Technology in Mind

I’m currently trying out a 14 day free trial of the Mobile Grid Client on my Android phone which allows me to access a number of common in-world functions within Second Life.  I can use in-world chat, review profiles, teleport, and even provides a region map of wherever I’m logged in.  I won’t go into detail since their own website in the link above details all the features quite well.

My initial gripe was the fact that the software is not a one time purchase, as it is with similar applications in the iPhone market (i.e. Sparkle IM and Touch Life).  However, the Mobile Grid Client is currently the only option in the Android Market filling this niche, and their subscription prices are quite reasonable. After the 14 day trial, the subscriber can opt for either the 250L$($1 USD) for the standard version or their professional version at $450L$ ($1.75 USD) per month.

The primary features that differs the standard subscription from the professional is that the standard does not permit you to change your active groups, make payments, and the application only remains idle for 15 minutes in the background versus 8 hours for the professional subscription.

As an ‘Augmenter’ versus ‘Immersionist’ in Second Life I tend to look for tools such as these to compliment my real life Internet presence without having to remain tied to my computer at home. This application seems well designed and it appears that the author is actively adding new features and functionality.

Not only am I blogging again, but I’ve also re-established my Second Life virtual office, this time on the mainland continent of Gaeto. This is the first time I’ve chosen to use mainland versus a private island.  I am leasing my land rather than purchasing, as I’ve decided there’s really no difference with the exception of who you’re paying your money to.  Also leasing means no upfront cost of a land purchase and doesn’t require that you become a premium member. One of the first things I noticed with renting an Oceanside parcel is that I’m now next to Linden Water rather than what is available with  the private estates. This makes it possible to sail around the entire continent and there’s supposedly a channel that will permit crossing over to another Linden continent.

I’ve also setup an irc channel in my office that permits me to monitor what’s going on in my  SL office when I’m not logged in. I can now monitor activity using any IRC client and have even installed the AndChat IRC client on my Android phone for when I’m not near my computer.  It permits me to view conversations and even chat with the people within range of the IRC device.  This is using QuickFox’s SL Gateway Service.

I took a hiatus from blogging last year while my wife and I worked towards bringing our daughter home from China.

In October we flew to China and adopted our daughter and she is adjusting to her new home in the U.S.  There are more details on our family blog at http://timandheike.com .

Since that time, I sold my HTC S621 Windows Mobile phone and am now an owner of the HTC MyTouch3G. I immediately rooted the phone and flashed the ROM with one of Cyanogen’s custom ROMS.

Although I thought I would miss having some sort of physical QWERTY keyboard I haven’t missed it, and there are so many great things going on with the Android OS that I can’t say I miss my old phone at all.

I look forward to getting back to posting my views regarding technologies that interest me and perhaps even regaining a small audience.

Thank you,

Tim

“Click, Click, Click”, the Western Digital My Book hard drive continued to churn as it denied it’s presence to my computer.  So I unplugged the firewire cable from the hard drive and plugged it in again. “Click, Click, Click”, it continued it’s dysfunctional state. I tried plugging it into different firewire ports, unplugged the power cable and reconnected, and even rebooted the PC.  My episode suddenly became reminiscent of an Edgar Allen Poe story wherein the clicks became more audible to my ears, laughing and sneering at my situation.

Lest you think I’ve gone mad, and as reassurance to myself that my sanity was still intact, I searched the indexes of google to see if my incident was an anomaly.  And in a twisted sort of way, I found comfort in a group of individuals that had fell victim to the same heckling of the clicking sound.

You might think that I’m being quite unfair and despondent to the suffering of a dying hard drive, except that I can speak to the souring of our relationship before this particular day.

I was initially enamored with my external WD My Book hard drive, relishing in it’s bountiful storage space. It’s flashing blue eye tempted and beckoned me to fill it’s vast spaces with the contents of my plentiful data. I gladly obliged, filling it with music, pictures, and videos. And even so, it’s satiety was lacking and I dutifully began using it to backup the other computers on my network. With it’s enormous appetite I established it as a storage area for my PVR, feeding it vast amounts of video to fill it’s longing sectors.

Little did I suspect the drive to have any ill intent, at least not initially. But in hindsight I now sense the foreshadowing of it’s evil plan.  At first it tempted me with it’s flashing eyes to trust my data to it’s 500GB of space. It worked diligently to become a respected device in my network, earning it’s trust in it’s utility. Once it had sensed my reliance upon it, it began it’s taunts.

It taunted me with sudden disconnects as a network drive! Just when I planned to copy a file, the drive mapping was suddenly gone.  This was sporadic and it’s timing seemed to be in correlation to how urgently it felt my need.

It taunted me with it’s disappearance to the PVR’s scheduled recordings! I could feel it’s glee from knowing that in it’s absence it caused me to miss an episode of 24 or Prison Break.

It celebrated my frustrations in attempting to reconnect, enjoying my trials of unplugging the firewire cable in and out, repowering it on and off, until it suddenly would reappear of it’s own accord! There seemed to be no logic or reason as to when it would work or wouldn’t, no methodology could be discerned. It would begin working again upon it’s own accord.

And then it’s final taunt, it bore out it’s fiendish plan, something I now suspect was preconceived. As the My Book hard drive self-destructed with my precious data, it heckled and laughed with his flashing blue eye, and sounds of “Click, Click, Click”!

Technorati Tags: western digital,my book,external,hard drive,satire

As a Windows Mobile user I struggled with finding a simple way to synchronize the podcasts I’ve downloaded to my computer, with my Windows Mobile Smartphone’s flash drive.  (I really don’t use my phone to listen to music.) Microsoft’s Active Sync does have the ability to synchronize with the phone’s internal storage, but for some reason they didn’t think that people might want to synchronize files with their optional storage as well, since that’s where most users would have plenty of space.

Several google searches later, I came upon an old freeware program called MobSync. I was concerned that it might not work as the website indicated that it was for PocketPC, and often that means it’s not compatible with Smartphones. But to my delight it functions just fine.

There is a bit of initial configuration as you need to specify the source folders and the destination folder on the phone and/or storage card.  I’ve set mine up to align with output folders from iTunes.  Via iTunes I’ve subscribed to various podcasts. I then open up iTunes, so it downloads the latest podcasts. Afterwards, I then launch MobSync which synchronizes them to a folder on my storage card.  One thing I have noticed is that it is important to right click on the MobSync icon in the system tray and exit before disconnecting the phone.  For some reason there seems to be a bug that launches a lot of error windows if you don’t.

But for a free solution to synchronize music, podcasts, pictures, or whatever folder to your Windows Mobile storage card, this works quite well.

If you have other methods for synchronizing (freeware and paid), share your ideas here.

Since Google announced their new Google Voice there have been alot of blog postings providing the history, walk-thru’s and going over the many features of Google Voice. A recent twitter search on “Google Voice” will show you that there’s ALOT of folks really wanting to try this new offering out. However as many have discovered it’s limited to the current pool of the previous GrandCentral users, although Google says that it will become available in the near future to everyone else (at least those individuals in the U.S.).

Lucky for me, I had a GrandCentral account, and after a week of checking my account a gazillion times, I finally got the message that I could upgrade to Google Voice.  I checked out the different features offered by Google, some which were already there from GrandCentral, and then the additional features that Google added.

As those of you who are versed in Google Voice know, Google lets you pick a new phone number from a pool, in your local calling area (with the exception to a few states like Hawaii, Alaska, and Maine). And then you setup your other phones that you want it to ring. It’s very customizable and can even have different incoming numbers ring only certain phones.  The idea is to give you one number that you provide to everyone and they can call that number and reach you however you’ve setup your other phones.

One of my connected phone numbers is my mobile number of course. So people can dial my Google Voice number and it will ring my cell phone number.  But if I want to call them back from my cell it suddenly becomes more complicated. Well not really, but hold on for a minute and I’ll explain. Google Voice’s idea is to give people a universal number where friends can reach you. Your friends expect that when you return their call that they’ll see your new number, not your ‘device end’ numbers. And you want them to see and use the new Google Voice number as well if you’re going to benefit from all of Google’s features. Otherwise here is what will happen.

1. You excitedly inform friends and family of your new Google Voice Number and ask them to start using this number instead of your other numbers.

2. Slowly your contacts start using the new number to reach you.  However, they notice that everytime you call your pre-existing house and cell number show up on their caller id.

3. In a very short time, they abandon your new Google Voice number and resume calling your home or cell number directly. Your Google Voice number becomes irrelevant in the structure.

On your cell phone, there are ways to dial out projecting your Google Voice number to the receiving party rather than your mobile number’s caller ID.

a.) Call your Google Voice number, press 2, then dial the recipient’s number, and press #. (This is dumb as it’s manual and you can’t even use your phone’s address book).

b.) If you’re near a computer, login to your Google Voice account and initiate the call from there. It will ring your mobile, then it will ring their phone.

c.) Use your phone’s Internet / data plan and visit http://google.com/voice/m . Login and select your contact from there.

d.) Use a calling card number that will utilize your contact list and automate solution a.) that’s listed above.

Point d.) made the most sense for me, so I sought out a solution.  I noticed that there seemed to already be a free Blackberry program.  There might be an iPhone program (if there isn’t I’m sure someone will be creating one really quick.) But I started searching for a Windows Mobile Smartphone application for my HTC S621 Excalibur (aka HTC Dash).

I learned quite a while ago that compatibility between PocketPC, Windows Mobile Professional (touch screen) and Windows Mobile Standard (non-touch screen) is nearly non-existent. Not only that, but Windows Mobile Standard seems to always come up short.  Many times there will be programs advertised for Pocket PC and/or Windows Mobile that only work on the touch screens. The developers seem to often forget to delineate as well between the touch and non-touch screens.  Anyway’s, I digress.

I found a program called Calling Card from a company called Sunnysoft that seems to work  perfectly in automating the dialouts using Google Voice in tangent with my existing contact list.  Currently I’m using their trial demo, but it seems definitely worth the purchase price of $19.00.  I’d prefer an open source or freeware  solution, but I do understand that there’s a group of people that would actually like to earn some money from their work and I can’t say I blame them.  On the other hand, I do fear that I might purchase this program and then Google introduces some free application that will make this software quickly obsolete for my purposes.

I downloaded and installed Google’s Latitude software on my HTC Windows Mobile phone this past Wednesday. It’s integrated into a new version of Google Maps, I simply downloaded and installed the new .cab file.  The only difference this time was that after launching Google Maps I logged in with my Google account credentials and agreed to use the latitude tracking software. There was a lot of ‘twitter noise’ concerning Google Latitude  and fear that this was going to encroach on people’s privacy. However, the service is opt-in with privacy controls that permit only those you’ve befriended to Google’s Latitude to see where you’re at. You can also turn it off completely or on a per person basis.  You can even manually set your location to make it appear as if you’re somewhere that you’re not.

I live in a small town with probably fewer cell towers than Google was counting on, so for non-GPS cell tower triangulation the accuracy was quite poor. But I do have an external bluetooth GPS unit, and this pinpointed my exact location.

I’ve tried to come up with some possible real life uses for this application beyond what Google’s stated and so far I haven’t come up with many. After it’s initial novelty wears off, I do wonder how useful it will be.  However, that was my initial thoughts when I signed up for Twitter and a number of other new technologies before I found ways to make use of them.

As I was in the midst of writing this, my Dad actually invited me to be a contact on Latitude, so it’s popularity seems to be quickly growing, at least with the geek crowd.

Nabeeha Khan discusses how to Access blocked websites without using proxies.

“We are all tired of proxies which are slow and full of popups and advertisement. Seriously using a proxy for safe browsing…”

I’m posting an email that my Dad forwarded to me with the steps for automatically starting MagicJack in Windows 7 Beta. I don’t use Blackjack, but I’m sure this may be of benefit to others that do.

__________________________________________________________________________

How to use the Windows 7 "Task Scheduler" to automatically start MagicJack after booting up or a Restart. The "Task Scheduler" is found in the "Administrative Tools" Folder.

Notes:

Use <Your_magicJack_Drive_Letter> in place of the “K:\” in the example below.

Complete steps found at:

“How-2 get MAGICJACK on WINDOWS 7 | Unofficial magicJack forum” at link:
http://www.magicjacksupport.com/post29556.html#29556

to get magicJack working on your computer before setting up to start at boot using Task Scheduler.

See Warnings at the bottom.

MagicJack Task Scheduler Setup in Windows 7 Beta Steps and examples:

1) Start “Task Scheduler”

2) Click “Create Task..” found under the Actions column

3) Enter a Name for the Task: “MagicJack Start”

4) Click: “Run whether user is logged on or not”

5) Click: “Run with highest privileges”

6) Configure for: “Windows 7” –OR — pick one of the server options

7) Select the “Actions” Tab

8 ) From the “Actions Tab” Click “New…”

9) Enter the “Program/Script”: Enter the following after using your <User_Name> C:\Users\<User_name>\AppData\Roaming\mjusbsp\magicJack.exe

10) Add Arguments: Enter the following after using your <Your_magicJack_Drive_Letter> in place of the “K:” below

/scf _magicJackPersonalDataRoot K:\magicJack

11) Enter “Start in”: /scf _magicJackPersonalDataRoot K:\magicJack

12) Click “OK”

13) Click “OK” again

14) Enter Password for your User name in the Task Scheduler POP-UP

15) Click “OK” to close the POP-UP

16) Close “Task Scheduler”

17) Reboot to Test

*** Warnings ***

Do not use with “MagicBlock”, caused repeated Blue Screen Crashes during testing!!!

Do start a second occurrence of MagicJack, it will trash the quality.

I heard that Google labs had launched 2 way SMS from within Gmail on Twitter and immediately had to try it out.  I went and enabled the feature and sent several text messages between the computer and my phone. It worked fast and was flawlessly.

The messages are sent and received through the embedded chat application.  You would have thought that this would be available in their external Gtalk application as well, but I’ve found no evidence of this to be true. Currently, the beta is limited to U.S. phones.

Comments on Techcrunch’s blog mentioned that this has been available through AIM and Yahoo IM for some time. I do know that there was the capability to send 1-way SMS’s (from the chat application to the recipients phone) but I didn’t think that 2 way was possible, except by using an IM SMS application. 

In other words, the recipients of the IM’s on those platforms would have to either have a GPRS IM application like Fring, MunduIM, Palringo, etc.  Or they would have to be using Yahoo’s or AIM’s SMS texting system which would require the person on the phone to have an AIM account or a Yahoo account.  (I stand corrected, at least with Yahoo Messenger 9.0. I just tested it, and it appears that 2-way SMS is available through their Messenger as well, regardless of whether the person has a Yahoo account or not, and they aren’t required to be signed in either.)