Baron’s Blog

Click the above link and pledge to download Firefox 3 when it’s released next month, you too can be part of history by setting a world record for the most downloads in 24 hours. I plan to celebrate by drinking a pint of Guinness if that helps with the effort.

Firefox is a great browser, is free and sure beats using Internet Explorer. I still use Safari a lot on my Mac since it syncs bookmarks with my iPhone but I still use Firefox a lot too.

I’m also thinking that if Mozilla developed Firefox for the iPhone Apple would probably have to allow it to be used just like how Microsoft was forced to allow other browsers to be used on Windows.

Download day is June 17th. Get your browsers started and ready for the download. Maybe we can break a record and crash Mozilla’s servers on the same day.

The Wall Street Journal has a story about a game called ‘Passage‘ which is a simulation of life in 5 minutes time. It has been said people have cried playing this game. Graphics are crude, controls are minimal (arrow keys) and gameplay is short, 5 minutes. You can download and play the game via the link above which leads to the download site.

I know sometimes record and movie companies embargo releases to the iTunes Music Store but 30 years seems like a bit too much no? Those had better be some damn good bonus tracks.

If you like to read then you should check-out http://www.wowio.com

You sign-up for an account and can download lots of books for free, the catch is that there’s an ad page in the first few pages of the PDF book, but that’s easy to page by. All kinds of subjects and different authors.

And if that’s not enough for you and you live in Hawaii (and have a Hawaii State Public Library System card) you can download eBooks for free too from http://hawaii.lib.overdrive.com/ but they have due dates where the books expire after a set amount of time. They have audiobooks too but iPods and Macs are not supported.

Okay, some of you know by now that I caved and bought an iPhone. I just couldn’t take the proper lack of sync software between my Palm Treo 650 and my Mac and had Verizon Wireless released the Treo 755 I would have still been one of their customers for another two years, but I digress.

The iPhone is pretty good but one of the things that bugged me was that I couldn’t use regular headphones with it. (sorry for the lousy photos but I wanted to get this out there)

As you can see, the iPhone jack on the left has a skinnier jacket than my old 5G (5th generation) iPod headphone. And as any iPhone owner has realized it pisses them off forcing them to either buy a 2nd iPhone headset or an adapter to use regular headphone jacks. That fat jacket prevents the normal plug from resting into the recessed iPhone socket. Apple claims it has to do with releasing the tension on the socket.

Well today I made a discovery. I was using my old iPod headphones in my laptop listening to some Led Zep and when I pulled the headphone out of the plug the jacket came off. Normally this would be bad but I noticed that the inside plastic insulator was skinny, kind of like the iPhone jack.

So I plugged it into the iPhone and it was a perfect fit!

I then put a little dab of glue onto the butt of the insulator and slipped the jacket back on. Probably a tiny dab of hot glue gun glue would work or some epoxy glue on the butt end of the insulator, you don’t want too much to make a mess.

I carefully gripped the jack and took it out of the iPhone to let the glue dry. I WOULD STRONGLY SUGGEST NOT USING SOMETHING LIKE SUPERGLUE, THE FUMES CAN ETCH THE GLASS OF YOUR IPHONE!

Now compare the two jacks. The iPhone jack on the top and my old iPod jack on the bottom. I can still use the iPod jack in all my devices but now it also works in the iPhone! The Belkin headphone adapter is $9.95, a 2nd headset from Apple would be $29.

I don’t know if the current generation of iPod headphone jacks can be pulled apart for this mod but maybe it’s worth a $9.95 try? Like the Belkin adapter sold in the Apple Store the iPod plug only has 3 electrical connectors since those headphones don’t have a microphone.

You wouldn’t want to be standing outside on the summit of Mauna Kea right now.

A series of images from the summit today. I think that’s ice building up in the upper-left corner of the image.

Yeah, I missed the full moon but it was still pretty full tonight when driving home so I stopped alongside the road for a photo. But using just my little Sanyo HD2 camera here’s what I got on the first try just to see what it would do on all auto setting. Both of the images below are cropped.

On all auto settings handheld it’s too slow of a shutter speed, notice the double image from the hand shake and the auto metering over exposes the shot as it sees mostly black night sky. So on a point-n-shoot type of camera like this how do I fool it to getting a decent photo?

Yep, that’s a photo out of the same little camera. Here’s what I did.

• White balance set to daylight (the moon is illuminated by the sun)
• ISO manually set to 50
• Focus set to infinity (actually the little mountain symbol on the screen)
• Exposure set by locking onto my car’s dome light (see explanation below)

The tough part was exposure so I can hand-hold a decent shutter speed and not overexpose the shot. Since focus was already set it didn’t matter what I pointed the little camera at to lock exposure, so I turned on my car’s interior dome light, pointed at parts of it until I saw the shutter speed I wanted, half-pressed the button to lock that in, recomposed on the moon and voila!

You gotta fool these little point-n-shoot cameras to obey what you want them to do. I did a similar thing with my friend’s cameraphone in Las Vegas. He wanted to get a nice shot of the Paris hotel balloon but it kept coming out over exposed. So I held up my cellphone screen to his lens to trick it to darken the photo, then quickly took it away and snapped a shot before it could change the exposure. If there’s a will there’s a way. I probably would have gotten a better shot using a tripod and not shooting through my front windshield like I did, but where’s the challenge in that?