Stranger In A Strange Land...

iPhone Headphone modifications.

brian — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 21:20:33 +0000

There has been plenty written about just what as Apple thinking when they decided to recess the iPhone’s headphone jack. And there have been plenty of manufacturers who have stepped up to offer solutions to allow existing headphones to work by the use of a simple adapter. Problem I have with that is many of those adapters are priced from $4 to $40. FORTY bucks for an adapter? I don’t care if it made sliced bread as well. On top of added cost of these adapters even the best of them have one big drawback, you have a much larger piece of plastic sticking out of your phone. It seems a bit silly to care about the cost considering the price of the phone or worry about the piece of extended plastic but I do. So I thought about it for a few minutes and figured what if I simply sliced off a bit of the offending plastic that prevented the headphones from being inserted into the hole. Googled “iphone modify headphones” to see if anyone else had written about the same thing and one of the top hits summed up exactly what I was thinking. So far I’ve modified a pair of Bose and Sony headphones. The surgery won’t work on my Shure’s E3’s though since where the plastic flares out on them right at the same place where the metal does as well. 2 out of 3 is not so bad.

The iPhone, 1st impressions.

brian — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:05:28 +0000

So I’ve been holding off buying a new phone for a few months now. But over the weekend my old Windows Mobile based SDA had one too many drops and pretty much stopped working. So off I went looking for a replacement. Home I came with an iPhone.

My first impressions, best phone I’ve had. Smooth operations, gracefull, snappy response, loads of features. Lots of stuff to like even for a 1st gen product. Of course there is plenty room for improvement and I’m throwing my 2 cents into the ongoing feedback Apple is getting on the iPhone.

1. Native IM Client that supports the top 5 IM Systems (Google, Apple, MS, Yahoo, AIM). The web versions just don’t cut it. Maybe one of them out there has what I need but so far they all look good but miss one important feature…NEW MESSAGE SOUND NOTIFICATION. Meebe and Beejive don’t offer a sound notification. I like the fact that meebo offers “contact is typing” messages, but I like beejive’s layout much better with bubbles and tabbed conversations.

2. Syncing. Why can’t I create a ’smart playlist’ for photos? i.e. Sync the last 50 pictures taken, or Sync pictures with tag, Sync 1GB worth of the most recent pictures, etc. Heck, lets bring viewing pictures into iTunes (which of course means it wouldn’t be iTunes anymore) and add tagging and rating support, then I can have a playlist that will sync all pictures with 3 or more stars.

3. Hard Drive/Manual access to move files onto the iPhone. yeah, the most recent version of iTunes seems to hint that this is coming.

4. Copy/Paste ability.

5. Springboard mod. Or configurable “Stacks” There are some things that just don’t need to be on the springboard’s 1st page. Other things that could be grouped together.

6. The built in Alarm app needs some help. Currently the alarm you choose appears to be tied to the default incoming calls ringer settings. I can choose a unique alarm sound, but if I have my default ringer set to also vibrate, then my alarm sounds and vibrates. The volume level is set based on the phone’s volume and can’t be set independently. So for the alarm I’d like to see:

* Truly independent ringer selection; i.e. if I want alarm to vibrate, but not incoming calls let me choose that and vice-versa.

* Volume setting of the alarm should be separate from the volume of phone and or default incoming ring.

* Would love to have a increasing alarm volume setting.

* Would love to have a customizable snooze setting (incremental minutes options for snooze duration).

7. True Exchange Sync support via Exchange push-mail.

That’s a start. Still playing with it and learning it’s strengths and weaknesses first hand and based on my own needs.

Hello world!

brian — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 01:53:26 +0000

This is the re-launch of my web site. Just in time for my trip to India. Talk about truly being a “Stranger In A Strange Land”