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.