Robot Monkey Pants

Source.

Don’t upgrade to 1.1.1, in case you didn’t realize that. Really, don’t upgrade to any new firmware until the community has determined it doesn’t break anything. Then wait a week after that so you are confident there are no time bombs. If it’s not obvious, I’ll happily post my results here as updates occur.

I have a long rant about this, but I’ll save that for the weekend when I have more time. Just let me say this. Apple, just because you say it, doesn’t make it legal.

Update: Read this. It sums things up nicely.

Also, I’m making an iPhone category here to keep these things in.

Make no mistake, Amazon MP3 is going to be huge. DRM-free, and can work with any MP3 player.

Apple really needs to stop being such a closed shop, or they’re going to get left behind. Once upon a time, they were the only serious contender for downloads, but music downloads that are cheaper and even more portable have got to send some sort of wake-up call that they’re not the only game in town.

(Yes, I know eMusic has been doing this for some time, but there’s no way they would amass the catalog that Amazon can.)

The top and bottom stories in this collage on NFL news items shows that Google News apparently has an eye for the ladies on the sidelines.

As a relatively new football fan — I didn’t get into following the NFL until I was 25 — and coming from an area where college sports is not anything close to what it is here, I was always quietly amused at the concept of the cheerleaders in adult sports. In high school sports, you sometimes might need that “rah, rah, rah” pep squad, but having scantily clad dancers gyrating on the sideline doesn’t seem to me to add anything of substance to anything related to the event. When you’re dealing with a live audience whose population surpasses that of many suburbs, 5-8 girls wearing spandex and shaking their booty isn’t going to work the stadium into a frenzy.

But each team (who has them) promotes them on their websites, the cameras do tight zooms on them when going to commercial, and they have been apparently used as a sexual distraction on the opposing team. But here’s my question — of the major sports, why only basketball and football? Why not baseball? Why not hockey? (Oh, man, how awesome would it be to have the cheerleaders out on the ice during gameplay?)

What is it about football and basketball that says “Let’s put women on display for ogling” that isn’t there in hockey or baseball? As a Canadian, I’m also going to lobby for having curling cheerleaders, though it would be hard to drown out the yelling already present in that sport. And why limit ourselves to team sports? Let’s have the hot ladies of golf or tennis! And, since so many people these days are under the delusion that it’s a sport, NASCAR! (That’s a rant for another day — suffice it to say that not everything that’s a competition is a sport.)

We have that entire other side of cheerleading, too — where the cheerleading is the sport (or competition). Roving bands of cheerleaders roam the countryside, showing up on ESPN2 every once in awhile to jump around, be agressively happy, and occasionally shatter a femur — all for our entertainment! We need to combine these things all into one fantastic event that nobody would dare miss!

Imagine it, a real NHL hockey game being played while happy high school and college cheerleaders form pyramids and throw each other across the ice, while dancers in spandex and extra-short shorts gyrate behind the nets. With race cars!

Now that would be a sport!

iPhone update will likely brick unlocked phones.
Needless to say, let braver souls try the updates before you install them.
Me? If the only thing 1.1.1 gets me is wireless iTunes downloads, I’m quite happy without it.

Overheard in New York.

Well, my first weekend was enough to convince me I liked this thing. But, as I said in a previous comment, I am in no way enamored with the device Apple sold me — I love what I turned it into.

What Apple sold me I had to use on AT&T (a carrier I would not use), I had to sign a new cellphone contract (no thank you), I could install no applications (WTF? There’s no task list on a iPhone), and I had to pay for the privilege of hearing a song I own as a ringtone.

What I turned it into is a device I can use on any GSM carrier — I’m quite happy with T-Mobile, thank you — and is riddled with applications (admittedly, ranging from useful to trivial to useless), and plays a jaunty tune from Brak whenever my wife phones me.

The AppTapp installer provides a great number of utilities and programs. Here’s a short list of my favorites:

• Community Sources, BSD Subsystem, and OpenSSH — obvious. I had to use these to unlock the thing.
• MobileChat — There are a couple of IM clients, and I’m using this for now. But Apollo should soon have libpurple ported, which gets it the ability to use more than just AIM. At that point, I switch.
• SendSong — lets you e-mail any music on your iPhone, but even better lets you set anything as a ringtone. It’s trivial, but the mere fact that they want me to pay to do this makes me want to do it for free even more!
• Sumbler — Always nice to have a WiFi network finder at your disposal.
• Mobile ToDo List — Gots to have my task list.
• SummerBoard — Springboard (the iPhone’s desktop application) replacement that lets you customize things a great deal. The ability to scroll the application list is crucial if you’re installing applications.
• UIctl — GUI for LaunchAgent that lets you manage services. This is how I turned off sshd without removing the OpenSSH package.
• Five Dice — Yahtzee. Prior version was buggy, but 0.8.0b is much more stable.
• Lights Off — A nice diversion

The lukewarm list:

• iFlickr — has potential, but I don’t like that as soon as I snap a picture it’s uploaded to Flickr.
• Term-vt100 — minimally functional, but the terminal emulation is horrific. It also seems to be using a proportional font, which leads to an interesting display.
• MobileTetris — Enh. This phone doesn’t have enough buttons to pull this off. The screen controls are not the best, and it’s pretty buggy.
• iPowerHour — Huh? Why would I want 60 second snippets of my music played for an hour?

All in all, I’m generally very pleased with the phone. It’s doing what I need it to do, and doing it well. The last puzzle piece I think I need is to get it to act as a modem for my laptop. That can come in tremendously handy when you have a wireless data signal but no WiFi. This guide looks reasonable, and I’m going to give it a shot soon.

The following is a copy of what I sent to Apple at the behest of iTunes technical support when I asked why I am expected to pay for ringtones:

Charging extra to turn an ITMS purchase into a ringtone is one thing, preventing users from putting music they already own on their iPhone as a ringtone is entirely another.

I’m sure it’s the record companies driving the former — though I’m sure Apple doesn’t mind the revenue generated by charging someone twice the amount for the privilege of hearing a 30 second clip of a song when someone calls them.

But the latter — preventing a user from using a song they already own (or, for that matter, wrote and performed and recorded) as a ringtone is entirely a money grubbing move that encompasses of all the worst aspects of the software and music industries today. My Windows Mobile devices trivially allow me to set any mp3 I want to be my ringtone. Likewise, my Palm Treos trivially allow me to set any mp3 I want to be my ringtone.

And yet, the supposedly most advanced phone yet does not. It makes me choose from a selection of songs available on the iTunes Music Store, pay twice what I would pay for the *whole* song so that I can use a 30 second clip as a ringtone.

The sad thing is that there are enough trust fund kids out there that will just shrug and pay it so they can have the latest “fiddy cent” ringtone. So be it. But, without question, this move has forever tarnished Apple, and I, for one, will not be paying a single penny toward this asinine “feature”.

But, I need to make sure you at least comprehend this much: my Windows Mobile device allows me greater freedom of how I use it than my Apple iPhone. Does that make you even a little sad? It should.

After a few false starts before finding the guide I linked to previously, I’m up and running on T-Mobile flawlessly. Everything Just Works, aside from the Visual Voicemail — you just get regular voicemail. Fine by me, since i use Grand Central, which has its own visual voicemail system.

Given how well this works, I don’t understand why Apple did the exclusivity thing. They should have gone it alone, sold these things unlocked in their stores and let people choose their carrier. If these phones are as sexy and desirable as expected, the carriers could implement the voicemail feature independently as an enticement to choose them.

The predictive text/autocorrect thing is all at once ingenius, infuriating, and inconsistent. I probably need to adjust how I operate. An example of inconsistency is that I’m composing this on my phone (via the web interface no less), and after the first paragraph, it stopped offering suggestions.

Best mobile browser I’ve used so far, bar none. Nice mail client, and I’ve got ssh (and sshd) going, so the only real things left are to get my calendar and contacts synced — I’ve yet to sync this with iTunes — and adjust to this bloody keyboard.

The experiment continues.

Update: My first sync with iTunes went fairly well. All the mail settings and bookmarks I’d meticulously set up last night and this morning were blown away by the versions on my computer, but I think I’ve got that settled.

I’d like to point something out on the iTunes Music Store Ringtones Frequently Asked Questions page. Nowhere on this page is what I’m sure is the most frequently asked question: Why do I have to pay for this?

I’m making an attempt at using an iPhone. The combination of the reduced prices and the ability to unlock the phone (so I can continue to use T-Mobile and not the DeathStar) has made me more amenable to giving it a shot. The 4GB version is on clearance for $300, far more palatable for an EDGE capable phone.

A plethora of guides for unlocking the iPhone exist out there, but they’re all geared toward the PC users out there.

This is a top notch guide with the Mac user in mind. Follow it, and be happy.

Above all, avoid the HaRRo version (freeiphoneunlock.com) — it’s not reliable. I couldn’t get it to work, and I had to figure out how to get to the point I could use it on my own. The guide I link to above walks you through it, from right out of the box to having a phone that works with T-Mobile (or Rogers, if you’re in Canada).

[Update, it just got easier.]

[Update 2, now it's easier still.]