The iPad's role in your car?

(originally written for and posted at mp3car.com)

 At first glance, the idea of having a 7.5" x 9.5" iPad in or around my dash doesn't sound realistic or desirable at all.   The New York Times liked the concept.  Navigadget hates it.  I hated it, but the more I think about it the more I like it.   About a year ago we did a video of how the iphone was the death of the PND and the concept here is similar.  The iPad's size and a few other details aren't perfect but many people will find a way to mount these in their car.  Why?  Love it?  Hate it?  Let's get the debate rolling on the mp3Car forums.  Some key pieces of technology and features contained in the iPad are leapfrogging features currently available in the car:

Bmorefiber

I have been spending a good bit of time on this project.  We have gotten great press coverage, support from the city and city data.    Read more at www.bmorefiber.com

Grant clarifications

UPDATE 3-7-10 - I made a website called wwww.quickexplore.org specifically for my bike project. You can track that project in detail there.

• The map tracking and elevation information will be overlaid in a corner of the screen with the trail video filling up approximately 66% of the screen. 
• The videos will be available to anyone who wants to use them at no cost.  There is almost no trail documentation so I imagine these movies will be posted at all relevant websites.  I will use social media, and e-mail communications to make relevant organizations aware of the existence of the videos.  

Baltimore Ignition Grant Planning

UPDATE 3-7-10 - I made a website called wwww.quickexplore.org specifically for my bike project. You can track that project in detail there.

What: Ignite Baltimore is offering a $1,500 grant to start a new idea.  If approved, this grant will utilize about $390 of funds from the 1st ignition grant.


Goal:  Increase usage, knowledge and appreciation of parks & trails in the Baltimore area.

Background:  Our city has invested millions on parks, but they continue to be underutilized.  Health care costs and obesity are ballooning out of control.   Our parks are a great free way to stay fit and enjoy the outdoors!


Method: 5 minute video clips of Baltimore trails

• Accelerated video of entire trail  (example below)
• Pauses to show highlights from the trail
• Map overlay to help viewer understand geography (example below)
• Help viewers understand trail difficulty through Elevation overlay
  
  
  
  
  

Stop playing facebook games. Learn how to help #haiti with no cash in 10 minutes.

This Saturday I went down to check out the Crisis Commons.  The event was a mind blowing collaboration of over 1,000 technical volunteers on three continents.   Crowd-sourced community-generated maps have become the official on the ground map resource in Haiti.  In this video, Fortiusone's CTO Andrew Turner explains how you can start helping Haiti in 10 minutes with no cash, just some of your time. Links talked about in the video are ushahidi - Haiti SMS disaster relief collaboration, Crisis Commons ,and ImapHaiti.

How you get started in less than 10 minutes: http://imaphaiti.com The event was also covered by internal media organizations such as CNN, BBC, Washington Post, LA Times,  Wired and O'Reilly Media.

Monday PM Haiti Updates

I just posted this on my friend's Haiti Blog.  I thought I would post this here as well.

Carol and Tom tried to send me several pictures today.  The mobile network has been terrible.  I have gotten no updates.  Hopefully we will have some text and pictures tomorrow.

I had a 15 minute phone call with Tom tonight.  He has been made the "chief of staff" at the hospital.   There are a lot of amazing efforts happening here in Baltimore to raise money.   Tom hopes to get a chief of technology at the hospital tomorrow to handle communications issues.

A lot of you have been asking what to do.  The answer is send money to professional disaster relieve organization.  Just flying to Haiti and saying I am here to help is not a good idea.

UPS has also shut down all shipments in and out of Haiti until further notice, so 'care packages' are not an option.

Friends in Haiti

Two great friends are on their way to Haiti to help.  Check out their blog to see what things look like on the ground and how you can help. http://www.carolandtominhaiti.com/

One week later, meter now worse off by 2 hours and 1 minute

The office of Jim Kraft (Baltimore city councilman, District 1) called the parking authority, who in turn called me.  They both insisted the problem would be fixed ASAP.  The problem is now worse.  As of December 12, 2009 2 dollars buys you negative 1 minute of parking in front of Whole Foods. The meter shows 4:42 and my phone shows 6:43.  If you bought a 2 hour pass it would expire 1 minute ago.  How much did the city spend on these meters?  A writer at the examiner also agreed with me this is ridiculous.

I sent a letter to Jim Kraft's office again.  I am not upset about this one meter, I am upset with the  disfunction of our system.

If we are trying to encourage folks to move to the city and increase the tax payer base, little things like this are terribly corrosive to that effort.

I am sure the city paid a fortune for these meters.   Can't someone enforce the warranty on these meter system purchases?  Being a computer guy, I can promise this is a very basic fix in the meter software.
The clocks should be automatically updated daily when the credit card transactions are processed.

Baltimore Parking Problems - Broken Meters

I hate to admit it, but I had to drive today. It was too cold for the bike and I had too much to carry.

Baltimore parking is terrible. Our meters made by Cale Parking systems (link) have been broken for at least a month in the Harbor East Area. I bought this 2 hour parking pass on the left at 3:31pm today. The ticket reports I bought it at 1:21pm giving me only 10 minutes to park for 2 dollars.

This is not a way for Baltimore to encourage tourism or the patronage of our local businesses.

Fox did a report on this November 5th, one month ago here(link) and the problem still hasn't been fixed. I sent this to our city councilman Jim Kraft. It will be interesting to see what happens with this.

There is also a recent interesting WBAL (11-2-09) report here(link) about the problems and city council concern with the current parking authority.

A quick review - Google Earth for the iPhone

Google LatLong: An update to Google Earth for the iPhone
I love the new POI Look ups and aggregated crowd sourced data from Zagat, Yelp, urbanspoon and others. The app is also substantially faster as google claims. Something really bothers me about how much battery this graphically intense app consumes. Only a week's worth of testing will tell how useful it will be.

CES Las Vegas

I dug up this picture from Las Vegas. One of the better shots of our mp3car demo car.

• Dual Zone Audio, Video & Internet entertainment
• 2 Intel Entertainment and Navigation computers
• Navigation, Traffic
• Internet Radio
• High Speed internet
• 6 monitors, 3 touch screens
• 5 cameras
• 1TB+ of media storage
• Front and rear seat USB ports

Intel X25 in a Macbook Pro. Trouble In Paradise - Corrupt OSX Partition.

I love my Intel x25 SSD but yesterday the darn thing stopped working. I was having some USB problems so I decided to reboot to see if that fixed the problem. Upon Reboot I just got the dreaded folder with a question mark in it. I then booted with OSX S Snow leopard CD - Disk utility sees no partitions. Now what? My backup is a month old (yeah i know) no need to say more)

I Booted with UBCD for windows (because I had one handy) and used the testdisk open source tool. this is also available for the mac which I didn't know at the time.

Rob Trimming The Jib

Here I am trimming the white, yellow, and blue jib on a downwind leg. I am the guy on the left wearing the green shirt and brown shorts. This big sail is trimmed by the rope in my hands that goes through a pulley and a winch at the stern of the boat. For the best boat speed an adjustment is made every few seconds. In heavy winds I am assisted by a winch grinder to help me pull the sail back in after it has been eased.

Thanks for the Picture Carolyn.

USVI & BVI Customs policies

Despite what the CDP.gov (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) tells you, for US citizens as of June 2009 a passport is required to go from the USVI (United State Virgin Islands) to the BVI (British Virgin Islands) and then return to the United States. After calling the CDP ahead to confirm it was ok, we planned our trip around using a certified birth certificate for exit and re-entry.

As of September 2009 there seems to be some games going on because the CDP offices in St Thomas will tell you it is fine to go to the BVI using a certified birth certificate and they even tell you to enjoy your trip. When you go to get on a ferry to the BVI, the operators won’t take you because the CDP fines ferry operators $3,000USD for taking non-passport carrying US citizens to the BVI even if they have a certified birth certificate.

Why does the CDP tell people to enjoy their trip yet fine the ferry operators? Are they afraid of retaliation or reciprocal policies from the British border patrol in the BVI?

The US CDP office in St. Thomas was very rude and even hung up on us when we asked why we were given mis information. This seems like poor policies left over from the Bush administration and 9/11 hysteria.

Why Rob leaves work early every Wednesday

Here is a picture of me trimming the Spinkaker on Wednesday night racing. Great friends and a wonderful diversion on hump day.

Motionx Not working well for short Sail Races

According to some developer forums, the Iphone refreshes apparently every 5 seconds. From reading around, it looks like the refresh rate is so bad, we can't even use the Hz measurement.

I have been testing the iphone app motionX GPS on my Wednesday night racing and comparing it to a 1Hz Garmin marine GPS. The knot meter fluctuates by 4 knots and our VMG and bearing aren't accurate either.

The average readings are accurate, but this isn't good enough to allow us to make tactical decision on a several mile long race course.

A refresh every 5 seconds might be perfect for highway driving, but this is going to be terrible for quick sequential turns.

Maybe developers can make the GPS readouts better by artificially simulating 1-10hz gps through the use of accelerometer data.

VMG bearing, Iphone sailing App, MotionX

I think I might have found our new Wednesday racing VMG tool for those of us who are iphone users. If we use this heavily, it might be worth while to get a waterproof cover with wrist/pocket strap or something. It looks like it will be very easy for us to enter in the marker letter’s lat /lon and then track bearing, VMG, time average speed, distance.
Here are some other boats that are using this:
Transpac, Columbia River Oregon:
View Race path in google maps:

I hope to use this two Wednesdays from now and will post results, if successful. My biggest concern is loosing my iphone overboard. Maybe there is a retractable strap that could clip inside the bottom of my shirt pocket and then connect to a waterproof iphone case.

Hacked Iphone & Beeline rockin' the USSR ...err Russia.

Heather and I recently took a trip to Russia in the early spring. I wanted to be able to have working GPS and internet while we were there. AT&T offered no roaming plan and it looked like rates were going to be around 5$USD per minute and unknown rate for data usage. So what did I do? I hacked my iphone and

installed yellow snow.

For about 20USD$ Heather, using her Russian skills, bought this Beeline sim card at a telecom shop. It was a prepaid card that allowed me to make 1 quick phone call and all the internet I could use on our 10 day trip. I didn't track KB usage, but I liberally used maps and checked e-mail. We even posted a few photos to facebook while we were walking around. We ran out of our prepaid allotment at the airport on the flight home, but refill stations were everywhere if you need more of an internet fix.

The documentation was unclear as to whether this would work, but this nice little hack saved us a couple hundred dollars of cell phone bills.

Moscow had great edge coverage. The sales reps in Moscow said there was no 3g coverage anywhere in the country but we found St. Petersburg had great 3g coverage. We even made a few voip calls over the 3g with siphone.

Laser Bike Lane

It looks like you can't buy one yet, but what a great idea:http://www.lightlanebike.com/

Bye Bye Hot Tub. I know being listed on Ebay was a draining end to a long life.

Bye Bye Hot Tub. I know being listed on Ebay was a draining end to a long life. Buy on Ebay, Download a PDF containiing orginal purchase documentation, Download a 110 MB 2 minute Demo Movie

R.