First off I want to say that the Palm Pre is a huge leap in smartphone tech.  The interface is clean and crisp and the synergy functions of WebOS make it a great phone to organize and update contacts, calendars, notes and tasks across a range of services and social networking sites.  The integration with google is only shadowed by Android obviously.  The services that Sprint offer in their plans arent to shabby either.  The price plans are by far the best bang for your buck in term of what you get.  The fact that you can have navigation, unlimited sms, mms, im and data is awesome.  Even the unlimited everything plan is only 99 bucks compared to Verizon or ATT which would run well over that.  The app store is starting to grow which is another welcomed addition.  Overall the Palm Pre WebOS is what i would classify as a good starting point for Palm to regain some ground but there is more work to do.

I went and purchased a Palm Pre exactly 42 days ago expecting to upgrade my wireless capabilities to a new level and now I am chewing on blood pressure medication like they are tic tacs.  I grabbed the Palm Pre with the expectations of being able to replace a few of my daily gadgets with an all in one device.  My TomTom, iPod, Phone and PDA could all be in one handy little device.  For the most part I acheived my goal except there is that “for the most part” issue.  The Palm Pre is an expensive smartphone at the price of 200 bucks with a 2 year contract on Sprint  and now there are issues with the Pre.

First off, I had no problems for 30 days except the OS lacked some basic functionality that PALM really dropped the ball on.  Things like selecting text for cut, copy and paste is a pain and in calendar event view i can’t scroll to see the entire entry for an event location.  The Blue-tooth capabilities are seriously flawed and don’t work with most blue-tooth car kits or aftermarket devices. Now I am running into hardware issues.  The contact in the 3.5mm headphone jack sticks and disables the audio to the phone’s earpiece making the phone app unusable.  To fix this you have to exercise the headphone jack a few times to unstick the contact.  This is unacceptable for a piece of hardware i spent 200 bucks on. There are other issues that I have read about in other posts such as the slider breaking (mine is getting kinda loose) , screen pixel issues ( 1 is stuck and I’m sure more to follow) and wifi problems that I am sure i will have the privilege of experiencing in the near future.  Those issues are not the worst part though.

Sprint is the 3rd biggest cell provider in the country and their policies and customer service reflect that.  My experience with Sprint customer service is once you bought it and got past the 30 day period YOUR SCREWED!  I am 12 days over my 30 day return period and they are completely unwilling to work with me to resolve the issues.  The Sprint repair center I visited today said they could replace the phone under warranty ONLY if they were to receive a non functioning phone.  Well of course when i got to the store the contact in the 3.5 mm jack became unstuck and the phone worked again so they wouldn’t do anything.  But lets say it didn’t work for them either, they still would only replace it with another Palm Pre that would have had the same known hardware issue.  What am I paying the insurance for if they are gonna give me another phone that has a 99.9% chance of breaking too!  That’s like a Ford recall for exploding gas tanks only to replace it with a gas tank that could EXPLODE!  I can understand not taking a return on a phone that is 2 or 3 months past the return time but 12 days, Really?

Sprint is really on the ball with their plan options and included services but their customer service as the 3rd in the market needs some attention.  My love affair with the Palm Pre was was fiery at the start but is quickly over much like the ability to use the headphone jack for fear it might break my phone.  It was a nice try and a good start to rebuild the Palm name but the bar has been set pretty high by things like the iPhone and the Android OS.  Palm needs to hit those marks before i will buy a Palm device again.  Maybe the HTC Hero can save me?

Last night the folks at Boxee announced the release of a new Boxee alpha.  The top additions to this new alpha are the support for Pandora music streaming, PBS streams, RadioTime, a new API and the video playback is built on the XUL framework.  The XUL framework is the same that Firefox is built on.  Yes, HULU does work.  Good Luck blocking it now.  I just downloaded the alpha release from Boxee.tv and must say it delivers.  Go get it.

http://boxee.tv

Here is a short how to in order to use the new plugins:

Start Boxee and in the left navigation pane scroll down to “Apps Box”.  Along the top of your screen there are four selections, choose the repositories tab and add a new repository.  Type the following in the text field minus the quotes ” dir.boxeehq.com” and select done.  You will now be able to back out and select “New Applications”.  This is where you can add all sorts of new feeds to your Media Player.  Have Fun!

On December 24th 1906, the world heard its first extended voice radio broadcast.  It was from Massachusetts and the broadcast was received by “sparks”, otherwise known as the communications officers on merchant ships in the Atlantic.  Since then it seems that radio has made a few technology advances in how we receive their product but since the onset of FM has been stuck in a technology black hole and refuses to accept that the world around them is changing.  Technology is changing and the method to deliver their broadcasts is going to change.  I will admit that the radio industry has made a few attempts to leap forward with the times but have been run over with a truck much like Frogger.  These are my views on some of the mistakes that have been made and where radio needs to advance too.

I have been a Broadcast Engineer for 12 years.  I started when i was 20 years old and just recently have left the industry to pursue bigger and better things in the IT sector.  In my career I have worked for 2 different radio companies that shall remain nameless but are quite large .  In the time that I slaved over 50,000 watt transmitters and rodent infested transmitter sites in the middle of no where, I got to play with some pretty cool stuff.  Systems to digitize the music library, automation systems, RDS (Radio Data Systems), transmitter remote controls, instant news services, broadcast consoles that were fully routeable and HD Radio.  I watched all of these systems evolve quite a bit in the last 12 years to the point where they function reliably and efficiently with the exception of HD Radio.  I will get to that in a min.  All of the companies that produce these systems have embraced the new technologies, the Internet and the idea that everything is going to computers.  Radio has tried to go another route with the deployment of HD Radio.

HD Radio is the industries answer to improved quality and delivery to you the listener.  CD quality music with the option to hear more stations with the inclusion of HD2  over-the-air to your radio ( If you spend 200 bucks to buy an HD radio).  Has anyone heard HD Radio.  Does anyone even own an HD Radio.  More importantly, is anyone planning on going to buy one.  I think the answer is an overwhelming NO.  If you think about it for a second, you would realize that the average commuter has a 20 min drive to work each day.  In that time they are on the phone or drinking their coffee and  thinking about the work they have to do that day.  With that said lets knock the listening time down to 15 min each way.  There are plenty of radio stations and other devices such as CD’s and MP3 players that will deliver exactly what you want to hear with out spending the money on a new radio. The overwhelming majority doesn’t  listen to the radio at home. They have the TV on or are on the computer.  Does that really justify spending 200+ dollars on a new radio.  The improvement in audio quality isn’t to bad but definitely not enough to prompt me to buy a new radio.  They do sell an add on device to receive HD on your existing radio but who wants to deal with the extra display unit sticking out from your dash tethered to a cable.  I have one of those by the way and it sucks.  The only reason I have it is because I got it for free. So HD Radio was a move towards doing something new (sort of) but in my mind is going to fail horribly.  Good job guys on investing hordes of money into it.   If your still reading, the key sentence in all of this was “They are on the computer”.

So, where do I think radio needs to go now.  It is pretty obvious in my mind.  THE INTERNET!!!!!!!!!  Everything is going to the Internet and why should radio be any different.  The advances that programmers and developers have made in just the last few years on Web 2.0 have basically started the ball hurdling down the hill aimed at broadcast services along with many other things.  Now i know what a lot of people are going to say at this point, ” I listen to my local stations on the web while I am at work”.  This is true, many radio stations do have online web streams.  The stream you hear on your computer is the same as the one you hear on the radio.  Its just a rebroadcast. They need to start developing original content for the web-streams and start promoting them the same as their over the air channels.  Create web-streams with different music formats, talk content and data services.  Start pushing the technology to their advertisers in order to get them to spend money advertising on the web-streams.  Basically abandon the HD Radio medium and focus the same efforts and ideas on the Web.  The need to drive your listeners to the computer is now.  This is where the business is going to end up in less than 10 years. How and why you ask?

Radio companies are not the most efficient operations to run.  The costs involved to pay for and maintain facilities, transmitters, towers and staff are quite high.  Just think about the electric bill that it takes to run a 50,000 watt transmitter site when your transmitter is running at 60% efficiency.  Add this to repair and maintenance costs of buildings and equipment and it gets pretty high.  Now think about what you could do with the Web.   Centrally locate your facility in a large market and be able to broadcast via the internet to the entire world.  This means fewer facilities and less cost.  The inefficient transmitters would be no more. The possibility of an unlimited amount of programming and the only constraint would be available bandwidth.  Use geotagging in your commercials to sell and play local content to specific markets.  The most important reason would be the ability to have your content heard through devices such as cell phones, computers, Internet Tablets and anything else that can access the Internet today and future devices such as in car computers and Internet enabled car stereos.  Most of these devices people already have in their pockets and they already have the capabilities.  This eliminates the requirement of the listener  to spend anymore money in order to recieve your content.  You get better Radio and the broadcast companies get their listeners to drive their sales.  Sounds good!

This is where radio is going.  Most of the technology to make it possible is already provided to you through your computer or cellphone.  The missing pieces such as city-wide or nationwide Internet access is being worked on as I type.  Computers are already being installed in cars to bring you advanced data services such as the Microsoft SYNC system in Fords.  The SYNC system is an early idea that will be expanded in the very near future to include added functionality such as Internet access while you drive.  You will also start seeing competitors to the SYNC system being installed or offered by the major automobile makers.  Combine this with the technology already available to us and its not hard to see where the future of radio is.  The first broadcasting company to partner with a technology provider such as Verizon, Nokia, Apple, RIM, Sprint, ATT or Google to be a part of further developing this new delivery method is going to be the winner. Radio that costs less to produce, reaches more listeners, and provides better service.  Its not hard to see that this is where radio is going.

Update: The original text for this tutorial was apparently submitted to me as an exact copy of an article by ah2 at ah2’s universe. Please check out the original article there.

The following are instructions for installing the HP Mini’s Mie interface on Ubuntu. The process is fairly easy but be aware that not everything works as expected yet. You can get most of the functionality of the new interface working but in my experience things like the special book marking shortcut added to Firefox don’t work. All in all the HP Mini’s interface is pretty good for small screens.

Warning some features may not work and I ran into an issue where the harbour-launcher used over 50% of the processor.

This instructions were original posted in the Ubuntu forums by wildcard and rafaelcapanema

Download the GTK+ theme, the Firefox theme, and the Thunderbird theme if you want.

The GTK+ theme can be activated through System > Preferences > Appearance (mind you, you don’t need to change the wallpaper, so leave it at the really out-of-place brown), while Firefox should load the theme choosing screen on next load. If it doesn’t, go to Tools > Addons.

Now that that’s over, you’ll need to do some work for getting the launcher.

Firstly, download this, and save it to your home folder. Or anywhere really, but if you’re not that good with Linux you obviously don’t want to.

Now, go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal, and put this in:

sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture --force-depends harbour-launcher_0.78.3_lpia.deb

If the file you just downloaded isn’t in your home folder, then change the last part.

To launch it, press Alt-F2 and type in harbour-launcher. If the launcher didn’t show up, press the Show Desktop button or Ctrl+Alt+D.

But wait! Not everything’s working yet.

For music/pictures, you will need to install elisa. Elisa can be found in your repositories, but don’t install it from there.

You will need to install a number of packages, one after the other.

So here’s a bunch of links. Install them in the order provided.

libpigment0.3-8_0.3.11-1~ppa2-intrepid1-1_i386.deb
python-pgm_0.3.8-1~ppa1-intrepid1-1_i386.deb
python-elisa_0.5.15.5-0dennis1_all.deb
elisa_0.5.15.5-0dennis1_all.deb
elisa-plugins-good_0.5.15.5-0dennis1_all.deb
elisa-plugins-bad_0.5.15.5-0dennis9_all.deb
elisa-plugins-ugly_0.5.15.5-0dennis1_all.deb

Whew. Now that that’s over, restart, and press Alt-F2 and type in harbour-launcher. Enjoying it?

Alright, so now, do you want to actually make it auto-start?

Then go to System > Preferences > Sessions, and add a new startup entry, with anything you want as the name, and harbour-launcher as the command.

Boxee runs on Linux, OSX, and Windows. The Linux and OSX beta clients are open to download but the Windows beta is still an invite only deal.

I have been using boxee for a couple of weeks now and I can say I am in love. No more visting each individual web site to look for content. I just launch boxee and surf the content on most of the major media sites just like I am changing channels on my T.V.

Boxee comes with the ability to play content directly from Hulu, Comedy Central, CBS, Last.fm, Netflix, MySpaceTV and a number of other sources. Seeing it is open source and based on the XBOX Media Center project there are a number of additional plugins for other sites available with new ones showing up in their forums every day. I found this Adult Swim plugin on their forum. No more missed episodes of Robot Chicken. I couldn’t be happier.

I can’t explain it as well as the video below so check it out.

docx-converter FTW

The Debian package was a quick one click install with no hassle. Set-up of the software was the same.  Simply enter the name of your HAVA box, enter your password, and click on the connect button and away it goes. Be careful as the IT wants to make the first character a capital by default. Video on the LAN is superb. It’s leaps and bounds better than the equivalent slingbox mobile and desktop players.  The best part of this is that it’s portable. You can take your IT (Internet Tablet) wherever you want to go, you can even watch an episode of House in the bathroom if you want.

The video and audio on the LAN is very good and remote viewing over the Internet isn’t to shabby either. This will obviously depend on the quality of your Internet connection. I have a pretty poor connection at home (Stay away from housing developments that use Hcontrol) and I can still view a show with decent quality. The video does have a tendency to get out of sync with the audio from time to time but, this is a slight offset and should be improved before the final release to the general public. The HAVA unit is also capable of streaming HD content from an external HD Tuner. I played with this a little yesterday and it does work but, there’s nothing to exciting about it. The quality was the same as standard definition content but, I guess if you want to see your local broadcasters HD2 weather channel, then it’s a plus.

The user interface is simple to navigate and provides quite a bit of control. The software includes four generic remote control surfaces that include a standard number pad with channel up/down, a favorites pad with 12 programmable favorite buttons, an STS remote with standard sat receiver controls, and a generic PVR control for playing recorded shows. The last function is not implemented yet. The only way to view recorded shows at this time is to record and then transfer them to your Nokia N800/810.

Overall, I have to take my hat off to the folks at Monsoon, good work.  This is an application that a lot of people have been wanting for a long time and the people at Sling refused to provide. Thank You.

I received the Hava Platinum HD in the mail a couple weeks ago and quickly ripped it out of the package (Christmas Morning Style).  The contents included the Hava Platinum HD, Ethernet cable, 2 Component HD cables, 2 AV cables, powers supply and CD.  The Component and AV cables are standard RCA connectors on one end and 1/8th inch 4 contact phono connectors to interface with the Hava box.  The Hava Box is capable of streaming HD channels across your network and has HD pass through so you can place your Hava Box in-between your cable box and TV, hence the two HD cables.  Audio is only standard stereo unfortunately and is handled by the AV cables minus the video plug.  Hell, if you wanted 5.1 surround, go sit in front of your 72 inch plasma with your 3000 dollar surround system with your 18 speakers.  That’s what you bought it for.

Heres the rundown:

Hava Platinum HD- HD and Standard Definition, IR blasters for cable or Sat box control,wired Ethernet only, recording or time shift capabilty to a PC and NO built in tuner.

Hava Wireless HD – HD and standard Definition, Standard Definition tuner built in, IR blasters for cable or Sat box control, wireless bridge built in, recording or time shift capability to a PC.

Hava Titanium HD – HD and  standard definition, IR blasters for cable or sat box control, wireless USB dongle with future support for N networks, recording or time shift capability to a PC.  This unit also has an internal hard drive or 2 USB ports to plug in an external drive for recording.  This function is in beta now. No built in tuner.

As of today, Hava only supports Windows based software for the player.  The software has a nice interface and is easy to set-up and use but the real advantage these units have over the Slingbox is that they are developing the client for the N800 and Linux support.  Thanks for showing the penguin a little respect.  More on this later when I get my copy of the Internet Tablet software.

First off, the Kindle is Amazon’s entry into the ebook reader market.  It joins the Sony PRS-505 Reader which has been around for awhile but, it adds a lot of interesting features such as a free built-in wireless connection that allows you to tap into Amazon’s online bookstore from just about anywhere you can access Sprint’s EVDO cellular data network.

The Kindle is similar to the Sony Reader. The Kindle is 7.5 inches high by 5.3 inches wide by 0.7 inch deep and only weighs 10.3 ounces. That is about the same as your average paper back. Both devices have 4.9-by-3.6-inch (6-inch diagonal), 600 x 800-pixel screens. The screen on both readers uses a technology call E ink. E Ink is an electrophoretic display.

From Wikipedia:

 An electrophoretic display is an information display that forms visible images by rearranging charged pigment particles using an applied electric field.

E Ink is a type of Electronic paper display. From Wikipedia:

Electronic paper, also called e-paper, is a display technology designed to mimic the appearance of ordinary ink on paper. Unlike a conventional flat panel display, which uses a backlight to illuminate its pixels, electronic paper reflects light like ordinary paper and is capable of holding text and images indefinitely without drawing electricity, while allowing the image to be changed later.

There are several different technologies to build e-paper, some of which can use plastic substrate and electronics, so that the display is flexible. It is considered more comfortable to read than conventional displays. This is due to the stable image which does not need to be constantly refreshed, the large viewing angle, and the fact that it uses reflected ambient light. It has a similar contrast ratio to that of a newspaper and is lightweight and durable, however it still lacks good color reproduction.

One annoyances of E Ink technology is that the screen takes a second to refresh. The result is it tends to blink when you change the page. Amazon has done a good job of minimizing this so it isn’t that distracting but, for those that have not used an E Ink display before, it might cause unnecessary concern. Considering you can read the screen in direct sunlight, the trade-off seems worth it.

Amazon opted not to use a backlight which might strain the eyes during long sessions. The result is that you’ll need a well lit reading environment just like you would with a real book. The Kindle has a 185 MB of user-accessible internal memory and is expandable with the use of SD cards. Memory cards up to 4GB are supported. That is a lot of books. The Kindle also supports playing MP3s and Audible audio books. The MP3 player is a little restricted in that you can’t select which MP3 to play. It will only play them randomly. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future firmware update but, for now, that feature is pretty useless.

Navigating the Kindle interface is pretty easy. There is a home button that takes you to the main list page of your content.  There is a scroll wheel that you can use to select lines of text and menu items along with next page buttons on both sides of the device. There is a pervious page button on the left side and back button on the right. Altogether, navigating is pretty intuitive. When you are viewing the home page, a click of the scroll wheel allows you to sort the list of your content by author, date, or title and to show just books or periodicals. You can bookmark key passages of what you’re reading, and (using the keyboard), make, edit, and export notes. The Kindle also saves your place when reading anything, so you can always pick up where you left off. One of better features is the built in dictionary. You can use the scroll wheel to select a line of text on the page. By default the dictionary will look up all the words on a selected line so you don’t have to worry about selecting a specific word or using the keyboard.

One of the Kindle’s main advantages over the Sony reader is the built in EVDO cell connection. This is included mainly to allow you to download purchased content from Amazon without the need for a computer or too be in range of a Wi-Fi network. Luckily, there is no charge for this connection and Amazon was nice enough to include a basic web browser. The browser is fairly slow and doesn’t handle link and image rich web pages very well but, if all your are looking for is a quick answer, it does the job. One of the main features of the built in browser is the direct access to Wikipedia. Basically you have an entire encyclopedia with you at all times. Another cool feature is by pressing Alt + 1 you are taken to google maps which, in conjunction with cell triangulation, using the built it radio, can roughly show you where you are. Sort of a poor man’s GPS.

Downloading books wirelessly to the Kindle is generally a very pleasant experience. You can search for titles or authors in the Kindle Store or scroll through the national and Kindle bestsellers lists (Amazon is currently offering more than 90,000 titles, including 90 percent of the current New York Times bestsellers).

Kindle is compatible with a few file types. Most files have to be converted. Amazon provides you two ways to convert your files: you can either send attachments wirelessly to the device’s personal e-mail address, which will cost you $.10 per attachment or you can send them to a “free” Kindle e-mail address that you access via your Windows or Mac OS computer and then transfer the converted files to your Kindle manually via USB.

By default the Amazon Kindle supports the following formats:

Turned the key to the on position and hit the button to start her up. As she breathed fire into my veins, the engine sounded like it was suffering while we waited in the pit stop. As the pace car led us down the stretch, she purred into motion. Slowly around the track of Laguna Seca to get a feel for what we were about to incur and then faster and faster. 0-60 in 4.7, and taking the turns like we were in a jet fighter pulling 2-4 G’s. It doesn’t get much better than this… or does it?

After getting comfortable with the speed and the way she handled, I was approaching turn 10 and it’s apex, I felt comfortable giving her a little extra push before and during the turn, but it was too much and as the F1 under steered, (you are not supposed to accelerate into a turn) so I did exactly what they told me to; clutch and brake in. I think I did about a 400 degree screeching wipe out so I was facing about the same way as I was originally going when I finally stopped, but that was AWESOME!! I wanted to under steer her again, but it never happened.

There is no speedometer in this beast so you can only guess at what speed you are going, but the pace car was up to around 110 and there were times I was playing catchup so I’m guessing we were hitting speeds around 110-130. The ground is so close to you in those cars that it doesn’t even feel that fast.

Getting in and out of them is a task in itself. If you weigh over 250 you might have some problems. In fact the school asks you for your weight and height when you sign up to be sure you will fit. You also have to know how to drive a stick for this particular school. I am sure there are classes to teach you how to drive stick, and if you have never done so, you definitely should try it. It makes you feel like you are a part of the engine which equals more fun.

Half the day was spent on the track and to tell you the truth, I could have spent all week on it. Turn 8, which is defined as the corkscrew is the best turn ever. You can’t even see the track from the top of the corkscrew while you are driving. You just have to have faith that it is still there as you go over the cliff.

After the trips around the track, we had lunch and then proceeded to learn how to brake hard without locking up the tires with a Mazda 3, go around a small cone track they had set up to learn how to take a turn with a little under steer with a Mazda Miata, and finally we learned how to correct an under steer on a Mazda RX8 with rear balding tires and wet pavement. This was by far the most fun of the 3 events.

The school that I chose was called Skip Barber. The one day school was around $1100 so it is not cheap, but every penny is worth it. They have very highly trained and professional staff that give you the experience of a lifetime. In fact, at the end of the day, the staff took us in the Miata around the small cone track at full speed. We were drifting on every turn and at no time did we feel like the car was out of control. They really know how to drive these cars and showed me that I’m only 20% of the speed racer I thought I was.

This goes out to my Aunt who bought me this trip for a Christmas gift. Thank you very much for this great experience. I loved every minute of it.

In my humble opinion…

I think before every driver gets behind the wheel, they should complete one of these schools. Not only is it a lot of fun, but you learn so much about how to drive that it can save you in many situations. Not to mention, better drivers equal less accidents which, equals cheaper insurance. (actually I am pretty sure that after completing one of these courses, your auto insurance will go down. I’ll have to call and find out)