justinjas

"Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded..."

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 22:34:02 -0400

“Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.”

- Margaret Mead

iPad Release Day Apps

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 23:30:27 -0400

"Loretta Bell: How’d you sleep? Ed Tom Bell: I don’t know. Had dreams. Loretta Bell: Well..."

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:29:24 -0500

“Loretta Bell: How’d you sleep?
Ed Tom Bell: I don’t know. Had dreams.
Loretta Bell: Well you got time for ‘em now. Anythin’ interesting?
Ed Tom Bell: They always is to the party concerned.
Loretta Bell: Ed Tom, I’ll be polite.
Ed Tom Bell: Alright then. Two of ‘em. Both had my father in ‘em . It’s peculiar. I’m older now then he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he’s the younger man. Anyway, first one I don’t remember too well but it was about meeting him in town somewhere, he’s gonna give me some money. I think I lost it. The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin’ through the mountains of a night. Goin’ through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by. He just rode on past… and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. ‘Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”

- Final scene from No Country for Old Men

3 Reasons I decided to free my iPhone

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:01:42 -0500

1) Google Voice

In one of the many App Store blunders Apple decided to pull a previously accepted app, GV Mobile. What was the infraction this app committed? It allowed you to use Google Voice on your iPhone. The official reason Apple gave developer Sean Kovacs was that “it duplicating features that the iPhone comes with (Dialer, SMS, etc)”. Of course this is inconsistent since there are a number of voice over IP and SMS apps still in the App Store. Richard decided to release his app on Cydia for jailbroken iPhones so now that is the only way to have a native iPhone Google Voice app.

2) A lock screen that doesn’t suck

The iPhone has had the same lock screen for the last 3 years. It shows you a picture and a “slide to unlock” control at the bottom. If you received a text message and had a couple missed calls all you’ll see is the last thing that happened as an ugly popup display. If there is any part of the iPhone UI that needs to be redone it’s this lock screen. Fortunately for jailbroken iPhones there are many apps that fix this glaring problem. I installed LockInfo which is customizable with multiple plugins to show whatever information you want to see. Now I get notifications, missed calls, weather, calendar items, and even the last 20 tweets from my twitter feed.

3) Mobile hotspot

I had looked into Sprint’s mobile hotspot offering recently. Their network really wasn’t worth it especially at $60 a month. I’m already paying $30 for data and over paying for my voice plan as I throw away most of my 450 minutes a month. While I understand why Apple and AT&T wouldn’t allow a mobile hotspot feature on the iPhone it’s sad to see other phones like the Palm Pre offer this functionality. The real kicker is when I buy an iPad in month they expect me to pay $30 more for the same 3G AT&T network. To me this is excessive so I installed the MyWi iPhone app. It allows me to create a wifi network from my phone that I can connect my laptop or future iPad to. It also enabled the USB and Bluetooth tethering options that Apple turned off after the 3.0 software release.

Sprint 4G in Cary / Raleigh, NC

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:41:00 -0500

Yesterday I heard about a new device being offered by Sprint, the Overdrive Mobile Hotspot. It allows up to 5 devices to connect via WiFi to Sprint’s 4G network. Looking at Sprint’s website (http://now.sprint.com/nownetwork/4G/) and marketing material they advertise 4G speeds average 3-6 Mbps compared to 3G speeds of 600 kbps - 1.7 Mbps. This sounds great, since my home is just in the coverage area they show online.

I decided to go pick one up today and try it out. If it worked I could replace my home roadrunner service with it and have high speed internet for my laptop and future iPad anywhere I went. When I picked it up it seemed pretty good, I was able to connect my iPhone on it and make some voip calls, the device showed 4 bars of 4G and I assumed I was getting the advertised speeds.

Once I got home though I realized this wouldn’t work for me. My house is right on the edge of their coverage so I wasn’t surprised that I barely got a 4G signal. The speeds were bad though. Pings in the thousands and downloads timing out. Obviously this wouldn’t work for me so I decided to return it.

Instead of just driving straight back I decided to fire up my iPhone and take some speed tests measurements around Cary and Raleigh. To my surprise the speeds were pretty bad all over the triangle. I never saw a download or upload go over 1 Mbps and pings bounced between 300 and 4000 ms. At one point I tried 3G using the overdrive and got higher speeds (1.3 Mbps) than 4G and using the 3G on my iPhone saw the fastest speeds all day (1.7 Mbps).

In general I was very disappointed with Sprint and its 4G network. I’ve heard it’s better in other areas but I hadn’t seen any information from North Carolina. If this information was available online I wouldn’t have even bothered with trying the device.

Google Maps (hover over points to see results): 4g-Cary-Raleigh-NC.html

Raw speedtest.net results: SpeedTestExport_20100227.csv

"Try to imagine Pegasus mating with a unicorn and the creature that they birth. I somehow tame it and..."

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:30:48 -0500

“Try to imagine Pegasus mating with a unicorn and the creature that they birth. I somehow tame it and ride it into the sky in the clouds and sunshine and rainbows. That’s what it feels like.”

- Graham Watanabe describing his 2010 Olympic experience

Mobile Buzz on the Desktop

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 11:32:00 -0500

I started using Google Buzz but wanted to simulate the small window I get with Tweetie. I found you can have Safari simulate an iPhone browser with the right settings. Since I use Chrome this doesn’t effect my regular browsing. Here’s how you enable it.

Go into Safari and click on Safari->Preferences from the menu bar.

In preferences goto the Advance tab and check the box at the bottom labeled “Show Develop in menu bar”.

Now click Develop->User Agent->Mobile Safari… from the menu bar.

After this when you goto buzz.google.com in Safari it will pull up the mobile version which makes for a nice minimal version of buzz fo your desktop.

My new MacBook cover, the BookBook.

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:40:00 -0500

My new MacBook cover, the BookBook.

My shaving setup. Love the simplicity of the double-edge safety...

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 13:02:00 -0500

My shaving setup. Love the simplicity of the double-edge safety razor and the process of whipping up shaving cream with a badger hair brush.

"All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite..."

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 02:53:00 -0500

“All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

- Conan O’Brien on his final show.

"Chuck Norris was on Celebrity Jeopordy once and because of his presence Alex Trebek’s mustache..."

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:11:00 -0500

“Chuck Norris was on Celebrity Jeopordy once and because of his presence Alex Trebek’s mustache fell off. It has never been able to grow back.”

- slashchuckbot

I love the simplicity of the French press compared to espresso...

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:30:00 -0500

I love the simplicity of the French press compared to espresso or drip coffee. Something about just boiling water and letting it steep feels right to me.

Back on tumblr

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:42:00 -0500

I’m back on tumblr now. For a month or two I moved the site to github pages. I liked the concept of my entire site being stored in a git repository and backed up on my laptop and iMac. The problem is that it makes it 100x less accessible and I never posted anything. This isn’t an issue with git but a testament to how easy tumblr makes it to post.

Plus tumblr now has a ridiculous amount of easy to swap out templates with their theme garden. Also unlike most web services (github pages, google app engine) tumblr will actually give you an IP you can use for your domain. This lets me put an A record on justinjas.com instead of being forced to use a subdomain with a CNAME record like www.justinjas.com. Tumblr FTW.

This is why google wave is cool

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:44:00 -0500

This is why google wave is cool

Ummmm, what the?

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:02:31 -0500

Ummmm, what the?

Contacts & calendar syncing for free

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 01:24:00 -0500

Contacts & calendar syncing for free:

UPDATE: ignore all this, now google offers direct exchange service for the iPhone (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/calendar-and-contact-syncing-for-iphone.html)

I recently considered getting MobileMe because there was one part of my digital life I just couldn’t quite keep in sync. I had email syncing using IMAP on my various devices, file/photo album syncing using Dropbox, and even note syncing with Evernote. But one thing that always bugged me was I could never quite keep my contacts and calendars in sync. I had some dates in iCal on my work laptop, some in my phone, and some on google. For contacts I pretty much just kept them all in my iPhone and gave up trying to keep them anywhere else.

For me having to plug my phone into my computer and sync iTunes is a poor excuse for syncing. Syncing data should happen automatically, you shouldn’t have to think about it. MobileMe would have gotten me this, but considering the bad reviews and high price tag I couldn’t see getting it. Plus I had Dropbox already which solved my file and photo needs, so I didn’t really care about that functionality.

Today I discovered a perfect way to keep my calendars and contacts in sync and it comes in the form or Microsoft Exchange and a free service called Nuevasync. Basically Nuevasync hooks up your Google contacts and calendars with their exchange server. So you sign up for an account, link it to your google account (or Plaxo if you choose) and have a fully functional exchange link to your data. This makes hooking up your iPhone a breeze since the iPhone now supports exchange servers. Everything works like it should, changes made on the web app show up on the phone and vice versa.

So now that the iPhone and web are talking together how about my work laptop, home laptop, and desktop? This was even easier and I found I didn’t have to install any extra software which I really liked. Apple’s address book app has supported syncing to Google for awhile now so it was easy to get going. In the past Google calendar was always a pain to try and sync with remote software. 2 way syncing wouldn’t work without some crazy daemon that had to run on your computer and you were stuck in read only land. Now thats not the case as they started offering CalDAV support for 2 way syncing and it works perfectly in iCal.

So now I have full syncing between my phone, laptop, desktop, and web app access, which for me is the holy grail of data portability. Hope this helps anyone struggling to setup the same thing.

I took these photos from my Ireland trip and made them black and...

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:30:00 -0500

I took these photos from my Ireland trip and made them black and white and boosted the contrast a little. They are from Inch Beach in the afternoon just as the days fog was rolling over the mountains. Makes a good desktop background. Feel free to download and use.

Ireland Beach B&W 1

Ireland Beach B&W 2

Amazon CloudFront

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:26:00 -0500

Amazon CloudFront:

Well that wasn’t hard. I’m now using amazon’s cloudfront on justinjas.com. I didn’t even have to change the domain I was previously pointing to S3 (static.justinjas.com) just had to update the cname record to point to my new cloudfront domain (djimaa1jzwrm7.cloudfront.net). Not that I need to have cached requests for Japan but still it’s not like it will cost me much so why not.

I’m huge in Japan

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:49:54 -0500

I’m huge in Japan

Little Big Computer (via upsilandre)

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:47:34 -0400

Little Big Computer (via upsilandre)