Funk Babblings

So the first Google Phone is finally available, a year after Google revealed their phone plans. The phone is called the G1. This is the first wide-availability phone with open-source firmware, Google's long-awaited Android platform. And unlike the iPhone's closed development environment, Android can be customized by any developer. (Both Free and non-Free Apps can be downloaded from the official "Android Market", or from a number of third-party sites.)

I've been waiting for this for a while, especially since my ancient phone has been on its last legs for at least as long as the Google phone has been anticipated.

There's only one major problem: It's only available from T-Mobile. ( Read more... )

Update: Here's an interesting 5-minute video demonstrating Android on the G1 and comparing it with the iPhone.

For the past couple of weeks I've been extremely frustrated when working from home because our DSL connection has been incredibly unreliable. It never completely died, but rather it would just go away for a few seconds or a minute, then comeback. Just enough to cause havoc with my various network connections in progress.

Then I realized that it got worse when it was snowy or rainy outside. Hmmm.....

So I investigated the wiring. Outside I noticed that the phone wire running into the house had a taped splice, which could be susceptible to dampness. Also the outside telephone box had lots of spiderwebs inside. Inside was worse though -- that incoming cable was split into its four individual wires by simply hanging by its weight in the middle of the basement, the ends hanging bare with the internal phone wires twisted on. The basement is extremely damp and covered everywhere with spiderwebs, so those bare wires were quite corroded. It looked pretty scary.

Yesterday I bought some new indoor/outdoor phone cable and a small wall-mount telephone junction box. This evening I replaced the cable coming inside, and connected everything together in the new box. I had to detour for a while because the most recent phone jack to be added to the house had been wired without regard to color-coding standards, and since I already had two color coding standards (traditional red/green/yellow/black, and modern blue/blue-white/orange/orange-white) to deal with I didn't want to have a nonstandard scheme on top of that. But rewiring that jack involved some cutting of the kitchen floor.....

Finally I got everything reconnected, and all the phone jacks test out OK. (I still need to fasten the outside cable to the side of the house, but that can wait until tomorrow.) So far the DSL seems to be working better, but it's really too soon to say for sure that I've fixed it.

At lunchtime today I kept having trouble with my 6-year-old Verizon/LG cellphone turning itself off unexpectedly. It may have been my fingers hitting the wrong keys, and it may have been the phone finally falling apart, but when I start thinking about conspiracy theories there are at least two other culprits I can think of:

1. Verizon, realizing that "get a new GPS-enabled phone so that enhanced-911 works" didn't entice me to buy a new phone (or sign onto another two-year contract with a "free" phone), has started messing with my phone so that I feel a more pressing need for a new one. Dangerous, since they don't know whether I'd stick with Verizon.

2. The powerful and all-knowing Google. The tech press has been talking about rumors of a Google Phone (gPhone!) coming next spring, and I've started thinking that I should wait until that's available to finally replace my old phone. This morning Google finally acknowledged those rumors in announcing their new Open Handset Alliance and upcoming "Android" phone platform and Software Development Kit. (The idea is to open up phones to third-party applications more than ever.) Anyway, the timing is rather suspicious -- gPhone announcement this morning, my old phone starts acting up at lunchtime. Hmmmm.

I guess if I'm going to get a Google phone I'll need to brush up on my Java abilities.

More proof that Google is cool (and, since he pointed it out, that Neil Gaiman/officialgaiman is cool)....

Google SMS - You can now ask Google questions (Where can I get a pizza nearby? How do I get there? When is Revenge of the Sith playing nearby?) by sending a text message from a cell phone to 46645 (GOOGL).

At one time I used the tiny web browser on my phone to get information while out and about, but I gave up because it was too cumbersome, used too many minutes, and there weren't enough sites compatible with my 2002 phone's mini-browser. I like the idea of using text-messages to replace some of that functionality.