mobile
Review: Google Nexus One phone
(one of my New Years resolutions is to write more — here’s a start! Happy New Year!)
I was lucky enough to get a pre-release Google Nexus One phone just a few weeks ago. Engadget has an extended review of the phone, so I’ll leave it to them to give you all of the [...]
Review: Jawbone Bluetooth headset
Recently, I went through another round of a roughly annual “find a Bluetooth headset that actually works” exercise after throwing the latest failed attempt in the electronic junk drawer beside the cracked Palm V and the old SCSI Jaz drive. First of all, let me state for the record that I don’t consider myself [...]
iPhone: resistance is futile
After days of resistance, I decided I was probably going to get an iPhone, but they were all sold out in the Bay Area, so I backed off. Then yesterday, I happened to be in Seattle with some Yahoo! Seattle geeks (did I mention we are hiring up there?) and they just happened to [...]
This DST thing could get (at least a little) ugly
Some people (like Paul Kedrosky) are calling the DST time change the “real Y2K,” and thinking about the characteristics of the change, I would tend to agree. Fundamentally, computers don’t like irregularity, and this change is not algorithmically pretty. The Wikipedia page on DST explains it like this:
Starting in 2007, most of the [...]
Asterisk is the new LAMP
I met with a startup today that does some interesting work bridging web services APIs with telephony, and I stopped them early in their presentation to ask what their voice platform was. The discussion was purely about their service, not the backend nuts-and-bolts, but I just had to ask: “Are you using Asterisk?” [...]
What to do when sending an SMS makes your Treo 650 reboot
Aside from a post about a certain college sports team’s legal troubles, the most popular post on this blog is consistently “Making built-in Contacts app the default on a Treo 650 with Goodlink.”
I’ve run into another semi-persistent problem that required a bit of research, so I’ll post a solution here. Every now and then, [...]
Laptop power on planes: observations, tips, and lessons
Before I get into some recent experiences getting laptop power on planes (both failed and successful ones), I wanted to give a plug for seatguru.com. If you want to know which seats are most comfortable on a plane (with detailed commentary on specific seats), whether or not power is available at the seats, etc. [...]
Checkmates: a mobile friend finder prototype for eTech
I’ve been working on a project recently that is really the convergence of everything I love about my work these days: promoting grassroots innovation at Yahoo! through events like Hack Day, building cool stuff, and trying to glimpse the future through prototypes that reach a little bit. (Aside: I just [...]
Disconnected from the desk actually means more connected
In Jeremy’s “where almost doesn’t matter” post, he mentions that I often gather my stuff and say, “I’m living out of my bag for the rest of the day.”
So why do I do that? Tim Converse nails it for me:
My hunch is that what being unchained from your desk makes possible is [...]
Amtrak bus: don’t think so
When a successful commute depends on both a phone company and public transportation, something just has to go wrong.
I didn’t get to try my new Verizon EVDO service today on my commute as I had hoped. Track work (details here) on the Capital Corridor line prevented me from taking the Amtrak train, though they [...]