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Road Runner getting more speed

I love reading that even more speed will be coming my way soon…

Road Runner said Tuesday that it will boost the download speed for its basic subscribers, who pay $45 a month, from 3mbps to 5mbps. Its premium customers, who pay $84.95 a month, will get a boost from 6mbps to 8mbps.

The move comes more than a year after Road Runner’s previous speed bump from 2mbps to 3mbps for its basic subscribers. [CNET News.com

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T-Mobile’s Pain

Nice thought piece by Jesse Kopelman at The Broadband daily on what T-Mobile might consider doing now that they are officially a sitant last in the major wireless game. Hard to argue the logic here… just a matter of how much pride needs to be swallowed in order to move on some of the ideas he suggests.

Unlike Sprint PCS, their daddy doesn’t need them to succeed (and may feel like disowning them about now). Unlike Nextel, they don’t have the high-margin customers everyone lusts for nor do they have the management team that routinely makes fools out of the industry, pundits, and FCC. Most importantly, Unlike Cingular and Verizon Wireless they don’t have 40 million customers paying to upgrade their network. To make matters worse, their data network is circa 2001 and they are a long way from being able to do any Verizon-like bragging about the quality of their voice network. [The Broadband Daily]

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The Long Tail

In case you missed reading The Long Tail either in Wired or online, you can now download a PDF thanks to ChangeThis. It’s a great read and now in a well structured format for either screen or printing.

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StickyBrain 3

Chronos has updated StickyBrain and seems totally worth checking out. You can collect and manage notes from all over your system and SYNC to either your Palm or iPod. You can also link to your Address Book as well as Mail. I’ve just downloaded it and will be moving some stuff I’ve been collecting in both Omni Outliner and NoteTaker to see how I like it.

UPDATE — Stickybrain is nice, but only allows for flat or rich based text. No outlining. This is a bummer since I was hopeful with the sync option. For now, I’ll probably keep going with Omni Outliner and NoteTaker (still deciding which will be my primary tool) and Life Balance for integration with my GTD system. The nice thing about LB is that you get the same full file on both your Palm and desktop.

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“To Tivo” is Bad?

I don’t understand why Tivo would protest this, other than to generate publicity for themselves which, might very well be the point. Seems that to become part of the language is a great thing for branding … see Kleenex for Tissues and Coke for cola as examples.

However, the company has recently stepped up efforts to police just how its trademark is used in a sentence. Using TiVo as a verb, for instance – as in “to TiVo” or “I TiVoed ‘The Apprentice’ last night” – is forbidden.

The company has begun sending letters to news organizations whenever it sees the term misused. “We’ve gotten more aggressive,” said Kathryn Kelly, a TiVo spokeswoman. “It’s a much more talked-about subject now.”

Running a close second among uses the company frowns on is “TiVo-like.”

“We do aggressively protect our trademark,” Ms. Kelly said, adding that with competing digital video recorders entering the market, TiVo wants to keep its name from going the way of Xerox or Kleenex. [New York Times]

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PalmSource’s Paradigm Shift

Andrew wrote a great post today on the PalmSource move to linux. A recommended read for all. We’ve talked about the announcement the past few days and I have to say I agree with this commentary. PalmSource will certainly gain from the move – opening doors that would have previously remained closed. Time will tell for sure, but it look like the future will be an exciting one!

Without a doubt, one of the most important benefits of PalmSource’s decision to put the PalmOS on top of a Linux kernel is that it will have removed one of the single largest barriers to adoption of its software and its quest to see the PalmOS adopted by the widest number of licensees to power an even wider array of handheld devices. The barrier in question is the complete paranoia on the part of many manufacturers to ‘lock’ themselves to a proprietary operating system. By choosing Linux, a ‘free’ open source operating system, there is no doubt that PalmSource’s appeal will increase significantly among existing and prospective licensees particularly since many of them have already invested and experimented with Linux powered devices. [Treonauts]

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Archive and Re-install

This weekend I took the plunge and decided it was time to reinstall the system on my Powerbook. I had been suffering from Kernal panics for a while but hoping magically and pathetically it would go away with some system cleansing. I was wrong. Every few days or even sooner I’d be greeted by a hard freeze.

Archive and Re-install turned out to be an amazing option! My system retained ALL my personal settings and I only had to resinstall Stuffit Deluxe and The Missing Sync – both which had saved and installed themselves at the system level. I did have to re-download all the updates from Apple since 10.3 had been released, but that was pretty easy. I am happy to report no issues since and my computer is actually running beautifully again!

The only clue I have as to what caused my issue is uControl — a really nice way to utilize the trackpad as a scrolling device. When I tried to re-install it I was told it was not supported by my system. Would have been nice of course if it had deactivated itself previously instead of (possibly) causing my issue. I am using Sidetrack as a replacement but still getting used to it.

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Nokia 6630: light on RAM?

Russs Beattie discovers the new Nokia 6630 has a wacky limited and proprietary memory scheme… Nothing like a new standard to tweak the geek in you.

Another thing, I was completely surprised that I couldn’t take my 512MB RS-MMC out of my 7610 (that Nokia also leant me) and pop it into my 6630. I was warned, but I didn’t believe it until I tried it. Yep, Nokia’s changed memory standards again and are now using a Dual Voltage Reduced Size Multimedia Card (DVRS-MMC). Oh. My. God. And people call the Memory Stick proprietary? You can’t even *buy* this memory!!!! Arrrgh. So I’m stuck with the 64MB of RAM that came with the phone, and even though I can hot-swap it out, I have nothing to swap it with. (Can you see the tears welling?)

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The Broadcast flag striking your DVR soon…

Get ready for the suck. It’s no secret that the Broadcast flag is coming and that your cable DVR (probably Sat) and Tivo will all quietly start erasing things you thought you had indefinitely saved for later…

Time-Warner is arm-twisting cable companies into agreeing to a scheme to automagically erase your saved episodes of Six Feet Under from your cable-company-provided PVR after a month or so. This is the danger of sucking up to the studios in the first place: they say, “Suuuure, we’ll ‘let’ you build a PVR that will tape the shows you cablecast to your customers, but that permission is contingent on our ongoing goodwill. So if in the future we decide, for example, that your PVR can’t record certain shows, or can’t skip certain commercials, or can’t store certain recordings for more than a few days, you’d better implement it. Or else. So what if your customers can’t figure out why their PVRs don’t work properly? That’s your problem, pal.” [Boing Boing]

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Gizmodo on the Treo 650

I was reading the Gizmodo review of the Treo 650 and had a few thoughts to add…First the bits of interest:

PalmOS advocates often tout the vast library of PalmOS applications available for the platform — I’ve made that same observation myself — but many of the applications are designed for older Palms with lower-resolution screens with pen interfaces, making their use on the Treo frustrating. Of the two or three IRC applications I’ve used, none of them feel right for the Treo, forcing me to use the touchscreen when I should be able to control everything through the keyboard. I’d trade 10,000 generic PalmOS applications for 100 designed for the Treo alone.

And the lack of multi-tasking — come on, it’s almost 2005. Why can’t I have an IRC window, an AIM window, and a web browser open and still make a call? It’s not a hardware limitation, it’s a limitation of decrepit operating system extended past its prime. [Gizmodo]

So here’s the deal Lev. I agree there should absolutely be applications that just run super well on the Treo. The more Iv’e used mine, the more I wonder why many applications that say they are compatible even bother. Whether it’s Agendus 9 simply requiring more power than the device can muster, or just a hack to get the 5-way to sort of work in many others. I think th eissue is that the Treo, while a huge component of PalmOne’s current sales is just a new device in an old line and there is not enough money for many small developers to create specific apps. There are quite a few great applications designed just for Treo though. I’d recommend you check out MyTreo.net, Treocentral and of course Treonauts for mentions. Both Treocentral and MyTreo have software sections specific to Treo and even have “homes” for the developers.

As far as multi-tasking goes… it may not be true multitasking as in XP or OSX, but I’ve found it quite possible to run a music player (Pocket Tunes Deluxe), my email (ChatterEmail) with multiple (AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo) IM services and even an eBook all at the same time. Do you really want windows floating around, or would you rather just more easily switch between processes? I can use the volume buttons to do that thanks to Butler, which lets me choose to use the Volume buttons as volume, or to jump back and forth between my previously run apps. Pocket Tunes Deluxe has a great feature which lets me press a key to pull it up from the background to advance, pause or even just open it all the way up. ChatterEmail is capable of popping up when new messages arrive and can even let you reply or delete without leaving the current app.

Out of the box may not suit you but the Treo platform is quite capable.

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The Potential of SIP

There’s a great new post by Chris Holland at The Broadband Daily on the potential of SIP or Session Initiation Protocol. SIP is currently being used by some VOIP providers and can provide a path for IM, Voice and Video as well as file transfer. The beauty is that it’s realtime unlike email. However just like email, it’s quite easy to use.

A SIP address looks just like an e-mail address. It uniquely identifies an Internet user, and encapsulates all information needed to attempt to get in real-time touch with them.

The ramifications of this protocol are far reaching.

Until SIP came along, it was only possible to easily get in real-time touch with somebody within closed, proprietary ecosystems: the traditional telephone system, ICQ, AOL Instant Messaging, Yahoo Instant Messaging, MSN Instant Messaging, Skype, CU Seeme, to name a very few. Each one possesses its own separate concept of a user%u2019s identity and proprietary communications protocols. Users of those closed systems can only communicate with other users of the same system. As a result, entering the real-time communications field was only restricted to a small resourceful elite.

Thanks to open standards and protocols such as DNS, SIP, and SRV records, just about anybody can now become a provider of real-time communications while enabling their members to be globally reachable on the Internet.

SIP allows real-time communications to follow the same adoption path as e-mail. [Broadband Daily]

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Too Many Routers

I currently have 3 routers running here and it’s causing some issues…

My current setup looks like this:

  • ATT CallVantage D-Link Router
  • Linksys Router (used to be my only one)
  • Vonage Linksys Router
  • Linksys Switch
  • Apple Airport Extreme

I only have two computers but I have quite a few devices connected on the network as you might imagine. The issues I am having are probably not too common and I am sure neither is my setup for that matter but perhaps someone reading has some insight.

I need to open some ports on the DLink in order to forward certain things to my desktop computer. I’d like to stream some music out to myself for example, which used to work just fine when I only had the Linksys, but with the additional equipment things are considerably more complicated. My main linksys uses 192.168.1.X addressing but the 2 VOIP routers have 192.168.15.X ranges. All my stuff can connect out to world except for the Vonage router. Since the Vonage box comes after the ATT, it loses and has yet to connect (this is the least of my priorities).

I can’t figure out how to correctly alter the settings on the D-Link since it has such a different way of management than the more familiar UI of the Linksys. The other annoying part is if you mess with something you not only have to reboot the damn thing, but you also take the chance that your phone service won’t work. I’ve already had the pleasure of reseting both my main Linksys and D-Link to default states in order to start my testing again… My addressing is DHCP with static IP numbers for the computers which works and will need to remain that way so external calls can properly route to the right place.

Bueller? Anyone?

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To stick with TMO or not…

I like T-Mobile and have been very happy with the service as well as their policies on usage… but the latest news from Reuters states that they will not be heading to 3G for at least 2 years and that EDGE will begin to rollout next year as a holdover. My Treo 650 will (hopefully) arrive soon after the new year, once the Sprint exclusive ends and will be capable of EDGE, but as of this moment only ATT / Cingular offers such a speed. I won’t have to worry about faster than that for at least 6-12 months since no devices capable of such speeds have caught my eye… yet.

Unlimited data plans range from $50-80 depending on who you ask (or what carrier you were with previously) and I think it’s actually still getting sorted out in the new Cingular. My $20 unlimited GPRS is nice, but will be slower than I’ll be capable of — and who really wants that right? EDGE will be a considerable boost, but will come at a price, literally. I’m sure T-Mobile will raise their price for the increase once it arrives and I would think NYC would be an early city as it has been for the other majors as they rolled out new speeds. Even if I dropped my TMO WiFi, I’d still be paying quite a bit more just for data…

I don’t like playing the waiting game when there are some unknowns.

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Skype for Mac OS X updated

8.12.2004 Skype for Mac OS X Beta 0.12.0.8

  • feature: Audio preferences: set sound devices for input and output
  • feature: Skype will automatically set your online status to “Away” and “Not Available” after your Mac has been idle for specified number of minutes
  • feature: rendezvous browser for finding local skypers
  • feature: Skype Help command of Help menu now shows help page in WWW browser (earlier it just issued an alert) [Skype]

Quite a few other bug fixes and changes as well…