B. Mann Consulting

This past weekend I did my first dedicated AdHack session. James and I professed our love for our Canon S5 IS cameras (see my initial write up after I bought it). We ended up with 15 minutes of video, taking turns explaining different features of the camera. The video itself was taken with each of our cameras, and then just roughly spliced together -- we might post process it some more with some subtitles, and maybe even some example photos and/or stills of some of the functions, but it works pretty well for now. Shame on other potential AdHackers that didn't brave the snow to hang out and make social media with us! :P

Click To Play

Oh, and I fiddled with the Brother printer that Monique is reviewing and got the wireless working (although this beast they call PictBridge is still pretty mystifying).

Mossberg has posted his review of the iPhone, calling it a "breakthrough handheld computer". What caught my eye was this statement:

But the iPhone has a major drawback: the cellphone network it uses. It only works with AT&T (formerly Cingular), won't come in models that use Verizon or Sprint and can't use the digital cards (called SIM cards) that would allow it to run on T-Mobile's network. So, the phone can be a poor choice unless you are in areas where AT&T's coverage is good. It does work overseas, but only via an AT&T roaming plan.

Uh....what? Somehow, we had always assumed that this would be a GSM phone. The confusion about the AT&T vs. Cingular brand heightens this. I was under the impression that AT&T was moving to GSM...but Cingular's network was/is CDMA based.

If the iPhone is, indeed, a CDMA phone, then the whole will the iPhone be locked to Cingular question is a bit moot: without SIM cards, you can't take it to another network.

What does this mean for the timeline of a Canadian iPhone provider? Well, Rogers is a GSM network, not CDMA. So...Bell or Telus? Well, just a bit more time and some more of this should be revealed.

Update: ok, I'm pretty sure iPhone as CDMA phone is incorrect, here's another review from USA Today:

In techie terms, iPhone is a "quad-band GSM" phone, meaning you can operate it overseas. (You'll have to tell AT&T to turn on international roaming.)

So. We know that iPhone *is* a GSM phone. But no SIM card. Our best guess now is that this is all done in software / firmware...hence the iTunes activation step. So, unless you know how to re-program the iPhone's firmware to make it emulate another carrier's SIM....the iPhone is locked to only the networks that Apple chooses to support. Which, however, they can update through iTunes.

Wow. Apple iTunes as gateway to buying cellphone services. I'm still shaking my head at how they managed to put the carriers in a headlock...and still sad that they took away user choice by not just having a user-accessible SIM card.

Update 2: OK, last update on this (and boy, this blog post now is completely wrong). The iPhone *does* have a SIM card slot, which we can see thanks to David Pogue's graphic about it. The comment says:

If you insert a pin or an unfolded paperclip into the pinhole and push hard, the pre-installed SIM card tray pops out. Any recent AT&T SIM card should work, although only after iPhone activitation in the iTunes software.

Thanks to Scott Langevin for pointing this out in the comments.

So, final final conclusion -- the iPhone is a GSM phone (duh!), it *does* have a SIM card (yay!), and it is somehow locked and/or tied into iTunes activation. Next challenge: unlock the iPhone....

A very nifty personal (only you get to add content) or shared (allow anyone to update and edit) mapping site powered by Google Maps. Has all the buzzwords the kids like today, from community to tags to reviews. Minus points for no Flickr integration, and for no support of Canada (!).

Last night I was up too late for my own good, drawn into some strange corners of the Internet over on the Mac section of Danny Choo's site, and found a link to DoubleTake, a Mac OS X application for stiching together panoramas. I decided not to try it out, but did add it to my del.icio.us links for later. My description was a bit strange ("$12; there are no free stitch apps that I can find; I'm having a hard time finding *good* ones, never mind free ones"), and hinted at my frustration with other tools like the open source, highly complex/somewhat slow Hugin and Canon's crappy still-looks-like-OS-9 Photostich.

I was very surprised to get up this morning and get an email from Henrik Dalgaard, creator of DoubleTake and other apps at Echo One. He is obviously tracking del.icio.us linkage, and wanted to know more:

So, after completing the previous post about storing video and other large files, I did go off and buy my AudioBlog.com membership for a year (you can try a 7 day free trial as well).

Over on my personal site, I posted my first moblog: I called into the AudioBlog phone number with my cell phone, recorded, and hit publish. I had previously set AudioBlog up with all my blog details (I have 4 set up so far -- this site, my personal site, Bryght, and Urban Vancouver), and you punch a code into your phone identifying the blog to which you want to publish. You can also just record and handle the publishing details later on through the website.

Everything went pretty easy, minus a few things I had to fiddle with in Drupal to get things working seamlessly. The two things you need to know here are 1) choose MovableType as your blog type...the Drupal one falls back to using the Blogger API, which doesn't even support titles, never mind categories; and 2) AudioBlog uses an iframe to display the Flash audio player, which won't display unless you have Full HTML and/or iframes not filtered by default.