That's all I got to say man, bring it on! I can see it now, Han and Chewie going over stick-man schematics of mad-cap rubes of plans to overtake some imperial fortress, a-la Mall Rats!
"C'mon LUNCHBOX! Fix that fuckin' hyperdrive already!"
I work in cellular and have both Mac and Linux boxen. I've installed quite afew solutions for myself and many a customer. XP in general has been tweaky. Even Linux has been more straight forward and could be called easier depending on your POV. OS X at first was hit and miss but with each update it just gets better and better at mobile data in general and that's without even mixing in the open communities great additions like the Ross Barkman scripts.
Good to hear about the VZW cards. I use one on my Windoze lappy (my work made me take THAT computer!) and have also played with it on Linux. As for OS X I love the fact that most handsets, CDMA or GSM, seem to work over bluetooth or data cables right out of the box. They do a really good job on the seamless syncing too. Now if they will just get on the ball with SyncML then all will be well. Hell, world peace may even ensue, starvation and poverty could become a thing of the past and, um, ok perhaps not. But it would be nice;-)
I just don't get this idea at all. It's been tried a few times - other posters mentioned specifics and I've seen the products as well and imediately lost interest when I figured it out.
In the article he writes Pegasus thinks they've found a bridging technolgy or something to that effect. I've seen similar writtings in the market spins of other similar products. All I see is someone getting tired of clipping the little reader on their notepad/having to carry around another gizmo/screwing around with inevitably buggy winbloze only software, loosing the reader in the dark recesses of their desk drawer and then using the fancy reader/ink pen on conventional stickies, legal pads and Franklins. All I see this ultimately doing is driving away more would-be converts. I hate this family of devices and I've never even played with one. As for importing hand written or drawn works we've had plenty of ways to do that for some time now. That's the way to market these things. Take a look at Nokia's Bluetooth pen. I read about it some time ago and if memory serves me right that's the spin they used. And yes, I'm too lazy to link;-)
My suggestions? Well, the writter already listed some and I'm preaching to the choir. Perhaps if I was writting this with some snazy digital pen... Instant on. NO BOOT TIME! most PDA's have this already fairly well. Perhaps putting something in there wherein the PDA "knows" you want to just start jotting things down. I.E. when the status comes near the screen the unit wakes up and an input panel opens. I'd say the UI should allow for immediate input, preferably via fast, accurate and trainable handwritting recognition, and have say a small toolbar at the bottom. One would first jot down whatever it was and then hit the tool to file it under, eg contact, freehand/drawing, etc. Let's take that one step further and start parsing that input once the app is started so that say if it was a contact the app could try and sort it out. Perl anyone? Who wants to donate one of those new Zauri to me so I can get started hacking this together?;-)
Other things I would do would be to keep the instant-on app launching buttons Palm has. That's truly useful. Those should also launch straight into the app screen and not the jot screen I mentioned. More cellphone integration or better yet let's retry the cellphone module, a.k.a Visor springboard. SDIO GSM/CDMA phonecard with a BT headset anyone? I like that new S/E headset with the small cord and lapel clip display. How about just getting more simple cellphones out there with BT or WiFi and getting the nice PDA's with both below that $450 barrier? $299 seems better and just loose some of the fat. And would someone please get it into M$'s head that a PDA UI need NOT look and work like fscking Windows? Clicking down three to five layers to get to a hand writting app is just fucking stupid. Finally, if the physical pen tip to screen interface could be made better that would help. If someone would come up with the just right combination of screen surface and pen tip that would help. I'd also bet that focusing more on using landscape orientation for handwritting and perhaps some well thought out auto-scrolling as one writes on the virtual paper might be a nice touch. Once again, send me that Linuxed-up Zaurus you don't really need and I'll get right to work on it;-)
I'm just wondering who's pantleg that thing rolled down? C'mon Rio, you can, and have, done better in the past. Back to the drawing board with you and your iTurd
</flame>
Geeze. One other iPod extra that they have unknowingly cloned. Some kids will get beat up over that thing too. Not so much because of theft but more over someone harrasing the owner of that thing for having a "fake-assed" iPod. Kids are mean like that. I hate kids. They're only usefull when sold to gypsies for beer money and computer parts;-)
Oh fawkyah! All I can say is I'm expecting a #7 button in the center of my steering wheel of my soon to be aquired red GTI (remeber that promo? Gawddamn I still want that VW poster. My local VeeDub dealer has one in the service department. I smell a mission impossible comming on...). Or was it #5? Hmmmm, good excuse to get the DVD archive of all those old Speedracer shows! Science is a bitch and I, hers;-) I'll be Trixy's beeyotch any day:-D (Please, no pr0n linx...)
- Dr PooFinger
Unfortunately for Nokia they probably won't be able to win back many here in US anytime soon.
Our wonderful carriers have such a convoluted aproval process that it can take over a year to get a new handset to market. The CDMA guys are the worst too. Still waiting for some sort of functional bluetooth. (Nokia has been trying to get VZW to show more interest in their CDMA chipset for a very long time now. Qualcomm has it pretty sewn up. Oh, not hold my breath for the moto V710 either) Hell, even IR ports are rare. Guess the CDMA guys here hold stock in some data cable manufacturers? Hmmm...
N'way, my point being that by the time some of those new handsets make it to market here many consumers may just be starting to forget about Nokia. Credit where it's due though, T-mobile got the 6600 out fairly fast. But then they're not an American (or CDMA) carier either. Just my $0.02
In order to stop the nucience of camcorders in theaters I reccomend body cavity searches at the door and don't stop until you reach the backs of their teeth! Those seen walking into the theater yapping away on a cellphone and/or with small screaming children in tow are some of the most likely suspects.
Heh, I'm laughing last. I live within riding distance of three great mountain biking areas and the street I live on is part of one of the best road biking routes in SoCal. Who needs a camping trip? Bah! Feh! Oh, but if the urge/need arises then yet again, I'm quite close. I live within an hour of two mountain ranges very popular for mountain biking, hiking, camping, etc. Only less than a half tank of gas in the ol' guzzler pickup truck, round trip.
I also have a few restaraunts, a Trader Joes, my local watering hole, two good, independant (NOT starfucks house of foam n' some junk and maybe a shot of expresso in there somewhere) coffee houses complete with free wifi, a good bike shop and at least one good computer parts place all within 3 miles (meaning very rideable) radius of me. So there, STFU!;-) Admittedly though, my goddamned job requires that I drive all over SoCal visiting retail outlets to be abused by store managers and their snotty customers. Mix that in with all the traffic and I NEED all that riding area in my (miniscule) off time just to keep me from dropping dead in my tracks of a heart attack or something.
No, no, our, er, I mean the plan is much more nefarious than that. Just wait until you start getting spams with semacodes for teen pr0n sites! Oh, and warchalking is going to get interesting too. The PHBs will have no idea just what those funny little stickers with little pixelated boxes printed on them are festooning the outer walls and windows of their office buildings Muwahahahhaaaaa!
Small 'puter & that cat is trying to mate with
on
PC In An XP Box
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· Score: 1
That is neat, fine and dandy and all but did you see the other pics on the site and the way that cat was getting off on that thing? WTF?!? So fluffy is in heat and backing herself up to the nanode with the CD drive in full on 99x self destruct spin mode... Ugh, nastay!
Re:So whats better? My new codec is!
on
Friday Apple Fun
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· Score: 2, Funny
Here, I just wrote you a new codec and it works absolutely great for recording silence. I call it HUSH. Very tight, compact, clean code. Compiles with anything. See below:
Ok, I'm forming the angry mob right now. The torches and pitchforks are on me but I need someone to bring a bag of feathers and a bucket of tar. SIEZE THE CRETIN! Who's with me?
Satellite on the road? Here ya go. I thought I had previously seen one that was autotracking and in a randome, much like the TV only versions which can be used while in motion and I've installed in the past. I couldn't find that link though. Pricey stuff. I'll stick with my GSM/GPRS phone, thankyou very much.
I've given much thought to Doing something simular. Get the T1 but get the neighbors to chip in and then distribute it over wifi. The bandwidth of the line purchased would be related to the number of users on it. It wouldn't work for every neighborhood due to topography, some neigbors not wanting stuff installed on their house, home owners association rules, etc but it could make for a good little community experience running a co-op of sorts like that in many a 'hood.
In such a system I'd say that one would, and should, put up their own domain, run their own small mail server(s) and even put up a shared web server and give everyone a little webspace to play with, run your own game servers, streaming servers, etc, basicly become a mini-ISP ala co-op. It all sounds pretty neat in theory at least. Get three or four neighborhood geeks together to run it, design it, teach other users, etc, have twenty or so users on it, could be kinda fun. Personaly, in an installation like that I'd want to build out the wireless network so well that anyone under it's coverage could roam about in it truly sans wires. In other words, using nothing more than the built-in antenna of their wifi device. My ulterior motive would be to have the ability to roam about my neighborhood using an iPaq or a Clie' UX50 as a wifi internet radio. Soma FM on the go! Muwahahaaaaaa!
"I'd *love* to make the jump to T-Mobile, but you can be driving down the street in San Jose and loose GSM coverage. And there's no excuse for being without signal in a major metropolitan area."
True dat, and what I reccomend to most folks is that they purchase their wireless as what fits their needs, budget and geographical coverage (meaning where do you travel and need coverage). Fortunately now days you can go to any carrier and try out their service for around 15 days no strings attached. If you cancel in that period and return everything you're only out your useage in that time frame usualy.
Here in SoCal Tmo works pretty good. As I know it, in your area it's VZW first (and even they are spotty), Sprint next, and GSM just blows in general. Wierd, I'd have figured that GSM would have been all over the Sili valley like fur on a weasel. Go figure.
I've been around cellular off and on since its conception and the games they all play are about the same. Don't believe the hype, take advantage of the programs they offer to new users (Trial periods and prepay) and find out what works best for your needs and go with that. I can attest to the fact that sometimes early deact fees are less expensive than riding out a contract but with the ubiquity of prepay and most having trial periods there's nearly no excuse for getting stuck in a contract. Oh, and from the inside, handsets do still cost a lot of money and if too many get given out to winey customers for free it does cost jobs to poorly paid techs. That due more in part to fat execs wanting to well, stay fat. 'Nough said
DRAT! I had just about gotten rid of all my great-grandfather's supply of vintage snake oil he bequeathed to me! I was one more case of the worthless stuff and three more vials of Testors brand silver model airplane paint away from completing the perfect crime! CURSES I say!
Waaay back in the day there used to be a common little box one could purchase for around $300 if memory serves me right. It had nothing but optics in it and one would afix it to a super 8 projector and then their video camera to the other opening.
I never played with such a thing but I remember them being fairly ubiquitous in the mid 70's to early 80's and I believe even Radio Shack carried them for awhile. It seems to me it wouldn't work too well with an analog video camera though due to the difference in framerates, 30 vs. 24, as was mentioned above. However, provided you could find such a thing, it might work well with a mini DV camera. Most can be set to different framerates, one of which happens to be 24fps. Actually, that's done on the software transposition side when compressing the footage for burning to VCD/DVD/MPEGs whatever. On mine I can play with a so called shutter speed which seems to do little more than adjust the scan rate. It's so one can compensate for such things as florecent lighting and CRTs. I have a Cannon ZR20 and the manual adjustment mode is varied by a wheel so YMMV on different cameras. Anyway, sounds like something you might stumble accrossed in a yardsale or even on ebay. Worth a shot if it's cheap enough.
Heh, I just had to email that link to a friend of mine. He's a little odd. I always give him a hard time and tell him that I suspect he likes to keep some of his personal effects in his, um, ass. I suggested he gets one and if it has bluetooth he could use that phone and a Tungsten Palm to work it without ever having to remove it. Hmm, charging it could be interesting. Well, if my suspicions about him are correct he never has to worry about loaning his phone to anyone;-)
Now, keeping all that in mind my next guess is that a CDMA version of it would make the ideal phone for Verizon and that their customer service reps would be more than happy to, um, install it for anyone. I see a Southpark episode Staring Mr. Garison taking form...
BREW is evil! Run away screaming like girl! I've had a VX6k, have a VX4400 and a 3100. I also work for VZW overseeing their service techs. About the only thing good about the LGs is that they have decent radios. Other than that, they sux0r. All bitpim and GAGIN let you do is move files around and in the case of GAGIN, actualy install BREW apps. You have to have the Qualcomm BREW SDK and then obtain GAGIN (Big ol' stinky warez hack!) and only then can you put stuff on your phone. The other route is very pricey and was detailed above. Changing your WAP settings only gets you free (as in devoid of corporate bullshit) WAP and doesn't allow you anymore ability to install to the phone. BREW wants to see a cert on the app before accepting anything OTA
As for the J2ME side of things you can upload freely to most phones, develop freely and so on, for the most part. Nag screens while DLing unregistered apps are about the only thing I've encountered, no show-stopper there. I've had much success on the lowly LG 5350 with Sprint, although that particular phone still has little cable support. You can browse the file system on it with bitpim though. Um, one big problem I see with most CDMA phones is that they have no common AT command set as do their GSM counterparts. There's plenty of Googleable info out there on common AT command sets for GSM phones. This is important because beyond the usual modem stuff there are extentions that allow for changing data modes, phonebook transfers, getting into test modes - all sorts of fun. And because it's fairly standard on current GSM handsets and openly published you can focus more on tweaking the phone itself and not just figuring how to talk to it. I've yet to find anything like this for CDMA handsets, although I have my suspicions about the S/E T68i for the few lucky bastards that own them.
Oh, and for the record, for my personal use I have Tmo and a S/E t68i. I only use VZW for work and because they supply it. I canceled my personal service with them due in part to their deplorable billing practices and because $80/mo for unlimited data is just outa line. Credit where it's due though, they have one hell of a network. The Sprint Vision unlimited for $10 is sweet but my wife now has that phone and I just had to have bluetooth and a GSM phone to play with. The S/E was free, has excelent battery life and crappy reception. But hey, for free, it's a good start. Next month I should have me a Nokia 3650, chock full of Symbian cotton panty goodness and soon, Perl! Wheeeeee! Oh, yeh, Tmobile is $20/mo (on a voice plan, $30 without) for unlimited data with no NATing (yup, that's a real IP address there buddy!) and no port filtering/blocking. Basic WAP service is included in the voice plans if I'm not mistaken(80, 110, 25). As for GPS on GSM phones I really don't know much about that yet. I've not seen it on anything first hand myself.
As for the CDMA guys, I hope someday that they come out with some good phones (bluetooth, Kyocera palm thing that doesn't crash, decent battery life, get over the goddamned camera fetish already, ditch fucking BREW!) and realize that their poo does stink and that their data service is NOT worth $80/month. $40 I would pay, especialy for EV-DO when it gets widespread, but that's all I'd pay for their unlimited data. 'Nuff said.
Hmmmm, hard to say. Watching the big glass walls of the Goodyear tire shop near 1k yards away vibrating was fun but also having sis shoe away the other two cop cars and their angy ocupants was nice too. Anyway, it was a truly fun day. Evil abounded. Even my then badassed cop little sister had to crack a smile. Afterall, she did grow up with a geekster. She was into blowing things up, wiring wierd things together rebuilding old Chevy and Ford engines and whatnot and I sent her off with good enough geek training that I've only gotten emails from her that stated she fixed Mom's windoze quandry;-) We were fortunate to have an airforce geek dad who was handy with many electronic tools, a computer and a few wrenches whilst we grew. I think we did well. Too bad she moved away to OR, I miss her. And no, I've never taken advantage of nepetism beyond that day. But boy, a big box of Mexican fireworks, her influence and tonight would be a good time;-)
Hmmm, well, I did something like this today on the way back from work, kinda half-baked but it worked good!
1st attempt: Whiped out iBook, pluged in my crapy little iRoq fm modulator, opened up iTunes and tried a Groove Salad 56k stream over GPRS curtesy of my BT S/E T68i. Kept rebuffering about every 30 seconds and was much too annoying. I then went to the 24k stream and voila! No more rebuffering but with sound quality barely better than AM it wasn't that much fun.
Then comes another brainstorm. Pulled over in the first available parking lot, whipped out my work lappy (Dell, winbloze, blah blah...) and it's verizon wireless aircard (I work for them and have an unlimited data account) and booted that up. I knew it would work well with 56k, tried it before. However, it's a bad idea to drive and mess with the radio. Hmmm, so, I picked my ad hoc wifi profile and let the Mac discover that. Now I had uninterupted 56k service. Sounds much better but still mono.
The reason I was so insistant on using the Mac as a player is because I have both Romeo and Salling Clicker installed on it and use my T|T3 Palm or t68i as a remote. I put together some scripts for Romeo some time ago that uses just the joystick on the phone as a control. Makes for good semi-hands free control (well, I can keep my eyes on the road at least). I also have a playlist on iTunes with shortcuts to the streams I listen to most. So, I can "tune" presets fast and easily.
Oh, one more bit of buffoonery. I tried using my phone as a modem on a 24k stream and also had Romeo running at the same time and that worked well. For GPRS service I have the Tmobile $30 all you can eat data. I use Tmobile as my personal data phone because I can't afford Verizon's ass-piracey price of $80/month for unlimited data. I get nearly as good throughput on tmobile in some areas and suspect that it will sustain a fatter stream.
I'm building a Linux box for my truck to do stuff like wifi sniffing, GPS nav, MP3 jukebox, fm tuner and all remotely controled from a dash mounted touch screen. ($700 for the damn screen is why I'm still in the building process;-) That will have bluetooth on it so to use my phone for a data connect. I can tweak xmms to use a big buffer and hopefully get a good stream. I want to try cobling together some fancy scripting that can monitor wifi for open hotspots and that would jump between wifi and cellular automatically. That remains to be seen though...
As for being a little more on topic, I'm hoping to see some sort of two-way satellite data service come about for mobile use. Hopefully that would support streaming and it would be great for stuff like GPS nav where one could DL maps on demand, some sort of messaging (voice recognition/text to speech?) and hopefully it wouldn't be too latent for something like VOIP. I could go on for hours with this one...
Slashdot Mirror
"C'mon LUNCHBOX! Fix that fuckin' hyperdrive already!"
fap fap fap fap fap fap...
Hey! shut the door damnit!
Good to hear about the VZW cards. I use one on my Windoze lappy (my work made me take THAT computer!) and have also played with it on Linux. As for OS X I love the fact that most handsets, CDMA or GSM, seem to work over bluetooth or data cables right out of the box. They do a really good job on the seamless syncing too. Now if they will just get on the ball with SyncML then all will be well. Hell, world peace may even ensue, starvation and poverty could become a thing of the past and, um, ok perhaps not. But it would be nice ;-)
In the article he writes Pegasus thinks they've found a bridging technolgy or something to that effect. I've seen similar writtings in the market spins of other similar products. All I see is someone getting tired of clipping the little reader on their notepad/having to carry around another gizmo/screwing around with inevitably buggy winbloze only software, loosing the reader in the dark recesses of their desk drawer and then using the fancy reader/ink pen on conventional stickies, legal pads and Franklins. All I see this ultimately doing is driving away more would-be converts. I hate this family of devices and I've never even played with one. As for importing hand written or drawn works we've had plenty of ways to do that for some time now. That's the way to market these things. Take a look at Nokia's Bluetooth pen. I read about it some time ago and if memory serves me right that's the spin they used. And yes, I'm too lazy to link ;-)
My suggestions? Well, the writter already listed some and I'm preaching to the choir. Perhaps if I was writting this with some snazy digital pen... Instant on. NO BOOT TIME! most PDA's have this already fairly well. Perhaps putting something in there wherein the PDA "knows" you want to just start jotting things down. I.E. when the status comes near the screen the unit wakes up and an input panel opens. I'd say the UI should allow for immediate input, preferably via fast, accurate and trainable handwritting recognition, and have say a small toolbar at the bottom. One would first jot down whatever it was and then hit the tool to file it under, eg contact, freehand/drawing, etc. Let's take that one step further and start parsing that input once the app is started so that say if it was a contact the app could try and sort it out. Perl anyone? Who wants to donate one of those new Zauri to me so I can get started hacking this together? ;-)
Other things I would do would be to keep the instant-on app launching buttons Palm has. That's truly useful. Those should also launch straight into the app screen and not the jot screen I mentioned. More cellphone integration or better yet let's retry the cellphone module, a.k.a Visor springboard. SDIO GSM/CDMA phonecard with a BT headset anyone? I like that new S/E headset with the small cord and lapel clip display. How about just getting more simple cellphones out there with BT or WiFi and getting the nice PDA's with both below that $450 barrier? $299 seems better and just loose some of the fat. And would someone please get it into M$'s head that a PDA UI need NOT look and work like fscking Windows? Clicking down three to five layers to get to a hand writting app is just fucking stupid. Finally, if the physical pen tip to screen interface could be made better that would help. If someone would come up with the just right combination of screen surface and pen tip that would help. I'd also bet that focusing more on using landscape orientation for handwritting and perhaps some well thought out auto-scrolling as one writes on the virtual paper might be a nice touch. Once again, send me that Linuxed-up Zaurus you don't really need and I'll get right to work on it ;-)
I'm just wondering who's pantleg that thing rolled down? C'mon Rio, you can, and have, done better in the past. Back to the drawing board with you and your iTurd
</flame>
Geeze. One other iPod extra that they have unknowingly cloned. Some kids will get beat up over that thing too. Not so much because of theft but more over someone harrasing the owner of that thing for having a "fake-assed" iPod. Kids are mean like that. I hate kids. They're only usefull when sold to gypsies for beer money and computer parts ;-)
Oh fawkyah! All I can say is I'm expecting a #7 button in the center of my steering wheel of my soon to be aquired red GTI (remeber that promo? Gawddamn I still want that VW poster. My local VeeDub dealer has one in the service department. I smell a mission impossible comming on...). Or was it #5? Hmmmm, good excuse to get the DVD archive of all those old Speedracer shows! Science is a bitch and I, hers ;-) I'll be Trixy's beeyotch any day :-D (Please, no pr0n linx...)
- Dr PooFinger
N'way, my point being that by the time some of those new handsets make it to market here many consumers may just be starting to forget about Nokia. Credit where it's due though, T-mobile got the 6600 out fairly fast. But then they're not an American (or CDMA) carier either. Just my $0.02
In order to stop the nucience of camcorders in theaters I reccomend body cavity searches at the door and don't stop until you reach the backs of their teeth! Those seen walking into the theater yapping away on a cellphone and/or with small screaming children in tow are some of the most likely suspects.
I also have a few restaraunts, a Trader Joes, my local watering hole, two good, independant (NOT starfucks house of foam n' some junk and maybe a shot of expresso in there somewhere) coffee houses complete with free wifi, a good bike shop and at least one good computer parts place all within 3 miles (meaning very rideable) radius of me. So there, STFU! ;-) Admittedly though, my goddamned job requires that I drive all over SoCal visiting retail outlets to be abused by store managers and their snotty customers. Mix that in with all the traffic and I NEED all that riding area in my (miniscule) off time just to keep me from dropping dead in my tracks of a heart attack or something.
No, no, our, er, I mean the plan is much more nefarious than that. Just wait until you start getting spams with semacodes for teen pr0n sites! Oh, and warchalking is going to get interesting too. The PHBs will have no idea just what those funny little stickers with little pixelated boxes printed on them are festooning the outer walls and windows of their office buildings Muwahahahhaaaaa!
I drive a Dodge, you insensitive clod!
That is neat, fine and dandy and all but did you see the other pics on the site and the way that cat was getting off on that thing? WTF?!? So fluffy is in heat and backing herself up to the nanode with the CD drive in full on 99x self destruct spin mode... Ugh, nastay!
""
Enjoy!
- C
Ok, I'm forming the angry mob right now. The torches and pitchforks are on me but I need someone to bring a bag of feathers and a bucket of tar. SIEZE THE CRETIN! Who's with me?
Satellite on the road? Here ya go. I thought I had previously seen one that was autotracking and in a randome, much like the TV only versions which can be used while in motion and I've installed in the past. I couldn't find that link though. Pricey stuff. I'll stick with my GSM/GPRS phone, thankyou very much.
In such a system I'd say that one would, and should, put up their own domain, run their own small mail server(s) and even put up a shared web server and give everyone a little webspace to play with, run your own game servers, streaming servers, etc, basicly become a mini-ISP ala co-op. It all sounds pretty neat in theory at least. Get three or four neighborhood geeks together to run it, design it, teach other users, etc, have twenty or so users on it, could be kinda fun. Personaly, in an installation like that I'd want to build out the wireless network so well that anyone under it's coverage could roam about in it truly sans wires. In other words, using nothing more than the built-in antenna of their wifi device. My ulterior motive would be to have the ability to roam about my neighborhood using an iPaq or a Clie' UX50 as a wifi internet radio. Soma FM on the go! Muwahahaaaaaa!
Amazing! GW get's hotmail on this thing?
True dat, and what I reccomend to most folks is that they purchase their wireless as what fits their needs, budget and geographical coverage (meaning where do you travel and need coverage). Fortunately now days you can go to any carrier and try out their service for around 15 days no strings attached. If you cancel in that period and return everything you're only out your useage in that time frame usualy.
Here in SoCal Tmo works pretty good. As I know it, in your area it's VZW first (and even they are spotty), Sprint next, and GSM just blows in general. Wierd, I'd have figured that GSM would have been all over the Sili valley like fur on a weasel. Go figure.
I've been around cellular off and on since its conception and the games they all play are about the same. Don't believe the hype, take advantage of the programs they offer to new users (Trial periods and prepay) and find out what works best for your needs and go with that. I can attest to the fact that sometimes early deact fees are less expensive than riding out a contract but with the ubiquity of prepay and most having trial periods there's nearly no excuse for getting stuck in a contract. Oh, and from the inside, handsets do still cost a lot of money and if too many get given out to winey customers for free it does cost jobs to poorly paid techs. That due more in part to fat execs wanting to well, stay fat. 'Nough said
- C
DRAT! I had just about gotten rid of all my great-grandfather's supply of vintage snake oil he bequeathed to me! I was one more case of the worthless stuff and three more vials of Testors brand silver model airplane paint away from completing the perfect crime! CURSES I say!
Waaay back in the day there used to be a common little box one could purchase for around $300 if memory serves me right. It had nothing but optics in it and one would afix it to a super 8 projector and then their video camera to the other opening. I never played with such a thing but I remember them being fairly ubiquitous in the mid 70's to early 80's and I believe even Radio Shack carried them for awhile. It seems to me it wouldn't work too well with an analog video camera though due to the difference in framerates, 30 vs. 24, as was mentioned above. However, provided you could find such a thing, it might work well with a mini DV camera. Most can be set to different framerates, one of which happens to be 24fps. Actually, that's done on the software transposition side when compressing the footage for burning to VCD/DVD/MPEGs whatever. On mine I can play with a so called shutter speed which seems to do little more than adjust the scan rate. It's so one can compensate for such things as florecent lighting and CRTs. I have a Cannon ZR20 and the manual adjustment mode is varied by a wheel so YMMV on different cameras. Anyway, sounds like something you might stumble accrossed in a yardsale or even on ebay. Worth a shot if it's cheap enough.
Now, keeping all that in mind my next guess is that a CDMA version of it would make the ideal phone for Verizon and that their customer service reps would be more than happy to, um, install it for anyone. I see a Southpark episode Staring Mr. Garison taking form...
As for the J2ME side of things you can upload freely to most phones, develop freely and so on, for the most part. Nag screens while DLing unregistered apps are about the only thing I've encountered, no show-stopper there. I've had much success on the lowly LG 5350 with Sprint, although that particular phone still has little cable support. You can browse the file system on it with bitpim though. Um, one big problem I see with most CDMA phones is that they have no common AT command set as do their GSM counterparts. There's plenty of Googleable info out there on common AT command sets for GSM phones. This is important because beyond the usual modem stuff there are extentions that allow for changing data modes, phonebook transfers, getting into test modes - all sorts of fun. And because it's fairly standard on current GSM handsets and openly published you can focus more on tweaking the phone itself and not just figuring how to talk to it. I've yet to find anything like this for CDMA handsets, although I have my suspicions about the S/E T68i for the few lucky bastards that own them.
Oh, and for the record, for my personal use I have Tmo and a S/E t68i. I only use VZW for work and because they supply it. I canceled my personal service with them due in part to their deplorable billing practices and because $80/mo for unlimited data is just outa line. Credit where it's due though, they have one hell of a network. The Sprint Vision unlimited for $10 is sweet but my wife now has that phone and I just had to have bluetooth and a GSM phone to play with. The S/E was free, has excelent battery life and crappy reception. But hey, for free, it's a good start. Next month I should have me a Nokia 3650, chock full of Symbian cotton panty goodness and soon, Perl! Wheeeeee! Oh, yeh, Tmobile is $20/mo (on a voice plan, $30 without) for unlimited data with no NATing (yup, that's a real IP address there buddy!) and no port filtering/blocking. Basic WAP service is included in the voice plans if I'm not mistaken(80, 110, 25). As for GPS on GSM phones I really don't know much about that yet. I've not seen it on anything first hand myself.
As for the CDMA guys, I hope someday that they come out with some good phones (bluetooth, Kyocera palm thing that doesn't crash, decent battery life, get over the goddamned camera fetish already, ditch fucking BREW!) and realize that their poo does stink and that their data service is NOT worth $80/month. $40 I would pay, especialy for EV-DO when it gets widespread, but that's all I'd pay for their unlimited data. 'Nuff said.
My bad, couldn't resist...
Hmmmm, hard to say. Watching the big glass walls of the Goodyear tire shop near 1k yards away vibrating was fun but also having sis shoe away the other two cop cars and their angy ocupants was nice too. Anyway, it was a truly fun day. Evil abounded. Even my then badassed cop little sister had to crack a smile. Afterall, she did grow up with a geekster. She was into blowing things up, wiring wierd things together rebuilding old Chevy and Ford engines and whatnot and I sent her off with good enough geek training that I've only gotten emails from her that stated she fixed Mom's windoze quandry ;-) We were fortunate to have an airforce geek dad who was handy with many electronic tools, a computer and a few wrenches whilst we grew. I think we did well. Too bad she moved away to OR, I miss her. And no, I've never taken advantage of nepetism beyond that day. But boy, a big box of Mexican fireworks, her influence and tonight would be a good time ;-)
1st attempt: Whiped out iBook, pluged in my crapy little iRoq fm modulator, opened up iTunes and tried a Groove Salad 56k stream over GPRS curtesy of my BT S/E T68i. Kept rebuffering about every 30 seconds and was much too annoying. I then went to the 24k stream and voila! No more rebuffering but with sound quality barely better than AM it wasn't that much fun.
Then comes another brainstorm. Pulled over in the first available parking lot, whipped out my work lappy (Dell, winbloze, blah blah...) and it's verizon wireless aircard (I work for them and have an unlimited data account) and booted that up. I knew it would work well with 56k, tried it before. However, it's a bad idea to drive and mess with the radio. Hmmm, so, I picked my ad hoc wifi profile and let the Mac discover that. Now I had uninterupted 56k service. Sounds much better but still mono.
The reason I was so insistant on using the Mac as a player is because I have both Romeo and Salling Clicker installed on it and use my T|T3 Palm or t68i as a remote. I put together some scripts for Romeo some time ago that uses just the joystick on the phone as a control. Makes for good semi-hands free control (well, I can keep my eyes on the road at least). I also have a playlist on iTunes with shortcuts to the streams I listen to most. So, I can "tune" presets fast and easily.
Oh, one more bit of buffoonery. I tried using my phone as a modem on a 24k stream and also had Romeo running at the same time and that worked well. For GPRS service I have the Tmobile $30 all you can eat data. I use Tmobile as my personal data phone because I can't afford Verizon's ass-piracey price of $80/month for unlimited data. I get nearly as good throughput on tmobile in some areas and suspect that it will sustain a fatter stream.
I'm building a Linux box for my truck to do stuff like wifi sniffing, GPS nav, MP3 jukebox, fm tuner and all remotely controled from a dash mounted touch screen. ($700 for the damn screen is why I'm still in the building process ;-) That will have bluetooth on it so to use my phone for a data connect. I can tweak xmms to use a big buffer and hopefully get a good stream. I want to try cobling together some fancy scripting that can monitor wifi for open hotspots and that would jump between wifi and cellular automatically. That remains to be seen though...
As for being a little more on topic, I'm hoping to see some sort of two-way satellite data service come about for mobile use. Hopefully that would support streaming and it would be great for stuff like GPS nav where one could DL maps on demand, some sort of messaging (voice recognition/text to speech?) and hopefully it wouldn't be too latent for something like VOIP. I could go on for hours with this one...