iPhone as travel camera. Not bad! (with clear skies)
The iPhone was made to take pictures at Arches. Look at the colors in the photos. Every one I’ve posted so far has come from my iPhone. And autostitch, a paid program I spent $1.99 on, has done a fabulous job on the panoramas (see Landscape Arch and Delicate Arch panoramas). I just take the pictures, tell Autostitch which ones to blend, and it does. So handy! As a Posterous blogger, I use their app to create galleries, which instantly tweets it, puts it on Facebook, and adds the pictures to Flickr. It’s incredibly easy. Where the iPhone doesn’t perform Read more…
Some quick thoughts on AT&T’s new data plan
As I posted earlier, I think the new capped plans will generally save Mary and I money. We each use well less than 2 gigs of data a month (Mary’s even lower than that, at less than the 250 mb. But really, it sounds like a good deal now … it won’t sound like such a good deal in a month. The reason: multitasking. Starting in just a few weeks, the iPhone will be able to support multitasking. What does that mean? It means that I could leave my Skype app open and running, able to receive Skype calls anytime Read more…
I may not like AT&T much …
… but their new data plan will save us money. They're dropping "unlimited" Internet from the phones, but despite my heavy usage, I've never hit a quarter of their new cap. So I can save $5/month but going to it, and Mary can save $15/month (you can tell who the heavier iPhone user is obviously). It also inspired me to check our voice plan with them, which I realize too that we don't use the phones often enough to justify the plan we're on. So I cut that down too. Not a bad morning.
On artificial life
A 1997 conference was organized in Casablanca by The Islamic Fiqh Council. A consensus was reached “that cloning does not bring into question any Islamic belief in any way. Allah is the Creator of the universe but He has established the system of cause-and-effect in this world. Sowing a seed in the ground is the cause but only Allah produces the effect from it in the form of a plant. Similarly cloning is a cause and only through Allah’s Will it can produce the effect. Just as the person sowing the seed is not the creator of the resulting plant, Read more…
The iPad
My parents, Mary, and grandparents went in on an iPad for me! One was on order from Apple, but we went to the Tacoma Mall this morning and got in line early for the grand opening of the Tacoma Apple Store. We were able to snag one (and will be canceling the online order shortly). I’m pretty smitten. I know what I said earlier: I wouldn’t want an iPad unless it could replace a laptop, but already I can tell it’s pretty close. I use my laptop for many things, and this would fill the gap on most of them. Read more…
For iPhone twitterers. Tweet a photo of your homescreen. Might be a good way to discover new apps. #phonehome
This is mine. I love Things, Tweetie, and Reeder. Might be my favorite non-standard apps. Giving Harvest a go as a time tracker. We’ll see.
Galileo’s Dream
I have read many books by Kim Stanley Robinson including two trilogies (the Mars books and his Science in the Capital trilogy). Galileo's Dream was both unusual and yet typical from him. Unusual, in that it was primarily a work of historical fiction about Galileo. Typical, but he also painted a picture of a fantastic future that is not dystopian and is rather idealistic. In Galileo's Dream, he achieves this by having a future society living on the moons of Jupiter (circa the year 3020) contact Galileo. The "first scientist" goes back and forth between his present life in Florence Read more…
The Technium: Twitter Predicts the Future
The Social Computing Lab at HP Labs in Palo Alto, CA found that using only the rate at which movies are mentioned could successfully predict future revenues. But when the sentiment of the tweet was factored in (how favorable it was toward the new movie), the prediction was even more exact. via kk.org As the author asks, if it can do box office grosses, what else can Twitter predict?
^