HBO Documentary Films has made available a moving documentary about Neda Agha-Soltan, the young women taken by a sniper’s bullet in the protests last year. You can watch the film (broken into 10 minute segments) for free. ]]>
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10:00 am — I was number 8 in the store and about number 1 to come out. I then spent about 5 minutes taunting others in line who didn’t have an iPad just yet and then drove home at a relatively reasonable rate of speed to plug in the new new shiny thing.
Apple Store Annapolis had an “all hands on deck” day. There were literally 50+ employees that came streaming out the door at 9:00 clapping, high-fiving, and singing the Steve Jobs chants (joking about that last bit).
First impressions of the iPad? It feels a bit smaller than I thought. I was expecting something about the size of a magazine but it’s more like the size of a hardcover book. It’s not as heavy as I had thought, but might be a little tricky for my boys to play with as they are not that big.
The iPad comes with a power adapter (like the iPhone’s little two-prong thingy) that connects to a USB cable. There are NO headphones included, so you’ll have to make due with some of the others you might have lying around.
It does work with my existing iPhone USB cable, which means I don’t have to unpack the other one from the iPad box nor go under my desk and set up something new, which is nice. However, while in the sync mode I noticed it said “Not Charging” so I’m not sure if that is because of the sync process or whether it is a cable thing. (update: the iPad cable does charge, so maybe it is a cable thing). iPad comes fully charged btw. Will check that out after the sync. I purchased the official iPad case (it looks pretty slim) and the stand (not the keyboard stand, but the regular stand). I’m planning to use the Bluetooth keyboard with this so I don’t need to be ‘docked’ into the thing physically. I thought about passing on the stand (I may return it) as the case folds over and can hold up the machine, but only in the horizontal mode, not vertically. Not sure how that will work when typing / working.
When I plugged the iPad into the computer, iTunes booted up. There were a few screens of setup and then it gave me a rather odd option: “An iPad has been previously synced with this computer.” Well, no, it hasn’t. But apparently it saw my iPhone backups and was debating whether to rebuild from the old iPhone backups or whether or not to set up a “New iPad”. As new iPad was defaulted, I went with that rather than the option “Restore from the backup of” my iPhone.
10:15 — The next screen was the start of the sync process. Which is taking a few minutes so far. I’m moving probably 32gb of data (apps and pics and videos) over to the iPad so I’m kind of in the middle of that adventure. Note: it seems to be syncing all the applications on my iTunes, not necessarily the ones I sync to my iPhone (I have a limited subset that I put on the phone).
10:25 — As it is the first sync, it ended up taking about 10 minutes for just the Applications (I have about 150 apps I think). Now it is starting about 900 songs and podcasts. Maybe time to get some donuts.
10:28 — The next step is “Optimizing photos” for the iPad. As I have 36000 photos, I have a really bad feeling about this. It’s at 218 of 36,038. This could be a bit time consuming.
10:29 — 380 of 36,038.
10:30–I click the stop button as I’m not waiting for this many pictures.
NOTE: By default, it seems the iPad is set to sync “All photos, albums, events and faces”. Unselect that to save some time.
10:32 — Resync’ing, this time with only 1,624 photos syncing.
10:37 — 1294 of 1624.
10:38–1,624 of 1,624 photos optimized. Now waiting for them to sync.
Now updating podcasts, files, etc.
10:40–114 of 931 audio / video podcasts. I listen to too many podcasts.
10:47 — 200 of 931. This could be another hour. Back to the magic stop button.
10:48. Have deselected sync’ing all movies and podcasts. Will get to that later. Taking way too long.
10:50 Now syncing songs. Going much faster just song. 70 of 660.
10:52–319 of 660. Sigh. Delayed gratification is supposed to be more enjoyable. We’ll see about that.
10:55. Finished all the music. Not it is doing the photos (drastically reduced numbers of photos).
10:59. The sync is done. Time to disconnect and start playing!!!!!!!!!!!!
11:09. Ok, it synced everything but the personal stuff like email, etc. Back to itunes…]]>
UPDATE:
After a few fits and starts, we now have DOCSIS 3.0 service. It required me to replace my 7 year old router (who’d of thunk that?) but now all systems are go and we have, ta da, 60mb down.
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Dan Woolley was trapped under the rubble of the Haiti earthquake without much information about what to do. He was in pain, but not sure of his overall situation. He needed help, and believe it or not, it was just a finger slide away. His iPhone. Woolley used his iPhone as a flashlight (a totally under-appreciated function) to diagnose his foot as broken.
Then, he used the instructions from (a medical) app to treat the excessive bleeding from cuts on his legs and the back of his head. Woolley used his shirt to tie off the three-inch gash that was opened on his leg and a sock to bandage the back of his head. He said he also looked up ways to stop from going into shock.Woolley also used the notepad function to type out his last notes to his wife and kids, should he not make it. But he survived and is back doing the talk show rounds this morning. On a slightly more serious note, there are several iPhone applications on sale today with the proceeds going to benefit Haiti earthquake relief.]]>
Haitian earthquake disaster. This simple code allows you to have a I’m am Lost I am Found kind of solution to any website (though it is acting up a bit at the moment). Here is the code:
<iframe
src="http://haiticrisis.appspot.com/?small=yes"
width=350 height=300 frameborder=0
style="border: dashed 2px #77c"></iframe>
Some other interesting tech bits today:
Haitian Twitter information.
CrisisCamp, using technology to help those in need, are meeting in many US cities.]]>
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I’ve taken a bit of a break from digital media blogging this week. The jetlag from Vegas/CES and the fact the Haiti story is just so much more important than new TVs has led to me blogging about that disaster instead.
One of the interesting things I’ve been reading about is the actual process by which satellites are being pulled into service (retasked) to assist in the rescue effort. The BBC’s Space Reporter has an excellent piece about the efforts underway by the EU and other nations who are pulling in space resources to assist in the disaster.
Many space agencies have signed up to something called the International Charter [on] Space and Major Disasters. It was initiated back in 2000 by Esa, and the French (Cnes) and Canadian (CSA) space agencies; but then quickly acquired other signatories including important US bodies like Noaa and the US Geological Survey. The UK, too, is involved. It has a very particular contribution to make through the Guildford-based Disaster Monitoring Constellation company, which manages a six-strong fleet of optical and near-infrared imaging satellites that can – as a team – picture the entire Earth’s surface in one day. When the Charter is activated, the signatories re-task their satellites to get the data most urgently needed in a devastated region. The Charter was activated this week – of course it was.Be sure to take a look at all the pictures that have been not only generated, but also modified to show specific damage in neighborhoods, etc. Geoeye, which works with Google, has also done some interesting ‘before and after’ type photos, matching up specific coordinates so people can see what things looked like before the earthquake and after. By far the best use of this data is in today’s New York Times, which utilizes Flash to allow the user a house-by-house comparison of the two photos. MSNBC’s Cosmic blogger is also doing an interesting piece on satellites being retasked. His story remarks about the worldwide collaboration that is going on:
GeoEye is by no means the only satellite operator on the case. A whole fleet of eyes in the sky are focusing on Haiti: DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-1 andQuickBird. France’s Spot-5, Japan’s ALOS, the European Space Agency’s ERS-2 and Envisat, and Canada’s RadarSat-2.The MSNBC piece also talks about some of the volunteer efforts underway to establish communications systems in Haiti. One such agency is TSF–Telecom San Frontiers who deployed a recovery team to Haiti already. Looking over the devastation I’m reminded of my own seawall. It’s 100 feet long and surrounded by large boulders. Every year I say I’m going to pull back the boulders closer to the seawall (the curl of the wave pulls them toward the sea) and every year I end up not doing it. It’s just too massive of an effort to accomplish on my own. And now I look at what is going on in Haiti. This is going to be more massive than we can even comprehend at this point. The fleet that we have sent is nowhere large enough, and the plane bridge will not be able to keep up with the demand. This is going to get much much worse in the next weeks and months before it gets better.]]>
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The predictions have been out there for some time that we would get a third wave of this most recent novel H1N1 pandemic. Previous pandemics have behaved similarly, and the idea that H1N1 will ‘obey’ the general flu season is something that was shot to hell as it spread around during the last Summer. Still, predictions are never perfect. With that in mind, it’s quite interesting to look at Google’s new city-by-city flu map. If you chart the current H1N1 levels across the nation on the grid, and then superimpose the data for the last three years or so, you’ll see we’re pretty much in the same place we were at this time during other flu outbreaks, and that February is generally a pretty bad time for the normal seasonal flu. We’ve all got our shots and boosters so we’re in a pretty good position right now. With our upcoming travel plans I’m pretty glad everyone is immunized given the long hours and tiny plane I expect we will be flying to the other side of the world.]]>