I don’t have much to say lately, but I need to say this:

Google’s Android mobile phone platform is freakin’ AMAZING. T-Mobile’s “G1” handset — which is the first of the commercially available Android phones — is very nearly as awesome a device as is the underlying platform.

Imagine the offspring resultant from a drunken one-night-stand between a Sidekick/Hiptop and an iPhone. That pretty much describes the G1; it is fully touch-enabled and has a wealth of downloadable applications ala iPhone, but boasts the flip-out keyboard and actual navigation buttons which are the hallmark of a Sidekick for those times you don’t feel like looking like a total tool rubbing your fingers all over your phone.

Best yet, you don’t need to deal with any of the iTunes bullcrap that every iPhone owner has to admit to disliking dealing with. If you want to put mp3s (or oggs, w00t!) on it, you simply plug a NORMAL USB CABLE into it and it shows up as a removable drive. Copy your music over and you’re good to go. Same with photos and videos. Software updates come automatically over the air, so no dealing with the endless cycle of backing up and restoring when iTunes makes a mess of things. (Or, if you’re a nerd like me, you can manually download the firmware update and apply it yourself.)

Unlike with iPhone, users can install applications that modify very nearly any aspect of the device, and are not at the whims of Apple as to whether the app will be “allowed” or not. For instance: I have an app installed that can turn on and off features when certain criteria are met. When the GPS finds that I’ve arrived at home, it automatically enables wifi. When I leave it turns it off again to preserve battery. If my battery drops below a certain point I’ve got it set to turn off GPS as well to further save battery. Try doing that with iPhone :).

Want to set an mp3, m4a or ogg file as a ringtone? No problem, support for that is built in.

All-in-all, Android has far exceeded my expectations, and is quite the anti-iPhone platform that I’d envisioned. I highly recommend it.

Hello Internet. Long time no see.

Since it’s been so long since we’ve spoken, I’ve amassed a number of things I wanted to share with you. Sadly, I’ve forgotten most of them. Here’s the first one I remember.

1) I can no longer live under the protective mantra of “Oh, I’d never BUY an iPhone, I just use this one because I won it in a contest.” That’s right. I bought an iPhone 3G. Go ahead, mock — I’ll wait. So the purchasal of the 3G is noteworthy for another reason: it marked my first venture into an Apple Store.

Know how when, walking into a skyscraper or something, there’s often an air pressure differential? Where, you can feel the conditioned air ruffling your clothes and hair as you open the door? That’s what the Apple Store is like, except that the pressure differential is not with the air, it’s with SMUG. You can sort of smell the smug leaking out around the doorframe as you approach, but when you open that door… it’s almost overpowering. If my hair weren’t firmly glazed up in a mohawk prior to entering, the blast of smug would surely have formed a fauxhawk of some sort. Those hipster glasses? They’re not so much for fashion as they are EYE PROTECTION from the smug.

The first thing you notice about the Apple Store is just how many employees there are. The second thing you notice is that none of them can actually HELP you. I asked if they had any 3Gs in stock and was told:

“Yep! We sure do!”

I let a full beat pass before adding:

“Well, can I BUY one?”

This required her flagging down some other hipster employee, who passed me off at least 3 more times. Then I was left standing for 5 minutes while the latest hipster went to go try to find a 3G for me to purchase. While Hipster #5 was in search of my iPhone, I got to witness a conversation that nearly made my head explode. It was between a Typical Mac Owner and an Apple Store Hipster, and it went like this:

TMO: “Hi, I bought this iPhone and I can’t get it to work.”

ASH: “Oh? What happened?”

TMO: “Well, I plugged it into my Mac and iTunes said it needed to upgrade itself to version 7.7”

ASH: “Right.”

TMO: “So I tried to do that, but it said it couldn’t.”

ASH: “Right. You must be running Kitten.”

TMO: “Yeah. I am.”

ASH: “WELL, iTunes 7.7 requires that you be running Sabretooth, not Kitten.”

TMO: “Oh. So I need to upgrade in order to use this $200 phone I just bought?”

ASH: “Yep!”

TMO: “So I just run Mac Update —”

ASH: “Oh, no, you have to BUY Sabretooth. That’ll be $299.”

TMO: “Wait… so, in order to use this $200 phone I just bought, I have to spend like another $300 to upgrade my operating system first?”

ASH: “Yep!”

TMO: “... ... OK! Let’s do that! HERE ARE MY CREDIT CARDS!”

That conversation ACTUALLY HAPPENED. Geez. Apple customers…

Anyway, all said and done, I got out of there with an iPhone 3G. Most of the smug did eventually come off — not all of it, mind you; Apple smug can never really be completely removed. I still catch my internal monologue mocking people without iPhones sometimes.

After getting home, I proceeded to get all the contacts from my old iPhone to show up on the new one. This took 45 minutes of frustrated fighting with iTunes on D’s machine. In the end, after only ending up with the contents of D’s Outlook contacts on my phone, I decided to try letting iTunes sync my contacts to Google Contacts. That did the trick. Except that now every email address that has ever sent mail to my gmail account is now a contact on my iPhone. Good thing the phone app filters contacts to show only the ones that have phone numbers associated — wait? It DOESN’T filter them? Whose stupid frakking idea was THAT? So now, in addition to thousands of contacts on my phone, all the people who have both a phone number AND were in my Google Contacts have duplicate entries in my address book. Well, not DUPLICATE, per se; one has phone number, another has email address. Thanks, Apple.

So the iPhone 3G has GPS capability that is quite awesome. Many apps support it, allowing you to, for instance, look up movie listings without having to put in a location. Find which of the five Starbuckses that you can currently see is the closest. Stuff like that. It’s really great — or WOULD be, if it didn’t always think I was in Houston, Texas whenever 3G is turned on. (Which is pretty much always… why would you turn it OFF?)

Despite this annoying crap, a jailbroken iPhone is by far the most “open” internet device/phone I’ve ever used, so I’m unapologetic about my love for it. It does make me feel a little funny, though, being seen with one. The anti-hipster in me cringes and can only be quieted by showing it all the awesome stuff MY iPhone can do that Apple doesn’t approve of.

That preposition at the end of that sentence means it’s time for me to once again bid you adieu.

Dear Amazon,

The Kindle is nice and all, but it’s a lot of money for a dedicated device for reading books when I already have tons of devices capable of reading books. A screen, a wireless connection and a keyboard. That describes a Kindle. That also describes laptops, cellphones, iPhones, PDAs, etc.

If you want to sell lots more ebooks, I suggest you release Kindle software for some or all of those devices. Specifically I would suggest laptops and iPhones. The iPhone is my preferred way to read Kindle books (it is way smaller and lighter than Kindle, and I already have it with me all the time), but it’d be really swell if I could wirelessly purchase the books from you and not have to break the law in order to read them.

Now that Apple has 3rd-party apps for iPhone/iPod Touch, I HIGHLY recommend that you make a Kindle app for them. You’ll sell bajillions more books than you already do. BAJILLIONS.

D recently bought one of those new-fangled Amazon Kindle thingies for purchasing and reading books in an electronic form. (She loves it.)

I like to read books in an electronic form on my iPhone, but find that it’s pretty hard to come by them legally; there are many different sellers and formats, some of which have certain books but not others. Sometimes they have the book, but not in a format I can do anything with. It’s generally easier just to illegally download them from torrent sites.

Amazon has tons and tons of books available for Kindle, and have chosen the standard MobiPocket format as the one their reader uses, meaning it is theoretically trivial to purchase them and convert them to something else. Except that they won’t sell them to you unless you have already purchased a $400ish Kindle on which to read them. Meaning you don’t need to convert them…

In any case, now that our household has a Kindle, it frees me up to purchase books from Amazon in Kindle format without actually having a Kindle myself. I then just remove the DRM that Amazon puts in the files (to keep people from converting them, natch), and then convert them to HTML or txt to read in Books.app on iPhone. Want to know how to do the same thing?

Howto:

Step 1) Find someone with a Kindle.

Step 2) On their Kindle, go to the Settings menu, and type ‘411’ on the keypad. This will bring up a little information dialog with a bunch of things in it, of which you only need the Serial. It is a 16-character string of letters and numbers. Write it down.

Step 3) Ask the Kindle’s owner to buy a book for you. Give them some money so you don’t look like a mooch. Once you’ve given them the money, ask them to log in to their Amazon account and navigate to their ‘Kindle Downloads‘ page from your computer. When they complain, mention that you’ve already given them money. The Kindle Downloads page will list all the books they’ve purchased, and yours should be right at the top. Click ‘Download to computer’ and you’ll get a file named ‘Title-of-Book.azw’

Step 4) Download MobiDeDRM.zip, which is a small suite of Python scripts that some kind soul wrote and then distributed through links that expire all the time and can be kind of a pain to track down. I’ve hosted them from my site so that they won’t expire. This .zip file contains mobidedrm.py, mobidedrm2.py, kindlepid.py and mobihuff.py.

(These scripts require that you install Python on your system, which is something outsite the scope of this howto. I’m on linux, but there’s a Python for Windows called “ActiveState Python.” Google will help.)

After unzipping the archive, open up a terminal window and pass the Kindle’s serial # (which you previously wrote down) to kindlepid.py. Something like this:

python kindlepid.py XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Where all those Xs are replaced with the Kindle serial number. It will return something that looks like this:

Mobipocked PID for Kindle serial# XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX is Z1QFCDQ*74

Make note of that last 10-character gibberish. That’s the secret code (or PID) we’ll need to remove the DRM from any books purchased for that Kindle.

Step 5) Now it’s time to remove the DRM. Do this:

python mobidedrm.py Title-of-Book.azw Title-of-Book.mobi Z1QFCDQ*74

where my 10-character gibberish string is replaced with the one you made note of in the last step. This will take about a minute, and when it finishes you’ll see:

Decrypting. Please wait... done

Now you will have a decrypted MobiPocket-formatted ebook that you can read in any MobiPocket reader.

If, however, you want to convert it to HTML to read on any device you wish, you’ll want to install MobiPerl. (This, of course, will require you to install Perl. MobiPerl’s website will walk you through that.)

6) With MobiPerl installed, do this:

mobi2html Title-of-Book.mobi

This will create a directory named ‘unpacked’ that will contain Title-of-Book.html

Things that can go wrong:

Amazon seems to compress longer books in a slightly different manner than shorter books. If your resulting .mobi file and/or .html file are oddly gibberishy (for example, if the first line starts in the middle of a sentence, and clearly not the beginning of the book), let’s go back to step 5.

Step 5b) These ‘huffdic-compressed’ books require a slightly different script to remove the DRM. Do this:

python mobidedrm2.py Title-of-Book.azw Title-of-Book.mobi Z1QFCDQ*74

Note the ‘2’ in ‘mobidedrm2.py’ in this one and remember to replace my gibberish PID with yours.

6b) The ‘huffdic-compressed’ files also require a different script to convert them to HTML. Do this:

python mobihuff.py Title-of-Book.mobi Title-of-Book.html

This script will output the .html file in the directory from which you are running it.

All in all, this is as much of a pain as it looks, but the selection and availability of books on Amazon makes it worthwhile to me. They have far more books than The Pirate Bay does, and I feel better paying for them

Good luck.

Dear Apple,

Would it have killed you to have made the ‘new tab’ button in Mobile Safari automatically put the new tab into URL entry mode? I mean, what else could I possibly want to do with a new tab other than go to a URL?

[Full disclosure: I am no fan of Apple. I didn’t even own an iPod until recently, and only then because I was able to immediately wipe Apple’s software off it and use the far-superior (for me) open-source Rockbox firmware on it instead. I did not buy iPhone, and had no reason to hold any bias towards it prior to playing with one. In fact, when I did play with one after finding out that I won mine, I hated it. If anything, my bias is against iPhone, and is most definitely against Apple.]

I’ve been having the hardest time writing up a full review of the iPhone, partly because even I am sick of hearing about them. The short answer is that for me, iPhone is a lot like Michael Bay’s Transformers; sure, there is a lot wrong with it, but I like it anyway. Would I pay $600 for one? Probably not, but everyday I get more value out of it, putting me closer to the point that I would. I’m up to about $350 right now, for those that are curious how much I would pay for one.

If all you want is a phone with email and access to the “real internet,” (<--- you should really click that) then I'd say your money is better spent on one of the many other cheaper options (many of which do a better job of those things, some say. I agree with them.) that aren’t crippled in such painful ways. One of my favorite examples of iPhone stupidity is the following: if someone sends you a calendar appointment in iCal format, iPhone doesn’t know what to do with it. Yes, Apple’s email client on Apple’s phone can’t understand Apple’s calendar format. Yes, iPhone actually HAS an Apple calendar app on it, there’s just no way to get appointments into it without plugging it into a computer.¹ Stupid. There are many other stupid things that I don’t feel I really need to go into here. If you know someone that has one, you’ve surely asked them about something and been told “no… but maybe in the next update,” or heard other people bitching about them. In many ways, iPhone really sucks.

That said, here’s why I love mine and cannot get rid of it: because the high-profile lust-worthiness of the device coupled with Apple’s non-commitment to releasing a 3rd-party software development kit has resulted in a “hacker” development community that kicks all manner off ass. Within a month of the device being out, people had already written not only UIKit, a sort of cobbled-together SDK, but also a compiler and linker and various other tools to be able to get the code they write with the SDK to run on iPhone. Tomorrow will be 2 months exactly, and already there is a multitude of really awesome apps out there letting me do any number of awesome things, not to mention a full suite of UNIX command-line tools. (Being able to set up cron jobs on your iPhone to, say, have your iPhone rsync all your camera photos to your webhost over the wireless connection at certain times of the day? Yes, that’s no problem.) There’s a neat voice recorder app (which hopefully will gain MP3 functionality soon, allowing me to email recordings right to my blog. Instant podcast from anywere? Awesome.), DOOM, a couple different NES emulators, a terminal client, a bunch of neat games, a text editor, a couple different file browsers, an ebook reader, etc. I’m just scratching the surface here. One of the neatest apps is called Installer. It works as a sort of package manager, allowing you to install/upgrade/uninstall various applications without ever having to use a computer.

Speaking of having to use a computer: after gaining access to the whole iPhone, the easiest way to manipulate things on it is via ssh. (Yeah, you can ssh into your iPhone. Also available on iPhone: Apache web server, and SAMBA so you can make it show up in your Windows Network Neighborhood.) One neat little trick is that if your OS is smart enough, you can use ‘sshfs’ to mount your iPhone’s filesystem to your local computer over ssh — without ever plugging anything in. This allows me to manipulate things on it, even loading music and videos all wirelessly. Whenever my iPhone is in range of my wireless router it shows up on my local machine. That is pretty frickin’ fantastic.

So, in conclusion, if shiny trendy expensive things aren’t really your bag, but being able to use that UNIX knowledge you’ve got to do UNIXy things anywhere you happen to be, then perhaps iPhone might be for you. It sure is for me. (But then again, mine was free. I’m confident, though, that after some more time with it I might get to the point that I’m willing to pay full price for one. Just not quite yet,)

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1: the calendar, like pretty much every other source of data on the iPhone, stores its data in sqlite3 databases, meaning that it’s fairly trivial to manipulate without iTunes. I’ve been kind of half-assedly working on some scripts to pull down my google calendar .ics file and inject the events into my calendar db, but thus far my heart hasn’t really been much into it. Maybe some day.