shahine.com/omar/

I did a Google search for “Facebook birthday notifications” and clicked the first link, which was this:

http://blog.facebook.jp/blog.php?post=38780477130

You know what happens when you click that link? Your Facebook UI is now all in Japanese. Usability FAIL. Now how do I fix that since I can’t read Japanese?

Do another Google search for “Facebook change language” and got this page:

http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?language

and I found this in there:

How is this useful?

Note: if you do a Bing search for “Facebook birthday notifications” you get an English page. Yay Bing.

Interesting that Facebook is now sending out HTML emails. For the past few years they have sent plain text emails only. This made the Birthday reminder emails they send out look particularly bad. However, this morning I was greeted with this:

I wonder if this is a sign of things to come.

When we moved to Seattle one of the purchases we needed to make was a new TV. I happen to love buying new TVs because it’s not something I do often, and the technology changes that occur in that time span are staggering.

The first TV I purchased was a 27 inch tube Sony. I then got a 34 inch 16:9 Toshiba CRT that was about 200 lbs but the first HD set I owned. It was stunning watching “progressive scan” DVDs.

The next TV was a Samsung Plasma and since then I’ve decided all my future TVs would be Samsung. This was for 2 reasons. 1) Their service is amazing and 2) they make great, well priced, quality products that are pc/media center friendly. Since my TV is mostly driven by a Media Center TV, things like DVI/HDMI support are important.

So on moving to Seattle I decided on getting a Samsung LED TV. These TVs are 1.2 inches thick. I can’t describe how cool this is. They also look awesome and come in giant sizes (55 inches) an weigh practically nothing. In fact, Samsung makes a wall mount that is more similar to hanging a heavy picture to a wall than a TV.

Figuring out where to buy this TV from was a challenge. Good old Brick and Mortar wanted about $400 more than online, but I was also pretty sketched out about buying such a big ticket and heavy item from an online etailer. Also most of the good prices were from “grey market” dealers.

Luckily Microsoft had a special going with a company called Intech out in New York that was an authorized Samsung dealer. The prices were better than any online deal I saw and they included a free media center extender. Shipping was also free.

I pulled the trigger and ordered the TV. it arrived in 5 days from the east coast. I set the TV and all seemed well, but then I noticed that the TV was actually bent! yes, the TV is so thin that at some point the TV had received concealed damage in the box and had a nice big dent in the top middle. I never noticed because you could only see this by looking at the profile, and the picture was otherwise perfect.

I pretty much assumed I was out of luck, but working with the fine folks at Intech they worked tirelessly over the course of the next week to work with Samsung to issue a replacement TV. This required that I document the damage by sending them a bunch of photos to document the damage, and they were fantastic in working with me through this. I shudder to think what might have happened had I purchased from a great market etailer.

Anyway, I’m writing this because I love to point out when companies go above and beyond to make things right. Thanks Intech and Samsung!

You can view Intech’s webiste here: http://www.thehighdefinitionstore.com/

Apparently this is news to people. Well, here is the deal. When you buy an application from the Apple App Store, you are allowed to install that application on multiple authorized iPhone and iPods. This is controlled by Apple’s FairPlay. Before the App Store the same was true for DRM’ed music.

My wife and I both have iPhone. Whey I paid $99 for TomTom Navigator, I installed it on both our phones. Actually, Apple did that automatically for me since we both use the same account (my iTunes account) for all our purchases. Try that with a Garmin GPS device. Go buy 1 and then see how you can turn it into two devices. You can’t. So a $99 purchase is effectively spread across all the iPhone/iPod devices you own.

I’m not sure how many devices this is supported for, but basically, this becomes a cost effective way to buy and share programs with your family in a legit way. For once DRM is not total FAIL.

So there you go. More info here.

I’m a pretty big fan of convergence when it’s done well. Having fewer gadgets, cables, and power supplies to carry around is all good. This is especially true since we had our daughter and are looking to shed stuff that gets cumbersome to carry, pack and deal with.

The iPhone has turned out to be a pretty decent convergence device. Specifically it combined a smartphone with a music / video / podcast player that was just as good as a stand alone iPod. This was a huge selling point for me.

However, the original iPhone 3G had a pretty lousy camera and so it was never in the running to really replace a real camera. Furthermore the maps program while cool, was no replacement when you needed voice and turn by turn navigation. So for that I had a Garmin nuvi device that I used faithfully for the past 2 years. Otherwise the iPhone is an excellent “I am here, tell me what is near me device”.

Since getting the iPhone 3GS I’m frankly surprised at how many photos and videos I take with the thing (including close ups now that it can do Macro). The iPhone is actually “good enough” for many scenarios that my camera was previously required. For one thing, I carry my iPhone everywhere with me, so the likelihood that I will have it when I want to capture a video is extremely high… like when we were driving around in our car and our 2 year old said she wanted to listen to Lady Gaga and Madonna. Pretty funny, and no camera with us at the time, but we got it on video and were able to upload it to Facebook directly from the iPhone.

Now, with TomTom for the iPhone, another piece of technology that I would schlep around on vacations and around Seattle when I’m trying to navigate to Home Depot or Best Buy is no longer necessary.

So now we have a device that can do:

• Phone
• Email and Calendar
• Photos
• Video capture
• Music
• Turn by Turn navigation
• Games
• etc

And you get the point. This thing can replace at least 3 or 4 independent device and do the same job 80% as good as dedicated gadget.

I call that progress.

If you car has an integrated iPod kit, chances are when Apple removed the ability for Firewire to charge through the iPod adapter, your iPhone 3G and iPod don’t charge any longer.

In the past few months a few options have emerged that basically allow a firewire powered iPod connector to charge the iPhone or iPod using USB.

I had luck with an adapter that Apple sells called Scosche passPORT. It works great in one of my cars that has an aftermarket Blitzsafe adapter, but it doesn’t work at all in my new car, a Mercedes with a Media Interface (which is basically a killer interface that allows control of the iPod or iPhone via the system’s COMMAND interface, steering wheel etc).

Anyhow, even though automakers have had about 3 years to adapt to this change, the bottom line is that many of them have yet to release anything that allows their kits to charge a modern iPhone or iPod. Silly really.

So these adapters are great. Griffin makes one now called the Griffin Charge Converter however it states very clearly on their web site:

Our Charge Converter is not compatible with Pioneer head units that use the CD-iB100 or CD-i200 iPod to IP-Bus adapter. The Pioneer units send proprietary data as well as FireWire power. Although the cable will continue to pass the audio, iPods that charge via USB-only will not charge, remote commands may be limited, and the head unit may display an error message. iPods that charge via USB-only include the 4th generation iPod nano and 2nd generation iPod touch, as well as iPhone 3G.

This may also apply to the Mercedes Media Interface Cable.

Bummer. Mercedes released a service bulletin S-B-82.60/643a in January that says:

If you receive customer reports in the above model vehicles (equipped with any of the two options below) that their Apple product (refer to below list) is not charging but music/telephone communication functions are operational, this maybe due to a change in the charging circuit design by the Apple Corporation.

Apple Product:  iPhone 3G, iPod Nano 4th Generation, iPod Touch 2nd Generation and iPod Classic  120 Gigabyte (GB) storage capacity, as well as all iPod/iPhone products superseding the ones  referenced in this Bulletin.

For vehicles equipped with the Accessory Media Interface Option, a customer-pay remedy is forthcoming. This bulletin will be updated accordingly when available.

For iPod Interface Kits (part numbers listed on Page 1), a new iPod data cable connecting the iPod Interface Module and the iPod/iPhone, the part number is B6 782 45 31. 

This is a customer-pay remedy.

This technical change (change in charging circuit in newer Apple Products) is applied by the Apple Corporation; MBUSA is not responsible for diagnostics, parts and labor costs.

So basically what they are doing is blaming Apple for this when they had a few years to address the problem while also saying they have no solution for 2009 cars with their brand new Media Interface.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I found an adapter that does work made by a nice fellow in Sweden. I PayPal’ed him last week and received my adapter today. The best part is, IT WORKS.

You can get the Small iPhone 3G Charge Converter for $29.90 plus $9 shipping.

Last week I was hanging out in Kepler’s books, one of the best bookstores I have ever found. I came across this wallet called the Tyvek Mighty Wallets. I was intrigued, initially by the cool NYC Subway Map design that was used to make it. Being from NYC, there is something about the subway map that I love. In fact the line I used to take all the time is right on the front (4, 5, 6).

So I started to play with this wallet. I immediately recognized the paper like material used since you have felt this if you’ve ever received a FedEx envelope. It’s called Tyvek and it’s one of those amazing inventions made by accident at DuPont. God I love DuPont. They make such cool stuff out of fossil fuels and recycled crap.

Every 2 years I go on the hunt for the minimalist wallet. I want something small and light than can hold some dead tree money, some credit cards, and receipts and such. The Tyvek Mighty Wallet weighs close to nothing and is pretty indestructible. It’s also cheap at $15 and can be recycled when done.

Of course I tweeted this find last week. Jeff Atwood managed to reply immediately and I knew a blog post was forthcoming . He seemed to latch on to the dotmatrix version of the wallet which has Pi printed out on it.

Here it is if you want to peruse the interesting comments, of which one is from the designer of the Tyvek wallet (Terrence Kelleman). He placed a link to a video that does a great job of giving you the skinny on this amazing wallet.

The company, Dynomighty design, has a bunch of neat stuff. I’m thinking custom wallets would be cool as would the Luggage Tags.

In fact, Jeff, how about a Codinghorror Wallet?

Also if you are into it, you can make your own wallet from a FedEx envelope.

Wow, this is exciting news. No longer to you have to carry around a security dongle or pay money to get one. VeriSign created an application for the iPhone that does everything that one of their devices does and that I blogged about a few months ago.

Now you really have no excuse… if you have a PayPal or eBay account and an iPhone protect it from hackers with two factor authentication.

If you use VeriSign’s OpenID system, PIP… then this is a natural way to log into that service.

My hope is that more and more services will support two factor authentication via cell phones. VeriSign clearly has a leg up here, but I suspect RSA won’t be far behind in getting an RSA SecurID app out there.

Big Kudos to the VeriSign folks.

I hate newspapers. I hate the way they feel, I hate reading 2 paragraphs and then hunting around for the rest of the article. I hate folding those huge pages. I just never ever liked reading the paper. But I do like the cover page. I look at the paper when I see it.

Online never really did it for me either. I disliked the way that most newspaper websites layout their pages. Perhaps the Wall Street Journal online does the best job.

But, I love the New York Times iPhone app. It’s easily skimmable and glanceable. Of course it’s slow and buggy and crashes pretty much all the time. In fact I launched it over an hour ago on my iPhone and it’s still Updating… but when it works it’s great.

The other day I saw a link to a new New York Times Prototype called the Article Skimmer. It’s simply fantastic. It’s entirely designed for some one like me. I just want to glance at the news every day, and drill into the articles I might find interesting. You can read about it here.

They have done a really good job at actually bringing the best aspects of the analog paper including sections and a new “most emailed” feature, and they have awesome keyboard shortcuts. They also seem to be using the little square photo that the iPhone also uses to make the articles pop.

This is my new Homepage, the Article Skimmer

Compare this to the current New York Times web page.

The Skimmer is just better in every way.

I refresh a bunch of my gadgets almost yearly. This includes things like iPods, Cameras, Phones etc. Selling these items through eBay can be tedious. Selling them through Craigslist usually has some one on my doorstep negotiating a different price with me. Both are annoying.

In fact, I just just sold something on eBay yesterday and eBay decided to “hold” my money for 21 days. That is just lame. Actually this is PayPal, but whatever, same company.

So for the past few months I’ve used a service called Gazelle. I love this service because they tell you up front how much they will pay you for something. They will also ship you a postage paid box to send the item to them. When they receive the item, they inspect it and then pay you via PayPal, Amazon Gift Card, check, or you can donate to charity.

Gazelle is super easy to use… and you get money without any hassles.

My only complaint is that they don’t buy all forms of Gadgets, but if you have a camera, digital music player, mobile phone or anything listed below, it’s a bit easier than eBay or Craigslist IMHO.

• Cell Phones
• Digital Cameras
• MP3 Players
• PDAs
• Laptops
• GPS Devices
• Gaming Consoles
• Camcorders
• Satellite Radios
• External Hard Drives
• Video Games
• Movies
• LCD Monitors

Another great thing is that they will recycle anything of no value for you.

Give them a try next time you need to sell a gadget.

Get Cash For Your Gadgets at gazelle.com!

There is one thing in life that is certain. Hard drivers get cheaper and bigger.

For the past year I’ve been using a Windows Home Server to backup 6 computers in my life. If there is one piece of technology you should down it’s a Home Server. It has literally probably saved my wife from devastation at least once (she completely horked some work critical data that would have cost her months of time) and it’s saved me countless hours when upgrading hard drives and such in my Media Center. Best of all, it’s piece of mind and I value that a lot.

BTW, they key about Windows Home Server is that you don’t have to think about what to backup and what not to backup. Traditional backup solutions have you deciding what to save and what not to save. Windows Home Server just backs every dammed file up (minus temp files and such). You don’t bother to think about it, the entire computer is backed up such that if you rip the hard drive out and place a new one in, you can restore your computer to any machine state over the past 3 months). Is that cool or what? Not to mention it uses Single Instance store meaning that if a file exists on two machines it only stores one copy of it. That means that when you backup 6 machines running the same operating system, the os is only stored once on the server, not 6 times.

However, Home Server not a panacea. If your house burns down, or some one steals your Home Server, all your stuff goes with it. As such you need some kind of a backup for your backup strategy.

Well there are two ways to do this:

1. Remote backup to the cloud
2. Offsite backup

Remote backup to the cloud

Remote backup to the cloud is possible via KeepVault and Jungle Disk, both of which have Home Server add-ins that will copy your stuff to the cloud. The problem with both these services is that they are pretty inefficient. They don’t support block level backups (well Jungle Disk does via a $1 monthly addon). They also don’t support file renames or moves (if you move or rename a file it’s copied back to the server, and in the case of KeepVault they don’t even delete the old copy).

Why should you care about block level backups? Well lets say you have a photo that’s 6 MB. Now lets rate it or add a keyword. Well, now the file has changed by a tiny amount, yet it takes smart backup software to know this. Most software will just see that the file has changed and copy 6 MB up to the cloud.

This isn’t a big deal if we are talking about a single file. But we are talking about gigabytes of data (which I have), then this can seriously mess things up. It means that your bandwidth is getting hogged up by these apps, and the amount of time it takes to copy the changes to the cloud means that your changes are unprotected during this process. No good.

There are two other backup programs I have used that support block level backups, Mozy and Carbonite.

Unfortunately, neither of these are supported on Windows Home Server.

I currently use Carbonite after having started with it and then switching to Mozy for about a year. However, Mozy royally screwed up my backup at one point and my attempts to get them to help went unanswered so I dropped them and went back to Carbonite. Since then I’ve not had a problem. It just works and I don’t think about it (like my Home Server).

As I mentioned though, they don’t support Home Server. For me this isn’t a big deal though. I have a Windows Media Center PC which acts as a “Media Hub” with all my photos and videos. It also has Windows Live Sync (aka FolderShare) installed and all the stuff I use to Sync between my PCs gets backed up to the Media Center.

This ensures that:

1. all my files are backed up to Home Server (because the Home Server backs up the Media Center nightly)
2. all my files are backed up to the Cloud.

However, is this really practical for all your files? Well keep reading.

Offsite backup

I have also employed an Offsite backup strategy to complement my Cloud backup strategy. An offsite backup is actually what it sounds like. You keep your stuff not at your house.

However, today I got a gizmo that literally makes this a turnkey solution for me.

Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 has a feature that lets you backup your Home Server shares using the built in software. All you do is plug in a USB drive and select which shares you want backed up.

Up until today I was using a desktop USB 500 GB drive to do this and I would take it to work. However, this proved to be a bit of a pain in the neck. It meant that I need to lug around cables and a dreaded power brick. I HATE power bricks.

Anyway, this weekend while at Fry’s I noticed that Seagate makes an awesome little portable drive called the FreeAgent Go. It comes with a super cool dock that you can just leave plugged into your Home Server. Then you can get a couple of 500 GB portable drives that plug into the dock. The drives were selling for $109 (limit one per household) so I got one and plan to get another from Amazon.

Now I can keep one drive at home, and one at work. Once a month I will just swap the drives and it will ensure that I at least have an offsite backup of things like my 100 GB of my music and 200 GB of Movies and such so that I don’t have to rely on Cloud Backup for moving around that much data. If I ever lose a drive it’s also much faster to drive to work, grab 500 GB and drive home than it is to download that much data from the cloud.

A few years ago I wrote about adding GPS coordinates to your photos. Much has changed since then, and I thought I’d write about how I Geotag photos these days without using a GPS receiver.

Of course you can always use a GPS receiver, but they are generally a pain to carry around for casual photos. Also I fully expect consumer cameras to have some form of A-GPS support very soon. Till then this solution is easy, we get to use all the location information associated with WiFi access points that are all over the world.

Requirements for Geotagging without GPS

1. An Eye-Fi card with a Geotagging subscription
2. Downloader Pro for downloading your photos

Eye-Fi

The Eye-Fi card is a neat little memory card for your camera. It has a built in WiFi chip so that you can have your photos automatically copied to your home computer or a photo sharing service. However, the coolest feature of all is that the Eye-Fi card is always looking for nearby WiFi access points and recording what access points the card “sees”.

note: there are numerous models of the Eye-Fi card. They all support Geotagging via an optional upgrade from their website. However, the Eye-Fi Explore comes with unlimited Geotagging as part of the purchase price.

Later on when the Eye-Fi software is copying the photos to your computer it looks up the GPS coordinates of the WiFi access point and then stamps the GPS coordinates like this:

+37° 26' 57.00", -122° 9' 50.00"

that’s cool and everything, but not really all that useful. Enter Downloader Pro

Downloader Pro

If you consider yourself an amateur or pro photographer you simply need this software.

Downloader Pro does one thing, and only one thing. It moves photos from one place (usually your camera) to another (usually your hard drive).

There are literally a million options in this program, but I only use a few. What I do is that I point Downloader Pro at the folder that Eye-Fi uses to store photos copied from my camera via WiFi.

important: your photos must be copied via WiFi to your computer or the GPS coordinates won’t be included.

Rename Photos

I rename all my photos from the default camera photos to a format like this:

20090123_G10_0011.jpg

This means:

{Year}{Month}{Day}_{Camera Model}{Camera counter #}

This essentially gives all my photos a unique and sequential file name

Up till today though I’ve been clueless about the GPS features in Downloader Pro, and there are many. However, the one I’m going to talk about assumes that the GPS coordinates are already in the photo.

Configure the Reverse GeoCode feature

Select GPS Settings from the Edit menu and enable the second checkbox:

Reverse Geocode is when you take GPS coordinates and turn them into a set of human readable words. Many iPhone applications do this already.

In my case I store these in the IPTC/XMP fields of the photo so that I don’t need to bother with tagging my photos with City, State or Country, although you could certainly also use the tokens below to create Keywords based on the Geocoded names.

Store Place Names in the IPTC fields

Select IPTC/XMP data from the Edit menu and select the Origin tab.

Now enter the following into the respective boxes:

If you did this right it should look like so:

Now when you download the photos from your Eye-Fi photos using Downloader Pro you should see something like this (see location info in the meta data area).

So in the end this:

+37° 26' 57.00", -122° 9' 50.00"

was translated to:

Palo Alto, California, United States

Pretty cool.

The thing that really drew me to Twitter was that it allowed me to use one service to both update my Twitter status and my Facebook status (via the Twitter Facebook applications).

However, what I’ve found is that I have a different audience on Twitter and Facebook. My Tweets tend to be more “geeky” than my Facebook friends probably understand. Also they are probably to “frequent”. Why are they too frequent? Well I post to twitter a few times a day and to Facebook once a day max.

Over time I’ve started to treat twitter more and more like a “Microblog”. That is I post small snippets of things that I consider more like a blog and less like a “Status Update”.

I view “Status Update” like

“Going to Seattle tomorrow”

and a Microblog post like

“11% of online adults use Twitter or update their status online. http://bit.ly/GFVqN”

So, a few weeks ago I decided to “break the link” between Twitter and Facebook. I was able to do this using a service called Ping.fm.

Ping.fm is a universal update status service. It allows you to add status update and microblog services and then chose where your updates go.

In my case I have defined the following:

if you look at the table above you can see how I’ve defined each service. Ping.fm has a notion of a Default trigger as well as a Status update and Micro blog post.

When I just post to Ping.fm without specifying a trigger, it will go to both Facebook and Twitter. When I post using a Micro-blog trigger it only goes to Twitter.

Here is a pretty picture.

So now I have one place to go where I can post to both services, or I can just post to Twitter separately and only have it go to twitter. In other words I use Ping.fm to replace the functionality I had where all services got updated at once without tying Twitter to Facebook.

When you use SMS to post to Ping.fm you can use triggers to route your posts. For example you would preface your post with “@s” to post a status update

• @s – status update
• @m – microblog
• @fb – just post to Facebook

The last thing I will note is that I aggregate my Twitter updates to FriendFeed but not my Facebook status.

Not every app supports Ping.fm yet but here are a few that do:

1. Nambu for the iPhone (Twitter, Ping.fm and FriendFeed app)
2. AlertThingy – Adobe Air multi headed client for Twitter, Facebook, etc
3. twitterfeed – will post your blog updates to Ping.fm
4. twhirl – another Adobe Air multi headed client
5. i.ping.fm – iPhone formatted page.

This system gives me a lot more control and lets me use Twitter to have geekier conversations and Facebook to have the kinds of conversations my friends and family would understand and want to participate in.

Big news day in my book, first Kindle2 and now this.

It’s interesting when you see a combination of technologies from so many fiercely competitive companies.

Google wants iPhone users to sync their calendar and contacts to the iPhone, so they go to Microsoft and license the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to do just that.

REDMOND – Feb. 9, 2009 – Earlier today Google announced Google Sync, which is made possible by a patent license they obtained from Microsoft covering Google’s implementation of the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol on Google servers.

Of note, Microsoft recently announced an expansion of its Exchange ActiveSync Licensing Program, and licensees currently include partners and competitors Apple, Nokia, Palm, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, among others.

Each of the three companies competes on 1) phones, + 2) services but it turns out that the company with the right plumbing to make it all happen is Microsoft and the company with the phone driving all this seems to be Apple.

Exchange ActiveSync has won for the universal sync protocol of your Calendar and Contacts data. Congrats to the Exchange team for hitting a protocol home run .

“Google’s licensing of these Microsoft patents relating to the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol is a clear acknowledgment of the innovation taking place at Microsoft.  This agreement is also a great example of Microsoft’ s openness to generally license our patents under fair and reasonable terms so long as licensees respect Microsoft intellectual property. This open approach has been part of Microsoft’s IP licensing policy since 2003 and has resulted in over 500 licensing agreements of the last five years.” 

Now Apple if you are listening, please add multiple Exchange Account support to the iPhone.

... The Apple Store.

A few weeks ago my iPhone started to act up. Specifically my iPhone stopped reliably connecting to my Bluetooth headset. About 20% of the time it would fail and I would have to turn Bluetooth on and off a few times before it would start to work. Needless to say this got annoying. To make matters worse, when it did work 50% of the time the amount of time it took my headset to connect was longer than the ring time for the phone call.

I suspected that I was probably a victim of owning the first revision of the iPhone hardware. Probably my Bluetooth chip or antenna was acting up or something.

Anyway, last night I went to apple.com and made an appointment at the Genius Bar for 10am. This morning I drove to the Stanford Shopping Center and entered the Apple store. 10 minutes later a Genius asked me what was wrong, diagnosed the phone and then told me something that no other phone store will tell you… I’m going to replace your phone.

10 min later I walked out with a new phone, and even a little sticker to place on my iPhone box with the new serial number.

I went home, plugged my iPhone into iTunes and about an HOUR later, my phone was restored like nothing happened. It’s a bummer that it took so long but hey, it worked.

The best part? My Bluetooth headset connects in about 2 seconds when before it took 10 seconds. Something is definitely better!

All I can say is, this is an amazing benefit to owning an iPhone. When I had to get my Samsung Blackjack replaced in the past it meant waiting for AT&T to ship me a new one and then setting it all up from scratch again which is a huge PITA.

Anyway, I’m back in business and pretty happy about my experience. Living near an Apple Store is great.