Living Digitally

Mirrors make great whiteboards

The other day, a friend of mine and I were plotting to take over the world when one of us suddenly had the need to diagram something. I have a whiteboard in my closet which I've been meaning to hang for the last 9 months, but the problem is that I never think to hang it when I don't need it, and when I do need it, I don't want to stop what I'm doing long enough to hang it. My friend had the idea of using the whiteboard marker directly on the mirrored doors of the closet in my office. I never liked those doors, so I figured the worst that could happen is that we would ruin them, and then I could replace them. We discovered, however, that mirrors make great whiteboards, and both doors have been covered with diagrams and various scribbles ever since. It turns out I had two huge, almost floor-to-ceiling whiteboards sitting right behind me all this time.

How mobile phone ringers should work

While sitting in front of my computer at 9:00 PM in my completely silent office, I was scared half out of my wits by my Sidekick's email alert. It's even worse when I have it sitting out and it not only chimes, but also vibrates against my desktop like some old door buzzer. Of course there are other times -- in loud, crowded restaurants, or outside among the din of the city -- when I can't hear my phone ring at all, and since I keep it in a dorky leather holster attached to my belt instead of in my pocket (who wants to risk cancer down there?), I often can't feel it vibrate, either.

So I started wondering why mobile phone ringers aren't smarter. Just like my PowerBook will dim my screen based on a sampling of ambient light, why can't a phone sample ambient noise in order to decide how it should alert you? If you're sitting in your office and it's dead quite, a soft, pleasant chime should do the trick, but if you're having a drink in a loud bar or walking down a busy street, it should blare and vibrate.

I know some phones have the ability to gradually increase the volume of the ringer the longer a call goes unanswered which is a nice low-tech solution, however I've found that if you're in a noisy environment, by the time you realize your phone is ringing, you're not likely to be able to recover it from wherever you have it stashed before the caller is forward to voicemail (and you already know how I feel about voicemail).

Another low-tech solution I've noticed is keeping your phone out in front of you on the bar. Of course, problems with that approach include: spilling beer on it, other people spilling beer on it, and getting drunk and leaving it behind. Besides, why throw a low-tech solution at a problem when it's so much fun to over-engineer one.

How voicemail should work

I hate getting voicemail. The last thing I want to see when I look down at my phone is that stupid little voicemail icon. My messages go unchecked for days if not weeks, and every time I finish going through a backlog, I consider changing my greeting to something like "Please DO NOT leave a message. Send me an email, send me an SMS, or even better, just hang up since my phone will tell me you called anyway." But I don't because as much as I dislike it, I know voicemail is necessary. And I also realized the other day that it isn't actually voicemail itself that I dislike so much -- it's the horrible implementation that every mobile phone carrier seems to use.

To get my voicemail, I have to call in, wait, enter a code, wait, listen to the stupid greeting, wait, then navigate through one or more messages using a very clumsy and non-intuitive numeric interface. Even with all the menu options memorized, it still takes far longer than it should.

So how should it be done? Here are two ideas:

Gaming on the cheap

I'm taking a little break from my Developer Relations position at Adobe Systems to work on some of my own projects, which means no money coming in for a while, which in turn means I won't be dropping $60 on any new Xbox 360 games any time soon. Although I'd really like to be playing the new Ghost Recon, Advanced Warfighter (which I've played at friends' houses and love), I am instead entertaining myself with Xbox Live Arcade games.

If you have an Xbox 360, you need to spend some time checking out the Xbox Live Arcade. It consists of a couple dozen small, simple, downloadable games across six categories which seem to cost anywhere between $5 and $10, and provide hours of swearing and celebration. To get to the Xbox Live Arcade, go to the Xbox dashboard, navigate to the Games tab (or "blade" as Microsoft calls them), and it's right there.

I've played Hexic HD (written in Flash, I believe), Mutant Storm Reloaded, Geometry Wars Evolved, and Joust. My favorite is Geometry Wars Evolved so far. The graphics are simple, but extremely sharp and bright (on an HD TV), and the movement is amazingly fluid given everything that's going on on the screen at once. Hexic HD is available for free, and is created by Alexey Pajitnov, they guy who, by inventing Tetris, is responsible for decades of accumulated lost productivity.

You can download a free trial of each game which is limited in some fashion, but works well enough to give you a sense of whether you want to spend a little money on it or not. While playing the trials, your Xbox will ask you about 800 times if you want to "unlock" the full version which gets annoying, but the trial technique is appreciated, nonetheless. Unlocking (in other words, buying) the full version allows you to record achievements that your Xbox Live friends can see, and lets you play the entire game through.

The only thing that bugs me about the Xbox Live Arcade is that you don't pay real money for the games. You purchase "Microsoft Points" which you can then redeem for games, sort of like the Chuck E. Cheese token model. I guess I don't mind the model itself so much, but they conveniently leave out dollar equivalents next to points. In other words, you might see that a game costs 400 points which you can purchase quickly and easily right through Xbox Live, but there's nothing there to indicate how much money that actually is. Convenient. Anyway, the exchange rate seems to be 80 Microsoft points per $1, so games will cost between $5 and $10. Check out the Microsoft Points article on Wikipedia for more information.

Of course, there are other ways to game on the cheap. You can pick up an original Xbox bundle for $179.99 at Best Buy (that actually seems a little expensive to me), a PlayStation 2 for $149.99, or a good old Nintendo Gamecube for a mere $99.99. If you're into mobile gaming, I strongly recommend checking out the new Nintendo DS Lite (videos here and here) which will save you money over the PSP. And if you're a do-it-yourself type with no moral objections to this type of thing, you might be interested in knowing that the Xbox 360 firmware was recently hacked.