Now testing: New text parser with much higher filtering accuracy and inline image support.
Working at Tumblr, I’m the only person in the office without an iPhone. I own a BlackBerry Curve 8300 and it’s a perfectly fine phone, but its features are incomparable to those of the iPhone. The only thing keeping me on it is Verizon. Unlike everyone else here, I get reception at work. I also get reception everywhere in NYC. Hell, I get reception virtually everywhere I go. They don’t, and they probably never will as long as they remain on AT&T (at least in the NYC region).
I was a loyal Verizon customer before moving to the iPhone in late 2007. I frequently travel to the fringes of cellular reception areas, including many areas with zero coverage from any carrier. I’ve found:
Often, I’d be in the car with my iPhone and Tiff’s Verizon phone on a long trip. I found that, in various travels through extremely rural New York and Pennsylvania, neither Verizon nor AT&T had noticeably better coverage. Usually, either both or neither would work. Occasionally, the Verizon phone would work and the AT&T phone wouldn’t, but the opposite was true just as frequently.
New York City’s population density and abundance of huge metal buildings is challenging for any popular cellular network. It’s not a question of adding more towers — the problem is likely to be that there are so many towers to provide the necessary capacity that they overlap too much and interfere with each other. The bands are full. We’re saturated.
AT&T’s data network is definitely slow and congested here. So is Verizon’s voice network. I dropped plenty of voice calls on Verizon, and frequently had trouble placing or receiving calls even with full “bars” — the telltale sign of CDMA tower congestion. Tiff had the same problem, so I know it wasn’t just my phone. I also used two different Verizon phones in New York — one, the E815, known for having amazing reception — before switching to the iPhone. And I’m still a Verizon customer for my EVDO USB stick.
AT&T already expanded capacity onto the 850 MHz band in some big metro areas over the last few months. It helped, I think, but not enough to beat Verizon’s wide-open data speeds. But when Verizon finally gets some smartphones that normal people will actually want to use for mobile web browsing and music streaming, their network will buckle under the same pressure. In that way, it’s actually in Verizon’s customers’ best interests that the Droid doesn’t sell very well.
Due to the congestion, neither carrier is particularly good or reliable for voice. But today, Verizon is much better for data in Manhattan than AT&T.
The fastest and most reliable network in Manhattan for both voice and data is actually Sprint, because it has a very advanced EVDO deployment that’s used by almost nobody, relative to Verizon or AT&T, and therefore suffers none of the congestion problems. But Sprint has its own problems: in addition to mediocre device selection, the coverage isn’t as good as Verizon or AT&T. First-party tower preference kills most of the advantage of being able to roam onto Verizon’s network.
So it comes down to your needs. For me, my phone is a personal computer most of the time, and it’s occasionally used to make or receive phone calls. Most data is downloaded over WiFi, with occasional small transfers over the cellular network. Network flakiness hurts me less than device flakiness. For me, therefore, the device is much more important than the network, because I’m using the device much more than I’m using the network.
If you make a lot of phone calls, use a ton of cellular data, or frequently travel to Vermont, and will accept more shortcomings and limitations in your device to ensure the use of a better data network, you should consider Verizon. But if your phone is more of a pocket computer than a mobile telephone, the iPhone is the only way to go.
NORML: Judge testifies for marijuana legalization in California.
Retired Orange County Superior Court Judge James P. Gray’s testimony was one of the last to be heard, and to use a World Series metaphor, we couldn’t have asked for a better “clean up” hitter.
(via dalasverdugo, optimisto, poortaste)
When we first got the Wii a couple of years ago, it was a universal hit at Arc90. The bowling and golf games in the Wii sports package were just plain fun.
Fast forward about six months from the time we got the Wii and it’s a completely different story. It was hardly being used. Fast forward two years to today and I can confidently share that it probably hasn’t been turned on in over a year.
Every Wii owner I’ve spoken to, including myself, has the same story.
I’m not sure what could reasonably be done at this point to give the Wii better longevity and gameplay depth. Nearly every third-party title is awful. Nintendo’s games trickle out at a snail’s pace, and many of them are just as shallow, or more so, than Wii Sports.
One aspect that really doesn’t help is how dated the Wii’s graphics hardware is. It didn’t matter as much when the system was released in 2006 and everyone was (rightfully) enamored with the innovative new gameplay mechanics. But the Wii’s 480p resolution and Gamecube-era graphics hardware produce drab, dated, jagged-edged output on now-quite-affordable HDTVs, and it’s not helping the system age gracefully.
But the shallow, short-lived novelty of the few good Wii games is the truly fatal flaw. As this article states, it was a fad — and it ages as poorly as one. Playing Wii Sports today feels like reliving a shallow one-hit-wonder from the past, like listening to Kris Kross ironically in a PT Cruiser on your way home to feed your Tamagotchi and talk about Ron Paul on Reddit.
I’m not sure what Nintendo could do to convince the growing number of people tired with the Wii to come back to it. New sales were happening quickly enough that they didn’t need to care, but that’s now slowing. Where does the Wii go from here?
Like most used-up fads, I don’t think there’s a future for it.
I have no idea what Nintendo’s next console will look like, but I don’t think they have any great options. The novelty that made the Wii such a powerful fad will remove most people’s motivation to ever buy another system like it.
Tiff got me an amazing birthday* present: the 135mm f/2.0 L, the low-light medium-telephoto we’ve wished we had for many events, and widely regarded as the sharpest lens Canon makes.
I shot this hand-held from our bedroom window with it. This thing’s great. Obviously not a general-purpose lens (no prime at this length really could be), but definitely a lifesaver for when I need to shoot a musical performance in a bar, a wedding in a dim old church, or a speech in a darkened auditorium.
* My birthday’s in June, but this lens has been out of stock everywhere since the spring — until last week. It’s the only camera equipment I’ve wanted all year except February’s flashes, and it completes our lens collection for (probably) a long time.
Kottke points out the benefits and convenience of one-handed iPhone use.
Most of the time I’m using my iPhone, it’s one-handed. Left, specifically, as it comes from the left pocket. Instapaper was designed for all-left-handed operation because that’s how I use my phone most of the time: left fingers around the back to hold the right edge, left pinky holding up the bottom edge, and left thumb to hit buttons or rest on the top-left corner when not needed (usually when using tilt-scrolling) for extra grip.
(For what it’s worth, I’m right-handed.)
World of Goo’s pay-what-you-want report has some great statistics about the average prices people paid. This one was surprising: I expected Windows users to be the cheapest, but I didn’t expect Linux users to be the most generous.
Anyway, if you haven’t played this ridiculously good game yet, go download the demo. If you like it, buy the full version ($20, direct download, DRM-free).
World of Goo is one of the best new games I’ve played this decade. Really. It’s that good.
cowsandmilk asked:
Should I get a Nook for my parents so they can change the font size? They’re both over 60 now and my dad reads with a magnifying glass.
I’ve found that the adjustable font size is the biggest selling point, by far, to older people.
I use the term “older” here loosely: older than me, the majority of the tech scene, and most of the people likely to be reading my blog. Old enough to regularly use magnifying glasses or raise the font sizes on web pages. In reality, this could mean as young as 40. But it certainly applies in larger numbers to people above 60.
A lot of people are buying Kindles for their parents or grandparents, primarily for the font-size adjustments. The anecdotes I’ve heard like this have all ended well with the recipient loving the Kindle.
(Given how similar they appear to be, I’m guessing the same will apply to the Nook. And I bet this will be a major selling point pushed by B&N salespeople while demoing the Nook to “older” people.)
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