My son is reaching the LEGO age.  Certainly, he's been playing with blocks since he could manipulate his hands correctly, but DUPLOs don't hold a candle to LEGOs.  LEGOs present two problems: what's the easiest way to store them, and how can you cut cleanup time to a minimum?

Wired's GeekDad found a great solution called the Box 4 Blox.  The idea is simple; once all your pieces are free, just dump them into the top of four stacked boxes.  The biggest pieces will stay at the top, but the smaller pieces will fall through each level, with the smallest finding their way to the bottom once you give the whole stack a good shake. 

I haven't laid hands on the product, but my only complaints are that it's not big enough for some LEGO collections (you should see my nephew's case), and it doesn't have a place to put your "in progress" builds.  I mean, when you're constructing the LEGO Death Star, you need to stop for sleep.

I've started migrating all of the light bulbs in my house to CF from incandescent.  As an incandescent blows, in goes its CF equivalent.  About 3 months ago, I replaced all of the lights in my bathroom with CF.  The cost and energy saving made me warm in my heart.  The color, however made me look jaundiced. 

Unhappy with the perceived color, I looked around on the web today for a comparison of CFs.  Thankfully, Popular Mechanics ran an article in May 2007 on The Best Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs.

The punch line: N:Vision Soft White 19W (2700K) CFs are the winner in their roundup.  I'm going out today to pick up a bunch for bathroom #2.

Yeah, but what of the mercury used to generate the light?  Phoenix offers a great program for hazardous disposal (old paint, motor oil, etc) where you can bring these for proper disposal.  Ikea also offers a disposal program, and I expect Home Depot and Lowe's to offer them as well (if they don't already.)  If you want more information on mercury use in CFs, Popular Science also discussed this in a later article, Compact Fluorescent Bulbs and Mercury: Reality Check.

Yesterday, Gizmodo found pictures from the dbstalk forum of an on-the-horizon product from DirecTV called the HDPC-20.  Non geeks will look at this and say, "meh."  I look at it and say, "WOOOOWWWWIEE!"

The scans (front, back) from the brochure offer the following points of interest:

• "Use your computer as a DVR"
• "Enhanced user experience from PC power and Internet connection"
• Can stream all your media to multiple devices in the house (via Windows Media Center Extenders) such as other TVs and your Xbox 360

I've been warning (threatening?) my wife that I'm looking to geek up our TV watching experience by adding a PC and/or Mac to our mix.  The biggest reason for not jumping in with both feet is that I want the experience to be seamless.  I don't want my wife, or the babysitter to have to remember to change the tuner to "Video 2", then change the TV to the PC input - which isn't called PC, but rather "DVI 2" then... well, you get my point.  I want to say, "to watch TV, go to the easy-to-navigate menu and hit 'Live TV' and to see the last 5 episodes of Good Eats, go to 'Saved TV.'"

Even with the best of setups, current technology demands that you own a TiVo, a PC, and a DVD (read HD-DVD or Blu-Ray).  This setup fails at the Wife Acceptance Factor.

The HDPC-20 however, opens the door to a combined product which potentially replaces at least 3 products with one box playing Windows Media Center (yes, everyone on a Mac who wants to run OSX/Leopard just rolled their eyes; sorry, but it sucks to only have 8% of the market share sometimes) and getting all of the benefits of having an integrated experience, but not only integrated with TV and movies, but with music, pictures and the internet.  Check.  Mate.

The only downer is that the scans don't call out this product for being HD.  That likely means that it's not... which is significant.  (Another tell is that this product does not have a third coax for off-the-air HD broadcasting, which both DirecTV HD receivers have.)  Obviously, their R&D department is out of sync with their marketing department.  There is no way this product is taking off without HD, because 100% of the early adopters of this product are turbo geeks who have a big plasma or LCD in their house which is currently running HD.

Now that the first software-only hack for unlocking the iPhone is in the wild, I have to wonder how Apple privately is  handling all of this.  Publicly, they have stated that they are neutral on the idea of 3rd-party applications, which basically applies to this software-only hack.  But I pose the question: if you could stop this hack from working, would you?

Arguments for blocking the hack

The money

The people at Apple most likely gnashing their teeth are the accountants, and Peter Oppenheimer most specifically.  Rumor has it that Apple has an agreement with ATT which earns Apple $3USD/mo for each iPhone subscriber, and $11USD/mo for each new (to ATT) iPhone subscriber.  Given that Apple just recently sold it's 1 millionth iPhone, and the ATT subscription agreement is for 2 years, simple and conservative math yields a 2 year income to Apple of $3MM/mo for the next two years, or $72M USD over the next two years.

$72MM is a fair amount of money, but more than just the end number, its a recurring revenue stream which is the holy grail for sustaining any business, large or small.  iTunes, for example, doesn't make a dime on the download of the client software, but rather earns money on each and every song purchased; every day; every month; for as long as iTunes is the dominant player in the legal online music download space.  Now that is a killer application.  And that is exactly why iTunes is constantly battling the likes of Hymn and SharpMusique. 

User experience

The phone I use is a 3 year old handset running an unbridled version of Windows Mobile 2003.  Behind closed doors, you could certainly get Microsoft to admit that WM2003 has significant flaws, the most glaring is that it doesn't tell how much battery life is available on the main screen.  For the first six months with this phone, I would gamble taking the handset on an overnight without having a charger available, as it's a bit of a battery hog to boot.  The only available option to this problem was to purchase a 3rd party tool that displays the battery information right on the screen. 

The solution is elegant and provides better feedback from the phone, but it also has it's issues.  At it's root, the solution significantly alters the UI and the experience I have with the phone.  For someone like Apple, who worked so hard to create a specific experience, this might just be the reason to extinguish the hack. 

For example, one of the iPhone's five main sales points was visual voicemail.  With the hack (and service with someone other than ATT), this feature is gone.  Additionally, Steve Jobs specifically mentioned his concern to having 3rd party applications on the iPhone in a NY Times article, for fear that you load "three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn't work anymore." 

This hack should be driving the industrial designers in Cupertino completely batty.

Arguments for leaving the hack alone

Market share

I propose that a sexy piece of hardware, such as this, or the XBox 360 will have an inherent market regardless of the functionality or price.  If it can be hacked, I would suggest that you're going to get a perceptible bump in sales directly proportional to the ease of the hack implementation.  Engadget describes how a hackable system (XBox 360) can lead to tangential sales (DVD+/-R), but I would argue that Microsoft also saw a bump in sales.  Was it a 50% bump?  Not likely, but even a single percentage bump in sales would be welcome in such a competitive marketplace.

I hacked my original XBox.  I didn't do it to copy software, but rather to run all of the great 3rd party software developed for the hack, such as MAME.  As a matter of fact, that hack was the primary reason I purchased the XBox versus another game box.

The petri dish of 3rd party applications

One of the largest complaints leading up to the launch of the iPhone was that it lacked the ability to run 3rd party applications on the handset.  Although Jobs is worried about 3rd party apps, he's not entirely against the idea either.  In my opinion, he shouldn't be.  The Palm used to be the undisputed champion of the handset market not because it was sexy, but because it had the largest number of 3rd party developers writing software for the OS.  Heck, this was exactly how Microsoft beat Apple in the personal computer business of the '80s and '90s.

Although Jobs thinks Safari is an acceptable sandbox to write all of the applications to run on the iPhone, that idea is flawed in that it inherently allows application portability, which the Palm OS applications didn't.  In other words, if Microsoft can (finally??) get a handset and OS to the market that is stable and has a web client that doesn't suck, all of those web-based apps will suddenly and transparently work on that handset as well.  Facebook?  Check.  YouTube?  Check.  NYTimes?  Check.  How about a portable iTunes client? 

What this hack (more specifically, the underpinnings of the hack) allows is the ability for the millions of creative minds to do more in months with the iPhone than the thousands of Apple developers could do in years.  Specifically, all those disenfranchised Palm OS developers can now find a new OS to start porting their previously hot-selling application to.  It's a win-win solution for Apple.

CH Products has strangely been the lone producer of a yoke system, the most familiar interface to flight simulators for real pilots.  I've never been a fan of the cheap feel that their plastic products give off, and the layout of some of their sliders and switches have been less than convenient or realistic.

One of the oddest parts of the CH yoke is where their throttle/control stack is; right over the yoke itself.  So, say you've got your realism set fairly high, you're fighting a crosswind during a landing and you decide to go around.  You would have to reach over your yoke and shove that little tiny switch forward.  That's just not comfortable, and at best, it's just strange.

I just read that Saitek has added their own yoke to the market, and it seems to be a superior product than CH's.  Although CH does offer a separate throttle/control stack similar to Saitek's, it costs more.  So out of the box, it appears Saitek is offering more value for the sheer volume of products.

Although the casing is still molded plastic, the control shaft is metal (presumably aluminum) so if you're more into fighter games, you won't twist or snap the shaft off.  Saitek also has a USB hub in the yoke, so there's not a tangle of chords you have to plug/unplug to your main box (especially if you also use their rudder system, which also consumes a USB port).

I'm disappointed that they haven't released this product with a good force feedback, as that feedback is a much more realistic way to diagnose a stall or feel winds aloft.  Given that they've decided to add a timer to the center of the yoke, it appears Saitek wanted to add some realism to the product, but apparently not too much.  Certainly, if they offered feedback, they wouldn't be able to offer it at such a reasonable price, but a guy can dream, can't he?

GameAlmighty.com has some great close-up photos of the product in their review.

I blame my jangled teeth on hours upon hours of attempting to bite two tiny Legos apart.  You know the kind I'm talking about; the 2x1 1/4 height pieces that just seemed to glue themselves together?  Anyway, I've always admired PodBrix from afar, with their kitschy dioramas of Apple scenes made of specialty one-off Legos.  I came across a similar Lego hack today, this one of Stephen Hawking.  I'm not going to point any fingers, but you tell me: which one is awesome, and which one is evil?

 

To be fair, I don't think Brickshelf is meaning any harm; quite the contrary, their main page for the Hawking-Lego is, "Best wishes on your trip to the stars."

Today, Apple announced the 8GB iPhone would be discounted from $599USD to $399 and quietly did away with the 4GB model. 

This all seems very curious to me.  I'm not a marketer nor do I play one on TV, but the product was released 70 days ago; 68 to be exact.  A discount of $200 over 68 days equates a real depretiation of $2.941/day.  As long as I can remember, experts have been telling me that automobiles are the worst products at holding their value*, depreciating 20% within the first calendar year, but 33% in nearly two months?  Wow.

[*In my opinion, notebook computers are the worst consumer product at holding value.  I've never owned a notebook that holds any worth after 3 years.  Thus, that would be a depreciation rate of 33%/year, but I've never seen any offical studies on the matter.]

So this all leads me to wonder aloud about a few things:

• Did the 4GB iPhone model not sell enough to continue in a lineup?
• Did the 8GB iPhone not move fast enough at $599?
• Most importantly, will this affect future Apple-branded product launches?

I cannot think of another Apple product that has been deeply discounted so close to its initial launch.  Although the iPod got bigger and better, its best-available-product price has always hovered around the same range, ~$300. 

I'm baffled.  Privately, I'm having a sublime moment of schadenfreude thinking of all of the jackasses that waited in line for the iPhone.  I'm also feeling very sorry for the whole lot; price protection plans on major credit cards run out 60 days after the purchase.

[Update 9/7: Gizmodo is reporting that American Express is honoring price protection for 90 days, even though it isn't "usually covered under their plan." Note to self: use AMEX in Apple store.]