Vibram fivefingers

I just recived my vibram fivefingers shoes and wore them on my usual 1
mile walk. It's mostly gravel road and they did a great job. I felt
the stones but could walk through easily. I can't wait to try them in
desolation wilderness.

Metakine - Fairmount

Fairmount is just what I've been looking for since Mac the Ripper started misbeahving on some disks. I'll have to see how well this works with doing the conversion in handbrake.

iPhone as Flashdrive without Jailbreak

MyPodApps has as cool little program that lets you write files to the digital camera interface presented by the iPhone. This will work quite nicely until Apple exposes the USB Mass Storage interface for the device. The software is free for now, and hopefully will remain that way.

From their site:
"iPhone browser for Mac: iPhone Explorer. The software lets you browse your iPhone as if it were a normal USB flash drive and you can use the very easy drag and drop methods to add or remove files and folders from the iPhone."

Sipura 3102 simple dial plan to use PSTN as default

So I have had a Linksys Sipura 3102 sitting in my cabinet for a few months waiting for a way to use it. Here's a Sipura 3102 simple dial plan that defaults to the PSTN and dials SIP numbers with #9:

(x.<:@gw0>|<#9,:>x.)

That plan turned out to be not exactly reliable, though very short. I learned a little more about the dial plan from the SPA 3102 manual and modified the default string in the device. I had to put in settings for gw1 under the Line 1 settings. It's also key that you enable both PSTN and Line 1 for any of this to work. With the following dial plan I can call VoIP numbers by prefixing them with #. All other calls go though by PSTN line for now.

I figure that I can investigate routing other calls to a VoIP provider (like long distance) and scale back my AT&T service, once I have a better idea of the cost savings. I may also trim some services off of my AT&T local plan to pull that cost down.

The current dial plan is:

(*xx|<#,:>x.|[3469]11<:@gw0>|[2-9]xxxxxx<:@gw0>|1xxx[2-9]xxxxxxS0<:@gw0>|xxxxxxxxxxxx.<:@gw0>)

Stanford CS193P - Cocoa Programming | Announcements

I know that this class is probably old news, but I am going to try and work my way through this and the lectures to see if I can finally start developing something useful for the iPhone. it looks like everything is available for free online and from iTunes U.

CS193P - Cocoa Programming | Announcements

Anti-Pre support note

Here's the preparation for disabling the iTunes sync with the Palm Pre... how long until iTunes 8.2.x makes it fail?

iTunes: About unsupported third-party digital media players

Anonymous Pro - Coding Font

Mark Simonson has released a great freeware font, that build on his earlier work with the Anonymous font. I have installed this on my ubuntu linux box and find that it works great as a terminal font. I'll have to try it out on the Mac at home now.

Anonymous Pro

Just drop it into ~/.fonts and go.

iPhone Forensics: Performing a Live Recovery Over USB

Jonathan Zdziarski apparently has a new iphone forensic acquisition technique that operates over USB instead of the previous network based acquisitions that are documented in his book. I missed the live webcast but the video replay is available now. Webcast - iPhone Forensics: Performing a Live Recovery Over USB

This is a great discussion on using a custom agent on the phone to do an acquisition over the wire. This should be much faster than acquiring over the wireless network. He seems to be getting about 3.7 MB/s.

He uses Pwnage to build the firmware bundle modifies that bundle to restore the firmware without touching the user data partition in stage 1. This is restored to the phone, and then he builds another bundle that installs and runs a special listener (only 10K) in stage 2 instead of the SSH agent. The small agent replaces dd and netcat for pulling the live raw disk. It connects on the echo port (TCP 7) through usbmuxd. This all works for iPhone 3G with 2.2.1 and below, and should work on new versions 3.0 once pwnage is updated. It will be interesting to see if this works in any way on the iPhone 3GS.

The low level communication handled through usbmuxd with usbmux-proxy and he has his own client to recover the disk. He uses scalpel to carve out the useful data in deleted space.

I'd like to see if there is any way to add aquistion of /dev/kmem, such as outlined in Mac OS X Internals by Amit Singh.

Harvesting Pine Nuts from my yard (Pinus sabiniana)

Pinus sabiniana Dougl:

"Seeds of Digger pine have considerable nutritional value. Their protein and fat contents are similar to those of Pinus pinea (a pine of the Mediterranean region whose seeds are harvested for the table), and are equal or superior to those of other commercial species (4). Although Digger pine seeds are not raised commercially, they once were an important supplement to the diet of California valley Indians (23,30)."

"Cones may open slowly so that dispersal, beginning in October, sometimes extends into winter. Although open, cones may contain moderate numbers of seeds as late as February (6,16,30)."

And Permaculture Plants has a good stat on their nutritious value (30% protein, 60% fat, 9% carbs).

Now to wait until late summer when they become ripe. I think that they traditionally roasted the cones to help them open.

Apple’s iPhone 3.0 - In App Payments follow iTunes models

Narendra Rocherolle has a good article up on GigaOM about how
Apple’s iPhone 3.0 Rings in the Emerging Paid Web

I think that there are many good points in the article, but I disagree with the first premise: Apple should create it's own virtual currency. I can understand how there may be some desire to emulate WoW, SecondLife, or even XBox Live with their currencies or points, but I think that the complexity for end users might make people think twice about comitting their money. I think that Apple has done very well in using local currency with iTunes, and should not mess with something that works.

I like the idea that my in game purchase is transacted against my payment account. If I want "points" I can buy an iTunes gift card and put that in as credit on my account.

Nike+ and EasyCare Gloves

While I am waiting for my new iPhone 3GS to be delivered, I started thinking about a little hack that would make use of the Nike+ receiver that is built into the new iPhone.

I am riding my horses in the EasyCare Gloves these days and have these cool colored PowerStraps. Anna like purple for hers of course.

The presence of this springy rubber strap secured to the front of the boot got me thinking that this would be a great place to mount the accelerometer and pedometer that is the Nike+ Sensor device.

On Amazon there are some products for mounting these to a non-nike pair of shoes. There are a few instructables about building your own. I like this sensor pouch and this plastic carrier.

I picked up one of the sensors with some store credit that I had at Fry's, and I am going to see if I can make a little carrier that mates to a powerstrap and won't get too broken on a trail ride.

Researching this a little more, I found the FCC information on the device (FCC ID BCGA1193) that indicates it transmits on 2425 MHz and has the exact measurements (34.7mm L x 24.4mm W x 8.0mm H). I also found a great description of how the device works at HowStuffWorks web site.

Core Location Alert API Proposal for iPhone SDK

Brady Forrest has a write up on how apple is missing a big chance by not allowing background apps because of the need for GPS updates. I think that he is right about Apple missing a chance, but I believe that the answer is not for Apple to allow background apps, but rather to create a new API for location alerting. I believe that this could be done in a way that is related to push notifications.

I'd suggest that applications might be able to register with a location handler and ask to be activated based on certain location events. I believe that this could be an extension of the core location services which are already exposed. I'd like to be able to ask the system to activate based on a least 3 kinds of events:

• Proximity to a point (given by coordinates and proximity)
  
• Distance traveled
• Change in compass bearing (with a threshold)

I understand that polling the GPS radio does drain the battery, as will polling the magnetometer, but I would trust apple to put in some smart limits on the update frequency to preseve battery. Developers would have to deal with a delay, and a lack of accuracy, but I'd certainly prefer that to users complaing about a dead battery because of my app. Perhaps users could set a polling frequency under the Settings for Location Services similarly to how mail server polling is configured (options like Off, 15, 30 or 60 minutes).

This for example might allow an app developer like TomTom to alert a driver about an upcoming turn, even if the application was not active. I have quite a few ideas about good ways to use this capability and would love for Apple to make this available.