Jason Crowther’s Blog

With my left hand pretty useless at the moment, I decided to try out some one handed typing with my father-in-law’s Frogpad keyboard. After a little trouble getting the bluetooth part on the air with my Macbook, I was off and running.

As you might expect, retraining your brain to use just 20 keys when you’re used to 100+ keys is a challenge. But, it does felt strangely natural, due to the highly optimized layout. It’s taken me about 15 minutes to type this much; but I’m already getting appreciably smoother.

I’m trying desperately to keep my eyes on the paper cheat sheet that I printed out, rather than concentrating on the keyboard itself. Suddenly, I’m having flashbacks to my 11th grade typing class. Oh, the fond memories of Mr. Gaeta breaking a yardstick over the typewriter of another student who couldn’t keep their eyes off their hands.

Ack, that’s enough torture for now!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that Apple (now just Apple, as opposed to Apple Computer) finally let the cat out of the bag out their new cellphone. 30 months in the making, the iPhone is amazing. Part cellphone, part iPod, part Mac.

The Macworld Keynote reveal of the phone was pretty cool. Steve Jobs did a pretty good job teasing his way the through the introduction. He then proceeded to demo many of its amazing features.

Like the iPod, the phone is all about having a smart interface. There is only 1 mechanical button on the front of the phone. The rest of the interface is driven totally from an advanced touch screen. Its not just pointing either; its a multi-touch interface where you can use multiple fingers to do operations like resizing pictures, and typing. Perhaps the most amazing example was scrolling through your contact list just like it was a rolodex.

Of course, any new, high tech phone has be internet ready. The iPhone is no exception; but, it takes web browsing to a whole new level. Forget minibrowsers and WAP, this thing has scaled down (or phone enhanced, depending how you look at it) version of the Safari web browser. You basically browse the web as normal and then zoom up the specific areas of the page you want to read. I haven’t seen any other phones that doing anything like that yet.

I’d love to have one eventually, but I’m in no particular rush to run out and get one (even though they don’t even go on sale until June.) I just re-upped another 2 years of Sprint service. By the time I’m ready to get my next phone, hopefully they’ll have all the bugs out of this one and maybe the price will be down a bit.

Meet PermaTabs, a little hack that allows you to have tabs that can’t be closed.  After installing it, just right click on the tab and turn on the Permanent Tab option.  It also persists across sessions, so next time you fire up Firefox, it brings back your permanent tabs automagically.  Sweet, now I won’t keep accidentally closing my Google Calendar 100 times a day.

Heard about a guy who tests his hard core kitchen blenders by blending items that you normally wouldn’t on one of the Twit podcasts a while ago.  Finally saw a link to the site go flying by on digg.  willitblend.com is a riot.  Golf balls, hockey pucks, light bulbs, cell phones, and ipod?  You name it, they’ll blend it.  The host, Tom Dickson, is cool in a PC guy type of way.  ’scuse me as I get back to watching these over and over, giggling the whole way through.

Slickr, by cellar door software gives you a photo screen saver that scrolls through your (or everybody’s) flickr photos.  Cool pan/zoom/fade effects kinda like the similar screen saver on OSX.  Bonus, if you have a dual monitor rig, it shows different slide shows on each screen.  Check it out.