For the last year, Daring Fireball and other blogs have kept a close watch on all the phones that are not iPhones. And for the last year or more, there have been a plethora of tech sites where reviewers have pledged, “Here comes the iPhone killer…” and yet, not a one has (as far as I know) ever said, “better than the iPhone.”

Well, this latest comes straight from Wired (Tired?).

Danny Dumas spent a few minutes with the Samsung Instinct and determined, “it’s definitely good enough to rank as a solid second-tier player in the smartphone space.”

I have to assume that Danny didn’t write the headline for his article and whoever did either read only his first paragraph, or has never actually used an iPhone. The headline gives the reader hope… at least, that’s what I think about when I hear “run for the money”.

That means that the runner-up came damn close and actually threatened the winner.

But then, pretty much the entire sub-500-word article whines about how incredibly sucky the Instinct is:

• “it’s … not quite as polished” (which, from the text, seems a bit of an understatement.)
• “The web browser shows some terribly rough patches”
• “the narrower body … really cramps page size”
• “typing on the Instinct can be rocky”
• “Call quality is fair”
• “No WiFi”
• “Clearly cellphone-quality photos”
• and my favorite: “Includes a stylus … but provides no slot to stow it.”

I don’t have an iPhone (DAMMIT!), but Meredith will be getting the new one when it starts shipping (JEALOUS!). Even with the fact that we’re Mac fanatics, there’s the beauty and the ease of use that makes the iPhone the top choice for a truly wonderful device. I get the “mac bigot” ridicule pretty frequently, but at least 6 friends who’ve ribbed my Mac-headedness are now contemplating Macs because their iPhones "are such a joy to use."

Despite the fact that they do look mechanically very similar, which one’s icons look like crap and which one’s icons make it instantly apparent what the task is? Which one would you rather use? The iPhone is so simple to use… whether you’re surfing or reading e-mail or listening to music or looking up directions, it just makes sense. I haven’t used an Instinct, but I’m guessing it uses the same tired point-y-click-y that all the other crappy smart phones use.

That’s what made the iPhone so perfect (well, as perfect as you want to admit a block of metal and silicon should be) — it’s been designed with the people who are using it in mind. If you ever have used an iPhone, then take a second to re-read that abridged list of Dumas’ complaints.

Duh. Seems pretty simple really…

“Run for Its Money”.

Har.

I think the real headline should be, “Another Tired Knockoff Misses the Mark Completely, Despite Attempt at Near-Infringement Level of Mechanical Copying.”

or… "Yes, I read Wesley Crusher’s blog!"

I think it’s the best comic book movie since Sin City, and blows Transformers and the last two X-Men movies into oblivion.

So, again I state here for the record that I haven’t posted in, like, forever. And that I’ve been busy. And yada yada. There are any number of reasons to excuse my absense (sw release, xmas, new year, promotion, etc), but what draws me back? Sony.

No shit.

I caught this off Daring Fireball, and I generally don’t operate in the true ‘blogosphere’ of link-linking, but seeing as how I’ve railed on Sony before, I found this to be particularly hilarious as I read it:

Scalzi on Why It Won’t Work.

Yes, it’s been like forever since I posted. Things are hectic. Life is rambling and keeping up with it has kept me from this. However, I found this and had to share it.

So, I haven’t begun to dig, but I’m about to start hunting around. See, the thing is, I have this Linux server on my home network that occassionally needs access to Casper.

Casper is my laptop. It’s a mac. A very nice, pretty MacBook Pro.

It also uses DHCP on the network, so on any given day, my server (call him Vader) doesn’t know what Casper’s IP is and I don’t really want to have to force it.

And that’s where Bonjour comes in. Hopefully.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress. Ultimately, I’d like to be able to type something along the lines of ’ssh casper’ from a terminal on vader. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed.

Considering my wife doesn’t even like beer, I think she’s spent a little too much time at the Heineken website:

[I have removed the iframe that was here and replaced it with a direct link because it was disruptive even to me.]

Heineken Video

I’ve always been fascinated by bowties, but I’ve only ever worn one as part of a tuxedo. And I think in my entire life, I’ve probably worn a tuxedo a grand total of, oh I don’t know… let’s count backwards:

1. My cousin Kelly’s wedding
2. My wedding
3. My cousin Michael’s wedding
4. Senior prom
5. Junior prom

Uh, yeah. That’s it. But bowties… they’re pretty cool. I love their whimsy and the way they look much better with short-sleeved oxford shirts than a necktie does.

I think I will look to Mr. Kevin Greene for inspiration and perhaps go out and pick up a bowtie or two and maybe a new oxford shirt to wear with it.

I’m at the Apple store writing this post on an iPhone. It is very cool but the pricetag is a bit much. The technology, however, is most wicked!

Because we were going to be renting a boat while we were at Lake Buchanan, I decided to take my GPS. It’s an older model that doesn’t have a whole lot of memory and doesn’t do place maps. Nor does it jack into a computer. But it does do waypoints and tracks and navigation and that makes it easy to set a point on the GPS (“here, now”) then wander around for a few hours. When you’re ready to go back to that point, you just say, “take me there.” and it gives you bearing and distance. It’s very handy. We used it a few years ago at White Sands. We parked the car in the middle of the proverbial “nowhere” and set a waypoint. Then we did literally wander for hours. When we were ready to get back to the car, it turns out we were only about 2 miles from it over a couple decent dunes. We walked pretty much straight-as-the-crow-flies right back to the car. I love my GPS….

Oh, but back to our story — we were going to be on the lake in a boat, so I thought we’d do the same thing — set a waypoint at the dock where we got on the boat. Then we could tool all over the lake for the day and not have to worry about keeping track of landmarks (yes, I’m fully aware that a GPS is not a replacement for quality orienteering; we’re on vacation — NOT hiking the Andes).

Except that as we drove through Marble Falls on our way to the cabin, the display on my GPS went all wonky. Well, Meredith did not want to go on the lake without the GPS, and I’ve been itching for a new one ever since my dad got the top-of-the-line Garmin eTrex a few months ago. It does maps and jacks into the ‘puter and all that jazz. So, yeah, I picked up a new GPS at the local Mart of Walton (Sam, that is). It’s a Magellan eXplorist 210 and it does maps and connects to the PC.

Flash forward to today (oh, in case you’re wondering it did a yeoman’s job of navigating on the lake)….

I did a little poking around at geocaching.com and found about a dozen caches near our house. I even downloaded a file with all of them as waypoints. Then I had to figure out how to get them onto the GPS; I really didn’t want to have to enter them all by hand. I remember how well that went over a few years ago, when I got my first GPS. I spent several hours hand-entering several geocache waypoints into the GPS and then went out to find the caches, but didn’t actually find any because by that time it was dusk and I was a complete newbie to the whole ordeal. Talk about off-putting!

Anyway, I plugged the eXplorist’s USB cable into my Mac and lo-and-behold, the damn thing mounted as an external disk. I was able to see all the waypoints, tracks, routes, and et-cetera. VERY COOL! At that point, I just needed to figure out how to convert the geocaching.com waypoint file format (.loc) into a Magellan waypoint format (.upt). A quick Google search later, and I have Chimbisimo to thank for pointing me to GPSBabel! What an awesome tool it is! It instantly converted the .loc to a .upt and I was able to drop it right onto the eXplorist!

So, to make a long story short (TOO LATE!), Hays and Griffin and I went geocaching this afternoon. We hit nine spots; found four; didn’t find four; and had one inconclusive. These designations are all from the geocaching.com website.

Our four finds:
GCZH8V – Our very first geocache find, ever! Woohoo!
GCJXA8
GCP8KE
GCWP7P

The four we didn’t locate:
GCWP6Q
GCWP69
GCNA12
GCWP75

The inconclusive one was GCXPNG, where we did find a non-permanent chewing gum box, but it was empty, so I added a short note to it and put it back where we found it (under cover, no the green one).

I downloaded the track log from my GPS and then ran it through GPSBabel again to generate a Google Earth kml file. I then loaded that into Google Earth and massaged it a little and cleaned things up and organized them a bit. If you’d like, you can download a KMZ file of our trek. It should load directly into Google Earth (I tested it on Meredith’s computer, and it worked fine).

I think maybe next weekend we’ll go hunting for GCRK4C, GCW71A, GCW970, and GCWP82.

Some time ago (months, I think), Meredith sent me a link to a site full of Nerf mods. I can’t remember the link, but you can easily search for it. The simplest of the mods was surprisingly simple — no overt changes to the toy and the only equipment needed is a sturdy rubberband. The only caveat is that the Nerf gun needs an external plunger, which many of them do have (they’re often the cocking lever). Just wrap the rubberband around the gun and over the plunger!

Anyway, I had a giant rubberband lying around. It came from one of those cheap balsa planes with the wind-up propeller. The gun was some new thing Hays picked up recently (just as I have to buy my own guns, so does he). Anyway, here’s the mod, cocked. The band is looped through the plunger and wrapped over the barrel. It adds a good 20 feet to the range and significant accuracy (and down-right uncomfortable at point-blank).

Some guys I used to work with would frequently decend upon our development team unleashing Nerf assaults and we got pretty good at defending ourselves, but I wish I’d known about things like this — an arms race of sorts with Nerf tech (it got to be a rather expensive hobby).