Steven's Weblog

I’m pretty interested in watching the proliferation of little computers everywhere. Here’s the latest example I saw: a Linux firewall machine that fits inside your Windows laptop. I don’t exactly love the architecture of this particular beast (redirecting network traffic out to the firewall and back in via a hacked-up network driver), though I understand why they did it that way. But it is an interesting thing to contemplate how such nested/cohabitating computers can add neat little features to the mobile lifestyle.

With my latest mobile computing acquisitions, I’m becoming really fond of little semi-specialized general-purpose computers all over. If I want to go light, I can have my phone with me and still have very basic web browsing and email capabilities. If I want a few more features, I can add the internet tablet to the mix. If I have to do real work, I can add the laptop, or sometimes the laptop and the internet tablet. Pretty much mix-n-match, because they’re all good standalone and they synergize nicely when used together. They also all have some means of accessing the Internet and getting to my servers and a million others, which further extends the synergy.

It’s funny how the evolution of consumer products leads to odd outcomes, sometimes.

For example, my refrigerator has a vestigial ice-maker. I noticed this one night when I heard that clunk-clunk noise you hear from ice-makers. But I don’t have an ice-maker (or so I thought).

I looked in my freezer and noted that there is a sealed-off chunk of space in there that I had never really payed attention to. Likewise, there’s a sealed space in the refrigerator portion. It was sort of difficult to determine if that was the source of the noises I was hearing, but I was intrigued anyway.

I looked up the manual for the appliance online, but there was no mention of the function of these spaces. Ya know how they have the exploded drawing of the appliance with the little arrows and labels describing the various features; well, these spaces were there, little blank rectangular prisms, but no arrows and no labels.

A night of searching around the web finally uncovered the westinghouse-hackers listserv, where people talk about all their cool mods to their refrigerators and discuss the minutia of the various stock designs. Someone disassembled the mystery box in this model and discovered the weirdest thing. Seems there’s an entire closed-loop ice-maker system in there. It makes ice in the freezer, which is then dropped to the fridge, where it collects in a little container. It melts, then the water is pumped back up to make more ice.

The aforementioned investigator talked to some of her contacts at the local appliance repair shop. Apparently, this sort of thing is well-known among repair pros, but not outside those circles. If the ice-maker continues to function properly, the average person would never even really notice it was there; it’s only my sensitivity to those weird nighttime noises that alerted me to its presence.

There’s some debate among those pros about what the value of such a system might be. When called on to repair problems related to this system, most of them will just remove the entire thing, reasoning that it can’t possibly be useful to the user. However, a few, mostly among the ‘holistic repair’ set, will try to keep it running if at all possible. Some will even recommend replacing the water in the system with a special homeopathic preparation that’s said to slow down the melt-freeze cycle (‘metabolism’) slightly in order to increase the refrigerator’s longevity.

The hackers have found various ways to take advantage of this system; for example, one mod detailed on the listserv replaces the white plastic casing of the system with plexiglass and adds neon illumination. Another clever hacker extended that system with a ruggedized WiFi-enabled webcam so you can watch the ice freeze and melt without holding your refrigerator doors open, yielding a significant energy savings.

For now, I think I’m just going to stick with stock.

It’s really interesting how consumer electronics evolve. It struck me reading this article about a new NFC phone that cell phones represent the hottest real estate in CE right now. There’s really no particularly necessary reason that phones should also act as payment devices, except that Citi wants to get in your pants, and they see that you’ve got that bulge in your pocket, and it just starts to make sense from there, both for them and for anyone who has a cell phone and also pays for stuff. And once that technology is integrated, one can imagine all sorts of other synergies to be had, such that in a few years it’ll seem so obvious that of course your payment device is integrated with your voice-text-picture -video-addressbook-game -web-positioning-memo -schedule-reader-mapping -music-etc. device…

Why do my socks come in a resealable bag?

It’s somewhat fascinating to look at growth by accretion in software. For one thing, just like geological GBA (yeah, that’s how hip I am), it can give you a visible record of the history of a particular little piece of the world. For another thing, it can lead to interesting conflicts within and between developers, as something that’s grown by accretion rarely ‘looks right’ from a fresh (ahistorical) point of view.

I ought to look through the computing literature and see what people have done in the vein of automatically analyzing GBA and trying to reverse-engineer the ‘meaning’ if it. Thing is, when you look at some GBA and say it doesn’t look right, then you go and try to ‘fix’ it, you can often end up losing important features/functionality/quirks/etc., because you tend to sort of throw away some of the little differences that seem incidental but were actually hard-won little bits of real-world application knowledge. Having a little tool sitting over your shoulder and saying “look, jerky, you removed this bit of logic, but this here source-control comment says ‘I know this looks odd, but it’s VERY IMPORTANT'” could save some hassle sometimes.

I don’t have a lot to say about it yet, but I just realized I hadn’t uselessly announced to the ‘world’ that I bought a Nokia N810 to add to my stable of mobile devices.

It was pretty neat that the first thing it does out of the box is finds your phone and hooks up to the data service to get connected to the Internet. Well, if you’re me, that’s neat.

I used to be surprised when I ran into a really specific-sounding domain name on the web. For example, chairarmpads.com. But, when ya think about it, it’s $10/year or less to register a domain name, and the really specific ones are less likely to be taken already, and maintaining a virtual server for a name costs essentially zero unless someone uses it (in which case you can probably make back your money).

In this specific case, I couldn’t figure out where to buy replacement arm pads for my chair, but a web search revealed said web site and they delivered as advertised. So I’m much happier with my chair now that I’ve replaced the worn out (and sucky even when new) arm pads with these babies. Yes, I am willing to spend $60 for ’em, as long as they last better than the stock ones on this $300 chair.

Don’t know why it didn’t occur to me until I read An ‘attractive’ man-machine interface, but there’ll probably be a time when a person could have a temporary direct computer-brain interface without surgery or an implant or something. Just some nanobugs that you swallow, and that attach themselves to, say, optic nerves, and a wireless device in your pocket talking to them. I think I’d be quite a bit less hesitant to try something like that if it was shown to be reversible over a short period of time.

[If desired, insert joke about how if your brain was running Windows, then…]

OK, I’m late to the party, but only because I’m picky about what I put in my pocket. I finally got a smartphone.

I got the Palm Centro (in black, not red). And I must say, it is suh, uh, weet. I’m glad I waited until the point where the UI and form factor are where they are in this device, because it made for a very nice inaugural geekend.

I’m still waiting for Android phones, because that sounds like a great platform, but only ‘on paper’ at this point; I’m a bit skeptical that the real things will be as open and easy to develop for as stated. In the meantime, I hadda get something, and PalmOS is the most open and livable smartphone OS out there (for US/Sprint people, at least).

Actually, the development situation for PalmOS has improved markedly since last time I looked (when I bought my second Sony Clie, which is gathering dust at the same rate as the first). It seems that Access has reached a pretty good level of “All applications are equal”, and getting from zero to developing full applications, with a good IDE, documentation, and simulators, is a free registration and a free (and partly open source) single download. OK, PalmOS may be old and a tad wheezy, but it’s still looking fairly vibrant from my look around, and Access may take it places in the future.

I got an unlimited data, unlimited phone-as-modem plan for a decent $40 add-on to my voice plan, so the next time I’m at Borders and can’t remember which Simpsons writer wrote a few books including some sort of sci-fi one, I can whip out my little pocket web-browser-matic and get the answer. Hope that happens again to justify the hundreds of dollars of total outlay…

It’s John Swartzwelder, who wrote “The Time Machine Did It”, among others.

Wow, this happens so rarely I just had to tell everybody (bothbody, at least). I just had a positive customer service experience. Seriously. I sent an email through a form (to Sprint PCS) and they responded within the advertised timeframe, and actually read the entire request and responded to it appropriately (and with a good answer, BTW).

It’s amazing that that’s amazing, but it is.

More about the particular service I have in the next post…