Technical advances in the scientific field serve a dire need first and then those totems of communication and facilitation trickle down to the mainstream. The Deaf popularized pagers first, followed by the Hearing community in everyday business, then there was the move to SMS in cellphones and today, the new trend is video conferencing in your iPhone or iPad. The image below shows the first TTY — teletypewriter — that the Deaf used to communicate with each other in end-to-end conversations.
The horrible new 3D map App in Apple iOS 6 is still getting a lot of negative play weeks after the operating system update. While my experience isn’t as horrible as some, I can still report some tremendous disparity in the disappointing mapping results. For example, let’s take a look at a slice of my Jersey City neighborhood.
Yesterday, I spent my morning stuck in a Verizon store — not trying to order the new iPhone 5 — but rather trying to achieve one simple task: Swapping out the old SIM cards on my two iPad 2(s) and not getting very far, even though I had already done my web research and wasted an hour on the phone with Verizon customer support telling me the only way to add the iPads to my new “Share Everything Plan” was to replace the SIM cards because a “pre-pay” SIM card is hardcoded in the Verizon system as a standalone device and the only way to add an iPad to a shared data plan is to replace the pre-pay SIM card with a “post-pay” SIM card.
Easy, right?
Not so fast!
I have had my iPhone 4 in early August of 2009 and I have been carefully protecting it since then. At the slightest hint of rain I bury my phone deeply in my pocket and have had a thin yet solid cover which has, I believe, saved it on numerous occasions from dopey drops — the cracks in the case are testament to this reality.
Above all, I have kept it well away from bodies of water, trying not to have it out near ponds or lakes and even being careful when going to use the restroom. On Friday, as we were preparing for the holy Sabbath and I was doing the otherwise mundane task of washing dishes, disaster seemed to strike when I picked up my phone to look at something and it slipped out of my hand and straight into a large bowl full of water.
One popular article I wrote for the Boles Blogs Network appeared in Celebrity Semiotic on August 5, 2010 – Divorcing Amazon Prime Because of A-1 Courier Services Cheating – and that post is still going full-steam with comments, 315 as of this writing, with no end in stopping. When an article like that stays on blast — it is usually fury and injustice that drives the popularity — all that, plus an excellent Google ranking for a search on “A-1 Courier” always helps. There would be no searches without the rage, and so the hits, and the comments, keep coming against A-1.
In my replies for the article, I realized I should share my method for thwarting faked delivery attempts from FedEx and UPS and other companies. Unfortunately, A-1 is not currently in my App cache, and I’m sure they would never want to be included because then their deceptive end game would be over.
I use Junecloud’s excellent Delivery Status on my Mac as a widget and on my iPhone and iPad as an App. The widget and Apps all communicate with each other via the Junecloud.com website, so each device is always in sync with the latest delivery updates and my day is saved in so many ways.
The word legitimize has some pretty powerful connotations. While researching this article I searched for the word and came across many occurrences of things in the world that were at one point not taken seriously suddenly being treated with respect. For example, one movie review claims that the film “Shame” is going to be the thing to legitimize the NC-17 rating and make it something from which movie producers will not flee in the future. The governor of Washington state recently asked the United States Government to declassify marijuana and legitimize it for medicinal usage. With the release of the most recent update to iOS, the question becomes whether their tight integration of Twitter really legitimizes Twitter as a social networking service.
On Friday, the long purgatory that was AT&T and the iPhone came to a bloody end for Janna and me as we ripped open our Verizon boxes to set up our new iPhone 4S devices of love! I was actually so happy being back with Verizon that I took a hammer to Janna’s AT&T 3G iPhone and my AT&T 3GS iPhone and smashed the screens to smithereens! Then I took those broken AT&T iPhones and dunked them in salt water and let them sit there for an hour before I took them outside and dropkicked each one into the trash bin! Begone AT&T! Your misery knows no bounds and you have no shame! I can’t believe all the money we wasted paying you for lousy voice and data service!
The first thing you notice about the 4s, coming from the 3G series, is that the retina display is just as wonderful as you’ve read about since the rise of the 4. You can actually read tiny text and, as you can see below, the screenshots are magnificent!
Several months ago, our roommate Chad told us about a phone app called Foursquare that let him “check in” to places he went, allowing him to get virtual points and badges for accomplishing certain goals and granting him the title of “Mayor” when he visited a location and “checked in” more than anyone else had done at that particular location. I thought it was interesting enough and so I installed it on my phone as well. I made the decision a few days ago that I was going to uninstall the program from my phone as well as blocking it from my Twitter so that I would not see when people used it. Here is why I made this decision.
I have always believed we must live our lives and make decisions based on insufficient evidence we have in hand and then live with the consequences of those uninformed responses. I do not believe in regret. Regret is poison. Regret is emotional and intellectual suicide that decays the body from within. Reflecting on a reflexive life is different than regret. We must reflect in order to know what not to do in the future.
For the past eight years or so, I’ve lived my non-virtual, printed, life through a Canon InkJet printer. The printer was slow. The quality was so-so. The replacement ink cartridges were incredibly expensive. When Apple announced the availability of AirPrint for selected printers and iOS devices like the iPad and the iPhone, I knew then that I would soon be in the market for a new printer. Yesterday, the HP LaserJet CM1415fnw was delivered to my front door, and I’ve been a printing maniac ever since!
I was toodling around the iTunes App store this morning, and when I did a search for “guitar amps,” I discovered the “Vox Mobile Catalog” for my iPhone and I was hooked the moment after the free download.
Square is a new financial service that allows you to charge credit cards on your iPhone or iPad and the whole idea is really quite brilliant. At first blush, you might not understand why you would want to collect credit card payments if you use PayPal or some other online banking service — but if you think about your work day and how you interact with others in a business and personal sense — Square is giving you a cash register in the palm of your hand to facilitate credit card transactions just as if you had a storefront location. After verifying your vitals on the Square website, you can begin accepting credit card transactions on your iOS device. You mange your account online. Each week, Square will deposit up to $1,000.00USD into your bank account. Square’s vig for swiped credit cards is 2.75% +15 cents and 3.5% + 15 cents for keyed-in credit cards.
Awareness! is a new App for the iPhone that listens for danger for you while you lose yourself in your music. The App only runs on iOS4, and when it is active, you get a bright, red, throbbing bar across the top of your iPhone screen at all times reminding you the App is active. The only way to rid yourself of that annoying redness is to kill the App with a double click on the home button and then choose to close it as a live application.
Would you spend $200.00 USD on an iPhone App to give back your ability to communicate via voice? That might sound like a lot of money for a little bit of software, but for the disabled who can regain their lost communication — Proloquo2Go is just the right facilitator to help restore self-worth and speech.
