will work for doughnuts

“After I did it, I heard a voice - my own voice - saying, “Who the fuck do you think you are? Who are you that you can force your Goddamned minutia on other people, your stupid bullshit, your stone-ground artisanal condiments? How dare you. You should be ashamed.” And I was.”

Yeah, you said it man. That’s exactly it, I swear I do get why people use Twitter, but I just can’t use it and Tycho has explained why better than I could.

Twitter account: deleted

Friendfeed: removed all services, for now I’ll just ignore friend requests since I’m not publishing anything.

Flickr: all photos are friends only, removed some contacts.

Facebook: profile is still there, but made use of their new privacy settings (unchecked everything) and heavy use of the limited profile. Facebook only serves as a rolodex for me, and I don’t use it otherwise.

This blog: I guess it’ll stay for now, I haven’t made up my mind if it should survive.

Google Reader: Removing ~30 feeds, will try to regularly remove feeds that I’m not reading.

Why?: I’m not really sure, but let’s see if it cuts down on time wasted online. I don’t imagine that you (my friends) will care since I rarely use any service except Flickr, and all of you have access to those photos.

I got my rejection letter from Apple’s iPhone Developer Program today. It’s not explicitly a rejection letter, more of a “Thanks for applying, maybe we’ll approve you later”.  I guess I’ll be waiting on the hacked 1.2 release before being able to test anything. I knew it was a long shot, but I was hoping they’d let me in as an individual.

I’m playing around with the iPhone SDK, and according to the instructions here, you can’t run apps you develop on an iPhone unless you have a developer certificate. I gave it a try anyways, and while XCode recognizes the device, it won’t actually deploy to it.

Since my phone is jailbroken, I attempted to build, copy, and run the HelloWorldClassic sample app on my phone. I did this by ssh’ing into the phone and placing the built app in /Applications then turning off and on the phone. The interesting thing is that the app starts and loads the background, and widgets. It does not set the text in the widgets though before it quits. I have no idea why this is. I wonder if anyone has tried this with a jailbroken 1.4 iPhone (mine is running 1.3). I guess I’ll give 1.4 a try tomorrow.

(photo by johnwilson1969)

Last week I was thinking of using my Thinkpad as a file server and I started wondering how much power it would use if I left it on all day. Laurence said he had device for measure power consumption called a Kill A Watt.

After getting one and measuring the Thinkpad in a variety of conditions, I started wondering what devices in my home were poorly behaved with their power consumption. I went around measuring all the devices I could find for a couple hours.

One of the biggest surprises is that my Comcast digital cable receiver/DVR uses a whopping 42 Watts even when it’s turned off. That’s more than 3 times what my Thinkpad uses when set to save power. Another surprise was my Sony shelf stereo (circa 1999) which uses 9 Watts when it’s turned off and is just showing the time. As a result, I’ve hooked these poorly behaving devices up to a power strip that gets turned off unless I’m at home.

It turns out my Thinkpad only consumes 14 Watts when set to save power and with the screen turned off. All of my results for a variety of devices and chargers are now here on this Power Consumption Page. Feel free to measure your own devices and add to the page. I also measured a number of phone chargers, and contrary to the warnings in the video below, I wasn’t able to find one that drew any power when left plugged in.