Logographer

Well, I did it. Went and got me one of them iPhones. The WordPress admin pages aren’t terribly well-suited to the device, but I think I’ve figured out how to post an entry from the phone.

It’s the best phone/iPod/PDA I’ve owned, in spite of a few annoyances. One dissappointment is the poor interaction with the Bluetooth hands-free feature in my Audi A3. The phone and car make a connection when I start the car, but the connection is unstable and usually breaks in five or ten or fifteen minutes. I filed a bug report with Apple this morning, and hope they can and will produce a software fix for it. A BMW owner said he has seen this problem, and found that by disabling the phone’s WiFi while in the car, he could get a stable Bluetooth connection. I’ll give that a try the next time I’m out and about.

Now for full disclosure. I wrote most of this post from the iPhone, but had to finish it from my laptop. I can’t copy and paste on the iPhone, which makes adding a lengthy URL to the post a difficult chore. Some of the controls on the Web interface for WordPress administration are invisible on the iPhone, too. Just the price of being an early adopter, as they say.

Update Turning off WiFi while in the car didn’t fix the Bluetooth hands-free operation bug. A search of the web for iPhone bugs leads me to believe that Bluetooth support is one of the most unreliable of features on the phone.

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It was a beautiful summer morning for a visit to Stanford today. There is no parking fee on Saturday, and since it’s summer, there are no crowds.

I went to Green Library to consult the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, and although I transcribed some entries directly into a text file on my computer, some entries were just too long for me to copy that way. So I took out my trusty pocket camera and, in the fashion of Cold War spies, took snapshots of some of the longer passages. This worked pretty well, I think, but you can see for yourself.

After collating the photos of the pages into a single PDF file in Acrobat Pro, I then used the OCR feature of Acrobat. Now I can select text from the scanned pages and cut and paste to my heart’s content. I’m not sure if it saved me time in the long run, but it sure seemed like it in the library. Besides, I don’t think I could have taken the PLRE out of the reading room, so photocopying didn’t seem like an option.

I also scanned some pages of Alberto Ferreiro’s supplemental bibliography on the Visigoths while I was there.

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It’s time for me to get in shape again, in some manner of speaking. And being the gadget freak that I am, I bought a pair of Nike+ running shoes with an iPod Nano, and am hoping that it helps me establish (and achieve) my fitness goals. The shoes are extremely comfortable, so I certainly don’t feel like I’ve cut myself short just to get the techno stuff.

I started off using the Nike+ thing on a couple of walks in the evening with my wife. I now have one short run on record with the device too. I’m so out of shape, even a run of about 0.75 miles puts me at the limit.

The discipline of running regularly, or at least of getting regular exercise, might spill over into other parts of my life too. Take my thesis, for one thing. I have not exactly been a picture of diligent pursuit on that count. Speaking of which, I’m going to the Stanford library today to consult some reference material, including the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, the Notitia Dignitatum, and at least one volume of Alberto Ferreiro’s bibliography on the Visigoths in Gaul and Spain.

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I’m not getting one of those today. I’ll wait. But at lunchtime today, I went to two local malls and took these photos of the phenomenon. Need I mention that Woz himself was there? I snapped a few pics of him at the Valley Fair mall in San Jose.

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Nope. Not gonna do it. I’m not standing in line for one of these. But I’ll read about it, experiencing the Apple fan-boy excitement through surrogates.

(Yes, I see the irony of this post coming on the heals of one on global poverty.)

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I’m attending WWDC this week in San Francisco. Went to the keynote yesterday and heard The Steve talk about some of the new features in the next version of Mac OS X. Most of us heard about Leopard last year, but Apple was holding back some of the details. Now all is known, or nearly all. Besides all that, we heard about technical details that I can’t mention now, but it’s this techie stuff that will be the theme for the rest of the week.

We also heard about Apple’s plans to release their web browser, Safari, in versions for Windows XP and Vista, available now as an early Beta release. But I would caution you to think about installing pre-release software. It might not be as useful as you hope, as some people have discovered.

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The pieces are in place, according to rumor, for Apple to release the entire EMI music catalog, excepting the Beatles, DRM-free on Tuesday, May 29. Hey! That’s today.

I’ll probably pay the 30¢ to upgrade my collection, not only to get DRM-free copies of songs I bought, but also to upgrade from the 128kbps files to the higher quality sound that comes with 256kbps AAC encoding. This should improve the sound of my classical and opera tracks especially, but I’ll probably upgrade everything I’ve bought at the iTunes Music Store (which is only a tiny portion of my entire collection).

Update May 30th: Here’s the press release from Apple. Ars Technica has indications that the debut of DRM-free music on Apple’s site is in progress, albeit slower than planned.

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An interesting web site all around, Paleo-Future ponders digital rights management, past, present, and future.

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Eric Bangeman at Ars Technica gives a short summary of the recent HD DVD content restriction brouhaha, including links to the Digg part of the story.

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As this photo essay from Wired magazine makes clear, you can’t turn back the clock on the cracking of HD DVD content management.

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