Tag: Geek Stuff

Here I’ll Save You Evo 4G Owners Some Money

Let’s say you purchased an Evo 4G and decided you wanted a spare battery because the phone drinks fuel like a Ford F350. If you go to the Sprint store they want roughly $40.00 for it and that’s only if they have it in stock. Yes just finding a spare Evo 4G battery in stock is like pulling teeth. So what do you do? You buy a spare battery for the HTC Touch Pro 2.

The battery in the Evo 4G has the model number RHOD160. It’s the same 1500 mAh battery that HTC used in a few other phones including the Touch Pro 2, CDMA Hero, and the Snap S511. The only difference is the OEM battery included with the Evo 4G has a red case on it instead of a black one. Since the battery cover hides the battery I’m more than willing to live with the fact that my battery is the “wrong” color when I’m saving $29.00. Yes the exact same battery can be had, brand new, for $11.00 plus shipping.

I ordered one and have it running in my Evo 4G right now. And it’s a good thing I did because when I pulled out the OEM battery I noticed it’s swelling which means it’s probably getting ready to go boom. That’s the other lesson today, check the batteries on your electronic devices for bulges and swelling periodically. For lithium-ion batteries that’s an indicator that somebody really bad is likely to happen in the near future.

Why I Chose Android

Long time readers here know I was quite the Palm fan for a while. Now you hear my touting my Evo 4G and hear nothing more of Palm. So why did I jump ship? Well the answer is pretty simple. I still believe WebOS is the best of the current mobile operating systems hand down. But Palm itself was in a financial quagmire until recently when they were bought by HP. I didn’t want to purchase a phone that could face irrelevancy due to the manufacturer going bankrupt and hence I decided to go with an Android phone. Now that Palm is in the hands of HP I’m even more glad I went with Android as HP doesn’t have the greatest track record of using acquisitions well.

Let’s look at HP’s biggest fiasco, the Compaq acquisition. This is what I label as the beginning of the end for quality HP products. I had an old HP Vectra buisness computer which to this day is bullet proof (it still runs perfectly even though it’s old enough that it game with EDO RAM and Windows 3.11). We have some of their diagnostics equipment here at work that functions flawlessly even though some of it is from the early ’90’s. The problem is shortly after the Compaq merger the only PCs HP put out were shit. And the only decent thing Compaq was making at the time, the iPaq (Their PDA), was bastardized into oblivion. Likewise it was around this time that their calculator division went into life support (I still love HP calculators, RPN is a great system in my opinion). In the past HP calculators were heavy and well constructed. Now they’re plastic and the buttons have a habit of breaking over time. The bottom line is HP isn’t a company I can trust to do anything well these days.

The other reason I didn’t get a Palm Pre was the hardware. By the time I was ready to get a new phone the Pre was long in the tooth and I was expecting a new model to be released soon. That soon never came and the Pre has been out over a year now without any major upgrades (and since I’m on Sprint I can’t even get those meager upgrades).

Android on the other had has several things going for it. First it’s open source and thus not dependent on a single company for continue existence. The main company developing for Android, Google, isn’t looking to go away anytime soon. Android is also a pretty fucking awesome operating system with good developer support (there are actually third-party applications to purchase for example). The hacker scene is lively as well with custom ROMs being released for most of the popular Android devices. Finally the released hardware is pretty amazing (seriously this Evo 4G is just amazing).

So that’s why I ended up with Android instead of WebOS.

So Much for Apple Being the Most Secure

Apple zealots always tout the “inherit security” of Mac OS 10. These mindless drones claim Apple’s operating system is the most secure in the world because it’s built on UNIX (even though they don’t actually know what UNIX is, nor FreeBSD which OS X is built upon). Well Secunia has released a report of the top 10 most vulnerable software vendors [PDF]. Guess who’s on top… Apple!

Of course this is not in regards to their operating system but software they release for Windows. Yup their Safari browser and iTunes media player really raped their rating because frankly it’s got enough holes to fly a squadron of fighter jets through. This is why I don’t use Safari (and why I use extensions in Firefox like NoScript and Certificate Patrol) on either Windows or Mac OS (Safari is a popular favorite at the Pwn2Own contest when attacking the Mac platform).

I want to note I’m surprised Adobe wasn’t higher on the list with all the recent problems they’ve had with Flash and Reader.

Set the Way Back Machine For Way Back

OK this is kind of awesome in a nostalgic sort of way. Access who purchased PalmSource which was the spun off software side of Palm (seriously if you ever want to read a book on the most convoluted company history ever Piloting Palm is a good read) has release an Android input system that uses the old Graffiti system from original Palm PDAs.

I installed it and it’s kind of fun although still slower than the Evo 4G’s built in keyboard. Surprisingly I still remember most of the Graffiti strokes. Now that I think about it that shouldn’t be very surprising since I used it a lot throughout college (I wrote entire speeches for class on my PDAs because I didn’t often lug around a laptop).

When a Problem Isn’t a Problem

Google’s been getting some flak for recording MAC addresses and unencrypted data from unsecured wireless access points while cruising around in their little street view cars. Several European countries have blown this completely out of proportion as have 37 states in this country.

Google has been very forthcoming with information including the fact that they were running Kismet in their vehicles. Kismet was being used to record the MAC addresses of wireless access points which were than tagged with GPS coordinates. The idea behind this is pretty simple; each access point has a unique MAC address. If you know the location of these wireless access points you can determine your location through Wi-Fi instead of having to rely on aGPS. The main advantage is you can have location based services with devices that have Wi-Fi cards but no GPS (for instance most laptops). By default Kismet saves all unencrypted data so Google obtaining this information isn’t so much nefarious as just forgetting to change the default settings.

Truth be told very little information is going to be gleamed from this data because the speed at which they were driving around put them in and out of range of most access points pretty quickly. Of course there is another thing to note here.

If you have an unsecured wireless access point and somebody is grabbing your data it’s your fault. Wireless data is broadcast out for all to hear. Treat it like yelling, if you and your significant other get into a yelling argument you can’t blame your neighbors for hearing what you two were screaming at each other. Wireless data is the same way. If your wireless signal enters my property then I have every right to eavesdrop on it. If you don’t want me to be able to do this you need to encrypt the data or shield your house well enough where your wireless signal isn’t entering my property (or in Google’s case public property where there is no expectation of privacy).

Instead of wasting time with this case I’d love to see these State Attorney’s deal with some real issues.

Finger Pointing at It’s Finest

Let’s say you’re a multi-billion dollar technology company who puts out a phone almost everybody seems to want. Now let’s say you release a new phone which has a slight problem, it drops calls when being held in a user’s left hand. What do you do? Well you could recall the phone or offer an in-store hardware fix.

Or if you’re Apple you could point the finger at everybody else and claim you’re phone is still good because everybody has similar issues. I guess I do like one thing about that page, it shows the Jesus Phone isn’t actually better than other phones on the market. Apple zealots always claim Apple makes hardware that’s far better than the competition but in actuality that’s just a total pile of shit (yes they make nice hardware, but so do many other companies).

I Write Like…

Breda posted a link to a page that analyzes your writings and tells you who you write like. I decided to plug in several of my posts over the last several months and see who I write like. Apparently I’m schizophrenic in my writings.

My post about the recent Detroit Iron Maiden concert nabbed me this:

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Apparently when I write about the Second Amendment Foundation my style takes on a slightly scarier fashion:

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

And I had a few other random authors pop up but Corey Doctorow was certainly the most popular author brought up by my writings by a wide margin.

Technical Specifications on the New Kindle’s Screen

Yesterday I posted about the new Amazon Kindle DX. One of the new features being boasted about is the 50% higher contrast ratio screen. Well E Ink, the company behind the displays, has released some technical specifications on the new screen.

It appears that the new screen not only brings better contrast ratio to the table but also less power consumption to boot. From the specs page it appears the resolution of the new Kindle DX is 1200 x 825 which is pretty respectable considering some netbooks with 10″ or larger screens barely exceed that.

New Kindle Released

Yes I’m a Kindle fan boy and no I don’t care if you’re sick of hearing about them. Amazon annouced a new version of their gigantic uber-Kindle, the Kindle DX. The new Kindle DX sports a new color (graphite), a screen that is advertised to have a 50% higher contrast ratio, and a new lower price coming in at $379 (which is high in my opinion).

I have to say going by the pictures I like the new graphite color. It’s muted enough to not be a distraction when reading (as shiny black would be) but also different from the previous white. I would very much like to check out the screen and see how much of a difference the higher contrast ratio makes.

Anyways it ships on July 7.

Kindle for Android Released

There are two devices I love at the moment; my Amazon Kindle and my HTC Evo 4G. So what happens when you combine the two? Well I wasn’t terribly impressed but alas it’s not possible since Amazon finally released a version of their Kindle software for Android. It’s still reading on a phone which means you have a small screen with a back lit LCD instead of a good sized screen with an e-ink display. But it might be nice as a mechanism of having fast access to reference manuals you may have.