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Leo-pard-icious

I went down to Cupertino this afternoon to get a briefing and demo of Leopard. And a copy.

I’m installing it now. I haven’t played with the betas, but I have to say I was very very impressed. More to come.

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Not Dead Yet

Holy CowPeople seem to have misinterpreted my “dead cow” analogy and are assuming that I bricked my iPhone. Nope. I have both the original iPhone, upgraded to 1.1.1, and the unlocked iPhone still and forever at 1.0.2. I’m donating the latter to The Lab for further experimentation. I’ll keep the locked phone around so I can continue to cover the platform, which was the reason I bought it in the first place.
It’s not for myself that I am whining, or even others I know whose phone were bricked. My point is that it’s punitive for Apple to intentionally damage unlocked iPhones, and I believe that’s wrong.

To those who say we can’t know Apple’s intention, I’d respond that it would have been a simple bit of coding to checksum the modem firmware and refuse to update if it had been modified. In fact, that would have been a prudent precaution no matter what. By choosing not to do so Apple is making its intent clear, and absent any statement to the contrary from Cupertino I’m going to continue to think Apple wishes unlockers ill, no matter what Fake Steve Jobs says.

To prove I still have a working iPhone, here are two pictures from my hotel window in Vancouver. One with the iPhone and one with the Nokia N95. You tell me which you prefer.

Nokia N95

Nokia

iPhone

Apple

Oh, and incidentally on the Nokia and the unlocked iPhone uploading these images in full quality to Flickr takes one click using third party apps (ShoZu on the N95 and Send Picture on the iPhone). On the locked iPhone I had to dock to my Mac, import the photo into iPhoto, export it, and then upload to Flickr. That’s one of the reasons I want to be able add third-party apps to my mobile phones.

Now I’m going to run to the Fatburger next door and have a veggie burger. No more dead cows for me. Good night.

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The First VTR

I had a little time to kill before my flight to LA today, so I was finally able to stroll through the early audio exhibit in the United concourse at SFO (on the way to gates 76-90). Lots of interesting historic items including this first videotape recorder. When Apmex showed this to television executives in 1956 they gave it a standing ovation.
The first video tape recorder

The exhibit is Dolby heavy – practically everything is on loan from Dolby Labs, including the Ampex. Ray Dolby was on the team that invented it – but well worth the 20 minute stroll.

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Mobile Blogging

The Vox folks have lent me a Nokia N93 for my trip to Regis and Kelly and the Geek Cruise. It does pretty fair video and stills, but even better, it has a direct link to Vox so it’s easy to post. Get ready for a flood of marginally interesting shaky cam posts. Like this.

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Green Laser

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Green Laser

Green Laser,
originally uploaded by Leo Laporte.

Expression Engine (my former CMS) had built-in moblogging — that is uploading from a camera phone. But I think that with ShoZu and Flickr I can get some of the same functionality, although not automatically.

ShoZu installs on the camera phone and automatically uploads to my Flickr account. Then I can use the Flickr “Blog This” button to create a blog entry that interfaces to Drupal via the Metaweblog API.

If you’re looking at a glass of ice water illuminated by one of Woz’s green lasers… it worked!