7-11, Ice Cream & Christmas

Mark & Wes, in Walnut Creek, CA at the Tokyo Lobby.

Click here to listen to the official audio show

Mark figures out a way to intercept Wes on the bus using a system called Nextbus in order to take BART to the east bay together. We're thinking about changing the name of our show from WNO, to simply "SlurpCast". In this show, we talk a bit about the in-ear headphones that Wes got at the Apple store and Mark ordered via the Apple website. Mark feels that these are not as good as other in-ear headphones, like the Shure model he used before. Wes thinks that the lack of good movies has something to do with the writers strike. The Day the Earth Stood Still was yucky, although Gran Torino was good. Fart applications for the iPhone outnumber the total available applications on the Samsung Instinct. Ever hear about Usenet? Wes talks a bit about this old valuable part of the internet, but both of us get interrupted by the background noise of some darn college students.

Sites of Interest:

• The Nextbus system works with a few public transit systems around the US to give you GPS-based predictions for when the next bus will arrive at your stop. Their web server is good at bringing up very simple HTML when it sees you are contacting it with a dumb cellphone browser. The Routesy iPhone application interfaces with Nextbus data for San Francisco only.
  
  
• The new Apple In-Ear stereo headphones have a microphone for phone use and a remote control.
  
  
• The Spoofcard website and telephony servers let anyone on any phone in the US make phone calls with fake caller ID and altered voice. Mark inadvertantly kept calling this "spoofstick" because he was mixing this up with another service called VoiceStick. There is an iPhone jailbreak app called SpoofApp available through Cydia which makes it easier to use Spoofcard from an iPhone.
  
  
• Applications for Franky's phone, the Samsung Instinct.
  
  
• Opera - A very compact and creative browser for many operating systems, including some cellphones.
  
  
• The history of computer Spell Checkers. Also an interesting article on why the spell checkers in search engines are very different from the ones in word processors.
• Usenet - An underrated resource for valuable information. Wes' favorite usenet application is Agent.
  
  
• The Internet is for porn.
  
  
• Doug Engelbart demonstrated personal computing, networking, the first computer mouse, etc. in 1968.
  
  
• Videos of a Russian doll Theremin orchestra and a cat playing a Theremin. There are Theremin simulatorsfor the iPhone.
  
  

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

• Chopper - a game that reminds Wes of Chop Lifter for the Apple II.
• Allrecipes Dinner Spinner - an app that helps you choose a meal that's healthy for you to make at home.

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

• Keep In Touch- a contact manager that reminds you to keep in touch with people on an appropriate schedule.
• WifiTrak - a Wi-Fi finder that shows you whether an access point that appears to be open will actually let you connect to the Internet without needing validation.

Franky goes to Hollywood.. or San Francisco?

Mark, Wes, and guest Franky in Lafayette, CA at the Swad Indian restaurant.

Click here to listen to the official audio show

We have a guest this week: Franky, Al Bernay's disciple. Franky goes to Hollywood -- literally, that's where he lives; but for this week he was visiting in San Francisco. The audio quality in this show is excellent because we used a PZM microphone, however there is a lot of GSM noise because Mark's iPhone was too close to the recorder and Wes was more agressive than normal in editing this show to eliminate some of the noisiest spots. They talk about Myst Online, the new domain suffix .tel, the dBASE database management system, Radio Shack (ewwwwwww), CompuServe and Tymshare, and of course lots of iPhone stuff.

Sites of Interest:

• Radio Shack's PZM microphone, which may or may not actually be PZM.
  

• Franky's Facebook page. Franky Goes to Hollywood, the movie. Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the music group.
  
  
• Franky's cell phone is a Samsung Instinct.
  
  
• Myst Online goes open source.
  
  
• The new .tel TLD and how it is very different from other domain suffixes.
  
  
• History of the dBASE database management system.
  
  
• Read historic Radio Shack catalogs online.
  
  
• History of the CompuServe system.
  
  
• There are now over 10,000 iPhone applications in Apple's app store.
  
  
• A software hack to SIM unlock 3G iPhones -- meaning allowing them to be used on any GSM carrier instead of being locked to AT&T, for example -- will be released on 1/1/2009. If you already upgraded to firmare 2.2 using iTunes, then you won't be able to unlock using this method. If you have not upgraded yet, follow these instructions on how to upgrade only the firmware and not touch the GSM modem chip.
  
  

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

• Joost - play videos from joost.com.
  
  
• Woman Calendar - Men and women have very different reasons for using this; it's pretty expensive, but Wes thinks it's worth it.
  

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

• Copy/Paste - This is a little complicated to set up, but pretty easy to use and really does give you limited Copy and Paste functions for the iPhone.
  
  
• FindInPage - The podcast was edited so that a mention of this is inadvertently mixed in with the Copy/Paste discussion. FindInPage is a jailbreak app which is installed with Cydia, and edits your bookmark file to add a "Find in Page bookmark". WARNING: the current version of this app sometimes destroys your bookmarks instead of adding the new one, so wait for a revised version to show up.
  
  
• Pull My Finger - Stupid audio app which has a bunch of fingers to pull. Guess what happens.