The MOST TRIUMPHANT Vox

A few weeks ago, local tv station KCBS interviewed me about QIK.

The footage can be found here:
http://www.cbs2.com/video/?id=70193@kcbs.dayport.com

You can see me using my N82.  Funny thing happened that day.  I was supposed to meet them at 5PM at a nearby park.  On my way, I ran out of gas in a left turn lane.  Their news van pulled up behind me and called while I was waiting for AAA to help me out.

Under a rock
Originally uploaded by Dr Tran!

On July 4th at 2PM, nine inch nails updated their tour KML file for google earth.

Around 6PM, someone noticed something strange in the KML file. A question mark was placed in Burbank. The only info said "Under a Rock"

I was in the middle of barbeque and couldn't leave until 8PM. I drove to the location with help from my N82's Garmin application. I arrived around 9PM.

When I got there, I found the 2 rocks seen here. There was nothing under the one on the right. Under the left one, there was a lizard that freaked me out. I kept looking around, but it was no use, if something was there, it was gone.

I drove to the nearby park and watched the fireworks from the Rose Bowl. The show lasted about half an hour, so I went back to the rocks. I found an empty bank envelope and wrote down:

When I saw a coyote nearby, I left for my own safety.  I used Google Maps to find a Starbucks, since they have wifi there.  I got there and I turned on my N800 to participate in this thread at echoing the sound.  I got in contact with the guy who got the tickets. He got there maybe 10 minutes before I did.  When I came home, I posted the rest of my pictures here.

Monday 11:00 pm 6/23/08 Van Nuys, California
Originally uploaded by Dr Tran!

Last night I got portrait mode to work on my N800. I had tried to install it twice but never got it to work.

I finally got it to work, following the directions here:
http://www.internettablettalk.com/wiki/index.php?title=How_To:_Enable_screen_rotation_on_OS2008_/_N800

I was quite happy with myself until I woke up. I fired up Jaiku and found out Diablo was released.

I have more work to do today.

Overturned
Originally uploaded by Dr Tran!

Overturned big rig. South bound traffic was all the way to Nevada.

What I love about geotagging is that I know exactly where this happened.

The MOTO ZN5 is a 5MP camera phone with xenon flash.

There's a review at M-R here:
http://www.mobile-review.com/review/motorola-zn5-en.shtml

Things that jumped out:

• The camera UI seems WAY better than my N82's UI.  I love how the number keys have functionality 
• 500 mhz processor and dedicated optics processor: This means the camera loads really fast and images are processed faster.
• 32 MB or RAM.  No multitasking here.  Its not a smartphone, so don't expect any expansion.  This is also makes it a better camera phone.  If I have 5 or 6 apps running on my N82, it takes longer for the camera to load.
• RAW format.  Fucking awesome!  I would love for my N82 to have that option instead of compressed images.  I imagine the time wasted for processing the image for jpg compression would be no different than the time to write a large RAW image.
• Video quality sucks eggs.
• 3.5 mm jack makes it better than Sony Ericsson's C905.
• micro USB 2.0 makes it better than the N82

1. Nokia N82: smartphone OS and better video
2. MOTO ZN5: non proprietary ports, great camera UI
   
3. SE C905: 8MP camera, nice aestthetics, good UI
   

Hello my baby hello my honey..

20080619495

I recently flew home from Houston to Los Angeles.  I got myself a window seat.  I was pleased to find my seat had two windows.  Inspired by a post by Monadi at phone-rush, I wanted to try GPS in mid-flight for myself.

Before takeoff, I set the N82 to offline mode and then turned it off.  When the pilot started talking, I first turned on my N95.  It took a few minutes to get a GPS lock.  I couldn't move it around without losing the signal.

I turned the N82 on and it didn't take long for it to get a signal.  I was able to keep the N82 in my shirt pocket and maintain a signal lock.  I turned on the GPS data application and got this screenshot:

I first changed a few settings.  I set the units to imperial and the GPS filtering to low.  I then activated the Sportstracker. Here is a map of my position art:

As you can see, Sportstracker logged my journey from mid-Texas to Southern California.

There is a log of the journey with a few images at the sportstracker website:
http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/workoutdetail/index.do?id=236804

N82: camera and battery trials.

A while back, I went to watch wrestling in Burbank.  I’ve attended a lot of local wrestling shows and learned that sport mode does not work indoors. 

This is a picture using sport mode from September of last year:

As you can see, this picture is practically all black. 

Here’s an example of auto mode

The picture is still quite dark and very yellow.  The flash fired, but it didn’t help.  The ISO speed is 100 here.

I’ve found that using Landscape mode, Incandescent lighting, +0.5 exposure and high ISO settings gets accurate results.  Here’s an example with these settings:

I have those settings set up in the User defined scene mode.  These settings are helpful for capturing fast paced action, since there’s no time wasted on focus.  The problem with the user defined mode is that it takes three clicks to activate.  It would be really easier if the camera remembered the last settings used when closed.  Another great alternative would be to have keypad shortcuts.  Unlike the S60 Web browser, the number keys don’t do anything with the camera.  For now, the only way to keep these settings active is to leave the camera open and let it go to standby.  This leaves the lens unprotected and subject to dust.

This is a problem for me, since I love to sit in the front row.  Often the wrestlers will fly out of the ring and into the crowd.  When this happens, I usually close the lens protector.  It gets pretty annoying having to set up the settings each time I open the camera.

I shot over 100 photos that Sunday and by the end of the night, 3 hours of taking pictures, I still had 5 bars left on the N82.  This battery performance astounded me.  My N95 would only last about 90 minutes before hitting 1 bar of battery left.  The need for my Proporta mobile charger wasn’t needed any that night and made me very pleased.

There’s one thing the N95 has over the N82: left handed shooting.  With the N95, I could hold it in my left hand and easily make one handed shots.  With the N82, my left hand shakes due to the pressure required to press the capture button while maintaining a good grip.  I have, however, gotten the hang of one handed shooting with my right hand.  But this makes my wrist strap useless.

Over the past week, a lot of squawking has been made about N-Gage games being stuck to one handset.  People are apparently really upset that if you upgrade to a new phone, you lose your N-Gage licenses and have to buy the games all over again.

I just don't understand why everyone is so upset. 

Let's say games were not tied to one handset.  I could buy a game like Tetris and then share my login details with a friend. Or worse, I could post my login details on a message board and now hundreds of people are sharing the same game. 

Think about that from a business perspective.  Electronic Arts probably would have made $1000 from all those people buying Tetris.   Instead they'll make just $10.  There's no incentive to make more games if piracy like this will be easily rampant. 

Without more games, N-Gage dies.

If someone can afford to switch handsets every 6 months or so, how can they not afford another $30 or so for a few games? 

Maybe Nokia will want to consider a "Comes with Games" package.  They could add another $100 to the handset price and have it come with unlimited N-Gage licenses.  This could ease the pain of losing N-Gage licenses when switching phones all the time.

I could never get Sports Tracker working right on my N95.  I'd always run out of ram.  Since I'm trialling the black N82, with its 90mb of free ram, I can finally let loose with multitasking.

Yesterday I went on a walk to Radio Shack to buy an adapter.  I was able to have the music player running in the background while I turned on the Sports Tracker.  Taking pictures wasn't a problem.  Each picture I took came out great and neither the music player or Sports Tracker application crashed.  There was one problem though.  I forgot to charge up the N82 so I ran out of juice halfway on my walk.

When I came home, I plugged the N82 back in and uploaded my workout.  I had to search around a bit to figure out how to add pictures to the workout.  I found the instructions at Black Phoebe

My workout/photowalk can be found here

What I'd really like to see is a way to have an embeddable widget I could place here instead of just a link.  There are widgets for facebook and blogger and some other sites, but they show only your last workout.  I want to be able to share a specific workout.

I tried to upload the the kml file to google maps, but it wouldn't take it.  I tried a bunch of methods, but I couldn't get it to work.

Ideally, Sports Tracker and Share on Ovi would be working together with Nokia Maps to get a great united solution.  But I think we are a few years away from that.

Also,