Telephones are just supposed to work. No fuss. Pick it up, dial a number, and you’re connected.

Cell phones shouldn’t be any different – but they are.

In the case of my I-Mate K-Jam, the thing is simply too slow. And often times, it looks like its frozen – while its actually just chugging through something.

Last night I decided I need to do some research on overclocking this thing. Turns out, someone else had the same complaint and already had a blog entry about it. Here it is:

Smartskey update, overclocking integrated

The standard clockspeed was 132mhz, and now I got it running at 264 – twice as fast. Its only been in this state for about 6 hours, but its like having a completely different phone – its a huge improvement.

The only thing left is to see what it does to the battery life… 🙂

Ok, a lot of these are very, very trippy….

Illusions, Magic Tricks and Puzzles: When Your Perception Turns Against You!

Optical Illusions Blog

Some these are amazing – like the full size Lego SUV…

It’s time for our weekly Top 10 list and this week our editors bring you the “Top 10 Strangest (or Coolest…) Lego Creations”.

Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations

Yay!

You scored 90% or more!

Guy Kawasaki’s Entrepreneurial IQ Test
Brought to you by Tickle

In December, I got a new cell phone after deciding that my Treo 650 was a piece of junk.

I ended up replacing it with a I-Mate K-Jam – which is also known as an HTC Wizard… and is now also known as the Cingular 8125 or the T-Mobile MDA. Since I bought the unlocked version before it was officially released in the US, I paid a fortune for it. (You can read a recent review of the Cingular 8125 here and another one here.)

The K-Jam is nice… it has a huge screen, a 1.3megapixel camera, built-in Wifi and its still about the same size as the Treo 650 (if not exactly the same size).

The past few months of owning it have been pretty good – most importantly it doesn’t have the reboot problem like the Treo has. I only have two complaints about it:

1. Its not built for one-handed operation like a typical cell phone or the Treo. Which is a real pain when you’re trying to make a call while driving, or even walking.
2. The processor on it is pretty slow. I can get it to slow down to a crawl while surfing and emailing at the same time (which happens a lot, apparently)

After seeing how little Palm did to improve the one-handed operation of the PocketPC OS in their latest phone, the 700w, I wasn’t all that dissappointed in the end about the first issue. But the slow processor issue was a bit of a problem.

Until the new firmware update came out for the K-Jam! 🙂

The phone seems much more responsive now – only time will tell if it is really faster. They’ve made some tweaks to the apps here and there… but the biggest addition is that the new version of the OS supports true push-email on Exchange… it works, its fast, and its pretty sweet.

All in all, I’m glad I switched to the K-Jam – I’ll take slow over rebooting any day… and now that it does true push email, theres no reason to consider switching to a Blackberry. W00t! 🙂

I’ve been using Verizon’s EV-DO service for the past couple of weeks, and I have to say that I absolutely love it.

Its fast…. its VERY fast.

I almost never worry about trying to find a wifi hotspot anymore since I can get around 500kps on the EV-DO network most of the time (and faster if I have really good signal strength.) And to solve the signal strength issue while I’m in hotel rooms, I got a small external antenna…

I’m still waiting for my Kyocera KR1 EV-DO wifi router so I can share the connection… and a mag-mount EV-DO antenna for my car.

I highly recommend it. 🙂

As I said before, I continue to tell people NOT to buy HDTV sets for various reasons… one of which is the fact that the HDTV “standard” is a bit of a moving target.

A couple of years ago at CES, 1080-progressive, or 1080p, had become popular… (not there was any content for that format as the 1080p format isn’t supported via ATSC or QAM as far as I know)… turns out that 1080p will be supported in the new hi-def DVD formats coming up.

So lots of people I’m sure started buying 1080p televisions to make sure that they’ll be able to display the new Hi-Def DVD material…

But as it goes, the Hi-Def industry has moved the cheese again, and even if you have 1080p capable tv set, you probably won’t be able to display any HD-DVD content since they changed the DRM spec….

HD DVD to Screw Early HDTV Adopters

I imagine that the HDTV “standard” will evolve a few more times before its done… so to hold me over until then, I bought four standard-def TV’s the other day that were on sale. 🙂

Lots of folks in the advertising business have been poo-poo’ing the whole TiVo and PVR revolution… but I’m glad some advertisers are finally starting to adapt to the new technology instead of bitching about it:

Advertisers are running into a jam. With more and more people using digital video recorders, people are just zipping through the ads.

One company says you won’t want to do that with their latest commercial.

KFC says its latest ad has a hidden message. Apparantly, if you watch the ad in slow motion, you can decode the message, and get a coupon for a free sandwich.

KFC Unveils “Tivo-Proof” Ad

(Thanks to Vikram for pointing out this article – usually I’m on top of such things, but I was traveling when this article came out… 🙂 )

I had been looking for a new phone headset and I had a few minimum requirements:

• Wired – No Bluetooth – I love BT, but I don’t want to carry (yet another) charger with me
• Boom Mic – I hate the dangling mic on the cord, and I think that mics in the ear-piece still pick up too much noise (no matter what noise canceling tech is being used)
• Easy to carry – I have been carrying a GN Netcom headset around with me, and its been great but its a bit of a pain to carry around with its metal headband and all.
• Sufficient volume – The main problem I’ve been having with cell phones is that its difficult to hear the other person on the with so much background noise in the car or whever I may be at the time.

Speaking of volume – the Treo 650 I had was barely audible in a car or airport with the volume cranked (even with Volumecare), and the I-mate K-Jam I have right now is better, but not much of an improvement.

Instead of trying to boost the audio, I decided that maybe blocking out the ambient noise was better… While I was at CES this January, I had the chance to stop by the Shure booth and play with some of their newest sound-isolating ear-buds. I own a set of E2c ear-buds and I love them. So I wondered if they made phone headsets – and it turns out they do!

You can read about them here: Headsets For Mobile Phones

Mine came in today, and so far, I love it… it has a real boom mic, and its light-weight, and since it blocks out all the other noises around me I have to turn the volume down on my phone to its lowest setting so it won’t blast my ear. Sweet!

I went to the local Verizon store today to buy a Treo 700w. But I didn’t.

Its not to say its not a great phone:

• The sound quality is awesome – its loud and clear (finally!)
• The proc is pretty quick – but its not quick enough… I managed to get it to slow down when switching apps.
• The one-handed operation of the 700w is better than any PocketPC phone I’ve owned (or played with) but its not as slick as the Treo 650’s UI.
• It has EV-DO for data access and I can only sum it up with one word – “WOW!” Its wicked fast.

So the upside is that its probably the best PocketPC phone I’ve seen… but the downside is that since its on the PocketPC platform its really hard to make it that much different than anyone elses PocketPC phone… I mean, is there really THAT much difference between one company’s WinXP machine to another’s? (I’ve not thought so in quite some time.)

Ultimately it didn’t make sense to buy it at the Verizon store even if I did want to go home with it since Amazon.com has a $350 (after rebate) price on it while the walk-in store had it for $500.

Ok so people continue to ask me – “Does this ColdHeat thingy really work?”

I actually got one as a gift from Dirk, and quite frankly – I like it. It does take a little while to get used it – this is not your father’s soldering iron. But once you realize that its not the same thing, and treat it as something different, it actually does a pretty decent job soldering joints on wires and pcbs.

As an invention, Cold Heat seems to have everything. At first glance, it does something old (soldering) in a new, potentially better way (without a hot soldering iron and the risk of burns). It has the “Why didn’t someone do this before?” factor.

How Cold Heat Works

For years, I’ve been discouraging people from buying HDTV’s for two reasons…

1. To date, there are very few shows in any sort of HiDef format or resolution
2. HDTV display technology is changing rapidly and improving by leaps and bounds while prices continue to drop

There’s still very few shows to watch in HD… and while there was once simply CRT, LCD, DLP, and Plasma… there’s now LCoS… which appears to be the “new hotness”:

Liquid Crystal on Silicon, LCoS, is a relatively new and obscure display technology that is now making its grand entrance into the HDTV marketplace. What is really impressive is that instead of taking the traditional path of entering at the ground floor with mediocre performance compared to the established technologies and then trying to percolate up to the top tier in picture quality, it is starting out right at the very top. Already, LCoS provides the highest resolutions, the highest non-CRT Contrast Ratios, and the most artifact-free images of any display technology. For people that are sensitive to flicker and eye-fatigue, LCoS operates at the highest refresh rates (120 Hz) for the smoothest, most flicker-free images. This article will be an in-depth examination of 5 LCoS HDTVs, all but one of them prototypes, in order to get an early look into this unfolding technology.

LCoS Display Technology Shootout Part A

I decided to order one of these “Sleepmate” thingies… we’ll see if it works… 🙂

Have you ever laid awake at night wondering, “What do I have to do to get a peaceful night’s sleep?” as your neighbor’s dog barks all night and traffic roars by?

Why Constant Noise is the Perfect Sleep Solution

This is really cool – Its free… now you can finally recommend a solution for your friends for hosting their email for their own domain names…

20 accounts per domain, 250megs of storage per account…

Its basically Hotmail but instead of having “[email protected]” you can get “[email protected]” and use all of the normal hotmail features like spam filtering, web access… even syncing to Outlook.

Bitch’n!

Windows Live Email Service

I admit it, I have a bit of a fascination with the Rubik’s Cube.

Growing up, the best I could complete was two adjacent sides… then I’d just get frustrated and dis-assemble the whole thing, and just put it back together the correct way… which I felt was a far-superior way of solving it than moving the stickers around (like my cousin did). 😀

Here’s a short video clip of this year Rubik’s Cube Competition.

Video: A puzzle gone wild

My favorite part is the blind-folded competition… insanely cool. 🙂

It turns out that all the YouTube acquisition rumors… are just all that… rumors.

On the other hand, it was exiciting to think that someone could have bought YouTube after only being alive for 11 months (founded in Feb. ’05)… oh well. 🙂

YouTube Acquisition Rumors

Phil sent me this link this morning, turns out there was someone spying on us – well, ok, so the photographer was walking around constantly in plain sight – but its still a bit amusing to find us on the web like this… 🙂

TED Simulcast

After digging thru’ the site a bit, I found another shot of us in the Gallery (on Day 1, photo #27) playing with glow sticks at dinner:

TEDphotoGALLERY

Going clockwise from me (with the glowstick-chopsticks) – Jim Young (co-founder of Hotornot.com), Dirk Elmendorf (co-founder of Rackspace Managed Hosting), Evan Williams (co-founder of both Blogger.com and ODEO), Max Levchin (co-founder of PayPal and founder of Slide), James Hong (co-founder Hotornot.com), and Philip Kaplan (founder of both Fuckedcompany.com and Adbrite).

This is amazing… FOUR gigs on a high-speed SD card, and its only 200 bucks! And its not vapor-ware! You can buy it today! Incredible!

Surplus Computers has the A-Data 4GB 150x Turbo Secure Digital Card for $200 with free shipping.

A-Data 4GB 150x Turbo Secure Digital Card $200

Ya know, I kinda wanna own a Mac… but I’m attached to Windows… I know, I know – “MacOS is better – yadda, yadda…”

Anyhow, the question was – can one run Windows on the new Intel-based Macs?

With the announcement of the Intel chip based Macbook, the door is now open for running the Windows OS on Macintosh hardware, right? jaypatrick writes “BetaNews reports that along with the announcement of the first Intel based Macs yesterday, many users have rejoiced in being able to dual-boot both Mac OS X and Windows. Unfortunately, this is not the case; due to Apple’s use of the extensible firmware interface (EFI) rather than BIOS, current Windows releases will not run on the systems.” I guess not. But, wait… Big Z writes “Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing, said in an interview Tuesday that the company won’t sell or support Windows itself, but also hasn’t done anything to preclude people from loading Windows onto the machines themselves.” I think someone actually trying it out is the only way this is going to get straightened out.

Windows on Intel Macs – Yes or No?

Wow, sounds like everyone’s better off just sleeping-in than trying to rush into the office if you’re still a little groggy…

If it takes a while to clear the cobwebs after waking up, that’s understandable — “sleep inertia” leaves some people so groggy they might as well be drunk, researchers said on Tuesday.

Study: Waking up like being drunk

Its not often when Google gets beat by someone…

… Hitwise has crunched the traffic data, and YouTube indeed overtook Google Video in market share, shooting up 83% in one week …

Guess I Was Onto Something

And if you haven’t seen the “Lazy Sunday” Saturday Night Live sketch you can view it below… its pretty funny – DOUBLE TRUE!

SNL – The Chronic of Narnia Rap

Easy Ubuntu is cool, but this is just as useful:

This is a graphical interface for installation of a lot of apps on UBUNTU BREEZY and for tweaking a few things to get your Ubuntu box up and working in full throttle in the quickest possible timespan.

Automatix (Automated GUI installation script)

This is great – I’ve already used it four times in the past week:

Unlocker overrides those annoying Error Deleting File or Folder messages. When you want to delete a file and Windows won’t let you, use Unlocker to free the file from system processes holding it hostage. Unlocker will delete stubborn files, free files from a captive process or kill process that won’t let go using normal means in the Windows Task Manager.

Unlocker

It appears that Audible updated their website – they cleaned it up a bit… its a bit faster… you can now download mulitple titles at once. All in all its an improvement.

I also noticed that if you upgrade to their newer Platinum Listener account, you can get a free iPod shuffle as long as you stay on-board for 6 months. Since I’ve been a member for some time, I just figured I’d upgrade to the newest account to get the free iPod.

At first this was fine… I cancelled my older subscription, then signed up for the new promo… everything was great… until I went to check my “Next Listen” queue.

Its gone. >:(

It seems that they’ve eliminated the “Next Listen” queue in favor of providing “roll-over” credits… which is fine. Except now I have no idea what it was I wanted to listen to for the next few months.

Hey Audible – how about moving all the “Next Listen” items to the wishlist!? Or possibly just alerting the user to the fact that you’d be losing the items in the queue!?

For all you physics geeks out there… 🙂

These pages explain quantum entanglement by way of colourful pictures, helpful analogies, and absolutely no math.

Quantum Entanglement