Thank you iPhone, for bringing me 3G

I just wanted to say thanks to Steve, Apple and the iPhone for finally getting at&t to do something with their 3G network. They had been dragging their feet with it for so long and I know I'd still be waiting for it if you hadn't come along and convinced them that they really needed 3G to push more iPhone sales.

Sources all over are reporting that the second generation iPhone (the black one on the right) is going to be released in early June which seems to make sense, when the first iPhone came out at&t's 3G network was very small and while everyone complained that it should have had 3G at the time it just wouldn't have made any sense. It was a great idea to launch an EDGE version early, let everyone figure out how great they are then only a year later release a 3G version once at&t has had the time to build out their network. They get to gouge the early adopters twice and since everyone signed a two year agreement they'll have to pay full price for the new 3G iPhone.

I'm just happy I get 3G on my at&t tilt, which by the way, is black.

US Bank charges $400 for a $10 overdraft

My girlfriend, who has a checking account at US Bank, overdrew her checking account by $10. No big deal, happens all the time right? Usually they'll tack on some overdraft fees which sucks but is not unexpected. Pay the fine, bring the account current and everything is cool. So that's what she does, except she's still $2 overdraft somehow. US Bank does this rediculous thing where they charge you $8 dollars a day and so the charges keep building up. They of course don't bother to tell her and now they want a total of $400 dollars to bring the account current. She's already paid $200 to bring the account current, more than enough to cover the cost of the overdraft. WTF? Does that sound reasonable to anyone?

at&t activates 3G in Madison WI, 612 kbit/sec

I was delighted to find this morning that my phone had finally switched over to 3G. I've been waiting for them to flip the switch ever since I picked my Tilt which is the first phone I've ever owned that supports 3G. I'm not sure what other cities were lit up as well but I am doing a little traveling tomorrow so I'll see how long I keep my new high speed magic carpet ride. It will also be interesting to see how this affects my battery life, it's been pretty good so far giving me at least two days of regular useage. As long as it can still give me one day I can live with that as I charge my phone every night anyways.

Does anyone make a scanner that doesn't suck?

Why is it that nobody can make a scanner that doesn't make me want to go Office Space on it's ass? I've used a ton of different scanners and every single time it's the same thing, press the scan button and pray to the scanner gods while sacrificing a virgin in the hope that this time it will finally work. Do you know how hard it is to find a good computer tech only to turn around and offer them up as a sacrifice on their first day? If I have to scan any more pictures HR is going to kill me.

It's not really the hardware that's the problem. It's the god awful driver software. I had to install an HP scanner the other day and the driver software was a 150MB download! Adobe Photoshop CS3 in it's entirety is 150MB by the way. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. I don't need the scanner software to do image editing, cataloging, email, or make slide shows. I just need it to scan the image and send it to the computer quickly and without locking up the whole computer.

What they need to do is make scanners show up as a mass storage device. Memory is cheap these days, just scan the image to some internal memory then I can copy the files over to my computer as easy as copying a file. Have a nice user menu on the front that lets me adjust the DPI and image type and I wouldn't even have to install any software on my computer. If you're feeling fancy you could throw in a setting that could enable/disable auto-cropping and it would be the perfect scanner.

No one buys a scanner because of the software that it comes with so stop adding features, it's just making the quality of your software go down.

Paint the town with TomTheGeek.com

Just for fun I opened a shop at CafePress.com where you can buy a couple different shirts with the TomTheGeek.com logo on them. Maybe you need a fuse for your Molotov Cocktail or maybe you just want all those girls to stop hitting on you, either way the shirts are available now at the low, low price of $20 for either the always popular black tee or the confidence inducing white golf polo.

FyreTV Unboxxxed

FyreTV, the hottest boxxx you'll ever experience has been officially un-boxed by Scott over at SatelliteGuys.US. So far there's not much content to test with except for a small teaser video though they claim "around 20,000 movies" will be available once the service is up and running. Included in the package is the standard stuff though they do include a HDMI cable which is a nice touch.

The pricing starts at just ten bucks a month for 100 minutes of video with extra minutes available at .10-.30 cents each depending on how many you buy at a time. Individual movies will be $5-$20 with the option to buy just a certain scene from a movie without having to buy the whole thing. If those options are too complicate you can just buy all the content from a distributor for a flat monthly fee in the range of $10-$30.

FyreTV is in the process of rolling out the Beta which should last at least a couple months. Shipments were claimed to start February 4th but I'm still waiting for the final email where I can give them my address and other information. If you haven't signed up for the beta yet go to www.fyretv.com and use "Satelliteguys" as your promo code to skip to the head of the line courtesy of Estefano.

Server 2008 due Febuary 27th

Today Vista SP1 and Server 2008 were released to manufacturers. I can't wait to get my hands on Server 2008. Server core version is a huge change for MS, we're finally able to free our resources from the clutches of the MS GUI overlord. Other improvements include better PHP performance for IIS, better IPv6 support, better hardware installation control, an improved firewall, Network Access control and finally integrated virtualization support. So unlike Vista, Server 2008 has some solid reasons for upgrading. Let me know how SP1 for Vista works out for you, ok?

Environment monitoring with 1-wire sensors

I was looking for a solution to monitor our server room's temperature over a serial port and discovered the world of 1-wire sensors. 1-wire stuff is fantastically simple and has a wide variety of sensors and switches. The basic idea is that you can hook a large number of sensors to a pair of wires ( ground + data, hence 1-wire ) and can individually target and read each sensor.

Here you see the circuit I constructed as a 1-wire serial port adapter. The 1-wire sensors are run in parallel from the RCA connector. RJ-11 might have been a better connector to use in hindsight since the cabling is cheaper but it would be an easy retrofit if I ever want to expand my network. Right now I only have 1 temperature sensor (shown below) so the RCA connector is adequate.

The label you see on the side is a unique 64-bit address burned into each sensor. This is equivalent to the MAC address on a network card. The actual sensor is just a three pin through hole mount similar to many transistor packages. It's small enough that I was able to fit it entirely into the connector housing with a hole open on the end so that it's still exposed to the environment.

This is the final 1-wire adapter with sensor attached. It's not quite how I imagined it as I have to use an extension serial cable to hook it up instead of plugging the whole thing right into the serial port but it works and I can always change it later if I run into an appropriate connector. Ordering parts online is always a crap shoot unless you can see a picture. The whole setup cost under $10 and I can expand it to use more sensors if I want. All I would have to do is build/buy some RCA extensions and splitters.

The output of the whole system is the graph you see below. Not terribly exciting to say the least but considering the cost of the project it's pretty neat. I'm thinking about adding some window sensors for a cheap alarm system. Email notifications can be added to the polling script to notify you of any sensor conditions. In our server room the system is set to notify the IT staff if the temp gets any higher than 85F or below 55F. I doubt the server room would ever get below 55F but if it does it's a pretty good indicator that something has gone seriously wrong!

Shentech.com fraud warning

These guys always seemed pretty sketchy but I never had any real problems with them or at least so I thought. Turns out they're taking people's credit card information and opening bogus UPS commercial accounts then using them to make large shipments.

Brusk says:

Indeed. I bought something from Shentech about 5-6 years ago, and incurred a world of hurt. I bought a mouse--an Dell-branded Logitech USB mouse for about 6 bucks (great mouse, still going strong). Then over a year letter I discovered that someone had opened a commercial UPS account in my name and used it to ship wholesale quantities of goods from China to Shentech's address in Queens. I found this out when I received the bill. UPS was good about it and the bill went away...for a few months. Then another similar bill arrived at my new address (I'd moved from NYC to California). Again UPS's fraud squad dealt with it. I guess it was pretty obvious that someone who doesn't have a business wouldn't be shipping several thousand pounds of equipment across the Pacific. But they did something nasty with my contact info, and I've watched my credit reports carefully ever since.

So yeah, Shentech is evil.

This exact thing happened to me only I didn't realize what was going on. I've ordered several small items from them (fan guards, colored screws, ect..) in the past and one day I get this bill from UPS for a shipment of t-shirts to an address in NY. I simply called UPS and got them to dismiss the charges and forgot about it. I got a second bill a little while later but I just called a second time and I've never heard from them since. Because it went away so easily I never really looked into it but I wish I still had the bill so I could verify that it had the same address.

If there are any remaining doubts about Shentech just follow the fraud warning link at the top and check out their rating and read some reviews. None of this is proven of course, it's merely second hand accounts and circumstantial evidence but given the number of people they've pissed off and the fact that they're shipping counterfeit laptop batteries that can explode or catch fire I won't be buying anything from them for a long, long time.

Enable IMAP on your Gmail account

If you're like me you've been eagerly waiting for Gmail to enable IMAP access ever since you created your account. They've been slowly enabling it for a while now but today I learned a neat trick.

Go into settings and change your language setting to English(UK). Select "no" when it asks you if you want to enable it for your other google apps because the next step is to change it back to English(US). After that you should see IMAP enabled in settings.

No guarantees that it will work for you but it worked for me.