sixtyPercent: Cochlear Implants, Aviation, Technlology, and Philosophy 2006/01/03
A Webcam from Downtown Los Altos, California
Here's an experimental webcam from downtown Los Altos, California. The view is from my office, looking at the corner of Main and 3rd Streets. Satura Cakes is visible on the left, and Bank of the West is on the right.
The webcam is running on an ancient Gateway 266MHz Pentium 2, running Ubuntu Linux and a $19 USB webcam. Right now I'm using camserv to stream the images (really just a sequence of JPEGs, but I'm looking into alternatives. Software suggestions are welcome!
by David Creemer : 2006/01/03 : Categories technology : 0 trackbacks : 9 comments (permalink)
How Nokia and Apple replaced my Palm
Once upon a time, I had more time and money than I do now (i.e. I was single). I tried gadget after gadget, searching for things that would make my life better. Of course, this was largely a foolish quest, but wisdom correlates with age, I suppose, and now I'm mostly trying to find ways to get rid of things...
One gadget that generally did simplify my life was my Palm. I used to carry a Palm with me almost everywhere. It was the first product that neatly and simply let me carry my calendar and contacts with me in a nice electronic form, primarily because of the simple design, and of course Hotsync. Push one button and my data is backed up and mirrors on my computer and my Palm -- what could be better?
Well, one thing that could be better would be if every program I use on my desktop or notebook computers also consulted the same calendar and contacts database as my Palm. A while back Apple realized this, and included a nice system-wide Address Book with Mac OS X, and then added a decent calendar application too.
The glue that holds all of this together is iSync -- Mac OS X's answer to Hotsync. iSync collects together structured data (like contacts and calendar events) from a variety of sources, and -- at the touch of a button (where have we read that before?) -- makes sure everything is backed up and in sync.
At first, I used iSync to keep the data on my two Macs (desktop and notebook) in sync. Everything worked so well, that I tossed my cell phone into the mix -- an old Sony Ericsson T610, connecting to my Powerbook via Bluetooth. Again -- perfect! I now had the exact same set of contacts and calendar events on both computers and on my cell phone, and never had a problem, nor found any new complexity. The next step was to add my Palm OS device into the mix. Apple has an answer here too, a sort of "bridge" called the iSync Conduit, that connects Hotsync to iSync.
This "bridged" solution generally works OK -- syncing two macs, a phone and a Palm -- but complexity was certainly increased, and a funny thing started to happen at this point. For every alarm on my calendar, sometimes four devices would start beeping at me! iSync had started to introduce a bit of complexity into my life! While considering this, I also noticed that I generally stopped carrying my Palm. Funny -- since my calendar and contacts were on the phone, I generally didn't need anything else.
Now two years later, I have one less computer (only need the Powerbook now), and have stopped carrying the Palm entirely. The T610 has been replaced with a Nokia 6600 series phone, which runs the Symbian Series 60 (now just S60) OS -- but most people wouldn't care about that. What I do care about is that S60 has a decent calendar, a great address book, and synchronizes with my Mac absolutely flawlessly and painlessly via Bluetooth. The same contact records (including pictures) are used on my phone, email, IM, web forms, address book, calendar, and so on.
My wife is so far sticking with the Palm approach -- though she also values having less to carry and is using a Treo 600 instead of a Palm and a phone. Mostly this works fine, though I forgot my own simplify rule and added complexity by unsucessfully trying to add a 3rd party iSync-Hotsync "bridge" called Missing Sync v5 to her sync mix -- a mistake I have since corrected.
These days, I try to remember that when making a change to a system -- whether it's a life system or a technical one, I should begin and end with asking myself "how can I make this simpler?" and "what can I sensibly remove?" Now if I could only apply this rule to cleaning out the garage ;-)
by David Creemer : 2006/01/03 : Categories technology life : 0 trackbacks : 4 comments (permalink)
