michael’s thoughts

I came across the Pertelian X2040 in my web travels today.  It’s a general purpose LCD display system that hooks up to your computer via USB.  It’s available for purchsae from ThinkGeek for $48.99 which isn’t bad.  I’m almost tempted to get one, but I’m not sure what I’d do with it.

There are a number of applications listed on the Pertelian web site.  Displaying weather information, stock quotes, RSS feeds, etc.  I’m sure I could use at least one of those things.  But I’m not sure that it’s a “must have”.

If anyone reading this has one and has found a truly killer app, I’d love to hear about it.  If I do end up buying one, I’ll certainly let you all know what I think.

As I’ve written before, I am a big user of Google Apps for Domains services.  This includes e-mail and contacts, but also calendar services.  I have tried a lot of online calendar services, but Google’s calendar meets my needs the best.  The big down side has always been the lack of proper mobile support.  Google does have an iPhone interface to the Google calendar system, but it’s very limited in functionality.

When I got the iPhone I was hoping to be able to sync it with my Google calendar via iTunes, but no such luck.  That may work on the Mac version of iTunes, but it does not on iTunes under Windows.  So I haven’t had good access to my calendars on my iPhone.  Until about a week ago.

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I have been using the Twitter Tools Wordpress plugin to cross post by Twitter tweets to this blog.  I’m not thrilled with the way the titles get chopped off, though, and it’s not really clear that they are Twitter updates.  So I’ve changed the setting to instead do a daily digest post of all the tweets for that day.  I think that should make it more clear and readable.

I use the free version of Twitterific on my iPhone. It is ad supported and a great client. I’ve considered upgrading to the paid version but honestly I like the ads.

The ad sales team has done a great job of finding ads that are relevant and interesting to me. I find that I learn about a lot of innovative companies from Twitterific ads and I think I’d miss them I’d I upgraded.

Who’d a thunk?

I have been thinking about migrating from MediaWiki to Semantic MediaWiki for my personal wiki.  As I’ve written before (1, 2), I use MediaWiki as a personal document management system as well as a personal information system.  I use it as an electronic filing cabinet as well as a notepad where I make notes to remember for later, brainstorm ideas for future projects, etc.

It actually has worked out really well, but a lot of the information in the system has semantic attributes.  Unfortunately because it’s a free text wiki that metadata and the relationships between the data in my wiki is not available.

I haven’t really spent much time looking into Semantic MediaWiki and I won’t have time in the near future due to some projects at Communications Tool & Die, but I do want to find a way to leverage the semantic qualities of the data in my personal wiki.  I’m not sure if Semantic Wiki is necessarily the correct solution but I’m going to look into it further.

If anyone has any experience with Semantic MediaWiki I’d love to hear it!

Back in August, I wrote a post on some of the caveats with syncing Google Contacts to the iPhone.  Owen Cooper left me a comment suggesting the iPhone Apps Store application Sync in a Blink.  It’s only $5 so I decided to purchase it and give it a try.  It was $5 very well spent!

The application allows wireless over the air (OTA) synchronization between the iPhone and Google Contacts.  It works with GMail contacts, but I use it with my Google Apps account for the secretelite.com domain.

Aside from the benefit of wireless OTA syncing, Sync in a Blink also addresses the issue I wrote about in August where Google uses the email address as the key for the contact entry and so it doesn’t do a good job of syncing phone contacts that don’t have email addresses.  It also supports the syncronization of contacts that don’t have names, which is important for me since I tend to add businesses that I frequently contact into my iPhone contacts and now they can sync well with Google Contacts.

The other nice feature of Sync in a Blink is that it keeps a sync history and shows the details of what exactly changed, including before and after views for each contact that has changed.

If you are an iPhone user who syncs with Google Contacts this is a “must have” application.  Very well worth the $5.

Google Earth is now available on the iPhone, which is awesome.  Something about sitting in a coffee shop in the Washington, DC area and flying around Sydney, Australia on my phone is just very cool.  One frustration though.  No street names overlays.

I can understand that the iPhone version of Google Earth is necessarily more limited than the desktop version.  They provide the Wikipedia and Panoramio overlay layers.  Why not street names?  Google Maps for the iPhone certainly includes streets.  Hopefully this will come to Google Earth shortly.

Other than that, cool application.

After several months with my iPhone 3G, it’s still my favorite phone that I’ve ever owned.  There are really only two or three things that I find ridiculous and frustrating.

The first is the lack of MMS.  From what I’ve read, the Apple opinion is that since you can email pictures on the iPhone you don’t need MMS.  Unfortunately real life doesn’t work that way.  If everyone had an iPhone then emailing pictures around would be fine.  But they don’t.  And sometimes I want to send or receive pictures from other mobile phone users.  It cannot be all that complicated to implement MMS.  Please do so, Apple!

The other feature that’s missing is video recording.  This is a lifestyle/entertainment phone.  Why can it not record video?  It has plenty of internal storage.  And the processor can clearly handle it, since there are video recorder applications for Jailbroken iPhones.  Why can’t we have a legitimate video recording application?!

The other feature I’d like to see is the ability to use the 3G networking via Bluetooth networking on my laptop.  It would be great if I could use the iPhone as a cellular modem.  I would not pay any more than I’m paying now for an additional data plan, though.  Perhaps that’s why AT&T doesn’t offer it the option.

Despite these relatively minor annoyances, the iPhone is still the best phone on the market for me.  I’m happy with my purchase, although I do need to decrease my voice plan as I’m sick of paying $170/month for phone service.

I’ve been using this theme on my site for ages and ages.  But when we set up the company blog at Communications Tool & Die it was clear that any kind of standard theme would not be acceptable.  We needed something that integrated into the rest of the site layout.  So I took our existing CSS and modified it to fit the needs of a Wordpress theme.

But now that makes me unsatisfied with this site’s theme.  Alas I’m so busy with Communications Tool & Die that I really don’t have any time to change this site out.  Plus my focus here has always been on content rather than on design.  But we’ll see…it may be time for a change soon.