iphone Archives - Page 3 of 4

The Quantified Self

10 November, 2008 by sky Leave a Comment

I was amused and delighted by the topic, but a schedule conflict prevented me from attending a meeting at the Institute For The Future (IFTF) about “the quantified self” a month ago. The topic, however, is completely intriguing to me as I find my life increasingly digitized – as if it weren’t already. (See The Quantified Self Group.)

I picked up an iPhone app called EveryTrail, and have been testing it against measured walking/running courses all weekend, and also tried to use it to measure a walk from my house to the Ferry Building and back on Sunday (it was way off due to GPS inaccuracies in the skyscraper canyons of downtown San Francisco, but it’s spot-on when the GPS satellites are unobstructed, such as on the waterfront).

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We’re all Amateur Radio Operators now

13 October, 2008 by sky 2 Comments

I was fiddling around trying to find a good position (on a desk) for my iPhone yesterday in order to get good reception for a phone call, and it reminded me of the “old days” when I was first an amateur radio (“ham”) operator.

Can’t tell you how many hundreds of hours I spent fiddling around with antenna positions in order to get good reception. In those days they were mostly long wires strung from buildings or trees, but the principle is the same for a mobile phone antenna. It all depends on the direction the antenna’s pointing, the distance from “ground” (actual earth or metal objects below the radio’s antenna) and other factors that are just too hard to predict. And so we “fiddle” until we get it right.

In the case of a mobile phone, which is also a radio transmitter and receiver, the variables are pretty much the same. They include whether you’re holding the phone in your hand or not, whether it’s near metal objects, whether you’re inside a steel or concrete/brick building, and your orientation with respect to the cell you are currently connected to. So when you hear “can you hear me now?” what’s going on is that you and your callee are each adjusting or moving your radio and antenna to get better reception. We have all become amateur radio operators!

Your hand IS the keyboard

21 September, 2008 by sky Leave a Comment

Looks like there’ll be a Blackberry with a touchscreen interface soon. Maybe they’re just trying to cash in on the popularity of the iPhone, with its touchscreen interface (meaning that you type on a touch-screen rather than on a real keyboard), but I think there’s something more somatically fundamental in the appeal of touchscreen typing. The tiny Blackberry keyboards, which are like toys as I see it, still keep you one-level-removed from what you’re typing – there is this clunky bunch of electro-mechanical keys between you and your words. The touchscreen, on the other hand (“hand”, LOL!) means “your hand is a component of the keyboard.” You aren’t just poking at little mechanical devices, your fleshy round finger becomes a part of the “keyboard” on the touchscreen. And the way Apple has implemented the keyboard, if you touch and then roll the tip of your finger around, you can actually roll from one key to another until you get the one you intended to press, then lift your finger and your choice is made. Think about that, your hand IS the keyboard on a touchscreen!

Twitter made me (not) do it

7 September, 2008 by sky Leave a Comment

It’s been a whole month since I wrote anything in my blog? What happened? (Or rather, what did not happen?)

Well, let’s just blame it on Twitter. Or on the new iPhone. Or on two clients wanting 70-hour weeks from me all month. Or on processing 4 hours of teacher training videos.

Nah, let’s just blame it on Twitter.

Twitter seems to have taken a big bite out of my blogging energy lately.

I primarily use Twitteriffic on my iPhone to both follow and to create new tweets, but I also love Twitterfox (a plug-in for the FIreFox browser) if I’m at a computer (it just pops up a little panel showing the most recents, and lets me quickly twipe a new tweet whenever I feel the need.

But why do I even bother with Twitter? – because I get stoked with a dozen new ideas every day! In the old days, “kids” used Twitter to vacuously and narcissistically communicate “I’m having breakfast” or “I’m on the bus” or “I’m at the coffee shop.” But somehow a large number of busy people realized that not only was this a waste of a good communication medium, but something better could actually be done with it – and now what we do is communicate concepts, places, activities and ideas of interest to our group. Someone might be experiencing writer’s block and need inspiration and put out a call for help that explains the concept she’s working on, and get back a half dozen interesting tangential ideas! Another might have returned from a trip and posted photos – and will put up a tweet pointing to the photos. Someone else will be at a conference and will tweet about each speaker’s primary concept.

You have to carefully pick who you “follow” (whose tweets you subscribe to) on Twitter, but once you have your list tuned well, you have constructed a channel that lets you really stay in touch with the ideas and activities that will surface as blog posts and news in the next 24 to 48 hours. And you get a real boost from knowing what your friends and colleagues are working on and thinking about.

Netshare can tether an iPhone? Well, not quite…

2 August, 2008 by sky Leave a Comment

At first when Mike Liebhold (of IFTF) pointed me at the Netshare iPhone application from Nullriver, I was hopeful that we possibly could have a “tethered iPhone.” This means we could use an iPhone to allow our Mac to have access to the Internet when on the road.

3G phones are generally capable of being linked or “tethered” to a computer via bluetooth or USB in such a way that the computer can use the phone as a connection to the Internet. I used my Moto RAZR that way for several years, paying for a $20/month data plan. Although tethering provided between 40k and a maximum speed of 80k (bits per second) or roughly 2x phone line speeds, it was nevertheless really handy in those moments when I was far from free wi-fi or phone lines. And I had long ago dropped my AOL dial-up service, so dial-up wasn’t really an option.

And since using the iPhone to connect a computer to the net is a violation of AT&T’s terms of service, none of us ever thought that such an app would be sanctioned and appear in Apple’s online store. Obviously it would be done for “jailbreaked” iPhones, but probably not for those remaining solidly in the AT&T fold.

But the app did appear. Then it disappeared. Then it reappeared. Oof. Was it Brigadoon? Or was it the Flying Dutchman?

So when the app was visible online, this afternoon, I quickly plunked down $10 and downloaded Netshare to test.

Turns out that it doesn’t really tether the phone. Instead, what it does is serve as a SOCKS proxy for your computer, which means the computer can access web sites (including secure HTTPS) thru the phone’s 3G or EDGE connection. That’s really handy at those times when nothing else’s available, but it’s not quite everything that we need. You couldn’t get email onto your computer thru this app, for instance. (At least I haven’t figured out how to.) But you could do webmail. And anyway, you can do email on the iPhone if you have your accounts set up right.

So I’m happy with it as an emergency standby.

Technically the way it works is 1) you configure your Mac to create an ad-hoc Wi-fi network; 2) you configure the iPhone to join that network; 3) you bring up Netshare on the phone, which runs a SOCKS proxy on port 1080, available to any device that’s on the ad-hoc wi-fi network, and voila the Mac has access to HTTP and HTTPS sites thru the proxy software running on the iPhone. The access out “the other side” is via 3G or EDGE.

Slick, and unexpected, and a violation of the TOS, but still this is going to save my neck at some point in the future.