- Spam subject: “Your decent watch will upgrade your status.” You mean I won’t need my phone to update Facebook? AWESOME!
- WTF? Google C&Ds Android modder Cyanogen. Isn’t it supposed to be licensed open-source in the first place? The cease-and-desist order is about Google’s apps (Maps, Gmail, etc.) that are pre-installed, not about the operating system itself, but still, it feels like a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the license.
- Odd: it took 3 hours for my shoulder to get sore after the flu shot. Still, NOTHING compared to last year’s tetanus shot. Now THAT hurt!
- This XKCD comic reminds me of the “uranium-free pizza” joke from some scouting event way back when.
Category: Computers/Internet
Eyestrain
Yes! Realized eyestrain was a problem and finally got the PC set up on my original monitor. Bigger is nice, but more importantly, it’s NOT BLURRY! Still not sure how I went 1.5 months without fixing the refresh rate on the temporary monitor. Usually the flicker drives me *consciously* crazy.
Smartphone Radiation
Wow! Glad I didn’t move to a MyTouch! The G1 isn’t in the Top 10 Radiation-Emitting smartphones list, but it’s not exactly low either. The MyTouch, on the other hand, is #1.
Wingnet
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of disks on the freeway. Or a pigeon with a datacard.
[A] company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a “data card” strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data.
2024 (well, 2023) update: Yes, a Pigeon is Faster for Data Transfer than Gigabit Fiber Internet (via)
Popular TechTuber Jeff Geerling has delivered an updated take on the old chestnut about the relative merits of pigeon-based vs internet data transfers. With the proliferation of super-fast home connectivity like gigabit fiber, one might expect the carrier pigeon to be blown away in 2023. Spoiler alert: the pigeon with its high-capacity microSD cards won Geerling’s data transfer race by a significant margin. However, as you will learn later, the pigeon gets outpaced at distances over about 600 miles.
I’d been wondering whether bandwidth or SD card density had changed faster since then!
Ada Pong
Just realized the “busy” animation in the ada (desktop Twitter client) titlebar is actually a miniature game of Pong.
Hero, Headlines & Spam
- Just learned “Holding Out for a Hero” is cowritten by Jim Steinman. Explains why it keeps turning into “Good Girls Go to Heaven” in my head
- Writing for Twitter
- Spam vs SPAM. I suspect it’s way too late to close the barn door on this one. Kinda like “hacker.”
G1 Nearing Upgrade Limits?
I love my T-Mobile G1, but it’s no secret that the phone has way too little internal memory. Now Engadget reports that the limited memory could prevent the G1 from running future versions of the Android operating system.
You can add plenty of data storage (images, music, app data) by dropping in any size Micro-SD card (IIRC it came with 1 GB. I’m currently running it with an 8 GB card). But the phone system, all the apps, and the cache for updates all have to share the measly 256 MB internal storage. Android and Me breaks down the partition structure, and points out that the current system, Android 1.5 “Cupcake,” already fills 99.5% of that space. Since software usually gets bigger with each successive version, it’s been challenging for Google to keep the OS within that limit.
It seems like it would be easy to just move the update cache to the SD card and double the size of the system partition…except that it would require reformatting the phone. Doable, but risky.
Before we get too gloomy, T-Mobile has stated:
We plan to continue working with Google to introduce future software updates to the T-Mobile G1. Reports to the contrary are inaccurate.
Now, this may simply mean that they’ll continue issuing bugfix/security updates. Or it may mean that they’re working out ways to squeeze newer Android versions onto the phone.
Now, Some Perspective
Let’s face it: the G1 is a first-generation device. It’s right there in the name (Generation One). All of us who bought it are early adopters, and that carries a certain degree of risk. Just like all those people who paid, what, $600 for the first iPhone only to see the price drop heavily less than a year later.
Even so, with Cupcake, Android is already quite a capable OS. Whether the G1 hits the wall at Cupcake, Donut, Eclair or Flan, the phone won’t stop working just because it can’t get major updates. Whatever happens, it’ll still be usable for the duration of a 2-year contract (and presumably beyond).
I do worry about incompatible apps, but that’ll start happening anyway as more devices with varying hardware specs appear on the market.
Really, though: this is the first phone I’ve ever owned that had software updates of any substance. I think one of the two RAZR variants had a bugfix release that came out before I even bought the phone, but that’s it. The fact that my G1 is actually a better phone now than when I bought it is pretty damn cool!