I don’t recall how I found it, but the day after Black Friday I read that the product was on sale at 25% off, and I jumped at the chance to get one.  For $75 I had good insurance that I would have power at hand for the product’s lifetime if I was ever without a charger by just leaving it in my bag.  After using it for some time I’ve found that it carries enough power to juice me up 3 or 4 times before the device itself needs to be charged, which is probably about once a month.  Now that the product is back up to $99, and finding it to be a lifesaver, I can recommend that even at that price it is worth the cost.

Every product has its downsides.  If you have a case for your iPhone, you have to remove it each time.  Luckily I have the Contour Flick which slides off easily, but others with rubberized covers will not be so lucky.  I originally had an Incase rubber cover that I loved for its ability to stay in place when put on a surface , but which ripped from having to remove it so often for docking.  I love the Flick for its ability to let me dock without having to remove the whole case, but I’m now looking at the Griffin Clarifi for its little macro lens.  It remains to be seen whether this allows for easy docking.  I haven’t been able to find one in stores to get a good look at it, and haven’t found a review that covers this well. Easy removal for daily docking or use with the Mophie will be essential.

Another problem is the connector they chose on the outside of the unit.  I would have preferred an iPhone passthrough connection instead of the miniUSB port.  This means I need to have one of those USB to miniUSB pigtails with me when I have to charge it and cannot use another iPhone compatible device to both recharge the unit while using it with the iPhone while syncing.  Maybe that’s asking a lot, but it would make the device much more transparent while in a recharge crisis.  I’m not asking for it to fit in the dock, but compatibility with the sync cable would be the more flexible option.

The unit is also pretty bulky, but it’s the price to pay for having a battery large enough to juice you up a few times after being forgetful of the iPhone’s battery limitations.  If you love your iPhone as much as I do, you use it often and go through multiple daily charges, and need a companion like the Mophie Juicepack.

I use Twitter to watch human feeds, because you cannot follow too many people before being able to lose track of what is going on.  I believe the maximum number of personal connections someone can really truly follow is around 100.  Twitter allows some enhancement of this, but the number really stays the same before the stream appears to have a lot of noise.  Add the fact that most Twitter clients show profile pics, including on the Twitter web page itself, means that you can only show 5-8 tweets before needing to scroll up or down.  Following too many people involves a lot of clicking and scanning rather than interacting, especially if you follow any of the top/vocal accounts.  This quickly gets old and unmanageable.

I read about 330 feeds in my feed reader.  These are active feeds that in total generate over 1000 posts each day.  Much of this is professional and news notifications that I would have no other way of accessing without hitting all 330 sites to look for updates.  To wade through that many without some sort of organization would be madness.  My feed reader MonkeyChow provides that organization with feed groups so that I can read webstrips at one moment, quickly switch to Mini Cooper feeds, or view the whole stream.  Twitter does not provide any organization or filtering at all to the river of news - in its simplicity it provides nothing more than public or private replies.  Systems like FriendFeed can organize this into groups, and the ability to provide discussion around these is fantastic.  Although FriendFeed is my favorite way to deal with the aggregation of the various social networks, it is still not organized for scanning through hundreds of articles.  It is built for 2-way social interaction, and alerts or robot posts do not belong there.  My RSS reader does not provide the 2-way communication that Twitter provides, so those alerts belong in my feed reader.

My metric then for determining whether something goes into Twitter or the RSS reader is if it requires that 2-way communication.  Anyone using their Twitter account to post ads is not providing a 2-way communication, and thus it is worthless to me.   But someone posting updates and then actively discussing them provides a lot of value to me.  Robert Scoble makes an excellent point of this here.  Twitter is a phenomenal tool, but there are a lot of goofy tweet tools out there, especially some of these monetization schemes, that are trying to shoehorn services on top of Twitter that are just making it seem stupid.  Keep it simple.

Push notification - WHEN?!? We’re now two updates past when we were promised push notification.  In the 2.1 firmware it was even screwed up, so we know there are issues with the system.  What will it do to battery life when my IM client is always on?  From the few jailbroken apps that run in the background, we know this can reduce battery life, but with my power cable always with us, we’re prepared.

Better battery life - the next iPhone must improve battery life at the same time that it adds more always-on connectivity.  Solutions like the Mophie Juicepack have arrived, but they are pricey solutions.  The device needs to be more usable without having a charger a work, home, and in each vehicle.

Wireless sync.  We already have Bonjour sync through various applications.  It’s time for iTunes to do it to the PC and Mac host system.  And speaking of synchronization, when will we be able to sync notes.  How about tasks?!? The iPhone should be usable as a very basic PIM without resorting to the purchase of apps from the store.

The built-in PDF reader should support bookmarks and “jump to page”. This would make the iPhone much more usable as an eBook reader.  Currently I have to use Datacase, which is not always stable and ruins the reading experience with larger books.

Photo SMS - It seems this is really up to the carrier, and AT&T has yet to implement it.  Some of the foreign carriers are already working on this and we can only hope that AT&T will have something for us.  I can only imagine that this will be available as the next iPhone in August, causing a new round of upgrades.

Copy and Paste seem to be a much asked for feature, but I rarely find myself wishing for it during the day.  Instead, I feel this represents a basic issue of inter-application communication.  Currently Apple allows you to call other apps such as the Apple Store or the browser, but more is needed, especially once IM applications become more available.

Voice input for all apps as part of keyboard to prevent driving accidents.  Google has made good progress with this with the latest Google App for iPhone, but this needs to be built into the device the same way Google Maps was and further used throughout the system.

The next interation of the iPhone could be as little as a year away.  In that time we should see some further refinement of the interface.  Home screen interface - we need a way to arrange icons on multiple pages without scattering the icon all over; what we need is an orderable list view.  Password Keeper - Cookies don’t last forever, and it gets tiresome to enter passwords. Password keepers are the norm these days.  Some of the jailbroken apps are making major headway in these improvements.  I’ve seen one where swiping your finger across the top status bar will bring up a dashboard that lets you work with Preferences.  There are many times where the WiFi wigs out on me and I need to jump out of my application to fix it.  Jumping out of the application is an issue with the user interface, and these hackers have come up with an elegant solution.  It’s inconceivablt that Apple is unable to make these improvements, yet some hackers with a little free time area able to make it happen.

Today we’ll also be celebrating by trekking out to a local big chain retailer and setting up our tent in front of the store for an overnight stay to grab delicious consumer items.  This year’s selection is pretty yawn-inducing, but there are a few items we’re picking up for other people, so I’ll post pictures on Friday afternoon.

photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

The monthly magazine for Mini’s North American Motoring (NAM) Alliance in their latest issue has a nice article on Mini magnetic badge collecting.  Page 21 features the hood of my Mini Cooper with most of my badge collection across the hood, along with my custom order of American Flag badges.

In a few of the pages after that, you can see some of those flag badges in the collections of others I have traded with.  I even get a nice mention on page 23 for my badge tutorial.

As long as you are logged into your blog, you can click the link and the Press It! window for your blog will appear to let you post that title and link.

In the future I plan to make the number of blogs you can post to more flexible, but for now three seems like a nice number.  If you find yourself needing more, comment below and I’ll consider the priority of this feature.  The latest update can be found in the tarball directory and includes the previously mentioned twitter and iPhone support.  As always, it is available through SVN from https://monkeychow.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow by issuing the command

svn co https://monkeychow.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow

I started up the Xbox 360 and sure enough, there was an update.  It provides a much more streamlined way to get around the Xbox menus that frankly borrows a lot from the Wii by use of avatars.  These avatars, however, are cool, and look nothing like the Fisher-Price little people figures that Nintendo has offered.

The whole family spent the day customizing their avatars, even those with silver accounts can get in on the fun.

My gallery of photos from the dashboard can be found here.  You’ll see the picture utility that lets you pose your avatar to take their photo for use as your gamer picture.  A few thumbnails below to wet your appetite.

This was all certainly before I had recently decided to start using my Mac full time.  Upon loading new apps, and pictures from my camera onto the Mac I started to see much higher disk use.  I’m still only using 30% of the disk on the Mac Mini, but this was beyond the capability of that little keyfob with Time Machine.  Having a few servers running in the house with disk to spare, I decided to start backing up to an SMB share.  It turns out that this is as easy as typing

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

at the console and then using “Connect to server…” to add smb://servername to connect to a share.  The SMB share then appears in the Time Machine device list.

Next, since my SMB share is 300GB, I don’t want Time Machine to use all of that space up, so I set a quota by running the following while in a local directory, and then drag the resulting directory off to the SMB share using Finder.

hdiutil create -size $SIZE -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE
    -volname "Backup of $CLIENTNAME" $CLIENTNAME_$MAC_ADDRESS.sparsebundle

where $SIZE is something like 500m or 20g, $CLIENTNAME is the name of your system, and $MAC_ADDRESS is the MAC address of your system, as reported by “ifconfig -a”, with the colons or any other separator characters removed. The -resize option is available later in case I need to make it bigger. The key to this is keeping the computer name as seen in System Preferences -> Sharing as short as possible, preferably without spaces or other symbols.

While there are a massive number of photo apps in the iPhone app store, Shozu is the Swiss army knife of the bunch.  Simply put, this app allows you to upload photos to a large number of different sites: Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and so much more.

The ultimate note taking app, Evernote lets you clip pictures and text to their web based service to be viewed on your desktop or mobile systems.  As a bonus, it syncs to their site to offer an offline mode, which is especially useful for iPod Touch users.  For iPhone users, this means that your data is safe when you accidentally give your iPhone a swirly.

iPhoto is to be the best part of using the iPhone, or any other camera, with a Mac.  When you dock your iPhone, iPhoto immediately comes up and asks to import the photos.  Upon import, you can check a box to only show the photos that were last imported.  Then just highlight what you want, select File->Export, and upload them to Gallery2.  What could be easier?  In fact, it works this way when you connect an SD card with photos from a camera such as my Panasonic/Leica DMC-TZ1.  My gallery can be found at http://www.shokk.com/gallery2.  The iPhotoToGallery plugin for Gallery2 by Zach Wily is really fantastic.

Similar to the Gallery2 export, you can choose to push your photos to MobileMe to take advantage of their online storage, where you can share them with friends.  Click Share->MobileMe in iPhoto and you get a simple dialog where you can choose album and privacy settings.

The Griffin Clarifi is a unique product, designed to make the iPhone camera much more usable.  It’s a nice case that doubles as a macro lens for the iPhone, and the examples I’ve seen are nothing short of amazing.  For the same price as other iPhone hard cases, this is an easy choice.

To accommodate the drives we had to purchase a pair of carriers to replace the dummy covers on the drive slots.  First thing I noticed was that the carriers listed SAS and SATAII screw holes in the wrong positions.  After a momentary chill down my spine, I screwed the drives in and shoved the drives into the server with a little bit of force and everything fit.

Booting the system up, I noticed that the firmware was at 1.1.0 and gave a date of 2005.  This seemed odd for something that would need to work with these newer drives, but I gave it no thought.  Until I saw that the drives were not being recognized.  Bummer.  After reading a few forums I saw that some people had seen this and updating the firmware would fix it.  Luckily this server has another year of warranty left on it, so help was available.

I downloaded a BIOS update and the BMC update just in case.  The BMC was also pretty far behind, so it was worth doing that as well.  The server has no floppy drive.  A fully decked out server, and no one got the $20 floppy drive.  Well, in cases like this, I’ve used a BartPE disk with network support to mount a samba share off my file server.  The first disk I found was a couple of years old and didn’t have the necessary drivers.  So next I burned my own BartPE disk with the necessary Dell drivers and everything looked peachy.  Until I tried to run the 16-bit BIOS and BMC updaters that PE doesn’t support.  So I reached for another blank disk to make a generic DOS boot disk with the necessary updaters on it, when I noticed that I only had DVD-Rs left. The server has a CD drive, not a DVD drive.  OK, so lets go get some CD-Rs.  At 7pm on a Sunday, Staples has been closed for over an hour.

Things were conspiring against me, so I needed to take a new tack.  I discovered a spare USB keyfob that I had bought as a 3-pack for my two older kids on a back-to-school sale.  I found the HP USB Disk Storage utility and a Win98 boot files zip and quickly made a bootable flash drive loaded with the necessary files.  The server sees the flash drive as a hard drive and hitting F11 allows you to select it from the Boot menu.  In just a few minutes, I updated the server and could see the drives in the RAID controller.  I got a hold of the MegaRAID Manager software for Linux and used it to configure the drives from my CentOS 5 installation.  Right before bed, I started the fsck on the 1TB logical volume and when morning rolled around, I was greeted with a shiny new filesystem.

I think the lesson here is that if you are going to get a nice expensive system, spring for some of the cheap extras like the floppy or DVD drive.  No, you might not use it very often, but at the time you critically need it, it will save you some precious time.  At this moment I’m copying the VMs to the new partition so that I can free up that space on the main drive and start running more VMs.  I’m pretty lucky to have this system on hand, as it helps me train on systems that I might not be able to work with in the office.  It’s a great way to supplement one’s training, and if you think about it, not so expensive in the long run when you consider that you will be a better (and possibly better paid?) admin for it.