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Press Pause

Quick post just to warn everyone that comments will be closed for a few days as some changes are about to happen.

A lot more freedom choosing terminal.app colors

Very quick ‘before and after’.

What you can change on terminal.app’s color menu is pretty pointless if you can’t change whatever is beeing “force”  fed into it. so here’s the trick:

Download SIMBL

Copy this plugin into ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

Open terminal.app, go the the screen where you chose the colors and now you have a button there that reads “more”, click on it and go wild.

Before:

After:

Assistant out, Assistant in (well… recruiting)

It didn’t take long, and I praise the people involved in the project.

An open source version of IwantSandy is in the workings.

Check the twitter account and the blog.

I just offered my humble services to the cause.

Later edit:

Curiously Seth Godin noticed, and just today I quoted his post about firefox on the newsgroup where we’re aiming to revive Sandy in Open Source format:

Here’s the problem/challenge: when your friends switch to Firefox, your life doesn’t get better.

Hopefully we’ll get Sandy back on her feet, and then some.

Way up in the Cloud

Relax. Every muscle in your body goes limp now, feel free to slouch on the chair with your arms resting motionless, your hands on the edge of the desk, imagine a white light in the center of your chest growing, slowly flooding every vain, every tissue, every cell inside you in a comfortable white light that will protect you and guide you through the rest of the journey. Imagine the light growing and growing until it’s shining around you, a white halo surrounds your and you start to levitate, higher and higher, as high as the clouds that are now all around you. look around. see your cloud. your own personal cloud and float slowly towards it, slowly, very very slowly. Notice how it’s tailored for you, by you, so suit every little nuance of you body, notice the entrance in the cloud. Feel free to sit, relax, let your body rest against the soft white cloud that protects you, the feeling of protection not unlike the protection you once felt in your mother’s womb. close your eyes, let your body go. feel it become one with the cloud. slowly melting into the cloud, so comfortable, so cozy.

Now the cloud is gone, you’re in mid air and the halo of light is now red with inner panic and emotional turmoil. you start to descend, waving your arms and screaming “why?” as best you can wile the fast air fills your mouth, drying your throat and for a second you remember how amazingly safe you felt just now, a second ago, and how quickly it all changes.

I Want Sandy is closing it’s doors on December 8. That bright, innovative cloud began to pour rain on it’s users today and it will continue to do so until it’s out of business on the 8th. It’s a shame, I for one used the service and raved about it to friends and colleagues who in turn started using the service. Twitter bought Sandy and the developer (and CEO) of sandy joined the twitter ranks.

Though I mourn the end of Sandy, this post is much more about security, clouds, and storage of personal information somewhere out there, where your prayers of “I wish I’d never lose this” have been answered for better and for worst.

Sandy knows my phone number, it knows most of my friends birthdays and it’s not too hard for someone with access to my Sandy info to predict when will be next time I’m going for a hair cut. Even my christmas shopping list is there.

Well..was there. I’ve just spent a good amount of time deleting everything and canceling my account. But what guarantees me that it’s indeed deleted? It wouldn’t be the first time that a web app keeps deleted (or discarded) data long after a user has deleted an account.

The cloud is awesome, everyone loves the cloud. It’s a bit like the Simpson’s skyline right now, blue, pretty and looks sunny even thought there’s no sun in near sight (no pun on the current Sun situation intended)

I’m not very picky as to where I post my photographs and bio, I have a facebook account, a twitter account with my picture on it, hell, I have a blog with my CV on the right pane! I’m not as paranoid about security as people think I am.
Now what worries me is that 4 years, 8 years from now I can get an email from Sandy or from any other “past” online service.

But services like Sandy worry me more than most out there because of the sheer amount of raw information about me, my life and life style, what I like, my habits and so on. It’s a single repository with far too much information about me. and it can disappear just like that, and my data (that I willingly submitted) will be directed to the trash bin, or stored for eons, accessed by someone, sold to a third party, hell…anything not foreseen in the user agreement can happen. It’s gone, and in a shroud of cloudiness that is beyond my control or reach.

RandsInRepose wrote a great article on how the cloud is all about letting you be dumb, problem is you really have to smarten up once it starts to rain. And you better to it fast.

Controlling the mic volume on skype (OS X)

Losing your mind with the automatic mic volume control on skype that you can’t switch off?

Amazingly the feature is there, just not on the interface. You’ll have to edit an XML file located at

<user folder>/Library/Application Support/Skype

Open shared.xml with your text editor of choice, find the <VoiceEng> element create a new line and  add <AGC>0</AGC> (that’s zero, not “o”) so it will look something like this:

<VoiceEng>

      <AGC>0</AGC>

      <MicBoost>

        <Built-in.20Microphone>0</Built-in.20Microphone>

      </MicBoost>

      <MicVolume>

        <Built-in.20Microphone>90</Built-in.20Microphone>

      </MicVolume>

      <SpeakerVolume>58</SpeakerVolume>

    </VoiceEng>

Save, Quit and you’re done.

AGC stands for Automatic Gain Control, and you just turned it off. So now you can open System Preferences, go to Sound then chose the Input tab set the mic volume and rest assured that it won’t move by itself wile you’re on skype.

Made my day

Today I had to stop by my employer’s HQ which is very close to Alegro, a shopping mall that hosts the very first Portuguese Starbucks.

The good news: it’s exactly like a starbucks latte you’d have anywhere in north America. And there’s some comfort in that.

We, as Portuguese, are by definition coffee snobs and one could argue that Starbucks is not really about coffee but about the whole experience regarding a starbucks. But it’s especially hard for Portuguese people to set foot in a Starbucks, since you can get a latte in any street corner ‘café’ for 90 cents or less and taste higher grade coffee.

Personally it reminds me of Canada and the US. That’s the only reason why I went in there, so hyea, I guess in the end it’s all about the experience, my experience.

desktop meme

(feeling frivolous this week)

Take a screenshot of your desktop right now, don’t change anything, post it on your blog!

The first android phone G1 is here

And so it’ starts.

Today T-Mobile introduced the G1, here’s what you get:

Processor Qualcomm® MSM7201A?, 528 MHz
Operating System Android
Memory
ROM: 256 MB
RAM: 192 MB
Dimensions (LxWxT) 117.7 mm x 55.7 mm x 17.1 mm
(4.60 in x 2.16 in x 0.62 in)
Weight 158 grams (5.57 ounces) with battery
Display 3.2-inch TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen with 320 x 480 (HVGA) resolution
Network HSDPA/WCDMA:
Europe: 2100 MHz
US:1700/2100 MHz
Up to 7.2 Mbps down-link (HSDPA) and 2 Mbps up-link (HSUPA) speeds
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE:
850/900/1800/1900 MHz
(Band frequency, HSUPA availability, and data speed are operator dependent.)

Device Control Trackball with Enter button
Keyboard Slide-out 5-row QWERTY keyboard
GPS GPS navigation capability with built-in GPS receiver and map software
Connectivity Bluetooth® 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate
Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11b/g
HTC ExtUSB? (11-pin mini-USB 2.0 and audio jack in one)
Camera
3.2 megapixel color camera with fixed focus

Audio Built-in microphone and speaker
Ring tone formats:
AAC, AAC+, AMR-NB, MIDI, MP3, WMA, WMV
40 polyphonic and standard MIDI format 0 and 1 (SMF)/SP MIDI
Battery Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery
Capacity: 1150 mAh

Talk time:
Up to 350 minutes for WCDMA
Up to 406 minutes for GSM
Standby time:
Up to 402 hours for WCDMA
Up to 319 hours for GSM
(The above are subject to network and phone usage.)
Expansion Slot microSD? memory card (SD 2.0 compatible)
AC Adapter Voltage range/frequency: 100 ~ 240V AC, 50/60 Hz
DC output: 5V and 1A
Special Features Digital Compass, Motion Sensor

Okay, so that means: 3G, wifi, quad-band, qwerty keyboard, 3 megapixel camera, bluetooth (though you can’t use it as a gateway for, say, your laptop), motion sensors and pretty decent battery life.

So far no Exchange interoperability. Google maps supports street view (you lucky americans, you!) and you can download DRM free songs directly from amazon’s MP3 store, with similar prices to itune’s.

There’s the Android Market (similar to itunes’s app store, it seems)  and full compatibility with google’s usual apps, apparently.

This for a $179 with a two-year voice and data plan with T-Mobile (word has it, not the best of networks in the US).

It will get to this side on the pond by November for the UK and early next year for the rest of us.

C-Net is keeping tabs on it here: http://smallr.net/g1

(Im sure there will be more then enough iphone comparisons out there, I’m not running with that pack, so you’ll have to look somewhere else for that.)

Hurricane Ike, Galveston and Public Service

A hurricane destroyed Galveston, Texas, and I’m amazed and shocked of how little coverage the issue is having on TV. I have people I care for in that part of the world and I’ve been keeping a close eye on things the best I can, but it’s not easy… It seems the most important thing today besides the Lehman Brother’s collapse is the supposed fact that John McCain helped develop the Blackberry. It’s strange and leaves me with a eerie feeling.

Today Galveston’s mayor Lyda Ann Thomas ordered all city workers not to talk with the media. Claims this is not a media blackout. Reporters are also being escorted out of the city. No, it’s not a media blackout.

Google however is giving everyone a hand.

If you use google earth you can download a layer with recent images of the Galveston area after Ike’s impact. 

I feel obligated to mention that it can be quite devastating to look at.

If you are reading this post a few days after it’s been published you might want to browse google’s LatLong Blog for the most recent kmz file.

It does not substitute real news, but I hope that if at all possible it will help spread the service google provided. As I’m pretty sure that anyone who evacuated from Galveston and are prohibited of returning to their city for who knows how long need the piece of mind.

Also, KHOU keeps a twitter account that you can follow. They are pretty new at this twitter thing as they insist on reposting “news”, but it’s way better then nothing.

And here are some traffic cameras, that are slowly but surely getting online. 

Hope it helps.