On Thursday I went to my local T-Mobile store and picked up the new Samsung Galaxy S to replace my damaged Google Nexus One. I am usually reluctant to early adopt any new gadget, preferring to wait at least a few weeks to read about any issues or complaints other users might have. Being eager to replace my Nexus One with an Android-powered device that wouldn’t suffer obsolescence in six months, I went ahead and took the plunge.
I was thrilled with the brillant Active-matrix OLED (AMOLED) display. The T-Mobile version of this handheld is called the Vibrant and the image quality is just that. The device included a copy of the movie Avatar and it looks amazing. I also liked the thinness and light weight of the device. The device is also fast.
Given all my excitement, I soon found myself crashing into a brick wall of disappointment. The GPS utterly sucked. It took seemingly forever to get a GPS lock if I was lucky. Often I couldn’t get a lock at all, inside or outside. My buyer’s remorse intensified. This was a big deal. Using my previous two phones, the HTC Dream and the Nexus One, I found GPS to have become indispensable, especially when navigating in the car or geeking out with augmented reality apps, not to mention foursquare or Google Sky Maps.
Frustrated, I started Googling to see if this specific unit was just a dud off the factory line or if other users were experiencing the same thing. Sure enough, others were complaining and I came to regret my early adoption. I stumbled across across rumors that Samsung was preparing to release a firmware fix for the issue. This gave me the hope that the hardware itself was fine. I can deal with a fixable software problem.
It turns out it is just software that can be corrected with a small firmware change anybody could do themselves. I found this fix on XDA Developers forum. So far it seems to have done the trick.
- Turn Flight Mode on
- Dial *#*#1472365#*#* which brings up the firmware menu
- Under Application Settings change Operation Mode to MS Based
- Under SUPL/CP Settings change the Server & Port to supl.google.com (no “www”) and 7276 respectively
- Reboot
- Turn Flight Mode off
Ahh! My buyers remorse has vanished and I love this phone again.
In case you need to restore the default settings, they are:
Operation Mode: Standalone
Server: www.spirent-lcs.com
Port: 7275
I hope this works for you.
Cross posted at JamesReyes.com.
I am spending the day in Boulder attending WordCamp Boulder 2010. So far I have attended discussions on creating a blog community and WordPress consulting and right now I am in the middle of a talk on WordPress development. This afternoon I’ll be attending discussions on usability testing and “What’s next for WordPress.”
So far I have met some really interesting people, some of who have traveled from out of state to attend this event. Pretty cool stuff.
How sick is this. Toru Iwatani, original creator of the Pac-Man game was visiting Holland for their Festival Of Games exhibition. And while he was there, he brought along a special folder. (Click to enlarge) via bleedingcool
Many progressive bloggers who use Google AdSense to monetize their blogs have to constantly deal with the hassle of preventing Republican and right-wing ads from serving on their sites. By using Competitive Ad Filters, bloggers can go far in mitigating these ads from serving.
Here is a simple description on how to filter your ads and a way we can share domains to keep on top of what would be an overwhelming project for one person.
To get going, in the “Ad Sense Setup” tab go to “Competitive Ad Filter.”
You will see two tabs in the lower part of the screen, “Ad Sense for Content” and “AdSense for Feeds,” in which you can enter advertiser domains to exclude. Be sure to enter all blocked domains in both if you serve ads to RSS feeds via FeedBurner. In most cases you will simply enter the domain without the www, i.e. “gop.com” and not “www.gop.com.” This is important in the event any of your blocked advertisers should serve ads linking to other sub-domains of which you may be unaware.
Building a list of blocked domains can take some time. It would be nice if there was a simple setting like “Block Republican Advertisers” or something but alas there isn’t. For the most part you would just have to just wait for a “bad” ad to serve, note the domain and add it to our list.
This method, however, has a critical shortcoming. Most campaigns will geo-target their ads, that is limit their ads to serve only within a specific geographic area. For example, John McCain’s senate campaign in Arizona would likely only book ads to serve to users in Arizona. If you are a blogger in Colorado, you would be unaware of the fact that McCain ads are serving to your visitors in Arizona. I have build a list of Republican and right-wing domains that I know remains very incomplete, however I’ll share it with you here and if you know of other domains, please add them to the comment thread. I’ll verify the domain and update the list. This way, I figure we progressive bloggers can help each other out.
As a final note, when testing ads do not click on AdSense ads on your own site. This is a violation of the AdSense program policies as it creates an invalid click and inflates advertiser costs and your earnings as a publisher. It can also get you banned from the AdSense program and make you susceptible to legal action. In most cases the domain will display under the ad or you can use the AdSense Preview Tool to get the destination domain without clicking the ad. The AdSense Preview Tool will also let you impersonate different locations to test for geo-targeted ad. It’s a must for any AdSense publisher.
Apple has now fixed this, but their original advertising page for Safari 5 didn’t display correctly in any browser. Including Apple’s. Here’s how it looked originally in Safari 4 (Windows). We tested it on the iPad and the iPhone, and it had the same error.
One thing I detest about the typical modern American suburb is the street layout. I live in Denver and in a neighborhood with a standard grid orientation. It’s easy to navigate. The numbered avenues correspond to the intersecting street block numbers. If I go about 20 blocks north to the suburb of Arvada I end up lost in a maze of winding streets, cul-de-sacs and loops that is utterly useless for navigation. Some of these layouts are utterly ridiculous. It seems planners sought to placate the birds or aliens with pretty street patterns that serve only to confuse the humans moving around on the surface.
I understand the perceived benefits of some of these layouts. They reduce traffic through residential areas where often families with young children live, but often the layouts are ridiculously impractical.
Harvard Business Review had a piece last month citing a study on the problem these suburban layouts have on sustainable transportation.
Residents in areas with the most interconnected streets travel 26% fewer vehicle miles than those in areas with many cul-de-sacs. Recent studies by Frank and others show that as a neighborhood’s overall walkability increases, so does the amount of walking and biking—while, per capita, air pollution and body mass index decrease.
The story cites a law passed by the Virginia legislature limiting cul-de-sacs in future developments.
The images below compare a one-kilometer walk in two different suburban Seattle neighborhoods. The cul-de-sac maze is a disconnected street network with few destinations within walking distance. The grid, however offers easy access to parks and shops.
As a follow up to my last post, Henry Blodget of Business Insider wrote an interesting piece, “The Odds Are Increasing That Microsoft’s Business Will Collapse,” citing how cloud-computing and mobile is making Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office increasingly irrelevant. The battle lines are being redrawn and it’s between Google and Apple with Microsoft sitting on the sidelines.
They used to say that business software had to include Windows and Office. We run our business Microsoft-free because the alternatives are powerful and cheap-to-free. We don’t run on Windows, but either run on Mac or Ubuntu machines. Ubuntu desktop is a very mature Linux distribution and since we have increasingly moved to the cloud, which OS we use has become irrelevent except for some specialized roles. We don’t use Office, but run mainly on Google Apps, which we love for collaboration (I got hip to Apps working at Google, which needless to say, uses Apps internally). Also, managing email is much easier in Gmail than in Outlook. Google Apps does have some limitations for creating highly formatted documents or complex spreadsheets, which I know will be overcome in time. To address these shortcomings we use OpenOffice.org, which has fully matured into a robust product that is already in many ways superior to Microsoft Office. Since we use Google Apps, nothing makes more sense for our mobile phones than Android due to its tight integration. People often refer to company so-and-so as a “Microsoft shop,” I guess you could call us a “Google shop.” Just five years ago, I think we would have been tied to at least Microsoft Office. It’s liberating to be free from the so-called “Evil Empire.”
Microsoft has always been playing catch-up and has been damn good at it, in the end out-maneuvering the innovators they ripped off. Maybe the steam has run out now and their game has become unsustainable. Then again, Steve Ballmer is no Bill Gates.
Again, check out Henry Bloget’s piece. I really enjoyed reading it.
Ina Fried has a piece on CNET about Bill Gates early vision and evangelism for tablets going back to at least 2005. I clearly remember reading about this at the time and yet it failed to make an impression on me. Fried makes the point that the technology wasn’t quite there to offer a sub-$800 unit with sufficient battery life to take the market by storm as the iPad has seemed to do.
The iPad is perhaps the best-received new consumer gadget since the game-changing iPhone. The Origami effort, /* Project Origami was Microsoft’s tablet commercialization effort */ meanwhile, is a footnote, just one of many in a string of failures in the mobile market. And while the PC market is still fast growing and dominated by Microsoft, the company’s failures in the mobile market threaten Windows’ long-term future.
As Microsoft continues to struggle with new computing form factors such as smartphones and tablets, it might benefit from taking a look back at Origami. How exactly did Microsoft have such a keen grasp on the future and still let opportunity slip through its fingers?
For starters, Origami probably came too soon. Although Gates could see a time when computers had all-day battery life, small Windows machines were still lucky to get a couple hours of battery life. And it would be another couple of years before multitouch would arrive on both Apple’s iPhone and Microsoft’s Surface.
Microsoft also had a lot on its plate. It was in the process of developing Longhorn–a significant overhaul of Windows XP. Faced with challenges to create an all-new file system and other major changes, the company scaled back the project and created what became Vista. Vista, in addition its other well-documented shortcomings, had more intensive graphics that made Windows even less well suited to low-end hardware and more of a drain on battery life.
Being a poor unfortunate deuteranope myself, I would appreciate this. Click on the image for a gallery. Via Autoblog.
The Uni-Signal is aimed at helping those who are red-green colorblind to have an easier time with traffic signals. Instead of using circles for all three lights, the red light gets a triangle, the yellow light remains circular, while the green light goes square. There’s no mention of the colors of the lights being changed, but the shape identification could make for quicker comprehension among those who have a hard time with such things,
