Asides

Still Not a Linksys

Airport Express Goes N, Still Not a Linksys –

Stammy:

If you don’t need to stream music wirelessly to another set of speakers, don’t need the smaller form factor of the Airport Express for traveling, are smart enough to use Ethernet for large file transfers (hence no real need for 802.11n), use Wi-Fi for general purposes, enjoy getting insane bang for your buck and indulge in a bit of hacking, then the Linksys WRT54G router is for you. It’s the only router I recommend to friends and family, even if they won’t be hacking it.

It’s true. I’ve been rocking my Linksys wireless router for 5 years now, and even though I thought it died last week, it came back to life after giving it a couple hours off. Pretty impressive, considering I only power cycle it once or twice a year.

Still Not a Linksys

SmartSleep

SmartSleep: It’s a prefrance pane that will dynamically set the sleep state of your machine –

SmartSleep let’s you select each select sleep state. Additionaly the new SmartSleep state lets your notebook just sleep while the battery has a high level. If the battery level drops below a certain point ( default is less then 20% or 20 minutes ) it will switch to sleep and hibernate. So you have the best of both worlds.

I just installed it, and it is very smart (ha!). SmartSleep recognized that I had changed my sleep mode to “0”. I set it to “SmartSleep” mode and actually the MBP sleeps even quicker than before. Consistently in about 4 to 5 seconds instead of 9 to 10.

(Much thanks to all of you who pointed this out to me.)

SmartSleep

It’s the Software, Stupid

It’s the Software, Stupid –

Brett touches on exactly how I felt yesterday after watching the application demos at the SDK announcement:

And all this will be available to the entire installed iPhone base. No one gets left out. You do not have to buy another $500 device to get a few new features if you have an old model — just get the new software. […]

This seems so simple. But in the phone industry, this is revolutionary.

After watching the apps get demonstrated I had this “my iPhone is a sleeper agent” sort of feeling. Realizing there is way more under the hood which I, as a user, haven’t fully had the chance to experience yet. And, like Brett says, I don’t have to buy another $500 phone.

The first version of the iPhone may very well be the greatest 1.0 gadget released in history.

It’s the Software, Stupid

Weather on iPhone

Weather Underground has a very nice, iPhone optimized webpage. You can find out humidity, dew point, visibility, sunrise, sunset, detailed forecasts and warnings. It even has the large iPhone “slider buttons” for some of the settings such as animating the radar.

Another smart element is the #id links at the top of each section: “Current”, “Radar”, “Forecast” and “Warnings”. Not only can you can skip around between the sections, but each perspective’s section is identified by their title being in yellow (even if you scroll down to it).

I usually just use the Yahoo weather widget to check what the temperature will be and if I can wear flip-flops or not. But I’m adding this to my home screen for when I ever want to check anything more than just temperature.

Weather on iPhone