Linkstew

Subject: NeXTCube Serial Number AA001032 ("Burning Cube" -- any relation to Burning Man?)

This is a great story -- I've actually read it before, but man it's funny. Also, that picture of the cube funeral pyre is now my desktop background at work. =)

While moving later this week is going to suck more than the last few times I've done it, there is one thing that I'm actually looking forward to this time: While before I've always waited until the last possible minute to pack my computer(s), this time it won't matter. Thanks to only having a laptop at this point, when I'm finally ready to make the final transition, I'll just shut the lid and toss it in my backpack. I probably won't even turn it off. I really can't imagine going back to a desktop for any reason at this point.

I was inspired to write this article on a train ride back in February, and that's where I wrote most of it, too, without any internet to do any research. So of course, as soon as I plugged in I found articles like this one from more than two years ago, and I'm once again reminded that there's not an original thought in my head. But, I already wrote these 1,000 words, so here they are:

In my day, I've owned PDAs, mp3 players, a few Game Boys, a digital camera, and a cell phone. These days, I only carry my cell phone, my laptop, and my iPod with me regularly. The bulk of these devices is a reason that I stopped carrying some of them regularly, but it's not the primary reason.

At one point, I had wireless internet on my Palm V thanks to OmniSky (are they dead yet?). It was nice for what it was, but even then it seemed obvious to me that that was merely a temporary solution. Today, convergence is the name of the game, with more and more cell phones providing PDA functionality, and some are even providing gaming functionality.

It seems fairly obvious to me that the mobile devices (including cell phones, PDAs, game players, and to a lesser extent mp3 players and cheap digital cameras) are rapidly approaching a convergence. I won't be at all surprised if the more popular devices are going to be the ones that provide more features.

For that matter, the home entertainment market is hurtling towards convergence, too, with my PS2 able to play DVDs and connect to the internet.

Nintendo currently dominates the portable gaming market, with its Game Boy line being the only real contender. However, Nintendo has said on multiple occasions that they are a game company, and were only interested in supporting gaming with their devices. Witness the lack of DVD functionality in the Gamecube as a prime example of this. Generalizing this behavior and putting it in terms of what I've been talking about, it's unlikely that Nintendo is going to be very receptive to the convergence trend. In fact, I would be honestly surprised if Nintendo hopped on that bandwagon, and bundled phone or other features into the base Game Boy configuration. Sure, Nintendo may reintroduce peripherals like the Game Boy Camera or the Game Boy cell phone connector, but accessorizing is more Nintendo's habit than converging. (Because there's more money in accessories!)

Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised if Sony and Microsoft (and others) attempt to compete in the portable gaming space not with a dedicated game system, but rather, with a gaming platform piggybacked onto other devices, with the most likely target being cell phones. Heck, Nokia's upcoming N-Gage is just the first in what I expect to be a string of gaming platforms piggybacked on top of other devices. And I think, with that strategy, it is likely that someone will overtake Nintendo's dominance in the portable arena, primarily because I don't expect Nintendo to embrace the convergence that their future competitors will be offering. The more popular devices will be those that offer more features, so people will buy phones that also happen to be able to play games, and since their phones support the games, they'll buy the games for that platform.

So convergence of portable devices is coming, and I expect piggybacked platforms to have a pretty significant impact, but I'm not actually happy about that. And it's not just because I'm a Nintendo fanboy. No, I'm not happy about this because I subscribe to the philosophy of "do one thing and do it well." Witness my love of UNIX as proof of this. So I'm not happy about this convergence that I'm expecting because I'm afraid that we're going to end up with a sea of devices that do many things half assed. My iPod plays music incredibly well. My Game Boy plays games well. My phone answers calls well. My CellularGamePod, on the other hand...

I don't mind convergence. It's not a bad thing, and for people who can't afford multiple devices, it's probably a good thing. But I think a better solution that could be more significant than convergence in the long run is the idea of a "Personal Area Network."

• Components of a "Personal Area Network"
• A cellular link node for network/internet access. This could be a cell phone, a computer, or even a PDA with a wi-fi card installed.
• Bluetooth (or another, ideally less "nasty" protocol) to allow devices to communicate with each other. This would also enable network access for non-networked nodes in the network.
• An auto-discovery protocol. Preferably Rendevous, but (if I recall correctly) JINI might also do the trick.
• Some standard protocols for sharing standard data between devices.
• Then, add devices to yourself as you see fit. Some of these devices could be devices which offer more than one service.
• And most importantly, all of your data is stored on your local devices -- not accessed through the network.

The advantages and uses of such a PAN innumerable. You could access the contact list on your iPod with a borrowed cell phone to make a quick phone call. You could connect your laptop to the net using your cell phone or a friend's. Your Gamecube and Game Boy could talk to each other for connectivity. Two Game Boy owners could play each other without need for a cable. Take a digital picture and email it to a friend through your cell phone, or store the picture on your camera as identification, without using a shitty camera-phone. And on.

Basically, some devices would "offer" services, and other devices would "request" services. Phones both offer and request contact data. My Game Boy requests net. My laptop would offer and request a lot, depending on its current configuration (I'd certainly want my laptop to offer net if it were plugged into a cable modem, instead of messing around with a cellular link). And my iPod could offer music and conacts (though bluetooth doesn't have the bandwidth to stream music -- just one of many reasons this would ideally use a better protocol than bluetooth).

When my phone connects to a device offering contact data, it would browse that data remotely and not save a local copy, unless the owner of the data allowed it (though if the owner doesn't want you to download the data, he probably wouldn't let you browse it in the first place) and the browser of the data requested a copy of the data. This protects the owner of the data, and keeps each device from getting cluttered with data unnecessarilly.

I probably shouldn't be emphasizing contacts so much, because that's an example of pure data that should arguably be availble just from "the network", but that's a topic and an argument for another article. Better applications for this PAN technology are probably things like the digital camera services and the net services I described above.

The biggest unsolved problem in the sketch of a PAN I described above is security, but I can imagine numerous possible solutions to that problem. The first solution that popped into my mind was giving each piece of hardware a hardware based keypair. Don't make any way to get the "private" key from the hardware short of tearing the hardware apart and working some EE magic. Then make a "known_hosts" for your PAN, and your PAN can use something akin to ssh host key verification to allow access to your network. Of course, firmware upgrades would always have to be supported in case of flaws in the protocol... Something a little better than having to manage a "known_hosts" would be cool, but like I said, this is just one solution of many. And heck, for all I know, bluetooth might already have some way to do secure ad hoc networks, but I'm on a train right now without a PAN, so I can't connect my laptop to my phone and check. =)

I'm sure most of these ideas aren't very novel, but the entire vision is still my ideal future of digital devices. I wish I could do more than just hope things turn out this way.

I've got a midterm tomorrow morning, so obviously I had some reading to do tonight. Here's the list:

• Inside the PowerPC 970
• Tetris is Hard, Even to Approximate
• Two Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance reviews
• Portrait of a Blogger
• Carbon vs. Cocoa revisited
• TCPA and Palladium Technical Analysis
• Spam meets blogs
• And the usual blogs.

And that's in addition to all the time I spent playing with Linkstew's random taglines.

I also played around with the idea of making a new sidebar item that's just a list of articles I've read recently, without any commentary. I don't typically like posting links, because I always end up feeling like I should say something more about them. Since any post requires a title, I always feel like a puny little link would be dwarfed by the other interface elements on the page. So that might happen, but obviously not tonight. I've got "studying" to do.

So apparently my mom got her own camera, which means that she sent me a lot of new pictures of her dog. If you're so inclined, check out these pictures of the cute little shit.

Anyway, these pictures actually reminded me that I really need to get my dad set up with iPhoto, since he's still doing all of his organization by hand.

And on the subject of iPhoto, I found this Better Html Export iPhoto plugin the other day, and because of it I found a feature of iPhoto I'd never noticed before.

The main reason I haven't played much with iPhoto is because as far as I could tell, its HTML capabilities only interfaced with mac.com (via the Share/Homepage button). I never noticed the option under Share/Export for Export Web Page to export an album to be uploaded wherever.

And with Better Html Export, I'm not considering switching from my current train wreck of a photo album to an iPhoto based album. There'd be more manual work involved on my part, but at the same time, I'd get clean URLs and more customization options for my albums. Of course, it's nothing I'm going to worry about right now, or even until I start taking more pictures again. I haven't been taking very many pictures just because my damn camera is so huge that it's just impossible to carry around regularly. I want a smaller camera.

Yes, I'm really stretching to find things to pre-blog about at this point. I'm sure I'm enjoying Canada, if it makes you feel any better. ;-)

I wonder what kind of innovative uses of this thing the geek porn industry will come up? I see a lot of potential here... Women with keyboards projected on their breasts, backs, and (for the particularly adventurous) other hard to reach places.

So after my initial decision to pass up that great deal on that PowerMac G4 bundle, I did a lot of questioning of my decision. A lot of my co-workers were going in on the deal, and I tried to figure out how I could afford it and afford Whistler... But in the end, I came back to my decision that it wasn't worth cleaning out my bank account for because I didn't really need the computer.

But then, this afternoon, I got to my office and found an email me telling me that I hadn't picked up my January paycheck.

"That's impossible," I thought to myself. "There's no way I could have as much in my account as I do if I'd missed a paycheck..."

So I wandered over to payroll, and there was my January paycheck. And I went back to my office and looked at my bank account, and sure enough, I hadn't deposited a paycheck in February.

The check by itself was for more than enough to cover the PowerMac bundle. Yay!

Except, they already sold out of the PowerMac bundles. D'oh!

A fantastic deal came across my desk this afternoon: A bundle containing a new PowerMac G4 733 (with a 40 GB HD, a GeForce2, and CD-RW) and a 17" Apple Studio Display (flat panel) for just $1269. Total.

It's an absolutely fantastic deal, but I can't really afford it right now. Well, I actually have about that much money, but it's my operating surplus, and I don't want to blow it all on this.

I suppose I could (attempt to) collect from the people who owe me money (OA), or sell my extra computer to my brother, or ask for money for my upcoming birthday, or all of the above...

Blah, so conflicted.

Okay, I've said it before, but I really do love my Game Boy Advance. On the one hand, the recent GBA price drop is a pretty sweet deal for you folks who don't have a GBA yet. On the other hand, for folks like me who already have a GBA (Or my roommate, who has two... (Don't ask.)), it's irritating for a number of reasons.

For one, it means that if I'd waited I could have paid less for my system. And for another, the rumor that Nintendo may come out with an internally lit GBA sometime soon irritates me even more, because frankly, an internal light in my GBA would fix my one major gripe about it. Basically, I wouldn't be able to resist buying a backlit GBA as soon as it came out, probably for another $90-$100 bucks. Blahh...

But wait! For y'all who already have a GBA and just want some nice backlighting without buying a whole new system, there (will soon be) Portable Monopoly! They claim that, starting hopefully in March, they'll be selling kits self-install backlighting kits for the Game Boy Advance.

One look at those pictures of a backlit GBA are enough to make me want to void my warranty and go buy the soldering iron and other tools I need to make this modification right here and now. Boy do I hope that this one doesn't turn out to be a hoax...

I'm ashamed to admit it, but once the joke sunk in, this made me laugh out loud: amibiosornot.com.

I rather badly cut my thumb tonight, and the constant pressure I had to keep on it made it more than a little hard to type. Luckilly, last week I discovered Twerq, which emulates a half keyboard in software in OS X. (When you hold down the space bar, the keyboard is mirrored across itself, so typing space+; produces an a, while space+q produces a p, and so on.) I really love this functionality, and it kept me working tonight despite the thumb injury. However, I can't leave it installed full time because I type way too fast, and I accidentally hit space plus a letter at the same time way too often, and twerq just increases my typo count by tenfold. It'd be super slick if the functionality could be toggled without a reboot, but you can't win them all. There are a few other cool hacks on that Twerq page, including uControl, which makes capslock a second control key (though it's unable to disable the toggling of the capslock led).

Hi. I'm feeling very helpless and kind of depressed at the moment.

You see, today I got 512 megs of RAM for the lower slot in my PowerBook, and I quickly put it in, and my PowerBook quickly did not boot up. Not even a chime or a crash. Just silence. Nothing.

I was pretty calm about it the first time. I've had plenty of things not work the first time. So I pulled everything back apart, and double checked some instructions, and I put everything together again, and my PowerBook didn't boot again. Rinse and Repeat, several times.

It quickly came to be 2 o'clock, and I had class, so I left my laptop in pieces in the office. I felt naked walking around campus because my backpack was seven pounds lighter than normal. And for three hours I sat in class, growing more and more anxious about my PowerBook. For the last hour of 170 I could barely stay focused (That the lecturer is hard to understand doesn't help. That the lecturer is going over the exact same thing as last semester when I didn't get into the class, but attended for three weeks, helps even less).

I hurried back to the office, and I renewed my attempts to make my poor little PowerBook boot. I found this page of links to official Apple Service Manuals (the same manuals that an official repair-person would use). I tried the trouble-shooting tactics that I was capable of with my limited resources (I don't have a whole spare PowerBook of parts to drop in as a replacement), but it was all for naught.

And then there was a breakthrough! For three hours I'd been trying to make my PowerBook boot, but the processor card hadn't been seated. I felt like a fool -- I should have noticed that the card was freely coming out, but that I'd had to really tug to actually remove it in the first place -- I'd just been afraid to apply enough pressure to get it back in. With relief, I put everything back together, put in my batteries, hit the power button, and listened to the beautiful sound of

Nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. I took it apart and put it back together a few more times, trying all the permutations of the RAM. I made sure to actually seat the processor card each time. And each time, nothing. So I gave up and walked home, planning to try using my AC power adapter instead of my batteries.

But when I got home and pulled the PowerBook out of my backpack, it was warm, bordering on hot. It felt like it normally feels after several hours of constant use. I quickly took the batteries out and pulled off the keyboard, and found the insides very hot. So I let it cool down for awhile while I cooked dinner. After dinner, I plugged in the AC adapter, but it still didn't power on, and it started heating up just like it had with the batteries in my backpack.

So I unplugged it and removed the batteries and put it in the bag. I'm going to take it to the Mac Store on Saturday, since I'm booked solid with meetings and class tomorrow. I hope they'll be able to do something. At the very least, they should have the resources to run more tests and narrow down what the problem is. And if the Mac Store can't help, I'll try calling Apple.

And if it can't be fixed? Well, I already skimmed eBay looking at used Pismo PowerBooks. I already have lots of accessories for this PowerBook that are incompatible with new Apple Portables (an extra battery and an extra power adapter, for starters). I also like the design of the Pismo better than the new Apple portables, and I happen to like having a dual of batteries. And for that matter, even if they can fix my laptop, I'm seriously considering picking up a used Pismo in six months or a year as a backup, because I like it that much and I want spare parts.

But without my PowerBook, I'm feeling very... out of sorts. In fact, I'm feeling kind of powerless. I can't work in class, and my freedom of work at home is seriously impaired. I wasn't able to watch TV without getting really upset, because I always have my PowerBook with me when I'm watching TV. And tonight I'm using my desktop (for more than five minutes) for the first time in months. Basically, I've become totally dependent on a laptop instead of a desktop, and I'm going to have to get some sort of working laptop in the next month or I'm going to get really cranky.

And for that matter, I better have a working mac by the time OS X 10.1 comes out. Bah, it looks like paying to fix my stupid mistake is going to be karmic balance for working 60 hours of overtime this pay period.