Self Portrait from Mars

Congratulations to Curiosity and the whole NASA team for the smooth, audacious landing on Mars.

This is the second picture that Curiosity took, of its own shadow on the Martian landscape. Not quite as momentus as the photo of Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the moon, or the famous earthrise photo, but touching in its own way, and reinforcing the anthropomorphic qualities we collectively give to the plucky robot.

Update on the HTC One X performance

AT&T just rolled out an update for the HTC One X that I bought and wrote about recently. It includes a number of small enhancements, such as better access to 3rd party media apps like Pandora in Car Mode (which I’m using all the time and love now I’m commuting by car every day).

But the most welcome improvement is in system responsiveness. Gone are the pauses between switching apps, the app and Web Page reloads when returning to an app, and the occasional jitters when doing swipes between home screens. This was my only major gripe with the phone. It’s now a significantly faster feeling phone (not that it was exactly slow before). Very nice.

I haven’t used it enough yet to know if it has also fixed the problem of media apps stopping when run in the background if you try to do too many other things at once. Other reports on forums indicate that this has been improved also.

The only problem so far is that the update is causing Chrome to be buggy with tabs and sometimes with pages loading. It’s intermittent so hard to pin down.

On a related note, SwiftKey 3 came out of beta shortly after my last post, and it’s fantastic. It sounds like the new version of Android, Jelly Bean, contains a stock keyboard that bears quite a resemblance to SwiftKey in features and capabilities, but for now I’m very happy with the combo I have.

iPhone 5 Borrows Design From...iPhone 4?

Apple and Samsung are battling over rounded rectangles - Apple claiming patent infringement because Samsung copied the iPhone and iPad’s designs. The similarity between these companies’ products is, shall we say, striking.

In other news, if this rumor video of the next iPhone 5 is accurate, than the Apple of 2010 should frickin’ sue the Apple of 2010 for lack of creativity.

The NBC Olympics Blackmail

I cut the cord to cable TV over 2 years ago, and haven’t looked back. I’m not a big sports fan, except for watching the Tour de France religiously every summer, and for that I happily paid NBC $30 for full online coverage. I do like me some Olympics, but NBC has chosen not to offer any kind of online access…unless you have a cable subscription. WTF? I’d happily pay - I don’t expect them to give this away for free. This amounts to coercian to get a cable subscription, or a warning shot to people contemplating cutting the cord in the future, no doubt because NBC is now owned by Comcast.

I agree with Jim Stogdill’s piece on O’Reilly:

Anyway, here’s the thing. I would happily pay $50 to access those streams for two weeks, assuming they were done well. But I’m not going to switch to Comcast from my current provider to get it. And it’s absolutely idiotic for Comcast/NBC to think I would. The Olympics last for two weeks, but that behemoth’s crap service is forever.

These guys run their media empire the way Chavez runs Venezuelan power companies. Provide crappy service and limit innovation but keep the cash coming to what is essentially an IoC chartered royal monopoly. They could make it great for everyone, an amazingly wonderful experience, but then they would have to worry about what creative destruction might do to their current benefactors.

Get with the program, NBC.

Best Workshop Ever in a Caravan?

My wife and I today paid a visit to Jay Baldwin, so my wife could pick up some jewelry making equipment from his wife/partner in crime, Liz. He has a great workshop in an old caravan that is small in footprint but packed with equipment and materials. Jay used to travel around in it in the 60’s and 70’s doing eco-build projects (he worked with Buckminster Fuller for a time). It reminded me that I’d taken some pictures of it a few years ago.

Slideshow can be viewed fullscreen, you can also look at the original photo gallery here. Even though these were taken with my old Minolta 3MP point and shoot, they came out well.