Category Archives: Ramblings

Swappa.com is an awesome site to sell or buy Android phones

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1 minute, 24 seconds

I recently discovered Swappa. This is great site to sell or buy an Android phone. Why? First off they only sell good condition phones with clear ESNs. You won’t find any “only good for parts” deals here. As well, every phone posted for sale is verified by an actual employee at Swappa, so there’s no scammers. Further, they have lower fees than ebay.

However, I take the the blawg-o-sphere today because of their amazing customer service. The other day my one year old and I were hanging out by our pool. When he thought I wasn’t looking, he jumped in (ok, fell in) the pool, face down. Only thinking of ensuring my son didn’t drown, I jumped in and pulled him out. Only afterwords did I remember my Galaxy SIII in my pocket. After a week of letting it bake in the sun and still no speaker or mic working, I deemed it dead.

I went to Swappa, found my replacement phone, and purchased it. It was easy to find the exact phone I wanted, which even came rooted and with CyanogenMod 10.1. The seller told me it would ship out the next morning.

On a whim I powered up my old, left for dead phone. Oh my gosh! It totally worked! I even stuck my SIM card in there and I could make calls with the speaker and mic working no problem.

I embarrassingly asked the seller and Swappa if I could back out of the sale. Both agreed to help me out. The seller refunded my money, keeping $20 at my request. Swappa even refunded my buyers fee, which I had said they could keep. This all took hours and was tended to by the same Swappa employee who had verified the phone for the initial sale. What service!

I could not give them a higher recommendation and plan on purchasing all my phones from them. You should too!

7″ Android Tablet Spec Comparison

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1 minute, 38 seconds

For a long time I’ve always thought that tablets are not of much use until you reach the 3rd or 4th use case. You know, you have a laptop on which you can have 20 tabs of browsers open, have a full blown IDE to code in or even run a local instance of your dev environment. The second use case is your smart phone for when you’re on the go, don’t want any bulk or weight but still want to surf and check emails and listen to music. It’s not until you’ve got all those covered that you’ll consider spending hundreds of dollars on a 3rd device (or 4th if you have a desktop).

The wife is considering having a bigger screen than her Incredible to watch Netflix and read blog posts, news and library books on. This will likely spill over into reading kids books for our kids Emmett and Violet as well. Below are the tablets we’re considering. Each item has a product, review and purchase link in the first row. The second row is the presence or lack of a camera. While researching this piece I found Lisa G’s 7″ Tablet Smackdown on Mobile Tech and John P. Falcone’s Kindle vs. Nook vs. iPad on CNET reviews quite helpful. Also, those that wanna blow past the 7″ screen (to 7.7″) and $400 price should consider waiting for the Samsung Tab 7.7 ($600-$800 at this writing). Of course that depends on where you fall in regards to my and Moore’s law. Finally, if you’re looking for cellular connectivity, consider the T-Mobile Springboard .


Samsung Tab 7+ $399
HTC Flyer $299
IdeaPad A1 $229
Kindle Fire $199
Nook Tablet $249
Product – Review – $ Product – Review – $ Product – Review – $ Product – Review – $ Product – Review – $
Front and Back Front and Back Front None None
1024 x 600 1024 x 600 1024 x 600 1024 x 600 1024 x 600
7.5″ x 4.7″ x 0.45″ 7.7″ x 4.8″ x 0.52″ 7.68″ x 0.46″ x 4.90″ 7.5″ x 4.7″ x 0.45″ 8.1″ x 5″ x 0.48″
12.1 oz 14.82 oz 14.08 oz 14.56 oz 14.08 oz
dual-core 1.2GHz 1.5GHz 1.0GHz dual-core 1.0GHz dual-core 1.0GHz
WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS WiFi WiFi
16GB Int & MicroSD 16GB Int & MicroSD 16GB Int & MicroSD 8GB Internal 8GB Int & MicroSD
Android 3.2 Android 2.3.3 Android 2.3 Android 2.3 Android 2.3

Update: I’ve added lil’ thumbnails for each tablet.

.everyother { background:#ddd; } .tablettable {border:1px solid black;}

Ashley’s Law vs Moore’s Law

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1 minute, 3 seconds

I’ve been saying this for years, but there’s two laws out there when considering a new geek purchase. The first is Moore’s law which says:

The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every 18 months*.

– Gordon E. Moore, 1965

Most people round down to a year from 18 months. Additionally most people say that, “Shit gets twice as good, twice as fast, twice as small every year.” Moral of the story? If you wait longer the money spent on the gizmo will go twice as far than if you bought today (* Mr. Moore updated this be 2 every years, but I’m ignoring this).

Conversely, I’ve always given the buying advice I call Ashley’s law:

If you don’t have it, you can’t use it.

– Ashley Jones, 2011**

So, ya know, you’re limping along on that G4 iBook but don’t want to get a new laptop today because, “in just 8 months Apple’s gonna release the four gazillion hertz quintuple core laptop!!!” My logic says that the crazy slow laptop you’re using day in and day out really does suck. If you don’t have the new laptop, sure enough, you can’t use it (** I’ve been saying this for years, but am just now “publishing”).

Update: There’s a very unfortunate overlap with another much more serious, pre-existing Ashley’s Law. Well, they have disambiguation for a reason!

Raise my taxes, please

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0 minutes, 36 seconds

As we all know, there’s been a lot of movement in all levels of government around budget cuts instead of tax increases. I was inspired to make today’s post after reading Mr. Buffet’s op ed in today’s Times. Those of you that know me know that Warren and me are not anywhere near the same tax bracket. However, I feel we’re severely short changing our future by defunding critical programs. Having less social services, poorer quality health care and, pun intended, dumbed down education system won’t make us a richer country in the long run. Though I’m not sure I fully agree with the Nordic Model, there’s one aspect I do agree with. I think we should raise taxes, yes for the rich, but across the board as well .

Raise my taxes, please.

How much should you trust the cloud?

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0 minutes, 57 seconds

Recently there was quite a bit of hubulub about Dropbox allowing everyone’s account to be accessed by anyone for 4 hours. This is bad, obviously. The guys over at Securosis got it right in their response. However, y’all should have known already to encrypt anything in the cloud if you were reading this here fine blog back in aught nine.

I clearly do not trust cloud, or really, any services online (I also take issue with “the cloud” being synonymous with “online”). The few online services I do use, I follow extremely good password practices. For example, my gmail password being over 20 characters of which I don’t know even know. Really, we should all be using two factor authentication to really lock things down.

I’m still quite concerned with a scenario where gmail is hacked site wide (not per use phished or even “whaled”). There’s nothing you can do in this scenario to protect yourself. How expensive in time, and potentially, literal money, is it worth to have a free service like gmail at the point it gets hacked? I’ve asked the same question myself and have even priced out other hosted, dedicated email services, free or no.

So, the point of this post is A) Nya nya, I told ya so and B) be safe!

Level Up to Bees Knees

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1 minute, 52 seconds

So, y’all remember how much I loved American Born Chinese? Mr. Yang’s latest is Level Up and I just finished it. It’s great! Not quite as good as ABC, but it stands on its own.

There were a couple things about this book that resonated with me. The first is the addictive behavior of a young kid playing a video game. And not just any video game, but the video games my generation grew up on: NES, Super Mario Brothers, Zelda and the like. I actually wasn’t that good at these games back in the day, but I wasted hours down at Freeway Variety, the local five and dime store, watching my friends play (oddly the only mention of Freeway online is the glossary for a movie from some guys who grew up in my “hood”). To this day there’s still a few friends who I can say, “Elf needs food” and they’ll finish the saying with, “badly!”.

The second thing that resonated with me was that at that age, I read a lot of comic books. I would go to Comic Relief (clearly I haven’t been in a while, I just found out they’re closed, R.I.P.), go around the corner and by two slices from Arinell Pizza (it was 1/2 the size back in my day. Really!) and sit and read comics. That same night I’d go home and read every comic I’d gotten that day. Then I’d re-read them. How does this tie into Level Up? Well, I just couldn’t wait to start, let alone finish, the graphic novel, so I sat and read it as fast as I could, just like back in my salad days. Just like the protagonist in the book and his video games.

One big difference between eating Arinell’s pizza or 10 rolls of Smarties ’til I’m sick while I read comics and graphic novels, is now I’m all grown up! I can have adult drinks while I read. Ya know, like Bees Knees! My wife recommended a recipe from Not without Salt. Bees knees are tasty! Oddly, I think I might try the next ones with a bit of rosemary:

  • 2 oz gin
  • 3/4 oz Honey Syrup
  • 1/2 oz Lemon Juice

NWOS suggests doing the honey syrup like simple syrup: 1 to 1 of honey to water, bring to simmer, let cool and use. However, I cheated and just did the 1 to 1 measurement using piping hot water, and then stirring the bejeesus out of it. Worked fine and no dirty pan.

Meego 1.2, Meego Laptop and a MacBook Air

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1 minute, 40 seconds

As many of you know, I’ve had an on again, off again, and then on again affair with Meego. I love that lil’ guy! You may have expected me to be quite excited about the recent release of Meego 1.2, including a netbook refresh. Since I was running Meego on a netbook, you may have then also expected me to be super excited about the very recent announcement of the ASUS Eee PC X101. This is a 2lb laptop that runs Meego and is expected to cost $200. Sweet!

However, as you may have guessed from the title of this post, I’m not running Meego any more. I’m running OS X on a MacBook Air 11″. I had crossed the threshold of tinkering around on a laptop, to wanting to commute with one every day. Indeed, 2lb was my sweet spot for a laptop. I wasn’t that stuck on the OS as my apps are all cross platform enough. I seriously considered many different netbooks and then the MacBook Air came out. The 11″ was just over 2lb, included a full size keyboard, had a 1366 x 768 screen and a 5 hour battery. It was also insanely small. For a relative paltry $1000, there was simply no laptop, regardless of OS, that had had all of the above features. Period. Though I think the new Eee X101 will be very cool, it lacks the screen resolution of the Air. I briefly considered the Sony Vaio X (no longer available) which met all my requirements, but it was a pretty penny to pay for an Atom processor.

“But if you want something super light, what about a iPad?”, you ask? I do agree, an iPad’s insanely long battery life coupled with 1.3lb weight has some handy uses: a cross country plane ride, long regular commutes where you want to read the news and browse email or need a super light weight video conference rig. But what about when you want to run an IDE? What if you want to compose a 3 page (7,500 character) long email? What if you want to flip back forth between the 3 browsers you have open to check how your code renders? The answer is clear: you need a laptop.

I’ve been super happy with my Air and I wish the best of luck to Meego.

Why should I cut up my credit card?

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1 minute, 2 seconds

Recently, some one got a hold of my card and was making fraudulent charges on it. My card company was Johnny on the spot and called me to verify the charges (side note: I had no way of verifying they were who they said they were, so they did the right thing and told me to call the number on the back of my card. You can’t be too vigilant!). When I finally got a rep. on the line, they canceled my card and sent me out a new one. Done deal.

But then they tell you, “cut up your card”. Why? If the number was stolen and we’re de-activating it so it can’t be used again, why cut up the card? In fact, why would you ever cut up the card? I guess if you think that cutting it up an active card will stop you from using it, then you should do a good job and cut it real good. But otherwise, I can’t think of a reason. My 5 minutes of googling didn’t find an answer either.

Do any of my faithful readers have an answer?

Update: There’s some good discussion below, but more notable is my comeuppance! After writing this post, I got not, one, not two, but three copies of my new card. Now I have the need to trash three credit cards that are all not canceled. Oh the horror!

How to comment on this blog

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1 minute, 20 seconds

It seems that reCAPTCHA is a victim of its own success. Y’all know I’m a huge, huge fan. However, recently the spammers have started to submit comments, successfully getting past the reCAPTCHA . I suspect this is a mechanical turk or some such tomfoolery. Of course the comments don’t get approved, but they’re still a bother to have to delete.

Our friend over at hanskellner.com ( guess which friend?) also has the same problem with submitted span. This makes it clear that reCAPTCHA is being targeted (well, not clear, but it’s better than n=1!). However, he found a solution to stop the spammers. He added a static math question to his comment form. That is, it’s always “what is 5 + 6”, never any other question. Funny enough, his spam stopped all together. He still has his reCAPTCHA giong, but now it’s a two factor anti-spam.

I posit that the reCAPTCHA code is easy enough to programmatically detect, but some random math question isn’t, so it breaks the spam scripts. Let’s test this theory, shall we? I’ve just written a word press plug-in called simple-math. Using a simple to hack, all client side javascript there’s now an easy to solve math problem on the comment form. It is random, choosing two numbers between 0 and 9. I haven’t tested it too broadly, but you’re welcome to a copy.

I’ll let it run for a week and see how it goes and report back.

Feb 13th Update: I fought the law, and law won! Spammers got past round one of simple math. I’ve updated it to now check for the existence of the field on post, but still, no checking for a right answer on the server. As well, the field is created via javascript. Spammers, back to you for round 2.