Omega Point

Sickgue: backups are spiffy!

I’m sick. Sure, I’m get­ting over it now, but it’s been a cou­ple of days. I’m not actu­ally sure what I have, only that it sucks. So far, I’m pre­tend­ing it wasn’t due to my walk­ing to the phar­macy in the rain the day before I started see­ing symp­toms. No, that’s crazy talk.

Recently, it seems like every­one I know is either sick, or involved in some mas­sive family/social life drama, or hav­ing stuff stolen. I lost one half of a pair of ear­rings, Eric lost his cam­era equip­ment and Rob from Social Sig­nal had his Mac­Book stolen.

Rob, of course, had the courage to at least put on a brave enter­tain­ing face for the rest of us, but man… that had to hurt. After a quick “back up your data, seri­ously” con­ver­sa­tion, I did just that. Badly. But I’m going to grab another drive this week, so… you know, please don’t steal it before then, guys.

In the mean­time, I’ve been think­ing about ways of LoJack­ing my Mac­Book Pro to pro­duce some kind of enter­tain­ing pho­to­blog of snap­shots of who­ever stole it, com­plete with a record of access points detected, cross-referenced to WiFiMug. (or bet­ter yet, some obses­sive wardriver’s map!)

Expe­ri­ence tells me that stolen lap­tops are rarely recov­ered, and that pho­tos of com­puter thieves are fre­quently faked. Still, it’s some­thing I’m set­ting up just in case.

OpenMoko: like the iPhone, only Linuxier!

Like most Mac-owning, right-thinking indi­vid­u­als, I’ve been anx­iously await­ing the Apple iPhone, despite liv­ing in Canada, where mobile data rates are unfor­tu­nate, to say the least. Also, the whole “closed plat­form” thing. That and the “how do you dial this with gloves on?” bit. And the fact that there’s no word of any Cana­dian release date, and there’s only two GSM car­ri­ers in Canada any­way… and they both use the same net­work. But hey, it syncs well with iCal and has a real web browser! I want one already!

So enough about prod­ucts whose chief value is mak­ing its user look cooler and more afflu­ent than non-owners! There’s a far more geeky smart­phone just over the horizon!

Behold, Open­Moko! It’s made of Linux! FIC (not that FIC) has spear­headed the open smart­phone plat­form with their currently-almost-released Neo1973 phone being the first capa­ble of run­ning Open­Moko. The actual hand­held looks… cute, actu­ally. Kind of 70s retro, like a non-translucent clamshell iBook.

The fea­ture­set is impres­sive, with WiFi, AGPS and a 640x480 screen, and includes every­thing we’ve come to expect from a smart­phone, save for a cam­era. Accord­ing to the Open­Moko wiki:

“The 2nd gen­er­a­tion Open­Moko device will be intro­duced at this time. We have some­thing spe­cial in the works, but again, you will help shape this device.”

That sounds like a cam­era to me, since one’s miss­ing, but who knows?

The UI seems some­what dated, which is not alto­gether unheard of with Linux, though it will obvi­ously be skinnable in some way — a fea­ture I’d def­i­nitely want to make use of. I’m not totally impressed by the look of the dialer in par­tic­u­lar. I’d like to see some­thing a bit higher-contrast, personally.

I do like the fact that it uses a sim­i­lar multi-touch panel as the iPhone, but isn’t that patented? Oh. Yes it is — but maybe not by Apple.

Per­son­ally, I find the most impor­tant fea­ture of a phone or PDA is ease of use and how well it can sync with my com­puter. I’m eager to see how well the Open­Moko plat­form does among the early adopter crowd, but for now, I think I’ll be hold­ing off on that preorder.

Obligatory “return to blogging” post

Aren’t all blogs sup­posed to have one of these after an extended absence of posts?