In LA

I have an extra cell phone battery or two lying around, and have occasionally been on long flights that would have felt less long if my iPod could have played a few extra hours of video. I’ve noticed there are some commercially available devices that can charge an iPhone for sale on the net, but they are either expensive or are a little bulky due to their use of AA batteries. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could just use small, high-capacity, and cheaply available lithium ion batteries to act as an emergency battery pack for my iPod and other devices that charge over USB?

I’m in the process of thinking this through, and my knowledge of electronics is rudimentary. Here’s my current line of thought:

1. Whereas, iPods charge from a USB port, and
2. Whereas, USB provides 5V at 100mA (up to a max of 500mA, thus saith maxim in APPLICATION NOTE 3241 Charging Batteries Using USB Power), and
3. Whereas, my extra treo battery provides 3.6V (at ?mA), and
4. Whereas, many auto USB chargers for iPod currently on the market do not work with iPhones,
5. Now, Therefore, I would likely need to step-up the voltage from my Treo battery, and hopefully get sufficient amperage out of it. I do not know the reason that many chargers on the market do not work for the iPhone/Ipod Touch, but it does look as though other folk have figured it out. I’m going to pore over those ladyada forum postings and try to understand their fix for the problem before I try to build my own adapter.

Anyways, a fun project to think about. I’m at the thinking stage now, will write more if I actually take any action on this.

People often ask me if I’m going to get an iPhone, and I invariably answer that the iPhone looks great but three things need to happen for it to meet my needs:

1. It needs to be able to run my favorite Chinese dictionary software, Plecodict.
2. It needs a good Chinese pinyin input method
3. It needs to be unlocked so I can use it with China Mobile and other GSM phone systems around the world.

The first two items on this list require the iPhone to be officially open to 3rd party development. Sure, Apple will incorporate their own Chinese input method when they eventually ship iPhones in China, but there are better input methods I’d rather use. And Plecodict for iPhone won’t exist before an official SDK is released by Apple.

Hackers have made it possible for people to write native iPhone applications, and also to unlock the phone so that it can be used with GSM providers other than AT&T. Apple has generated some bad P.R. by blocking these iPhone improvements with a software update. And apparently Apple Store “Genius Bars” have been refusing to help customers who have installed 3rd party applications on their iPhones. I saw signs posted at the Apple Store in Santa Monica warning customers that hacked iPhones may not be eligible for warranty service.

Thankfully, Apple has announced that they’re going to be opening up both the iPhone and the iPod Touch to 3rd party application development, and will be distributing an SDK¹ to developers in February². This is great news, and will hasten the arrival of the kinds of 3rd party software for the iPhone that I find essential on my Treo.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Chinese, Chinese IME, Genius Bar, IME, iPhone, Pinyin, Treo

1. SDK == Software Development Kit [↩]
2. Why February? Besides ironing out the bugs, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple needs time to find a way to make it impossible to run voice-over-IP software on the iPhone. Surely the fact that the iPhone initially did not support 3rd-party software was in part due to the fact that AT&T wants people to use and pay for their voice call time, and doesn’t want customers to be able to call their friends at a steep discount using “Skype for the iPhone”. Their may even be such an agreement in writing between the two companies. I’m of course just guessing at all this, but it seems logical to me. [↩]

An ashtray on the inner door of the minty-fresh new Airbus A330 aircraft that flew me to Tokyo. The happy icon is the ashtray’s way of saying “smoke, ply me with ashes, and I will feel a great sense of purpose”.

One foot and one generation away, a sign on the other half of the door makes it clear that crime does not pay, and that these door-halves have not been talking to each other for some time.

A few notes on yesterday, March 28, 2007, which for me was a 36-hour-long day containing a couple of geeky surprises (marked in bold below).

• Woke up at 5:50 AM to the alarm and message “Wake up!” I’d set as an entry in my Treo’s calendar.
• Sync’ed my iPod nano so that I could listen to the latest Diggnation podcast while on the plane.
• Went to the Beijing airport and caught my Northwest Airlines flight to Tokyo’s Narita airport.
• The plane was an Airbus 330, which meant that it not only had nicely designed bathroom sinks, but also featured an electrical outlet for each seat.
• I plugged in my Mac Book Pro (after removing the battery to reduce the machine’s power consumption to below the 75W provided by the outlet) and watched an episode of Battlestar Galactica season 3.
• Changed my Treo’s locale to Los Angeles, and time zone to Pacific. Its clock set itself to L.A. time.
• Landed, hung out at the Narita airport for an hour and circled the waiting areas near my next flight’s gate.
• Noticed an extremely strong positive correlation in the waiting area between people holding paper bags of McDonald’s take-out food and their weight and nationality (lots of morbidly obese Americans waiting for flights to the midwest guzzling cokes and munching on fries).
• Caught a flight to San Francisco.
• geeky surprise #1: Slept for a couple of hours, and was then woken up by the same “Wake up!” alarm on my Treo when 5:50AM Pacific rolled around. How crazy-cool to be woken up twice on the same day by the same alarm in two different time zones!
• Plugged in the computer (plane was another A330) and watched four more episodes of Battlestar, the best sci-fi TV show ever. Strangely enough, I editorialized about this show a while back in a similar post about the trans-pacific flight from my last U.S. visit. The last episode I watched felt like Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle set in space. Battlestar’s ever-ambitious and capable writers managed to make it all work. I suppose anyone who can ably cover issues such to torture, sexual-abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder in fracking robots with fracking laser beams can pretty much make any complex story zing along.
• Landed in San Francisco, utilized SF’s awesome public transport system for a quick and no-fuss trip to Cupertino (BART subway from the airport one stop to Millbrae station, CalTrain South to Sunnyvale, number 55 bus to Cupertino).
• Had lunch with my pal Chris at Cafe Macs, said hello to a few other former coworkers of mine back at Apple.
• geeky surprise #2: Checked my email, noticed that internet luminary Odd Todd had posted a comment to my last blog post. A flush of geeky pride was in order –my very own blog had accrued a post from the creator of the great flash animation Laid-Off: A Day in the Life and other notable unemployment-related animated shorts. He also invented the very useful word “mep”. A brush with greatness.
• Hung out with my friends David and Ana. Chatted. Had some decent pizza and salad. Old friends, decent pizza, and quality salad are three things that are hard to come by in Beijing.
• geeky surprise #3: Got on my flight to LA. Walked toward my seat and saw someone who looked familiar. I realized that he was Alex Albrecht of the hilarious tech podcast Diggnation, but I was not absolutely certain and also wasn’t sure if he wanted to interact with a fan at that instant, so I tried to give him an out –instead of loudly calling out his name I subtly looked toward him and said “Diggnation?” (hmm, maybe it wasn’t that subtle, but the intention was sincere). He responded and we ended up chatting for a bit about the show. A few weeks ago I was surprised to listen to an episode and hear him talking about my friend Henri Lubatti, so we talked about Henri for a bit and about the pilot episode of Outsourced (”the worlds first weekly internet sitcom”), which Alex created and Henri starred in.
• I fell asleep almost as soon as I sat down in my seat, and slept for the entire hour-plus flight to LA. Woke up during the landing with that sort of pain in the ears that comes from sleeping through the flight without equalizing ear pressure.
• Henri picked me up at the Airport, I hung out at Chandler’s place for a bit, then went to sleep after a very long day.

Speaking of brushes with geeky greatness, I think the creator of the awesome Chinese language learning tools NewsInChinese and Adsotrans just left a comment on the post in which I decry the evils of streaming media. Cool. I feel a little silly sounding this excited over a few comments, but this blog gathers so few legit comments (20 in total since its genesis in January of 2005, not counting thousands of others advertising online poker or c1alis) that it’s kind of fun when a real post gets through, and it’s especially fun when the post is from someone I’ve never met but whose blog I’ve read or software I’ve used.

I took the long route to Minneapolis for a cousin’s wedding, passing through Los Angeles for a few days. Yay, visits with friends, and more airline miles. Along the way I grabbed a few photos of interest with my new Chinese-localized Treo 650.

In LA I saw the movie Cars with my cousins Jerry and Patsy, who had already seen the film once. Cars is amazing looking. Many scenes look like shots in an above-average car advertisement, which is a little eerie since these cars talk and have cartoonish faces. The film is very much worth seeing in a theater (rather than from an alternative-distribution AKA pirate DVD bought in China, at least until the US DVD is near release and the enterprising Chinese DVD distributors get their hands on good source material).

Cars is not as emotionally engaging as other Pixar films such as Toy Story or The Incredibles, but is still really something. Since few foreign blockbusters play in Chinese movie theaters, I’d highly recommend that all Chinese nationals spend six months of their salaries to travel to Hong Kong or the U.S. to see the film on the big screen. In case you’re reading this blog transated into Chinese by machine, the sarcasm may not be evident. Please be aware that I am joking. Few films are worth the trouble of international travel, though a stop after the film at the new Burbank Zankou Chicken might make such a trip more worthwhile. I could not believe it, a Zankou Chicken restaurant that is clean and features polite and helpful servers behind the counter (they even gave one friend who was a Zankou virgin a small taste of each of their meats so that he could make an informed decision when ordering).

It is true that most Hollywood films don’t play, officially, in China. I have heard that only 20 (or some other number, make up your own!) foreign films a year are allowed to be shown in Chinese cinemas, so most films don’t make the cut even if they contain nothing that would bother a Chinese government censor. Perhaps when my future kinder, back home in the US, refuse to watch the latest blockbuster that I feel they must see, I will make them feel guilty by telling them of the sad Chinese children who never get to see many Hollywood films in the theater. It’s the entertainment version of the old “Clean your plate, there are children starving in Ethiopia, who are you to refuse food” routine.

Speaking of films, in Minneapolis I watched the new Superman flick with my cousin Steve. We both found the film a little underwhelming, and he’s generally less of a grump than I about such things. It’s a bad sign when a film casts Kal Penn as a mere heavy and gives him almost no lines. Kal, you may recall, turned in a wonderful performance as Kumar in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. Other talented actors were similarly wasted in a film that was to me unexpectedly uninteresting.

click image to see related album

Guess who’s face glowed on the marquee of the Crest Theatre in Westwood Monday night (as well as from a billboard across the street)? That’s Henri Lubatti there, second from right, and he positively shined in the premiere episode of Showtime’s Sleeper Cell. It’s very nice to see an extremely talented friend get such recognition after he’s worked so hard for years. Apparently, sometimes the whole karma thing actually works out the way they promise in the manual.

Engadget has an “Exclusive first look!” of the Palm Treo 700w up on their site. The traditional press is also talking about this new device. Not-surprisingly I have some mixed feelings about it.

Just to give Palm some credit, it is very cool that they’re willing to be platform agnostic, and aren’t cursed with “not invented here” syndrome. They’ve been making devices that run PalmOS since the beginning, and if they can make a better device that runs a different operating system, more power to them.

But what to think of the choice of Windows Mobile? I’ll start with my impressions of PalmOS.

I use and like my PalmOne Treo 600, which runs PalmOS. Before this, I had a Treo 300, a Handspring Visor Neo with Sprint Digital Link, and before those the non-phone Palm Vx, Palm III, Palm Professional, and Palm Personal. PalmOS has been good to me. It does what I need, with a minimum of fuss. I’ve been able to sync my Palm devices with Windows, Linux, NetBSD, Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X, with few problems. There’s a ton of third-party applications for PalmOS, many of them free, many for specialized fields like Law and Medicine, and there’s even a free set of developer tools.

But PalmOS is showing its age, or maybe its focus on simplicity and only providing functions necessary for an organizer just make it seem outdated. In PalmOS (or at least, the version of PalmOS I’m running), there’s really no filesystem access to speak of without additional software, multimedia is an afterthought, multitasking can only be achieved in a non-elegant way (no offense meant to authors of Palm application switching software, I just mean inelegant in that it really should be an OS function), and additional hardware support is lacking (I’m referring most specifically to 802.11b CF cards). Palm’s defense over the years has been to point out that these features are all requirements of full-fledged computers, not necessary for an organizer or phone, and would just add bloat to the OS.

And maybe Palm’s defense isn’t just marketing. Perhaps I benefit from the simplicity of the OS running on my Treo every time I click to run an application and don’t see an hourglass or timer icon entreating me to wait. And the fact that my device doesn’t crash very often, and almost never loses data? Maybe that’s attributable to Palm OS… Although as someone who would like to expect the stability of NetBSD and OS X from all his devices, I’m inclined to think rock-solid stability is something that can be achieved in complex systems. Simplicity is not a requirement.

On to Windows Mobile. It lies on the other end of the simplicity-complexity scale. It includes API’s for the sort of 2D and 3D graphics that would be useful for game developers (DirectDraw 2D and 3D), DirectShow APIs for working with cameras and video, digital rights management, audio IO (waveform audio API), etc. Windows Mobile devices are targeted towards business users, and ship with mobile versions of all of Microsoft’s office applications.

I can’t comment personally on the merits of Windows Mobile, but I will say that I have heard secondhand about lag when launching programs, the start menu being an annoying way to hunt and peck for applications on a small mobile device (it’s annoying enough on my full windows desktop), and applications requiring complicated installers and uninstallers to scatter DLLs on the device (makes me wonder if there’s a ‘windows mobile registry’ to corrupt as well, or if Microsoft left that bit of the Windows legacy behind when designing Windows Mobile). Windows Mobile doesn’t sync to Mac or Linux without third-party software. Of course, all these reports were with devices based on Windows Mobile 2003, and Windows Mobile 2005 has recently been released and devices based on the new supposedly improved OS are just getting to users. I’ve found a few reviews of the new Windows Mobile, but none of them glowing.

Hardware issues probably earn these devices much of their detractors — the Windows Mobile phones all seem to attract criticism for being bulky and having poor battery life, and it’s hard to like other things about a device when you’re predisposed against it due to hardware deficiencies. On the other hand, the Treo 600/650 is a nice piece of hardware that is well designed, gets good battery life, and is easy to use. Maybe a Treo that runs Windows Mobile would be a hit in the market and could shake up the PDA-Phone landscape in a good way.

I guess time will tell. Windows Mobile doesn’t get me very excited, but if PalmSource doesn’t have something up its sleeve vis-a-vis their supposed new version of PalmOS built on Linux (the whole idea reminds me of OS X, which was a great leap forward for Apple computers) may soon be the best (or the only) real OS running on PDA-Phones. On the plus-side, I’ll still be able to run my old PalmOS apps under emulation :(

While I’m ruminating over the projected benefits and shortcomings of an unannounced device that I haven’t yet looked at, I might as well fantasize about what I’d like to see in a PDA-Phone. Given today’s technology, it would be something like this:

• Slightly wider and taller than an iPod Nano, with the same thickness and a larger screen.
• Runs some form of Unix to which all sorts of Linux apps can be easily ported
• Organizer apps (datebook, contacts, todo list) save files in non-proprietary standards-based or xml-based formats.
• Mounts as a generic storage device on all computers via USB
• Because it mounts as a generic storage device, it should be easy to sync on any platform (PC, Mac, etc) using open-source utilities like rsync.
• Bluetooth headset and DUN support
• Built-in GPS accessible by applications running on device
• Built-in 802.11b
• Processor fast enough to support SIP or IAX-based VOIP applications (eg. ifon, ZiaxPhone)
• usable keypad, like the one on the Treo 650
• Graffiti input method via stylus
• speaker-phone
• voice-recording
• camera for still and video recording
• SD or CF slots for media and devices
• UI closer to PalmOS or OS X than Windows
• This is optional, but it’d be nice to see some advanced multi-media capabilities of the sort available on windows mobile devices. Maybe a processor fast enough to perform multi-channel audio synthesis, a good quality (low noise) audio line/mic in port, and a video-out port for presentations (hey, the ipod photos have it, why not a PDA?).

I always preach that people should back up their data frequently, but in practice it’s not so simple. I had an ibook hard disk die on me, and although I have backed it up in the fairly recent past, it’s not as recent a backup as I’d like. Ah well.

So now I’m setting up a fresh new Tiger partition to run from on a new drive. Just to keep things extra-fresh, instead of restoring from backup I’m just copying over the files that matter to me from the backup, and am installing applications using the installers.

My Treo has now gone since 8/11/05 without syncing (and that was to the hard drive that is now dead), and I want to be able to access all of its info on the new system. So I went to palm’s website to download the latest version of Palm Desktop…

Palm™ Desktop 4.2.1 Rev B for Mac August 11, 2005 Not available at this time We apologize for the inconvenience, but the web download of Palm Desktop 4.2.1 Rev B for Mac has become temporarily unavailable. Within the next week, we expect to make this file available again. Until then, please install Palm Desktop from the CD-ROM that came with your device. Thank you for your patience.

Are they crazy? Argh. I’d be happy to install any old version of Palm Desktop and get it working just to be able to get my mac addressbook sync’ed. Why take down the download? I don’t have my Treo install CD handy, in fact it’s hidden away in the treo box in the back of my storage area in the garage behind an old monitor and a Costco-size pack of toilet paper. I never install from manufacturer supplied CDs, which may have been sitting in the product box for months and become outdated — it is always wiser to download the newer versions from manufacturer’s websites. For this reason I don’t keep the useless install CDs handy.

I wonder how long the Palm Desktop download link will be down.

– [8-18-05 — the download is still down, but the previous version of Palm Desktop for Mac is available and it works just fine for us non-Treo 650 folk]