Last week I installed the Amazon.com app for the G1. I have been trying it out, and it is really nice. Among other things, you can use the G1 camera to scan a bar code of a product in a store. The product's entry at Amazon comes up right away. Not only do you get to see the Amazon price, and I suppose order the product right away if it is cheaper than whatever store you were at when you looked at the barcode, but you can browse the product description and more importantly the customer reviews. Note that this is different from the Amazon MP3 store app that comes with the G1.
This has been REALLY handy at places like Best Buy and Fry's where the product displays are largely uninformative, and the staff are either scarce or well-intentioned but perhaps not very knowledgeable. Last Saturday I was at Best Buy looking at BluRay players that had internet connectivity, comparing various models from LG, Samsung, and Sony, and I scanned the bar code and then read the reviews for each one. At the time, the LG BD 390 had by far the best customer reviews, so even though I didn't buy anything that day, that is the one I am leaning toward. More interestingly, I showed the reviews to another guy who was also looking at BluRay players and trying to decide between Samsung, LG, and Sony, and when he saw the difference in the ratings between the LG and the others, he picked up the LG and headed off to the cash register. I was thinking I should have asked Best Buy for a commission.
Anyway I think the Amazon.com app works really nicely. Being able to read the customer reviews was great. You may ask, why didn't I just order straight from Amazon? Basically there are some things I still hesitate to order from Amazon if based on past experience they tend to fail easily. I have had bad experiences with DVD players in the past so prefer to buy them at stores like Best Buy where it is easy for me to return them.
About the only shortcoming I identified with the Amazon.com app was that when I was reading the manufacturer's product descriptions, the links to learn more about specific features were disabled. A "learn more" link that in a regular browser would have taken me to more detail was simple raw text with no linking. This was a problem since I did want to check on some very specific features, and it was unclear from the product packaging and the conversation with the salesperson how they were implement.
Meanwhile, there is a major new release of Cardiotrainer out, and it works really well. The UI is much improved. If you haven't downloaded it yet, but need something for tracking your workouts, do so immediately. I wish they would start charging for it so I could pay them some money for coming up with such a nice app. The app is constantly improving, and the team seems very eager to hear suggestions that they can implement, so it will only get better.
I installed the latest version of Twidroid, looks very nice. I may upgrade to the pro version soon.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Cheonggye Stream (청계천) in Seoul, August 2009
I just spent a few days in Korea, and it was great. I had some opportunities to get out in the evening and take pictures of the Cheonggye Stream and surroundings in downtown Seoul. It was very close to my hotel, the Best Western Premier Kukdo, maybe five minutes walk or so. The Cheonggye Stream is an interesting and apparently successful example of an effort to recreate a public space in a large metropolis by removing existing infrastructure. As I understand it, there had been a stream originally that was gradually paved over in the fifties and sixties. An elevated highway was built in the seventies. More recently, a mayor of Seoul who went on to become President pushed for the removal of the elevated highway and the restoration of the stream, along with creation of a landscaped public space on either side. According to the Wikipedia article, the project was controversial, and perhaps remains so, but it does seem to have created a popular public space. Both nights I was out, there were hundreds of people out strolling, or just sitting on the banks strolling. It may look deserted from my photos because I was waiting for breaks in the crowds to shoot.
The gallery of Cheonggye Stream photos is here. If you're too busy to look at that, here is a collection of favorites.
A few examples:
An alley in a nearby industrial area:
The gallery of Cheonggye Stream photos is here. If you're too busy to look at that, here is a collection of favorites.
A few examples:
An alley in a nearby industrial area:
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Cardiotrainer app for the G1
I have had a G1 for a while now, and one of my favorite apps right now is Cardiotrainer. Like Google's My Tracks and other apps, Cardiotrainer uses the GPS in the G1 to record a route. Much more so than My Tracks, however, Cardiotrainer is geared toward use while exercising.
For me the most important and useful feature is the real-time information on speed/pace, which helps me keep focused by reminding me when my pace is slowing down. You can also see a map view on the display of your phone to get some sense of where you are in your route and so forth.
Another very nice feature is that you can upload your tracks to the Cardiotrainer site to be archived for later review. You can either have tracks upload automatically as soon as you finish, or manually. Once tracks are uploaded, there are some additional options, including downloading them in GPX or KML format, or creating a link to a specific track for sharing. Here is an example of a track I ran in Ann Arbor a few weeks ago, using the URL provided by the Cardiotrainer site.
There is also a Facebook app that when installed on your account, will show a list of your recent tracks in a box on your profile and publish a line about your most recently completed track as soon as you complete it. The items include links to the maps.
Cardiotrainer also has music integration, but I haven't experimented with that. I'm not too happy with the sound quality of music played on the G1, so I just carry an iPod classic in my other hand when I am running. My issues with the music on the G1 may not actually reflect inherent problems with the G1, but rather the fact that to fit music onto my memory card, I convert it to a lower bit rate than I am used to. Also I find using a dongle to plug headphones into the mini-USB port on the G1 annoying, since the dongles I buy always seem to fail within a few weeks of use.
The people at Cardiotrainer are really committed to making their app a winner, so they have been adding features and resolving issues at a really remarkable pace. The app now is very stable, reflecting I think improvements in the G1 firmware for handling GPS as well as steady improvements in Cardiotrainer, so you probably won't have any troubles with it. If you do have trouble, the people are very responsive. They also take suggestions for additional features very seriously.
For me the most important and useful feature is the real-time information on speed/pace, which helps me keep focused by reminding me when my pace is slowing down. You can also see a map view on the display of your phone to get some sense of where you are in your route and so forth.
Another very nice feature is that you can upload your tracks to the Cardiotrainer site to be archived for later review. You can either have tracks upload automatically as soon as you finish, or manually. Once tracks are uploaded, there are some additional options, including downloading them in GPX or KML format, or creating a link to a specific track for sharing. Here is an example of a track I ran in Ann Arbor a few weeks ago, using the URL provided by the Cardiotrainer site.
There is also a Facebook app that when installed on your account, will show a list of your recent tracks in a box on your profile and publish a line about your most recently completed track as soon as you complete it. The items include links to the maps.
Cardiotrainer also has music integration, but I haven't experimented with that. I'm not too happy with the sound quality of music played on the G1, so I just carry an iPod classic in my other hand when I am running. My issues with the music on the G1 may not actually reflect inherent problems with the G1, but rather the fact that to fit music onto my memory card, I convert it to a lower bit rate than I am used to. Also I find using a dongle to plug headphones into the mini-USB port on the G1 annoying, since the dongles I buy always seem to fail within a few weeks of use.
The people at Cardiotrainer are really committed to making their app a winner, so they have been adding features and resolving issues at a really remarkable pace. The app now is very stable, reflecting I think improvements in the G1 firmware for handling GPS as well as steady improvements in Cardiotrainer, so you probably won't have any troubles with it. If you do have trouble, the people are very responsive. They also take suggestions for additional features very seriously.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Health care reform, and why I think the public option is not a good idea
In another departure from photography, I want to talk a bit about health care reform, and my take on the discussion of the public option.
I'll begin by talking about the different models for universal coverage, taking Paul Krugman's latest column as a starting point, and then talking about the public option, which it seems like President Obama may be getting ready to give up. I actually think the public option was a bad idea, but not for the reasons people often cite, and I'll explain later.
Paul Krugman's latest column compares the three different models used by countries that have universal health care, and points out that health care reform may leave us with a system that looks like Switzerlands. Switzerland has mandatory coverage provided by private companies, with government subsidies for the needy, and insurers are not allowed to discriminate against individuals with pre-existing conditions. Massachusetts' system is similar. As Krugman points out, that we may end up looking like Switzerland is not necessarily a bad thing.
Personally, I would prefer the second option for universal coverage, a single-payer system like Canada or France and some other countries where the government handles the insurance, but health care delivery is left to private entities, I think mainly non-profits. One way to think about it would be that it would be like extending Medicare, which works pretty well, to the rest of the population. Politically, however, a single-payer system seems not to be in the cards, at least for the time being. This is perverse, of course, since Medicare is so popular.
I'm not too fan of the third option for universal coverage, something like England's NHS, in which the government not only handles insurance, but health care delivery as well. The NHS isn't as bad as critics of reform here make out, but based on what I've seen, I don't know if it is something we want to emulate.
Back to the public option... One piece of the plan being batted around in Congress would be a public option, where along with the private insurers, there would also be a government-run insurance company to compete with the private insurers, to 'keep them honest.' This has been criticized because it smacks of a government takeover of insurance. This is the wrong criticism. I think the public option is a bad one, but not for the reasons that opponents of reform have commonly cited.
As I see it, the problem with the public option is not that the government-run insurance provider would somehow drive the private providers out of business, and serve as a Trojan Horse for the introduction of a single-payer system. I think the more realistic outcome would be that it would very quickly become a dumping ground for individuals with chronic conditions who the private providers want to avoid insuring.
Even if the private providers can't actively discriminate against individuals with pre-existing conditions, I am sure they will quickly hone their marketing to seek out customers who are in good health, advertising in venues where they will reach people who they think will be the least likely to get sick, and not advertise at all anywhere that they might attract people who are more likely to have chronic conditions.
More importantly, I suspect that the private providers who do have customers who have chronic conditions, would try to shift them to the 'public option.' I'm sure that when customers of a private provider turn out to have chronic conditions, they'll start getting phone calls or brochures from their provider, telling them what a great idea the 'public option' would be, for their peace of mind, or maybe because it is a little cheaper. And within two or three years, the private providers will shed themselves of any customers who are actually sick by figuring out how to get them to choose the public option. At that point, the public option will collapse. As I understand it, something like this happened with Alberta, experimented with a system in which there were private providers and the equivalent of a public option.
Accordingly, if we're going to take the Swiss approach, I think its much better to not have a public option at all. The private providers will be doing their best to hand off their sickest customers to each other but protect themselves against having their competitors dump customers on them, and some stable equilibrium will be reached. The private companies that can't handle it will go out of business and the ones that survive will manage.
So, I'm actually fine with the idea of there not being a public option. I would like a single-payer plan, but I'm convinced that anything between a single-payer plan and competing private providers with mandatory insurance is inherently unstable.
I'll begin by talking about the different models for universal coverage, taking Paul Krugman's latest column as a starting point, and then talking about the public option, which it seems like President Obama may be getting ready to give up. I actually think the public option was a bad idea, but not for the reasons people often cite, and I'll explain later.
Paul Krugman's latest column compares the three different models used by countries that have universal health care, and points out that health care reform may leave us with a system that looks like Switzerlands. Switzerland has mandatory coverage provided by private companies, with government subsidies for the needy, and insurers are not allowed to discriminate against individuals with pre-existing conditions. Massachusetts' system is similar. As Krugman points out, that we may end up looking like Switzerland is not necessarily a bad thing.
Personally, I would prefer the second option for universal coverage, a single-payer system like Canada or France and some other countries where the government handles the insurance, but health care delivery is left to private entities, I think mainly non-profits. One way to think about it would be that it would be like extending Medicare, which works pretty well, to the rest of the population. Politically, however, a single-payer system seems not to be in the cards, at least for the time being. This is perverse, of course, since Medicare is so popular.
I'm not too fan of the third option for universal coverage, something like England's NHS, in which the government not only handles insurance, but health care delivery as well. The NHS isn't as bad as critics of reform here make out, but based on what I've seen, I don't know if it is something we want to emulate.
Back to the public option... One piece of the plan being batted around in Congress would be a public option, where along with the private insurers, there would also be a government-run insurance company to compete with the private insurers, to 'keep them honest.' This has been criticized because it smacks of a government takeover of insurance. This is the wrong criticism. I think the public option is a bad one, but not for the reasons that opponents of reform have commonly cited.
As I see it, the problem with the public option is not that the government-run insurance provider would somehow drive the private providers out of business, and serve as a Trojan Horse for the introduction of a single-payer system. I think the more realistic outcome would be that it would very quickly become a dumping ground for individuals with chronic conditions who the private providers want to avoid insuring.
Even if the private providers can't actively discriminate against individuals with pre-existing conditions, I am sure they will quickly hone their marketing to seek out customers who are in good health, advertising in venues where they will reach people who they think will be the least likely to get sick, and not advertise at all anywhere that they might attract people who are more likely to have chronic conditions.
More importantly, I suspect that the private providers who do have customers who have chronic conditions, would try to shift them to the 'public option.' I'm sure that when customers of a private provider turn out to have chronic conditions, they'll start getting phone calls or brochures from their provider, telling them what a great idea the 'public option' would be, for their peace of mind, or maybe because it is a little cheaper. And within two or three years, the private providers will shed themselves of any customers who are actually sick by figuring out how to get them to choose the public option. At that point, the public option will collapse. As I understand it, something like this happened with Alberta, experimented with a system in which there were private providers and the equivalent of a public option.
Accordingly, if we're going to take the Swiss approach, I think its much better to not have a public option at all. The private providers will be doing their best to hand off their sickest customers to each other but protect themselves against having their competitors dump customers on them, and some stable equilibrium will be reached. The private companies that can't handle it will go out of business and the ones that survive will manage.
So, I'm actually fine with the idea of there not being a public option. I would like a single-payer plan, but I'm convinced that anything between a single-payer plan and competing private providers with mandatory insurance is inherently unstable.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Lingoes translation tool
One more discussion of a software package...
A friend of mine in Taiwan recently introduced me to the free Lingoes translation software package. This package installs on Windows and does cursor translation, i.e. it provides a translation of whatever the cursor is pointing at, or selected text, in a pop-up window. So far it seems to work well in almost any application, though occasionally (rarely) it seems to result in Word or Wordpad crashing. Of course I use it for assistance when I am reading documents in Chinese. My reading vocabulary is sufficient that in a typical document I may be able to get 90%-95% of the characters, but of course every few lines there will be a character pair that I don't know, and all I have to do is highlight that character pair and a translation pops up. If I highlight an entire section of text, it sends it to Google Translate, and returns the results in a pop-up. This is turning out to be extremely useful because now I can actually sit down and read Chinese-language documents fairly painlessly. Before, reading for me was very stop-and-go because I had to pause every few lines to look up a pair of characters in a dictionary or by going to a web site. One of the pleasures of using this handy tool is that I actually learn new vocabulary, so for example yesterday I picked up a few things like 体现 (reflect)， 构成 (compose/make up), 输送 (transport), and 招收 （hire/recruit). In many cases I already knew the spoken words, but not the characters.
One of the neatest features is that you can download and install additional dictionaries for dozens of languages. As I mentioned, there are a wide variety of dictionaries that you can install. So far for Chinese to English, I have been very happy with the CEDICT Chinese-English dictionary that I installed. Along with English translations, it includes the pinyin for the characters you look up, so you can learn the pronunciation in Chinese as well. Many of the other dictionaries I tried didn't include the pinyin for the Chinese. There are actually dozens of dictionaries, including many specialty dictionaries, some entirely in Chinese.
Overall, this seems like a pretty neat package. It claims that it is spyware and virus free. I can't assess that one way or the other, but so far Sophos AV and Windows Defender haven't reported any problems, and I have noticed any unusual performance issues with the computer.
I think the ideal application of this package is situations where you already know a language, but not perfectly, and like me you need an efficient way of looking up the occasional word or phrase while you're going through the document. This isn't really suitable for translating a large document in its entirety, there are probably better packages out there for that. And did I mention that it is free?
A friend of mine in Taiwan recently introduced me to the free Lingoes translation software package. This package installs on Windows and does cursor translation, i.e. it provides a translation of whatever the cursor is pointing at, or selected text, in a pop-up window. So far it seems to work well in almost any application, though occasionally (rarely) it seems to result in Word or Wordpad crashing. Of course I use it for assistance when I am reading documents in Chinese. My reading vocabulary is sufficient that in a typical document I may be able to get 90%-95% of the characters, but of course every few lines there will be a character pair that I don't know, and all I have to do is highlight that character pair and a translation pops up. If I highlight an entire section of text, it sends it to Google Translate, and returns the results in a pop-up. This is turning out to be extremely useful because now I can actually sit down and read Chinese-language documents fairly painlessly. Before, reading for me was very stop-and-go because I had to pause every few lines to look up a pair of characters in a dictionary or by going to a web site. One of the pleasures of using this handy tool is that I actually learn new vocabulary, so for example yesterday I picked up a few things like 体现 (reflect)， 构成 (compose/make up), 输送 (transport), and 招收 （hire/recruit). In many cases I already knew the spoken words, but not the characters.
One of the neatest features is that you can download and install additional dictionaries for dozens of languages. As I mentioned, there are a wide variety of dictionaries that you can install. So far for Chinese to English, I have been very happy with the CEDICT Chinese-English dictionary that I installed. Along with English translations, it includes the pinyin for the characters you look up, so you can learn the pronunciation in Chinese as well. Many of the other dictionaries I tried didn't include the pinyin for the Chinese. There are actually dozens of dictionaries, including many specialty dictionaries, some entirely in Chinese.
Overall, this seems like a pretty neat package. It claims that it is spyware and virus free. I can't assess that one way or the other, but so far Sophos AV and Windows Defender haven't reported any problems, and I have noticed any unusual performance issues with the computer.
I think the ideal application of this package is situations where you already know a language, but not perfectly, and like me you need an efficient way of looking up the occasional word or phrase while you're going through the document. This isn't really suitable for translating a large document in its entirety, there are probably better packages out there for that. And did I mention that it is free?
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Replacements for Adobe Acrobat
Yet another post that doesn't have anything to do with photography, but I thought it would be of interest to some readers...
I have been frustrated with Adobe Acrobat Reader for quite some time. At least in my experience, it loads slowly and locks up more often than I would like, even on my high-powered work machines that are running Vista. I began looking around for a replacement and after doing some searching found the free version of FoxIt Reader. This allows you to read PDF files on your machine, and is a nice replacement for Acrobat Reader. Even the free version seems to offer many more features than Reader, though I haven't explored them much. It seems to be very compact so it loads quickly, and it hasn't choked yet on any of the PDF files I have fed.
For producing PDF files, there are free alternatives to Adobe Acrobat. If you're running Office 2007 and that is where you will be generating most of your PDF files, then you can download a free add-in from the Microsoft site. To produce PDF files from other software, I installed the free version of CutePDF. So far it has impressed me as being more compact and snappier than Acrobat, with what as far as I can tell is a fairly complete set of features.
Sooner or later I will start posting pictures again. Lately I have been photographing people, including a lot of portraits, and I'm not making those publicly viewable. I'll be traveling to Korea again later in the month however so hope to come back from that trip with some nice shots to share with you.
I have been frustrated with Adobe Acrobat Reader for quite some time. At least in my experience, it loads slowly and locks up more often than I would like, even on my high-powered work machines that are running Vista. I began looking around for a replacement and after doing some searching found the free version of FoxIt Reader. This allows you to read PDF files on your machine, and is a nice replacement for Acrobat Reader. Even the free version seems to offer many more features than Reader, though I haven't explored them much. It seems to be very compact so it loads quickly, and it hasn't choked yet on any of the PDF files I have fed.
For producing PDF files, there are free alternatives to Adobe Acrobat. If you're running Office 2007 and that is where you will be generating most of your PDF files, then you can download a free add-in from the Microsoft site. To produce PDF files from other software, I installed the free version of CutePDF. So far it has impressed me as being more compact and snappier than Acrobat, with what as far as I can tell is a fairly complete set of features.
Sooner or later I will start posting pictures again. Lately I have been photographing people, including a lot of portraits, and I'm not making those publicly viewable. I'll be traveling to Korea again later in the month however so hope to come back from that trip with some nice shots to share with you.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
A rant about password security on the NIH Commons...
This has nothing to do with photography, it is just a rant about dealing with the NIH Commons site, in particular, the measures that it takes for password security. In addition to a fairly reasonable requirements that a password include numbers and special characters, the site has an annoying and I think short-sighted policy of making passwords expire at fixed intervals. Setting the new password is a hassle because the site forbids re-use of an old password (which means they are archiving all of the passwords I have ever used there!) so it usually takes several tries to come up with something that for personal reasons is easy to remember, but satisfies all the requirements, and has been used before. And because it is a new password that I don't use anywhere else, inevitably I promptly forget it, and end up having to go through the password reset process a few weeks later. Right now NIH Commons is the only site I deal with that makes passwords expire at fixed intervals and forbids re-use of old passwords, and it is a PAIN. I think I would be much safer with a single, very long password that I can use indefinitely, than a series of passwords that I will forget unless I write them down somewhere.
Generally, I would really like to see an overhaul of the NIH Commons... It is great that it is there, but it is very 1.0, they need 2.0 features to ease navigation.
Generally, I would really like to see an overhaul of the NIH Commons... It is great that it is there, but it is very 1.0, they need 2.0 features to ease navigation.
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