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Mandating Safety

I’m not a huge fan of the government mandating anything, but now, more than ever, believe that the government needs to start mandating more safety in cars. Specifically, I think that a) all cell phones must come with Bluetooth and b) all cars should come with Bluetooth for handsfree cell phone use. People argue that it isn’t the act of holding a handset that causes accidents, it is the distraction. Well, that may be true, but I’m sure that if people weren’t holding phones, they would have better reaction time in case of an accident and be able to navigate cars better. This won’t solve everything, but the cost is pretty minor; several years ago Jeep/Chrysler announced the UConnect system for many of its newer vehicles at a cost of something like $300 as a dealer installed option. Now if this was standard on all vehicles, the cost would be lower (less labor involved in installing it when the car is open and the number of units purchased would cause the cost to go down). If we say that the kit costs $300 and someone purchases a vehicle over 5 years at 7% interest rate, the extra cost for this would be $5.94 per month. Is that a lot? No, it is the cost of a few cups of coffee.

As for the Bluetooth handsets, many carriers think Bluetooth is a high end phone option instead of a standard item. Again, the cost isn’t all that high and it would be needed to work with the cars. Furthermore, carriers (Verizon and Sprint in particular) need to stop crippling or accepting half baked Bluetooth implementations. The standard handsfree, headset, and OBEX profiles are needed to make car kits and cars with built-in Bluetooth function properly.

Would I write this even if I didn’t put my own handsfree kit in my car? Absolutely. My next car (and my wife’s next car) will definitely have Bluetooth in it for handsfree calling. It definitely won’t solve the problem of distracted drivers, but it really does help keep two hands on the wheel.

On a side note, I received my first call on my handsfree kit while driving today. It was so neat to be able to not have to fumble answering the phone (even with a headset you have to make sure it is in and find the right button and be able to keep my hands on the wheel.

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I miss the Newton

My history with the Apple Newton goes back to the summer before my senior year in college. Apple’s PIE (Personal Interactive Electronics) group (before it got renamed as simply Newton) wanted to license my NotifyMail program and I negotiated a deal that I thought was excellent. I received a Newton MessagePad 110 and the Newton Toolkit (developer tools) which was valued at over $1600 at the time in exchange for a site license. People at school poked fun at me, especially after the Simpson’s episode where one of the characters wrote “Beat up Martin” and it came out as “Eat Up Martha”. I played around writing some programs for it and when I joined Qualcomm full time the following year, I started work on Eudora for Newton (my boss lobbied to let us do it) and over the course of the next year, I got to work with some great people at Apple who were working on their TCP/IP stack. I got early access to Newton 2.0 and was amazed; when Apple killed the Newton, it was a small part of my life (a few years) sort of disappeared. The Newton had so many things that was ahead of its time; handwriting recognition (in the last OS, it was good), flexible data stores (it was easy to expand the address book), flexible applications (I could patch an application in no time flat), and a convenient form factor. I used to travel with the Newton and a keyboard instead of a laptop.

I haven’t thought much about the Newton until I was given an old eMate last year (which I haven’t turned on because I need to find a power supply). Today, a friend sent me a link to a comparison of the Newton (a ten year old product) and the latest UMPC (ultra mobile PC). Despite the age of the Newton, it did quite well which is kind of sad in that 10 years of computing, the handheld hasn’t really been improved. Comparing the Newton to the Palm is also interesting; the Newton OS had flash internal storage meaning that when the batteries died, your data wasn’t lost whereas the Palm OS didn’t get this (NVRAM) until the Tungsten T|X and Treo 650 which was not that long ago. This was one of the main reasons I didn’t think Qualcomm should go with the Palm OS for a smartphone…your battery dies (which most people seem to do with their cell phones) and you’d lose your data. Unfortunately I didn’t succeed in pushing the Newton. (Prior to this, I was offered a job in the Newton group, but for better or worse, I turned it down and stayed at Qualcomm).

After reading that comparison, I started missing the Newton. If the Newton had developer tools that ran under OS X, USB, Bluetooth, and WiFi, I think it would be a killer platform today. Yes, there are WiFi cards for it, so it isn’t a huge stretch. If anyone has a Newton MessagePad 2100 that he or she is willing to sell for a decent price, please let me know.

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Energy conservation

In this time of high energy usage, the big buzz is on conservation. So much so, that CalTrans has lit up the freeway billboards with something like “Flex Your Power. Converse Energy.” Hmmm…how much energy does it take to light up those signs? Brilliant. The media and energy officials are saying to keep the thermostat at 78 degrees if you can. I’m thinking, if I put the thermostat at 78 degrees, the temperate in our house would drop by 6-10 degrees! People really need to use fans and suffer to some degree. We have air conditioning, but have never turned it on. Why? Cooling our house for just my wife and me with our dog is a complete waste. Others should follow suit, in my opinion. Our electricity usage is lower, I think, in the summer than in the winter despite the heat. In the winter, we run our heat in the early morning and in the evening; it is gas forced hot air, so the fan on the furnace runs to blow the hot air around.

I try to do my part conserving energy, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Look at all the store signs that are lit up. How about turning those off? We were at the mall the other day and the mall management was going around shutting all the store doors to keep the cool air in the stores (it is an outdoor mall, like most malls in San Diego). Do you have to be a rocket scientist to realize this? The stores all fear that people will think they’re closed because the doors are shut as evidenced by the handmade signs that said “We’re open”. I’m sure there are tons of other things people can do to help, but they just aren’t doing it, which keeps stressing the power system and conservation is only talked about when the system is close to being maxed out.

If high electricity bills aren’t enough, I’d hope that people have some sense of responsibility to the environment and learn to conserve.

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Car alarms

Yesterday I was in a parking lot and heard a car alarm go off. Like any good citizen, I dashed over to the car to make sure it wasn’t being stolen. Ha! Did you really believe that? Car alarms are almost completely useless. A better system for car alarms is a GPS tracking device (on the lines of LoJack, but LoJack requires you to report the car stolen which could be too late by hours especially overnight) that alerts the police when the car moves without using your coded key. That is probably the most effective way to recover a stolen car.

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Car kit issue…yuck

Following up on my earlier post, my car kit has an issue; the speaker in the Garmin sounds like crap and is too low (I think the car kit has the amplification, but the speaker is distorting the sounds). So, tomorrow it is back to Fry’s to look for an external CB (marine) speaker that I can mount under my center console. I also wired the car kit using only the front left speaker, so maybe if I wire all speakers together, I can get decent amplification with a decent speaker (there is probably a flaw in this theory, something to do with impedance I’d guess).

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Printers have a lot to be desired

About 3 years ago, I bought a Canon i470D printer to print photos as it was cheap and I could get cheap ink. It did a good job over its life, but yesterday it decided (yes, I know this is the passive voice, but I didn’t decide anything for it) that it wasn’t going to print black despite my hour of futzing with it, cleaning the print head, changing ink, etc. I said forget it and dumped the printer in the trash (OK, I took out all the circuitry first so that I could comply with the mandatory law requiring us to recycle stuff containing mercury). I checked the Fry’s ad (yes, I don’t like shopping there, but they always have cheap printers). They had an Epson R320 refurbished for $40 after rebate. As I figure these printers are cheap and will break anyway, how bad could a refurbished one be? So far, knock on wood, the printer prints well and the fact that it uses 6 separate ink cartridges is good so that I don’t have to replace all of them.

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My car is a storage shed

For those that know me well, know that I’m a bit compulsive when it comes to keeping things neat. I’ve kept my car this way for a long time and kept it uncluttered, but (in my old age), I’ve relaxed a bit when it comes to being neat. Now my car is more a general purpose storage area. I have several bottles of water rolling around (who knows when you’ll need water and I’ve actually used some), a large first aid kit (that’s primarily so when I cut myself I can put a bandage on), a hat, and other miscellaneous things. While I attempt to keep things arranged, it really doesn’t bother me anymore.

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Handsfree car kit installed!

Way back in January, I mentioned that I bought a Parrot CK3100 handsfree carkit for my cell phone. Unfortunately I had to return the kit because my phone kept rebooting the car kit. After hearing about the impending legislation requiring handsfree cell phone talking (car kit or headset), I decided to take another look. I read on forums that the kit now worked with the Samsung A900, so I decided to give it another shot. I went to Fry’s (a store I hate, but I knew that they had the kit and I could return it if it didn’t work), searched the shelves and found 1 left, but it had been returned (the upside is that it was $10 off). Having seen a brand new one before, I checked the contents and everything looked intact. I also knew that installing the car kit would be a pain, so most people would get intimidated when they saw the directions which gave me hopes that it was never used.

So, I go the kit home, hooked it up to a 12V supply and saw that my phone kept rebooting it. I checked the firmware and saw it was old. I updated the firmware and things seem to work fine, so I decided to install it the next day (today). I thought and thought and thought about how I was going to install the kit knowing that my car had some funky premium stereo and it wasn’t just a matter of connecting a phone hours. In the middle of the night, the solution came to me. I’d use the speaker hooked to my Garmin iQue 3600 car kit and let the handsfree car kit be the amplifier. This would make the install much easier. Another thing that made things easier was I decided that I’d use wire taps into the existing wires and forget about trying to do things without touching what was there.

The install took a good 5 or 6 hours and I only cut myself once. After I was figured everything out and was going to put it back together, I tested it and it didn’t work with the stereo on. Either the wiring diagram for the stereo was wrong or the wire I tapped into didn’t provide continuous 12V power in the accessory position. So I just tapped into the auxiliary power connector and everything was happy.

The kit works quite well with my phone and I’m reasonably impressed. Now we’ll just have to see what happens on the road. It is real cool to be able to turn on the car and have it pair with my phone. I was using a Bluetooth headset, but I’d have to turn it on everytime I got in the car and put in on my ear.

Mounting the LCD was another feat of engineering, but it turns out well. I also made it such that I could disconnect the speaker if I wanted to take my GPS unit with me. I could have drilled some holes in the dash, but what I did is good enough.

Car Kit 1Car Kit 2
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Software typos

Today as I was happily working in Apple’s Interface Builder working on some software, an error message came up that made me laugh. You can definitely tell that it never got proofread as it refers to a “header filer” instead of a header file. For your amusement, here’s the error:

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Training with the Garmin Forerunner 305

It’s now been over 4 months since I started using my Garmin Forerunner 305 to train for the Rock ‘N’ Roll Marathon. I managed to complete the marathon and am now training for a half marathon. At first, the Forerunner was more of a gimmick in helping me train, but now it is integrated into my training. I use the current pace to see where I should be at based on how I feel. By now, I know the distance on most of my runs, so while the total distance initially helped me, it is more now just telling me how much longer until the pain stops! I’m also very interested in my heart rate, so uploading my data to MotionBased allows me to see how I’m doing in trying to bring down my heartrate.

Unlike some others, I’ve had no problems with the unit and use it 4 days a week. It is an excellent training aid, even for the beginner. I know I’m a geek, but without this gadget, I’m not sure that I would have been able to complete a marathon and I don’t think running would be so enjoyable.