My Brute on iPhone

By Josh Highland in iPhone, video games

Lately I have been consumed by an iPhone game called “My Brute”. My Brute is an RPG fighting game based on the popular MyBrute.com. It works like this, You create a character, pick their body, their clothes, their hair and skin color. You pick an animal to represent your dojo (snake, fox or bear… I’m the bear of course). Once you have this all set up, you enter the arena, pick a person to fight and then WATCH your character fight for experience points, bonus weapons and award, and honor. Notice I said WATCH and not control. You have NO control over the actions of your brute. It basically turns into a spectator sport where you cheer your character on and hope he kicks the crap out of the other guy. It also adds stress when you only can fight 5 times in a 24 hour period, very stressful.

I am completely hooked on this game. On top of trying to make my brute the best he can be, you can recruit people to join your dojo. To join my dojo, enter in the following secret code when you are asked: HGHHFHFE

I think this game is worth the $4 I spent on it. My Brute is awesome to watch, and it totally draws you in despite the fact that you don’t control the action.

Check out the screen shots below

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My Dojos code is HGHHFHFE, join me and together we will crush the competition!

Controlling Twitter SMS notifications through code

By Josh Highland in hacks, internet, iPhone, linux, software, tutorials, web 2.0

twitter sms

It’s not secret my current favorite tech toys are my iPhone and Twitter.

I follow several hundred people of interest, and regularly use TwitterFon Pro, TweetDeck and Twitter.com to keep up with them all. For an elite group of people I follow on twitter I choose to have their updates pushed to me via SMS (text message) to my phone.

Sometimes I’m in area where I dont have reliable service to my phone (most of the meeting rooms at my work for some reason), and Twitter will try to send me an SMS message telling me that one of my good friends just made a tweet. If Twitter cant deliver that tweet for some reason, like the phone doesnt have service, Twitter simply stops sending message to your phone. There has been many times where i have thought to myself “damn Twitter is quiet today”, then I log onto Twitter.com and see a “is you device have trouble?” error. If i don’t go check the website, I have no idea that Twitter turned off SMS updates to my phone. Twitter is cool but they aren’t cool enough to send you an email saying “Hey your phone is screwed up, we are going to stop sending you SMS message until you fix it”. Atleast then the poor bastards like me who are addicted to twitter would know what we have to do.

Because I am such a Twitter addict, I have come up with a plan to end my frustrations with this problem. The solution? Use some evil “robots” to do my bidding. I have blogged about them before, I am talking about Cron and Curl. okokok, so they aren’t evil robots they are software running on my computer.

Twitter has an awesome API (Application Programming Interface) that allows you to do all sorts of sweet things using REST based http requests, including turning on and off SMS notifications to your phone.

cURL is an application that allows you to connect to web addresses from a command line.

cron is an application that allows you run application at scheduled intervals.

Can you guess where this is all going? Here is mathematical representation for you
((Twitter API + cURL) * cron(30 minutes)) = Happy Josh Highland

I have cron run the following command every 30 minutes (replace username and password with your own of course)

/usr/bin/curl -u user:password -d device=sms http://twitter.com/account/update_delivery_device.xml

I will never need to log onto twitter to turn on my SMS notifications ever again. In the event that Twitter disables notifications to my phone, every 30 minutes my evil robots enable MS messages to my phone. At most I will have 30 minutes of down time. I can live with that.

This is a perfect example of what one of my Computer Science professors told me… “If you have to do it more then 2 times write a script to do it for you”.

Info on the new iPhone has leaked

By Josh Highland in hardware, iPhone, mac

iphonemb717

I have been keeping my ears open for rumors about the new iPhone. Earlier this week, the above image was leaked onto a mac rumors website from a chinese source.

The image above shows a new iPhone model number “MB717LL” with 32GB of Storage. If the poster’s claims are to be believed, the new iPhone will contain the following features:

  • 600MHz CPU Speed (up from 400MHz)
  • 256MB RAM (up from 128MB)
  • Digital Compass and FM
  • 3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus
  • 32GB size
  • No major changes in battery, screen and external casing.

There is no way of telling if this information is correct, but the leaked photos and  information on the unibody MacBook and MacBook Pro also came from the same Chinese website, to they have some merit in my mind.

It’s no suprise that the screen and the physical shape of the device hasnt changed, if it did, us iPhone application developers would be screwed. I think its going to be nice to have a better camera and an FM tuner.

If this is all true, its not a major leap ahead, but I will still be inline to get one. I am guessing that the device will be announced and possibly released at the WWDC (Apple Worldwide Developers Conference) in June.