The Insomniac Coder

The Blendtec blender meets the world's toughest phone: the Sonim XP3300 Force:

Let's recap: Ivette's first Kindle, murdered because she (who blames PJ) sat on it. This was a first generation Kindle. Ivette's second Kindle, sort of died while in her custody. No physical signs of abuse, the thing just turned itself into a brick. I am almost sure this was a Kindle 2.  Ivette's third Kindle, a Kindle 3 Wifi , dead under suspicious circumstances. It looks almost exactly like #1, but she is too willing to blame PJ for it instead of owning up to it. So there we have it, three dead Kindles. Here's #3: Amazon's warranty doesn't cover accidental damage, and a new Kindle Wifi with offers is just $114. Today we have our usual weekly shopping trip with PJ so we picked one up at BJ Wholesale for $109. After sales tax it was $114.45. My "old" Kindle 3 Wifi is now hers: She didn't like that it said "Pedro's Kindle" on the title bar , so I changed it :-) Now, people are curious about what is different about the...

This is one of them days when I REALLY HATE MY CELL PHONE CAMERA. The camera in the Blackberry Curve is about as shitty as the cameras that shipped in the first two generations of the iPhone. It is simply terrible for anything that goes beyond scanning barcodes. What's sad is that when I got my new camera I made sure that I got a microSD card for it, so I could eject it from the camera, unplug it out of the miniSD adapter, plug it into the phone and blog from the road in all the glory that the Sony DSC-TX7 can provide. Instead, out of laziness (I had the camera with me, I never leave home without it) I tried to shoot with the cell phone, with the expected crappy results. To add yet more insult to injury, I had done bulk imports into blogger and I triggered their captcha failsafe. If you post too often, it starts giving you captchas to make sure that you are a real person and not a spam bot. The problem is this won't work if you are trying to blog through email, only if you ...

Image via Wikipedia This is almost not funny. Phil phones a store that is on either side of a big road, route 9. He asks a simple question: "Are you on the north or south side of the highway ?" This is a perfectly reasonable question. If you are driving on a major highway in a metro area and you are trying to pin down one lousy store, the wrong turn can easily eat 15 more minutes of driving trying to turn around and head in the right direction. Their answer? Not only they didn't know, but they felt offended at being asked the question. And yes, the manager of the store flunked the question too. Here is where it gets pathetic: he was calling a cell phone store. You can assume that these morons: All have nice cell phones , loaded with features. One of these? GPS -driven maps. All are involved in up-selling customers into picking up optional GPS service for their phones. Are all involved in up-selling customers from their current phones into a flashy smart phone, and...

From: Radio, RIAA : mandatory FM radio in cell phones is the future Radio, RIAA: mandatory FM radio in cell phones is the future: "Music labels and radio broadcasters can't agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs , and other portable electronics ." You can't fix stupid. An organization that makes a living out of selling music wants to force a whole industry to spend money to keep THEIR industry alive. If they spent half of the money they spend on this kind of bullshit lobbying into developing new means to deliver their services while embracing new technology , everyone would win. Of course, this is not what they are interested in. Instead they want others to spend money so the RIAA can keep on leeching.  I don't need a radio chip in my cell phone ...