosystem would go a long way towards making Windows Mobile relevant again. Think iPod.

Failure to Recognize Consumer Patterns of Behavior

It was only a matter of time before the average consumer was using personal devices to manage nearly every aspect of his life. Yet Microsoft took the wait and see approach, preferring to believe that the corporate world would drive personal device adoption, where, in reality, we can see that personal, entertainment-oriented device use has driven the entire mobile industry for the last several years.  Two parts gear lust, and one part nerdification of the general populous, this movement is the exact opposite of the strategy Microsoft used for Windows Mobile.

Most People Lose Their Stylus

The user interface options available on Windows Mobile devices, until recently, have been based on resistive touch screen technology, generally used with a small, inkless pen called a stylus.  Blackberry, by contrast, has always offered its trademark “scroll wheel”, and Apple developed a slew of UI technologies, including groundbreaking iPod controls, that culminated in a stylus-free touch-screen control environment for the iPhone. Windows Mobile never employed either approach, so solving this problem (and Microsoft is solving it) will help.

Give Developers a Reason to Develop

The real trick isn’t coming up with the idea. The real trick isn’t coding the program.  The real trick IS getting people to notice.  Apple has more than solved this problem, for better or worse, with the Appstore.  You bring the code, we bring the customers.  While some web sites have served as communities of developers and consumers of WinMo apps, they exist outside the ecosystem and don’t provide turnkey delivery of content.

When Microsoft finally did show up on the scene with an official WinMo store, they stubbed their toe by naming it “Windows Marketplace for Mobile”.  Srsly?

Stop Trying to Look Like Windows

Windows Mobile shouldn’t look like Windows and shouldn’t even be called “Windows”, since a windowing environment on a 3″ screen is a useless idea anyway. Yet when we look back at the releases of Windows Mobile (and its mobile predecessors), we get the idea that Microsoft has always wanted WinMo to look as much like desktop Windows as possible. Only with Windows Mobile 7 has this pattern been broken. (See above screen grab.)

Blackberry never had this problem, as their main objective was to develop a good mobile UI, and they had no ties to an existing desktop environment.  Apple, who does have Mac OS X, decided not to bother bringing the X look and feel to their mobile device. This was a great decision, of course.

I own two colleges and a bar.

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I’m not really sure what all the excitement over MyTown is about. It’s a social app for the iPhone that employs GPS as a means of allowing you to play a real estate game like Monopoly using local establishments as the places you trade.  Local businesses, that is, from the white pages.

When I first read about it, it sounded great.  When I read that it was developed by ex-Diablo engineers, it was a must-download.  While there was some meager novelty in “owning” the local community college, the shimmer quickly faded, because nothing at all interesting occurred as a result.

Sadly, 48 hours later, I think I’m going to remove it.  It’s boring, and it plays just like one of those Zynga social games where you have to check in as often as possible in order to “level up”.  I just don’t have time for that.

Twitter, public opinion, and Joshua Cribbs

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Friend Mike at Chronic Dawgs put up a post last week about how Joshua Cribbs, the best football kick returner of all time, is feeling under-appreciated by his team, the Cleveland Browns.  To put it in perspective, Josh had four return touchdowns and nearly broke the all-time pro football record for all-purpose yards this season.  No small accomplishment.

So the guy’s a big deal.  Anyway, he makes about a million a year and was insulted by a contract modification offer the Browns made for 1.4 million a year.  (As an aside, I’d be pretty happy making half that if my job was to play a game and stay in top physical shape using the best gyms and trainers in the world, but I digress.)

The din around Cleveland surrounding Josh’s contract has been constant and obnoxious the last few weeks. It all started when the new team president Mike Holmgren came in and started hiring coaches.  Fans feel that management has turned their back on Cribbs and are ignoring his request for a contract (never mind he has three years left on his current one) while they build up the white-collar staff in preparation for next season.

It’s amazing how much Twitter action I’ve seen on this subject. People are tweeting, from as far away as Kuwait, using the #payjoshcribbs hash tag. There are Facebook fan pages called “Pay Josh”, and I myself have received 7 to 10 separate invitations to support Josh’s cause.  Of all the causes to worry about.

Yet public opinion doesn’t influence an NFL owner’s bank account. Just ask the Browns, who just put the finishing touches on their ninth losing season since returning as an expansion franchise.

TechCrunch, Don’t Be Smug: Google did the “Right Thing®”

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So TechCrunch thinks Google bailed on China because the going was just too tough. They weren’t the market share leader and had so much to lose that they backed out of the most promising market in the history of the Internet in order to stop the “bleeding.”  I tend to disagree with that assessment.

Why, if Google were so afraid of wasteful business practices that they would pull out of their biggest growth market for content products, would they be involved in similarly valueless gambits?  Take things like GoogleVoice, Google Wave, the cloud, Android, and projects like that.  These aren’t profitable ventures for Google, but may indeed become so at some point, especially Android and Voice.  The point is, Google spends all kinds of money on things that make folks scratch their head because they believe there’s money to be made.

China is no different, except that something clear scared the balls off of Google in the process. Be it the communist secret police or a blackmail offer that would’ve been even more embarrassing to Google than the Chinese government-backed breach of Gmail they just revealed, SOMETHING scared Google away from the biggest treasure trove of the next decade.  And that something was big. Yet to believe TechCrunch’s assessment, you’d have to assume the move was purely profit-driven and not really borne of any moralistic decision.  Again, I tend to disagree.  Profit decision or not, at the end of the day, Google DID THE RIGHT THING.  Why is it so hard for all these young pay-per-post bloggers to understand we’re talking about brutal social communism?

So TechCrunch’s echoing of the silly notion that China is a bad market for Google because it’s just too hard for them—ahh, that’s justy a goofy idea.  Have you ever known Google to back down from a market fight? Me neither.  If you answer no, then TechCrunch advises you to “sit the hell down and shut the hell up”.  They should rename their web site BlowHard.

Somebody call Mike Arrington and hook his writers up with Critical Thinking 101 at the local community college.

Come on Nintendo, Apple is going to Gobble you!

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NetFlix on the Wii. $9 a month.  Great, just what the doctor ordered.  Except that, like the PS3, you have to put a CD in the Wii’s drive in order to actually watch the movies you rent.  A MacMini or AppleTV doesn’t suffer that characteristic.  Usability, guys.   Same thing goes for you Amazon–if you’re going to compete with the ecosystem king, you better do it by beating them at the thing consumers care about most. Usability.

How to Run UAE Amiga Emulator on the Wii

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Oddly, it’s really not hard to run UAE on the Wii, but the existing documentation that’s out there is kind of confusing and incomplete.  So here it is — how to get the UAE Amiga Emulator running on your Nintendo Wii.  Here are the steps I used to build my setup:

1 – The Nintendo Wii should be menu version 4.2u. Newer versions may work but watch those automatic system updates from Nintendo as they can break the software pre-reqs used by the Amiga emulator.

2 – Obtain a 2 GB SD card.  This card must be a non-SDHC card and the 2 GB size limit is the real deal. The Nintendo Wii will not work with a larger card without some hacking.  So save yourself the trouble (and coin) and just get a 2 GB card. This card will be used to load the Amiga emulation and floppy images later on.

3 – Download and install the Homebrew channel for Wii.  This is a piece of software required to launch the Amiga emulator and other hacker projects.  Note that by installing the Homebrew channel, you’re essentially voiding your Wii’s warranty.   These easiest way to obtain Homebrew is the Hackmii installer, available here. Here are the instructions for this step:

Navigate to Bannerbomb.  Download and unzip Bannerbomb onto the SD card. Next you download the Hackmii Installer and unzip it, copying installer elf to the card’s root and renaming it to boot.elf.

Note: If you have already used the SD card to attempt an install of homebrew the you could have a file on your SD card called boot.dol or a folder called private.  Delete or rename them.

4 – Once Homebrew is running (it will show up as a Channel on the Wii Menu), take your SD card back to your computer and delete everything on it.

5 – Download Simon Kagstrom’s UAE port for Wii and extract the zip file to the root of the SD card. There should be two folders — one called uae and one called apps.  You won’t need to do anything with the folder called apps, but the uae folder is where you’ll place your Amiga ROM files and floppy disk images.

6 – Obtain Amiga ROMs.  The easiest (and legal) way to do this is do purchase Cloanto’s Amiga-licensed (yes, the Amiga license holders are real people with real lawyers who actually exist) emulation product for PC and Mac, called Amiga Forever.   Copy the ROM files from the Amiga Forever CD-ROM into the /uae/roms folder on the SD card.  They should be called “kick13.rom”,  ”kick20.rom”, and so forth depending on the version of the Amiga you plan to boot.

7 – Obtain Amiga floppy images (games).  A great site is thegamearchives.com.  Save these ADF files into the /uae/floppies folder on the SD card.

8 – Re-insert the SD card into the Wii and launch the Homebrew channel.  You should now have a working Amiga.  Use the Wiimote to control the Amiga (keyboard support is extremely limited at this point but workable for most programs).

9 – Enjoy!

Does PETA realize how self-satirical they’ve become?

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When I first saw this image, I thought it was a pretty funny joke…  A joke pointing the lengths to which PETA goes to make arguably absurd statement about the defense of animals’ “feelings” and “rights”.  But then I found out that the PETA UNhappy Meal is actually a real thing.  It’s a ploy to keep kids away from McDonald’s Happy Meals, even sporting a satanic-looking version of Ronald McDonald brandishing a bloody knife and the catch-phrase “Chicken McCruelty”.  Good stuff.  I wonder how long their comic book hijinks will go on before PETA loses all remaining credibility.