Category: geekery

Here, read this. It’s fucking amazing.

Read the May 6 original before the two top-posted updates.

It’s incredible that:

• Anything designed built in the 70’s and launched into space is still functional.
• NASA has the ability to debug a computer that’s nearly fourteen fucking billion miles away.
• They can do it at the bit level.
• They have an identical computer they can test their changes on.
• And they can fix it.

It’s easy to dismiss NASA’s achievements in the 60’s and 70’s as quaint relics–pieces of a publicity war fought against a cold-war adversary.  A cell phone is a supercomputer compared to the computers that landed man on the moon.  When I see the perfection of work like this, it’s a testament to what the human race can accomplish.

Huh.  Apparently I wrote this in May and then never actually published it.  Whoops.

As someone who works in the computer industry and spends an insane amount of time online, it’s very rare when I find anything new that actually impresses me, much less amazes me.

I just found something that amazes me.

iPhone 2.0 came out last week, and with it the long-awaited App Store, which gives users the ability to install Apple-sanctioned applications on their devices. Tech sites have been fawning over this app and that app, but until now I hadn’t found anything I thought was all that impressive. I’ve been trying a lot of the free ones to see which are worthwhile and which are a waste of time.  Today, Digg linked to an article on the Pandora iPhone app. The blurb on their site claims:

It’s a new kind of radio – stations that play only music you like. Type in the name of your favorite artist, song, or composer and we’ll create a radio station featuring that music and more like it.

Here’s the thing: they actually live up to their own hype. I entered one of my current favorite bands, The Postal Service, and it created a channel of their music and other, similar artists. I listened for over an hour didn’t hear anything I didn’t enjoy, most of it completely new to me. While that, in and of itself, was really impressive, it still isn’t what amazed me.

The review I read said it was possible to play over AT&T wireless Internet (not wifi), but I didn’t believe it. AT&T’s EDGE wireless data network is usually dog-slow whenever I try to bring up maps or browse the web. The only thing it’s typically good for is checking my mail. I assumed that as soon as I was out of wifi range, the connection to Pandora’s servers would go to hell.

To test it, I took it along on my lunch drive to Taco Bell. As soon as I was out of the office wifi connection range, it switched over to EDGE and kept playing, literally, without missing a beat. I can now easily imagine listening to internet radio while on a long car trip, which I’ve felt for a long time was going be the next progression in in-car radio technology.

As far as the audio quality goes, it’s nothing spectacular. I’m pretty sure it’s monaural sound, and it sounds a bit compressed sometimes–but for any car where you have to turn the radio up over the sound of road noise (like mine), those differences are unnoticable.

I’m really, really impressed by Pandora. If you want to try it out, you don’t need an iPhone or iPod Touch. You can go to pandora.com and listen right in your browser.

[Sorry about another iPhone post, folks.]

I upgraded to iPhone firmware 2.0 yesterday, and now a portion of the touchscreen has stopped accepting input. It’s roughly equivalent to where the third row of icons lives on the main screen.

I’m mostly annoyed with this, but not too much… I brought it into the Apple store this afternoon, and they said they’ll replace it with a new one when I come back tomorrow. (The Genius Bar was booked solid for the rest of the day at 3:00pm, and the place was packed.) I’m going to try to parlay my replacement (8GB 2G) into either a 8GB 3G or a 16GB 2G. If I have to pay a bit to do it, that’s fine. If they’re not willing to go for it, that’s fine too. Getting a brand-new replacement phone for free is a good deal either way.

If anyone at Apple actually took the trouble to track my interactions with them, they’d never do business with me again. They’re lost money on every purchase I’ve made: I spilled whiskey in my MacBook, then convinced them to replace it. Now my iPhone has crapped out, and they’re going to replace that as well.

Yeah. Stick it to the man.

Update: I brought my phone in this afternoon, and they replaced it with a brand new identical model for free. I asked about the possibility of trading up, but apparently only identical trades can be done. I wasn’t really expecting to walk out with a 3G, but it was worth a try. Go Apple.