What’s My Next Telephone?

My mobile phone is starting to show it’s age. More sketchy connections, increased static and general inability to hear the other person on the line.

All independent of who I’m talking with or whether I’m on T-Mobile’s GSM network or a WiFi network.

All making me more unhappy with a device that increasingly feels like a buggy whip.

This weekend, I stopped by the T-Mobile store in the nearby mall. It was disheveled, half the demo phones were missing, and the displays were falling apart. Like their website, I couldn’t get a good sense what interesting phones they had – let alone which ones they wanted to sell me. The associate behind the counter was more interested in determining if my account was eligible for an upgrade than upselling me on a sexy new handset.

I kept thinking – maybe I should just buy an unlocked Nexus One.

Though – all I’m really looking for is an easy way to make voice calls- all that other smart phone stuff? Between a laptop, iPod Touch, and iPad, I’ve got it covered.

Two years ago, I predicted that once it expired, I wouldn’t be renewing my monthly mobile phone service plan.

If you’re a betting man – it still looks like a good bet.

The question is – if I drop my monthly mobile phone service, how do I make voice calls?

I’d like a mobile device optimized for the voice call experience. I don’t see that anywhere on the market.

So, what should my next phone be?

Upate 27 May 2010:
Early tests show Peter Cooper may have the answer.

“Ooh, a docked iPad + Skype == an awesome desk phone (sound is great both ways) even stuck with the scaled-up iPhone app for now”

Ongoing List of Foods I Shouldn’t Eat

(NOTE: Like many of my other ongoing lists, this post is primarily for my memory – rumor is it’s the first to go with age.)

I’ve been fortunate that to date – and been able to maintain a very omnivorous diet. Surpassing 35 has brought with many changes. Most notably – I now have a list of foods that make me feel worse that I did before I ate them.

The list so far:

  • Milk
  • Pistacchios
  • Anything from IKEA’s Cafe
  • Anything from Chipotle

Fontue Font Optimization Workflow – Open Sourced

With the Fontue web font server open sourced, I’ve done the same for the workflow scripts I use to to generate the fonts for @font-face use.

It’s a pair of scripts that pipe fonts in and out of other conversion programs like FontForge, sfnt2woff, Batik, and EOTFast. Along the way, doing a little clean up of the font file itself.

These workflow scripts are now included in the Fontue source code.

Kernest’s Web Font Serving Engine – Fontue – Now Open Source

I’ve talked to a number of people and organizations that want to start adding web fonts to their websites – but aren’t comfortable relying on a third-party service for something so integral to their online presence.

With that in mind, I’m pleased to announced that Kernest‘s underlying web font serving engine – dubbed Fontue – has been released under the MIT License.

Fontue is designed to be the lightest, fastest way to serve web fonts to @font-face supporting browsers while saving bandwidth and keeping CSS clean and readable.

Get more information at Fontue.com or download the latest version from Github.

An iPad App I’d Like to See – Shorthand

Inputing anything on the iPad more complex than – ‘I want that’ – is frustrating, even moreso with the keyboard.

The thought of taking notes on the iPad during meetings is still ridiculous. And I started wondering how people quickly took notes before we all became such proficient touch typists.

Eclectic_shorthand_by_cross

The idea of a single gesture representing a word (or series of words) rather than a single character is very appealing. And with a Javascript library like Raphaël, this could even be a web-based app.

Shorthand has least as much of a learning curve as QWERTY.

A Message on the Space Telephone Answering Machine

Dave Slusher’s clambake from April 6 2009 accompanied me on my between meeting drives today.

Yes, you read that correct – 2009.

A podcast he recorded more than a year ago.

It’s a great listen. He discusses how the people publishing to services like Twitter don’t own their own words. The company does. And the company – rather than the community – decides on the direction to take the service. Offline – there’s even a name for this type of arrangement.

“…Croppers were assigned a plot of land to work, and in exchange owed the owner a share of the crop at the end of the season, usually one-half. The owner provided the tools and farm animals…”

Following that thread, Dave works through the burn out of being on the receiving end of a firehose of continuous ephemera – for a year. Or longer. And how publishing tiny bits continuously hampers publishing bigger, more substantial bits.

Dave also includes a cover of Daniel Johnston’s ‘Walking the Cow’ by Kathy McCarty. It’s a song fIREHOSE introduced me to. Mike Watt‘s ambling bass line has an immediate calming effect on me – not unlike disconnecting from the real-time stream.

It’s one of my all time favorite clambakes. Thanks Dave.

the title of this post references an even earlier Evil Genius Chronicle

Demanding

“But imagine an incident far more disruptive and deadly when we really needed to move masses of people quickly. The major transportation and travel institutions that would do the mass movement of people seem to be woefully unprepared and unable to scale up quickly” – David Weinberger

Ironic given the internet’s origins as a national defense project.

Though, the same problem exists with our nation’s highway system.

Back in art school – I built a table that fell apart when anything was placed on it. No, that project was not funded by DARPA.