iPhone 2.1 SMS Reminder Annoyances

By Josh Highland in hardware, iPhone, mac, software

There was a new feature introduced with the iPhone 2.1 firmware update that is driving me crazy and making me curse apple an my iPhone daily. I am talking about the SMS multi reminder.

The SMS multi reminder is designed to notify you with an alert if you have an unread SMS (text) message. Sounds good in theory, but trust me, it horrible in practice.

When you receive a new SMS message to your iPhone, the first few lines are displayed in what I can best describe as a pop up box. Often if the message is short, “hey I’m running late”, you see the entire message. This is where the trouble lies. If you get an SMS message and you don’t unlock the phone, open the SMS app, then open the specific SMS thread, the iPhone thinks you haven’t gotten the message, so it will remind you 5 minutes later, and 10 minutes later that you have an unread message, for a total of 3 alerts in 10 minutes for a message you might have already seen.

Example of why this is annoying:
I’m sitting here working on my blog, “PING!”, ah I have a new SMS message on my iPhone, the screen is lit up and the preview box is showing. “From TWITTER: xFLORIDAx – I look like a shaved ape”. Ok, no response needed, I set my phone down. 5 minutes later “PING!” ah! I must have a new SMS message… strange my screen isnt lit up, turn on the screen. no new SMS messages, weird. 5 minutes after that, “PING!”…. so in 10 minutes, I have been alerted 3 times for a message I have already read. ANNOYING! I don’t want to unlock my phone for every little message that is sent to me.

I understand how this could be useful for someone who gets 1-5 text message a day… I average over 200 a day. Most messages come from twitter and don’t require a response. I would disable the multi reminder if I could, but apple doesn’t allow you to change the setting for it. It’s just on, like it or not. The only way to prevent the SMS multi reminder is to disable text notifications all together, and I’m not going to do that. I like getting one and only one notification when I get a new message.

If im in a meeting, should my pocket buzz 6 times in 20 minutes to let me know I have 2 text messages? GTFO! I should only be notified two times.

I really hope that Apple allows people to turn the SMS multi reminder on and off in the next update. I can’t imagine it’s to hard to do.

Catch Me Ridin Nerdy with my iPhone

By Josh Highland in iPhone, semi-legal, software

C-Low is one of the best dice based street gambling games there is. I have been know to play some mean C-Low in my time, in ghetto situations (random fact: I am in a gang)

Here is how you play:
Gather your homie in a circle, everyone places a set betting amount on the floor. Dollar bills work great.

Everyone rolls one die to determine the rolling order. The higest rolling player goes first, then second highest, etc.

The point of the game is to roll 3 dice until you get a matching pair of three of a kind, what ever happens first. You keep rolling until you get double or triples.

If you roll doubles, your score is value of the dice opposite the pair. Triples (“trips”) beat any doubles. The highest trips win.

Special dice combinations:
1-2-3: “crap out”. auto lose. You are out of the game, your money is gone.
4-5-6: known as “c-low“. Auto win. The game stops, you win all the money. Other players lose their turns.

Game Play Example (5 players)

Player one:
roll 1: 1-4-3 = no matches, roll again
roll 2: 3-5-2 = no matches, roll again
roll 3: 6-6-2 = MATCHING PAIR (6), FINAL SCORE = 2

Player two:
roll 1: 3-3-3 = TRIPPLE 3’s (“trip3”), final score = 333

player three:
roll 1: 5-6-1 = no match, roll again
roll 2: 1-2-3 = SPECIAL DICE COMBO! crap out. Out of the game, no more rolls

player four:
roll 1: 4-5-6 = SPECIAL DICE COMBO! C-LOW! AUTO WIN! no other player is allowed to roll, you take the $$$

player five:
does not get to roll, player four got a c-low.

its that easy!

Wait! What if 2 players recieve the same score? (4 and 4) or (222 and 222)

This condition is called a “push”. The players with matching high scores stay in the game, all other players must double their initial bet. If the buy in was $1 for the first round, the buy in for round 2 = $2 (the losing players now have $3 on the floor, the winners of the first round only have $1 on the floor). The game starts again, giving all players another chance to play.

Why am I posting rules on how to play street gambeling dice games on a mainly tech related blog? Simple, I no longer have to carry dice around to hustle suckas with! Say What? damn straight, with MotionX Dice, a free app for the iPhone, I have a sweet pair of dice to play c-low (or yahtzee) with when ever I want. All you have to do is change the setting to 3 dice, and shake the iPhone.

If playing illegal dice games on your iPhone doesn’t make you feel thug enough, you can always pour one out for the homies with another free iPhone app.

click here to see mor pictures from my 28th birthday party

My First Program, Age 7

By Josh Highland in hardware, Josh's Rambling

My Great Grandpa, Henry Izbicki, owned C & H Sales in Pasadena California, a well known electronic surplus store on Colorado blvd.

When I was a little kid, I’m talking about 5 or so. He gave me my first computer. The year was 1984, and I have never been the same since.

It wasn’t a fancy apple IIe or anything like that, it was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. The TI-99/4a was released in 1981 and discontinued in 1983 (I guess it makes sense that the electronic surplus store would have got them in 1984). The CPU on the computer was a blazing 3.0 MHz, with 256 bytes or ram.

To put that in perspective, my phone has 620 MHz with 128 MB. My desktop computer has two 3000 MHz cps and 4000 MB of ram.

The TI-99/4A computer was basically a keyboard that took cartridges, and hooked up to a TV. No internal storage, no file system.  Nintendo hadn’t come to North America yet, and the TI had games, the main reason I started to love that computer. I spend hours in front of that thing playing games like TI Space Invaders, Pole Position, Adventure, Munchman, Tombstone City and a bunch of other games I can’t think of right now, I just remember that they were awesome.

The more I played the games, the more interested I got in computers in general. For about a year straight I think I played those games non-stop until I dominated them all. As I played them, I wanted to know how they all worked, and why they worked. My grandpa had been given a TI computer also (actually every household in our extended family got one, my Great Grandpa literally had a truck load of these things). My Grandpa had some games for us kids to play, but he also had more grown up software, and hardware.

One of the things that my grandpa had that I didn’t was the TI-Program Recorder! The program recorder was an analog cassette recorder with special connectors that would hook up to the computer, so you could save the programs you wrote in TI-Basic. The recorder was amazing at the time. Since the computer had no internal storage, It had to save any data to the tape in an audio format. It sounded like a modem making an extra long call (music to my ears) when then data was being read or written.

TI-Basic was a programming language/application that allowed you to write your own programs. I was fascinated by it. When I was 7, I started to read my grandpas “Beginners Basic” book. It had a bunch of sample code in it. I remember pouring over that book for hours on end. I even used to bring it to school with me (my nerd career started early i guess).

I loved video games, and I was reading the TI-Basic book because I wanted to know how they worked. At age 7, I decided to write my very own game. I don’t really remember the exact details of it, but I remember working on it day after day. When I got out of school, I would beg my mom to take me over to my Grandpa’s house so I could work on it. I forget the details of it, but it involved driving a car, and I thought it was super fun to play and modify. The year was 1986. I was on top of the world.

1986 was also the year that Nintendo came to North America. Compared to NES, the TI games were totally lame, including my home brewed car game. Since I used the TI-99/4A mostly to play games and the NES was way sweeter, I soon forgot about the TI and it soon faded out of memory.

Fast forward to today. Its 2008, 24 years. I am still a fan of video games, but more so, I love programming and technology in general. I went to college for computer science and programming, and I have been working 10 years now as a professional programmer. To think it all started with a Christmas gift from my Great Grandpa, and the direct encouragement from my Grandpa. Both of them are gone now, but I think they would be proud of me, and the things I have done with my life and computers.

The real point of the blog posting is this:
Not to long ago, I was going through an old box of things that belonged to my Grandpa, and I came across this:

It’s the audio cassette tape that I kept at my grandpas house, the same exact one that I used to save my car game to when I was 7. It even has my Grandpas hand writing on the label, “Joshua’s Auto Races 1st Game Programmed Alone”.

I’m not very sentimental when it comes to possessions, but I’m glad that I have this tape. I’m going to frame it and hang it next to my diploma. As lame as it might be, its probably one of my most treasured belonging. Sure it’s my first program, but more then that, I love the fact that of everything I ever made as a kid, my Grandpa hung on to this for 20 years.

WordPress iPhone app

By Josh Highland in hardware, internet, iPhone, Josh's Rambling, software, web 2.0, wordpress

I love wordpress as a blogging platform an I love the iPhone as a mobile computing solution. Yesterday I saw that there was a wordpress app avaliable for the iPhone, so I had to try it out.

This is a post from the wordpress app, and so far it’s easy to use. I don’t know how much milage I will get out of this app, I tend to blog from home and use Twitter on the run. Who knows, this app might change that!

Let’s see how the image attachment feature works. This is me, right now in my office.

photo

iPhone screen shots made easy

By Josh Highland in hardware, iPhone, tutorials

If you have the new 2.0 software, follow the diagram below to take a screen shot of the current screen on your iPhone.

Press and hold the home button and the screen on/off button together. The screen will flash, and the image will be added to your camera roll, so you can download it or email it off. Great for remembering your settings!