Everett Guerny | write/geek

Nexus S review

Owing to its status as the current hot Android phone, the reputation of and continuing support for the Nexus One that came before it, and the Nexus line’s no-crapware, pure Android nature, last month I made a Samsung Nexus S my next mobile phone.

My previous phone, for reference, was the first Android device, a T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream).

I like almost everything about Nexus S. The device is, for the most part, blazing fast, smooth and completely open.

By “open,” I mean:

It’s sold SIM-unlocked, meaning I can switch between almost any service provider. This isn’t very useful on a daily basis, but is a great option to have for international travel.
Gaining root access to the phone is simple. Rather than relying on a security hole to get root, Nexus devices have official support for unlocking the bootloader, which opens up the phone to whatever you want to do, installing whatever you want, etc.
Even if you don’t root, the Nexus S—like all Android devices—is “open” in a very practical way: apps can be added to these devices from any source you as a user deem worthy. If Google doesn’t see fit to include a given app in the Android Market for whatever reason, the developer can provide an .apk file however they like, and you as an adult can make up your own mind as to whether you want to use it.

Here are a few things I like:

It’s fast. There’s almost never a hiccup in running apps, switching between them, having calls and messages come in when you’re doing something else, etc.
Front-facing cameras may be standard these days, but I love finally having one in my phone. Just need video support in the Skype app…
The screen is amazing. It’s bright, high-resolution, and the glass is actually curved, which lets it sit face-down on a table without scratching, fit the curvature of your face, and as some have suggested, there are ergonomic benefits for your thumb as well.
I don’t know the specs, but the battery life with active use seems way better than my G1.
Lots of onboard storage. 16 GB may not be enough for some people, but it is for me, and I prefer this over dealing with a slow, unreliable microSD card.
Small touches like the aforementioned curved glass, head sensor that disables the screen during a call, ambient light sensor for automatically adjusting screen brightness make for a nice experience.

Here are a few things I don’t:

The browser sometimes lags a bit while scrolling webpages with multiple large images. I don’t see a lot of this, so it’s not that annoying.
No 4G. Of course, T-Mobile doesn’t have “true” 4G service, and 3G speeds are enough for web browsing… and almost everything else I usually want to do. Where this has been a problem for me is in streaming high-quality music using the Last.fm app; the playback very often catches up to the loading. That said, I feel like Last.fm may be partly at fault too, as the app seems unreliable in other ways that make me doubt it.
In-browser Flash performance sucks, but I’ll take it over none at all so long as Flash elements can be off by default and loaded only on-demand (and they can).
I get annoying audio interference in the car when the phone is plugged to the audio while also charging. Not sure if this is the phone’s fault, as it doesn’t happen in the house.
Doesn’t shoot HD video, but instead, widescreen VGA… similar to my Canon PowerShot from six years ago. I can’t figure out who thought this was a good idea. I don’t do much video, so it’s not a deal-breaker, but an annoyance. I’d love to see them fix this with a software update, which should be possible given the beefy hardware in this thing.

The lack of keyboard worries me:

While the average person probably has to occasionally enter a simple password and a poorly thought-out status update, I’m a writer and a geek (did you guess?), so accuracy of text entry is important to me. Typing on-screen kind of bothers me.
I hate the lack of control when composing text, even if auto-correct takes care of most of the inaccuracies. It also corrects my intentional misspellings, colloquialisms, “big words” and many proper nouns. The thing to do here is obviously make sure it says what I want before clicking “Send,” but that’s not always easy.
Like I said, I’m also a geek. Who the fuck uses command lines these days? I the fuck do. I manage a Linux server at work, and very often remotely connect to the computers at home to do things throughout the day. Not only is typing awkward, but other things don’t work, like double-tabbing key for completing commands and filenames.
On the plus side, on-screen options like Swype and SwiftKey, and Google’s pretty good voice input makes this hurt a little less. Still, I’d totally go for an identical phone with a keyboard, even if it was a bit thicker and heavier.

But I’m optimistic about the future of my phone:

As a Nexus phone, its updates are managed by Google, so there isn’t any waiting for Samsung and T-Mobile to get their act together and release updates to future versions of Android.
Its open-phone status should make it appealing to third-party developers like Cyanogen, who will hopefully continue supporting it into the future.
While I’m a little concerned about buying a new phone now, given the upcoming wave of Android phones with dual-core CPUs (Tegra II and others), I’m not sure that my phone being left “in the dust” will be a concern for the next couple of years. After all, desktop developers haven’t exactly made great use of multi-core CPUs, which have been widely available there for at least five years now. They’re still good to have for multitasking, which is a nice feature to have your mobile OS support, but the sort of multitasking we expect out of our phones doesn’t usually involve two CPU-intensive tasks, but rather one that chugs along performing some menial task (playing music, routing GPS, etc.) while another in the foreground does what you want it to at the moment.

In all, I think Nexus S makes a pretty good G1 replacement, and will serve me well into the future. I’ll keep you posted, uh, Internet.

No longer, My Book

I’ve long understood, but was reminded tonight, that there are products designed with respect for the user, and those with mistrust and maybe even contempt. Until tonight, I hadn’t experienced any problems with my, admittedly aging, 250 GB Western Digital My Book Premium USB hard drive.

After over four years of adequate service, the My Book finally stopped working. It would click instead of audibly spinning up, and that it wouldn’t show in dmesg at all when plugged in suggested that the problem was likely the enclosure, not the disk inside.

I was right, but couldn’t be sure about this until tearing the case open and extracting the disk, a simple 3.5″ SATA. Tearing isn’t exactly the right word; I was careful and didn’t break anything while half-following these instructions, but I had to put considerable amounts of force into a few of the steps. Case in point: screws tightened by production line robots, so much so that only robots can easily unscrew them, suck.

I removed the disk and placed it in another enclosure—the kind sold without a disk—I had handy. The process (or lack thereof) was literally a joy compared to the fighting I had to do with the plastic My Book case. Sure, standalone hard drive enclosures are designed for people who at least know enough to buy one of those and a 3.5″ SATA disk, not to mention that these things exist. It’s not brain surgery, but it’s also not the kind of thing you need to know to be a “computer user” these days.

Of course, being such a user means shrugging your shoulders and losing data when only half of your product breaks.

The choice is yours, but unless you like headaches, I suggest not buying dumb shit.

QR Codes: great, but then what?

I keep a long and ever-growing outline of blog topics I may someday write about. Most aren’t fully formed, but each at least once struck me as interesting at some point or another, so I figured they’re worth keeping around.¹ (See one real example to right.)

<3 qr-codes
- bridges the physical and the cyber
- low-tech, lowest-common denominator
- cameraphones in every pocket
- makes a lot more sense than competing technologies, like that microsoft one with the different colors that requires color printing, etc. this one I could, if so inclined, draw with a pencil
- sadly, most of what I use this technology for is curiously decoding barcodes I come across on the web

I add topics to my list pretty regularly, but what doesn’t happen very regularly is someone reading my mind and writing my post for me. Okay, it’s only happened once: about a week ago, and it was geeking out on QR Codes.

I’m a bit behind on my RSS reading, but when I just came across this boingboing post, I was quite pleased. In it, guest blogger Glenn Fleishman pretty much lays out the case for 2D barcodes — QR being the most popular, good/open-enough format — as a useful sort of link between the physical world and the digital one. It’s an idea I happen to have loved for a few years now, and with Internet-enabled cameraphones all over the place, one that has the potential² to create some benefit to society on a large scale.

It should come as little surprise, then, that for as long as I’ve been aware of these codes, I’ve longed to find a use for the technology aside from the mundane let people scan your ad to go to your website, or send a URL from your computer to your phone. A handful of boingboing commenters pointed out a few real-world examples of ways they have used QR codes: labeling shared lab equipment or getting on the VIP list at Tokyo clubs. Interesting they are; world-changing they’re not.

Of course, there’s also the idea of providing richer information about wine than a simple bottle label could display, which I find a step above the others, and giving extra context to museum art, which I think gets us even closer.

Yet I still think QR Codes have even greater potential… but potential isn’t even half the battle.

Yes, they’re basically brain crack.[↩]
Naturally, the barrier to adoption is convincing the average person to bother solving for themselves a problem — easy URL/text/contact entry on their phone — they didn’t realize they had.[↩]

Uncommon Knowledge: Songs about “you”

Every so often I realize that something I believe to be common knowledge actually isn’t, simply because not everyone has the same life experiences as I do. I’m trying to document such things that I know, for the betterment of society as a whole. This blog seems to be the perfect place to do this.

Here’s today’s bit of very important, uncommon knowledge:

If you’re not in a committed relationship, perhaps the greatest thing you can do for yourself is begin one with a person whose name — or a reasonable nickname for their name — ends in the letter “u” (IPA: u: — MWCD: ü — NOAD: o͞o) or otherwise rhymes with the English word you.

Why would you want to do this, you may wonder. What you lose being in a relationship for an admittedly piss-poor reason, you gain in being able to fill the individual’s name into all sorts of popular music from at least the last 60 years or so. This will help you better put your feelings for them into words, and not sound entirely ridiculous in the process.

Seriously, have you ever noticed how many songs address someone in the second-person, where the singer sings words of love, hate or some other emotion to an unnamed someone? It’s true! You probably don’t notice just how useful this is until you find yourself in a relationship where you want to express some emotion or another for an individual who is named in that certain way. But once you do, this simple thing becomes very useful, indeed.

So go and find somebody with a compatible name. I suppose you could nickname pretty much anyone “Boo,” but that’s sort of lame. Unless that’s their given name, in which case they’re naturally a keeper.

Here are some example songs to get you started, and names to help narrow the field:

You’re just too good to be true/Can’t take my eyes off Stu #
I don’t believe that anybody/feels the way I do about Lulu now #
Hello/I love Drew/Won’t you tell me your name? #
I know I’ve got nothing on Lou/I know there’s nothing to do #
It’s Matthew that I adore/You’ll always be my whore #
Colour my world/with hope/of loving Jewel #
You probably think this song is about Marylou. #
An Eskimo showed me a movie/He had recently taken of Pikachu #
If only I’d thought of the right words/I wouldn’t be breaking apart/All my pictures of Sue #
If I leave here tomorrow/Would Kooh still remember me? #

Most pet names count, and of course, this works best with names of fewer syllables. Find the right person and the musical world is your phonetic oyster.

Uncommon Knowledge: Twitter @replies

I’ve been thinking lately, and I’m going to start a new series here on the blog, tentatively titled stuff I know and take for granted, but it’s stuff that a lot of people don’t know, you guys!

I may need to think of a better title.

I won’t, however, let that stop me.¹ These are things that the world may or may not need to know, but should certainly have the chance to know.

Here’s my first one:

If you have a common name on Twitter, you probably get lots of errant ‘@replies’ because people don’t know how to use them.

A little background: if you use Twitter—and I won’t fault you if you don’t²—you’re probably aware that you can direct your post to another user by placing their unique Twitter user ID after an @ sign somewhere in your post. For example, if you wanted to tell me I’m great, you’d say something like:

I think that @everett is great!!

(@nobody Hey, thanks!)

…and then my Twitter software client would alert me that someone directed a post my way. These are usually called “replies” or “mentions” depending on the client you use. Simple stuff, right?

Note that it just so happens that my Twitter ID is “everett.” This is so because I registered my account in mid-2006, early enough that first-names were still unregistered, and thus, available as user IDs. Because I chose a common name for my ID and quite a few people out there know people named Everett and some of these people don’t know what they’re doing, I often get posts directed at me unintentionally.

I’ve gotten used to it. Here are some examples of places I was ‘mentioned’ by mistake.

Not the worst advice, but I can’t take the credit.

This never happened. Really.

Not sure where I was on the evening of August 19th, but I’m not sure where Elijah’s sense of entitlement comes from either.

This example is interesting. Thanks to Twitter, I’ve learned that there’s a chain of barbecue places in the Oakland area called Everett & Jones, which a lot of people like to go to. Mentions of E&J actually get mistakenly directed at me a lot… and from everything I’ve heard, it makes my must-try list if I’m ever in the Bay Area again. Thanks, Twitter!

You could also say that I need to think of better ideas than this one, but I won’t let that stop me either.[↩]
Despite all the hype, Twitter is totally non-essential, and you’re probably not missing that much if you don’t use it.[↩]

…I just want some snack cakes

I was playing some Scarface: The World Is Yours earlier this evening on my Wii and while the game is in many ways a series of missions that don’t vary all that much, a part of the game that is pretty consistently interesting is talking to random people on the streets. (What does that leave? A pretty standard 3D open world, drive-cars-shoot-people-deal-drugs rush rush affair that happens to take place in a Miami I don’t quite recognize.)

But like I was saying, the conversations.

I can’t remember what purpose this serves in the game, but you can have back-and-forth conversations with the seemingly hundreds of unique NPCs that line the streets of the game. Walk up to one, press A and Tony spits out a line, to which they respond with something that more-or-less makes sense. Press A and Tony replies with something mostly relevant to what they said. Do this back-and-forth exchange a few times and your “Conversation” count increases by one. (You can only converse with any given individual once, at which point talking to them consists of seemingly-random one-liners that seem to either propose sexual relations or bodily harm… or are just strings of Scarface-style expletives.)

So earlier, I (well, Tony) was visiting our local bank branch when I decided to talk to some of the people hanging around in the stairwell. We walked up to one African-American gentleman in an ugly sweater and the conversation basically began like this:

Tony: Miami is full of pussy, meng. You just need to be rich to get it.
Gentleman: Man, I don’t care about pussy. I just want some snack cakes.

I’m gonna let that one hang for a moment.

…

Okay, I fucking love this game.

The word calamity makes me smile (and now I know why)

Words are special things to me, and when I was a smaller geek and would try to figure out the meaning of unknown words, I would often form a mental image of a word’s meaning based on, often times, another word it sounded like (regardless of whether the two words actually had anything to do with each other). Sometimes, I’d actually use context to help decipher the meaning of the mystery word, but that wouldn’t always lead me to the right answer.

From time to time, I’d be unable to shed this first impression of a word, which would stick with me even after I would learn the word’s actual meaning. I’d have these false images sometimes pop into my mind when I’d hear the word itself used elsewhere, even knowing full well what it really means.

So when I found myself, in more recent years, finding the word calamity to be, of all things, bizarrely amusing, I began to seriously question how this could be. It’s not like I find calamities themselves funny. And the word is not one I hear used much on a day-to-day basis, and it certainly isn’t one used to describe things that are supposed to be funny. It’s not nearly as well-used as its synonyms catastrophe, disaster, or even tragedy. So why would I find it difficult to suppress a smirk when hearing or reading about something that someone described as calamitous?

Here’s what truly brought my strange relationship with the word to a head: I used to work for a company with pretty strong ties to the Philippines, so when the rather deadly Typhoon Ondoy (a.k.a. Ketsana) rolled through the country during my time employed there, the storm, and its effects, were more than just the headline or two that they may have been to most Americans. Reading pretty extensively about the storm, both through news reports and firsthand accounts from many of our customers, I noticed, a handful of times, many pinoys using calamity to describe what had happened there. To what we owe their word choice is not something I understand or am really concerned with, actually. More important was the involuntary smirking effect the word had on me.

That I could find myself amused by something so strange, in the face of tales and photos of death and destruction, was something I found unsettling, so I later thought hard about where this feeling likely came from. I can’t quite remember how I made the connection, but it eventually hit me.

That cute little guy to the right is Calamity Coyote, a character from the early-90s animated television series Tiny Toon Adventures, a show that may not have made as lasting an impression on me as others from the era did, but is one I definitely remember watching. (I remember the theme song very well, for what that’s worth.) Calamity is also a relative of Wile E. Coyote, or something.

Lacking any other context to explain to my single-digit-aged self the meaning of the word calamity, I must have assumed that it meant… well, something funny! Because, you know, the show was made up of funny characters doing funny things, so this unknown word must mean something funny.

It makes perfect sense to me, and feels like the explanation, the true creation myth I’ve been looking for. I can’t imagine where else a younger Everett would have come across that word, and it’s not one I’ve seen enough times in the intervening years, making this one of those wrong definitions I still just can’t forget.

Do you have any words that have a special meaning to you, one that’s completely different than what the word really means? Or perhaps that even tickle your funny bone in an equally irrational way? (I really do want to know.)