Tongfamily Website

The iphone hackers have this great over the air installer called Installer.app or the Apptapp installer. I’m always looking for new iPhone apps, the latest and greatest apepars on http://modmyifone.com/installer.xml, type that into the Sources/Edit/Add screen…

Bob told me about Focus Magic uses forensic tools to recover sharper images. There is a demonstration but apparently works better than the traditional unsharp mask tools.

He also told me about DxO which works great to correct distortion, although the new version 5 is apparently very buggy, so you might want to stick with v4.51 for now. It works well to get rid of distortion.

Photomatix is an HDR package. You take a bunch of bracketed shots and combine them together to get really great color definition. According to Popular Photo its the most popular standalone program. Popphoto.com has a tutorial that covers how to do it with both Photomatix ($99) and CS2 ($650).

The other ones to try are Dynamic Photo HDR, the same folks who make DVDLab which is the DVD authoring software I’ve used for a long time. Out of the mainstream but nice. Also both Photoshop CS 2 and CS 3 have HDR creation as well, but somehow I seem to find the easier standalone programs better and simpler than Photoshop which is so complicated.

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Seattle used to be pretty baron of great places to eat, but now the number of new trendy restaurants is getting hard to keep track of. Beside Lark which just won Best Chef in the Northwest from James Beard, there is also Purple in downtown which has great cheeses and lunches. Last night, thanks to Mary we checked out Crow. As the review says, the chicken was terrific as was the mussels and the Mediterranean plate. Its a little hard to get to when the Sonics and the Nutcracker are both in town, but worth it. On the lower side of Queen Anne.

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I saw a piece on the smallest remote control helicopter in the world, but couldn’t find it. Quite a journey, but it looks like there is an entire world of enthusiasts for remote control stuff. Helicopters are cool because in our world of lots of rain, they are way more practical.

Piccolo

• RCGroups.com is the place to look for information on remote control stuff and a huge group on so called Micro Helis and even a very extensive FAQ at swashplate.co.uk that has a good web version. They have good recommendations for getting one.
• The Corona ahd ECO Piccolo come out on top. All things are relative, but at $270 from Helihobby.com I wouldn’t call it a kids toy.

Picoo Z

For fun, the hot model is the Picoo Z which is caled the Air Hogs Havoc Hell in North America or Honey Bee in Japan. It is made by Silverlit Toys of Hong Kong and distributed by SpinMaster in the US. There is a clone at Hobbytron which is just $56 for three of them, so quite a bit cheaper but has terrible online reviews so I probably wouldn’t order from them.

There is even a whole modders community devote to this little helicopter which is pretty amazing. They are a little hard to find, but Amazon has folks with them. Toysrus.com also has them for $20 and for $83, they have a set that can work together that include a little laser transmitter.

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Got this game on a whim. It is actually pretty fun and even somewhat realistic. There are of course lots of sites that cover it and the strategies. The 2004 version as http://www.morrisongames.com/ explains had lots of rules changes. The main thing though is to figure out what strategies work.

There are lots of strategies that don’t make much sense in the real world, but work for this game for instance, German is heavily weighted to getting the first run right. The main thing suggested is to invest heavily in rocket and bombers in the first game because rockets let you take lots of points. Also to attack the African areas quite a bit and to blitz against Russia to slow them down so here’s a good summary:

1. Get rockets. Basically in this game, rockets take away money from everyone and Germany is surrounded so it can hit both the UK and Russia. Use three rolls to get a 50% chance you’ll get them.
2. Get heavy bombers. They recommend not playing with heavy bombers because they really unbalance the game. They take twice the IPCs for every roll of the dice so once you get them, you can essentially win. This is because if you attack with just tanks, you might take the equivalent of 15 IPCs (three tank divisions), but a heavy bombers take way more than that.
3. Hold Western Europe. that is France mainly by building lots of infantry that you send east to hold against Russia
4. Get Africa. It has 11 IPCs (very unbalanced really) so you have to hold onto the German fleet there. You really want to take Egypt in turn one and then transport troops there from Italy.
5. Lots of fighters. You want them because they have good enough range to defend against Russia and UK.
6. Fight in Russia. Don’t expect to win here, just grind on Russia so it doesn’t attack Japan.

Most interesting thing is the recommendation to disallow technology improvements at all since they unbalance the game so much.

Finally there are many House Rules as in http://www.wargamer.com/axisandallies/original/houserules/house_rules.html that make the game more realistic. The most well developed at the MIT
Axis and Allies MIT House Rules and also a simulator that lets you play online even.

Remember that great video that almost everyone has seen in school showing zooming in and zooming out by 10 orders of magnitude, Calvin was wondering the same thing for computers. So here are some interesting facts:

1. Moore’s Law. Its been going on for thirty years, but every 24 months, the number of transistors in a microprocessor has been doubling. That’s some exponential. Wikipedia’s‘s_law description is actually better and more complete.
2. Kryder’s Law. A related idea is that the capacity of a hard disk drive increases doubles every 24 months. Actually the rate is increasing right now, as opposed to Moore’s which is predicted to end in a decade.
3. “Butler’s Law” says that the bandwidth of a fiber optic cable doubles every 9 months which is simply amazing and explains why the Internet is so cheap and pervasive.

Finally, although it can’t go on forever, the actual growth of Internet users sure looks like an exponentials as Internet World Stats shows.

Internet Systems Consortium does show the number of domain names, a measure of how big the web is can grow exponentially and they have a history to prove it.

After reading reviews from gpsreview.net, I finally caved and got an el cheapo $300 GPS for our old Volvo. It cost about $3000 for the DVD Navigation unit in new cars, so its interesting to see how good the add-on products are. I have to say I’m amazed. The thing really is not much a kludge. The biggest thing is that it has a Lithium Ion battery that last five hours so you don’t necessarily need an ugly cable connected to your cigarette lighter (12V car outlet for the politically correct). And it includes an FM transmitter in the unit, so you can play right to your speakers.

The other great thing I hadn’t appreciated is that the SD card let’s you use it like an iPod. That doesn’t sound so cool until I actually tried it. The user interface is terrific and it is nice not to have to always plug in my iPod all the time.

The user interface is actually pretty good and easy to use. The only gripes I have is that the actual software part isn’t super clear. Basically, the newest software client is TomTom Home 2.1 and it is only available on Windows. Mac just has 1.6. You need 2.1, because you get what are called TomTom updates, so rather than having to subscribe to really expensive GPS updates, they are creating a community that corrects POI. You get updates from the community, so for instance, the thing started up not knowing where any of the Starbucks but you load the “Latest Map guarantee” and move from version 7.05 to 7.1 and suddenly you know where to get your coffee.

There seems to be a pretty good community of folks who know how to hack it at Tomtomforums.com. The main question right now is when does voice input work. Some say firmware 7.221 allow it in the US. TomTom is a European company so for instance, they have traffic data in Europe that requires a separate device called a TMC in the US. Voice input works in the UK, but not US or Australia. Apparently, there is a fix where you:

Create a text file support_asr.dat and just put 1 in the file. Then copy it to the ASR directory on your TomTom internal drive. It will enable the icon to allow you to input address. However, you may need to have the North_America map v7.10 to be able to input City and street though voice. I can only input street number before I upgraded to v7.10.

On the other hand, their Mandarin chinese voice output works great

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One of the truly cool things about iPhone applications (assuming you have a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch) is that the user community is amazing. Most folks now use Apptapp which downloads applications over the internet automatically for you. You get Apptapp pretty much automatically if you use jailbreakme.com for 1.1.1 firmware.

They include a bunch of what are called community sources, but if you want the list of lots and lots of other things, you have to add them manually to apptapp. Modmyifone.com has a great Wiki for these various repositories that are the three official ones:

AppTapp Official: repository.apptapp.com
Conceited Software: conceitedsoftware.com/iphone
Ste Packaging: psmxy.org/iphone-apps

Original Three rogue sourdes that started it all

HighTymes: hightymes.org/iphone/index.xml
iSwitcher: web.mac.com/iswitcher2/list.xml
Loring Studios: loringstudios.com/iPhone-schnapps/index.xml

All of The Others that I haven’t had a chance to try yet

AlohaSoft Graphics: http://homepage.mac.com/reinholdpenner/alohasoft.xml
iApp-a-Day: iappaday.com/install
MTL Repository: home.mike.tl/iphone
Studded.net: studded.net/installer/index.xml
Swell: lyndellwiggins.com/Swell.xml

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Got a great note from Bruce about getting up to Whistler. Some I knew and some that are really useful:

Take the long way around as you can see with Borderlineups.com there are four border crossings to take. Most folks take the Peach Arch which is the most crowded. The next is the so called Pacific Border crossing which is know as the commercial crossing. Rather than go straight through the Blaine border crossing, take the Aldengrove/Lynden crossing as the wait times can be much shorter. As an example right now the delay iw 30 minutes at the Blaine WA but there is no delay Aldergrove. You then go the long way around. You really need to constantly check wap.gc.ca or www.gc.ca o see the real time wait times through your phone. Use the WAP portal if you have a less advanced phone like a RAZR or use the full web site for XHTML if you have an iPhone or a Blackberr but the drawback is that it doesn’t have the Aldergrove wait time so you use Borderlineups.com to look at the actual webcam. From the Lynden/Aldergrove crossing, you then wend your way on Canadian Route 1 through and miss some of the traffic.

One important thing is good places to grab a bite. Going up to Sun Peaks, we made the Stanford’s restaurant as a mandatory stop, but there are more things on Route 1:

1. Westview Oriental (westvieworiental.com) – Good Chinese, including pretty extensive dim sum from a menu, with friendly service, in a shopping centre just north of Rt 1 (exit 17) in North Vancouver. There’s also a decent, friendly little sushi place in that same center.
2. East No. 1 Seafood Restaurant, upstairs in the big shopping center at302-2800 East 1st Ave @ East Kaslo, East Vancouver (exit 27 & go west) – Good dim sum.
3. La Casa Gelato (lacasagelato.com) – 218 flavors (flavours) at a time rotating from a much larger selection!!! 1033
   Venables @ Raymur, a couple of miles west of Rt. 1 in between exits 26 and 27.

Finally if you are renting up there, try Alluradirect.com. Good recommendations and the site puts you directly in touch with condo owners. Some folks like Whistler Village because it is central, but it is also major party time, so be a sound sleeper if you stay there as the party goes on forever.

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