April 26, 15:21 | Comments (10)

For sale: Powerbook 17'', iPod Mini

So I've upgraded to the latest and greatest during my trip to Chicago, which means that I now have the following items for sale:

• Powerbook 17": 1.5 Ghz / 1GB RAM / 80GB HD / US keyboard / 6 months warranty left.
  Asking: 16.000 DKR.
• iPod Mini: 4GB / Silver / 6 months warranty left.
  Asking: 1.000 DKR. SOLD!

Both are in good condition and great machines. Write me at david@loudthinking.com (Danes / Malmø residents only).

February 02, 17:01 | Comments (38)

Getting the wakeup call through Skype

Everything Basecamp has a short blurb about FIXED: Temporary database glitch. Jason called me up at 7 AM this morning (three hours after I went to bed) to tell me about it. Nothing unusual in that, programmers and system administrators are woken up in the middle of the night all the time.

Only Jason was calling from his Powerbook at 2 cents a minute. To my cell phone. In crystal crisp quality. In other words, Skype 1.0 is out for the Mac and SkypeOut freaking rocks. The quality was so good, I didn't even realize he was skyping me until long after the call.

Once more, that's lower-than-local rates for calling across the atlantic to normal phones. I'd start to worry if I was a telco living large off overpriced international calls. They're going to be 1, 2, 3, gone in no time at all.

While iChat AV is pretty darn cool and getting even cooler in Tiger, I can easily see Skype growing big and large in no time. Or, actually it is big and large at 54 million downloads. But bigger and larger then.

I especially like their voicemail feature. I'm not sure if its available to the general public yet, but my man on the inside of Skype hooked me up and it's super cool. It's just one more step to get push-to-talk and then it'll all get even more interesting.

I'd love to see recording of calls straight to MP3 as well. It would be a great way to record design conversations and then upload them to Basecamp for the team to share.

P.S.: Jason is just as psyched about it on SvN.

January 13, 0:59 | Comments (11)

I ordered a Mac Mini

I needed a good excuse (or any excuse, really) to get a Mac Mini and in the long lasting desire of a PVR to record TV onto a harddrive, I found it. I'm going to "build" (plugin firewire cables and chuckle at the missing step three) my own PVR using the Mac Mini and the EyeTV 200.

I'm ever so envious whenever I drop by Jason's place and play with his Tivo, so since Tivo won't come to us Danes, we'll build something even better ourselves. That's right!

I already have the external firewire drive to beef up the storage and since I'm getting it with the airport extreme card it'll fit right into the stereo rack under the TV. Oh, got the bluetooth builtin as well, so it can be controlled with Salling Clicker from that wonderful phone of mine.

Can't wait to stop complaining about how we got 40 channels with nothing on.

January 05, 21:21 | Comments (21)

23'' with 1920x1200 pixels of pure pleasure

I had been contemplating the move for a while. Debating back and worth whether it was worth moving away from always the same every where. But when Apple lowered their prices by about 1/4 yesterday, I did it. I bought the 23" Apple LCD.

And oh my. Oh my, indeed. It's freaking huge. And gorgeous. But mostly huge. I can fit a browser, TextMate, a terminal tailing the log, and CocoaMySQL on a single desktop! That's just productivity screaming out right there.

Of course, it does have one somewhat annoying dead pixel. A green one showing up on black, but I now keep the editor to the right and the browser to the left, so it's not noticeable in normal use.

Funny thing was that Rails friend Tobias Luetke ordered just today as well. Heh. They got a killer deal going on there. In Denmark, it's now an instant depreciation for companies (if you throw on a student discount).

Did I say it was huge?

November 26, 15:02 | Comments (268)

Nokia 6630 review: Time to return to the fold

Ever since I got my Motorola A925 in the Spring, I've secretly been longing to go back to a Nokia. And when the 6630 was announced almost six months ago, I knew that was the phone that would take me back to Finnish mobile engineering. The specification read 3G, 1.3 megapixel camera, 1 hour video records, more RAM, smaller size, and lots of other goodies.

Recently, though, my longing for Nokia had grown into despise of my A925. Russel was spot on with Smart Phones Are One Handed Devices. What I wanted was a smartphone, what I had was not:

If you can't use the phone with one hand, it's not a smart phone. Got it? It's pretty simple. It's a PDA Phone or a Communicator or something. Whatever it is, it's not a smart phone. It's a relic. An elecronic organizer with an antenna. An anachronism. A soon-to-be market failure. Get the idea?

Let's go over this again: If it doesn't have a keypad? It's not a smart phone. If you have to use a pen? It's not a smart phone...

The Motorola A925 is not a smartphone. It's successor, the A1000—that I tested for the Christmas issue of the Danish 3 Magazine—is not a smart phone either. I had to learn that fact over a couple of months. When you have to stand still and use two hands to SMS or when you need either really baggy pants or a bag to carry your phone around, something is just not right.

Continued...

April 29, 14:06 | Comments (21)

Gadget love on national television

TV2 is airing a show called 16 1/2 tonight at 20.00 focused on being online, technology, and gadgets. It's for the latter that I come into the picture. Yesterday, we spent around seven hours shooting footage for a five-minute segment for the gadgets part. 16 1/2 is all about lush visuals, so I'll be showing off the iPod, my new 3G phone, and of course the Powerbook.

But the gadgets in themselves doesn't seem to excite as much as the combination of gadgets and a life free from cords and location-fixed obligations. So we shot the whole deal at Charlottenlund Fortet under the pretext that I had moved the office outside due to the lovely weather. It actually was a spectactular nice day, so it wasn't as far-fetched as it could otherwise seem.

Update: Video (5 min)

Continued...

November 05, 20:26 | Comments (2)

Ebooks on the Nokia 3650 with Repligo

My new-found love for ebooks is in part driven by the combination of my Nokia 3650 and a program called Repligo. With Repligo, you can turn most any document type—be it Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, or most importantly, PDF—into a highly compressed RGO file that's optimized for small-screen viewing. You get the Repligo viewer for free and the encoder is $24.95.

As an example, I'm currently reading Pragmatic Version Control with this solution. The original PDF was 1.2MB and the RGO file is around half of that. So fitting all of the 165 pages is no problems. And the viewer is pretty darn fast as well, so reading is (almost) a complete joy.

This is how it looks:

A few caveats:

• The Repligo Encoder is only out for Windows (you know, that legacy system you run through Virtual PC). Their FAQ speaks of a possible Mac version, but I wouldn't hold my breath. (This does shut G5 owners out in cold as Virtual PC doesn't work on those machines)
• The Repligo Reader conflicts with iSync causing non-fatale crashes each time you sync. Annoying, but if you're willing to forego RGO file recognition, you can delete /System/recogs/RecRgo.mdl on the phone to make the crashes go away. You'll have to find and move new files /Documents/ and open them directly from the viewer, though, as the phone will no longer recognize the .rgo extension.
• There's no forced backlighting as ReadM and others have. So either you read a page and go to the next within 15 seconds or you suffer constant light mode switching. Pretty annoying, but the developer says they're "aware" of it, so hopefully a fix won't be too long.

Now, why on earth would you want to read books on a a screen the size of a match box? Here's a few reasons for you:

• You'll always have a bunch of books on you and it doesn't require carrying around a big bag. I have 128MB on my MMC, so with books the size of Pragmatic Version Control, I'd be able to carry around more than 200 at once!
• You can read in low-lighting situations like on the back-seat of a car at night or in bed when the girlfriend insists the light should be off.
• You can read standing in a crowd, such as the early morning busses I need to take into Copenhagen Business School. Pages are easily turned with one hand.

August 22, 12:26 | Comments (0)

A month of delayed mblog delights

August 18, 19:58 | Comments (1)

Control your Mac with a Nokia 3650

Long has my envy of SonyEricsson t-series owners been almost unbearable. Controlling your Mac from your phone over Bluetooth has got to be one of the coolest applications of the latter. On top of being cool, it's also Really Useful. Especially as a iTunes and Keynote remote.

Neither Clicker (pioneer) nor Romeo (free), which both facilities the controlling, has previously made any advances (or even promises!) towards broadening their support.

So the arrival of Veta Universal 1.0 comes as an unexpected and pleasant surprise. This $8 shareware serves as a wrapper for all of those SE t-series API calls into Series 60-speak. Very cool!

Unfortunately, it only works with Romeo so far. Romeo is the free, but feature-challenged one of the two available Mac remotes. It lacks playlist and search support for iTunes and keypad mode for Keynote. And since Clicker is just $9.99, I'd much rather have a wrapper for that than Romeo.

But let's not talk down a good thing. Romeo + Veta Universal is currently the only available controller combo for the Nokia 3650 and for that they both deserve a world of praise!

(Only hag is the inconvenient registration process of Veta that only works over PayPal — you even have to be a member — and the ensuing wait for your key)

July 10, 11:15 | Comments (14)

pvPlayer user interface and feature suggestions

What a pleasent surprise to have my opinions discovered by the company itself. It makes me even more comfortable recommending pvPlayer when I know the company listens its customers and checks weblogs. Great!

So now that I have your attention, pvPlayer team, I'd like to suggest a few changes to the application on the 3650. As you might have noticed, I complained about the "horrible user interface". But it's not worse than implementing the following changes could lift it to "great".

Continued...

June 18, 13:57 | Comments (23)

Nokia 3650 vs Nokia 6600: It's the colors!

Yes, the Nokia 6600 is smaller and lighter, features a standard keyboard, and does Java MIDP 2.0. What matters much more, though, is the color range. It has the same amount of screen real estate (176x208 pixels), but with 16-bit instead of 4096 colors.

Who cares about the amount of colors on a mobile phone? Video does. Greatly. Below is a comparison shot from a single frame of a Simpsons episode I encoded played back in 4096 and 16-bit color. The difference is more than noticeable.

Unfortunately, Nokia is going to hold out on us with the 6600 until the third quarter. Damn. I want it now!

June 17, 11:01 | Comments (22)

Real MPEG-4 playback on Nokia 3650

3GPP is poor-man's MPEG-4. The specification mandates that movies run a maximum of 15 frames per second from a throughput of 64 kbit/sec, which leaves a paltry 4.3 kbit per frame. Of course, it sounds a lot worse than it is. 3GPP is certainly watchable and, especially with cartoons, even enjoyable. It pales in comparison, though, with the unrestricted variety of MPEG-4 that doesn't limit frame rates or throughput.

So why not do unrestricted MPEG-4 decoding right on the phone?

Continued...

June 13, 13:10 | Comments (2)

Add iPod sound to the mobile cinema

Mono sound through a loud speaker tuned for low-quality telephone conversations doesn't do much to cooperate the idea of the mobile cinema. So in my search for the latter, I quickly realized that it was necessary to move the audio part of the experience away from the Nokia 3650 and onto something more suitable. Luckily, the answer was obvious: My iPod.

Continued...

June 11, 12:04 | Comments (22)

Movies and calendars on Nokia 3650

Change a single boolean in the iSync config and iCal will synch the calendar with the Nokias. Some people are getting off-by-one errors, which is probably why it's not generally available. But it works perfectly on my setup.

The ability to watch full-lenght videos and TV-series with RealOne is even cooler, though. I just got my 128MB MMC card and a card reader to go with it. I just converted an episode of Simpsons (10MB) and an episode of Friends (14MB) to 3GP. It works surprisingly well. Simpsons is by far the nicest quality, but Friends is also certainly watchable.

This phone just keeps on giving.

June 03, 15:43 | Comments (11)

Nokia 3650 synching and movies on OS X

Among friends, it's been no secret that my new Nokia 3650 has me more than a little enthralled. There's just so much to love. The astonishing picture quality from the tiny camera, a perfect email-client speaking IMAP over GRPS and doing attachments with ease, decades of retro-gaming with the GameBoy and C64 emulators, a sweet calendar, and browsing with mobile Opera. All in a single, slick package for around $300.

And now Apple just blessed it with iSync-compatibility! Version 1.1 adds address book (with pictures) synchronization and promises calendar (the most important thing) and to-do lists "soon". Hopefully "soon" is defined as in days or weeks, not months.

On top of that, QuickTime 6.3 allows for a 3GPP plug-in, so the movies recorded from the camera phone can be played-back outside of Nokia's closed, Windows-based player. That is freaking awesome. Prepare to see mobile movie-blogging rocket.

The Nokia 3650 is the phone to own.

October 11, 17:31 | Comments (3)

Gearing down on gadgets

I have way too many gadgets and pieces of electronics that I'm not using. Now they're all for sale. I'm not interested in dealing with international shipments, so the page is in Danish and directed at Danes.

Gadget sale: Sony Vaio SR21k, Sega Dreamcast, Game Boy Advance, Palm V, Sharp minidisc, Sony microphone, Ti-83 calculator.