Hasta La Gadget!

It was always curious that Google’s response to the FCC inquiry about Google Voice and the App Store had been redacted, but now we’re starting to see why — El Goog and the FCC have just released the full text of the letter, and it flatly contradicts Apple’s take on the matter. If you’ll remember, Apple claimed that while Google Voice hadn’t been approved, it also hadn’t been rejected, and that its status was in limbo while the folks in Cupertino “studied” the matter. Not so, says El Goog: according to its letter, Phil Schiller himself told Google that GV had been rejected on July 7 for duplication of functionality, following a similar conversation on April 10th during which Schiller rejected Google Latitude in part because it might “offer new features not present on the preloaded maps application.” Yeah, that’s a huge discrepancy, and it makes Apple’s version seem even more divorced from reality that it already is. Things are starting to heat up — we’ll see what the FCC makes of all this.

Update: And here we go — Apple just pinged us to say the following: “We do not agree with all of the statements made by Google in their FCC letter. Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google.”

Update 2: So we’ve been thinking about it, and here’s our question — if Apple didn’t reject GV, and is still studying it, what exactly did Phil Schiller say to Google to make them think it had been rejected? The difference between “rejected” and “on hold pending further discussion” isn’t a subtle one, and Google clearly thought GV had been explicitly rejected. For whatever it’s worth, reports of GV’s “rejection” are how this whole mess got started, so either this is all one huge misunderstanding, or someone here isn’t telling the entire truth.

Read – Google unredacted FCC filing [Warning: PDF]
Read – Google Public Policy Blog explaining decision to release letter

Filed under: Cellphones, Software

Google says Phil Schiller himself rejected Google Voice from the App Store originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the coolest features for Spore gamers is the ability to create their own creatures. Now, anyone can assemble aliens through a new site set up by Electronic Arts.

Spore Creature Creator 2-D, released Wednesday, lets you conjure up and animate your own creatures using an assortment of eyes, arms, feet, horns, and various unidentifiable body parts.

Produced by EA’s Maxis studio, the Flash-based game starts with a large egg cracking open to reveal a simple alien body that you mold online like a lump of clay. Thin, fat, long, or short–you devise your creature’s basic shape. Then it’s time to build your baby with the right parts.

The Spider

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

Choosing from such categories as mouths, limbs, and graspers, just drag your favorite body parts onto your creature to evolve it from a formless blob into a fully-functioning whatever. The game helps you along, directing you to drop the parts in all the right places. You can bend and resize many of the parts, giving your creature big eyes and a small mouth or long legs and stubby feet. You can also add a splash of paint by choosing from a wide palette of colors.

As you develop your creation, it takes on life by showing off its animated parts, such as a mouth that opens and closes, eyes that blink, and graspers that try to grasp. If you’re in a hostile mood, you can even add weapons, like the Problem-Solvent that sprays solvent, the Hockitlauncher that spits out water, or the Phlegmthrower that shoots, uh, well, you get the idea.

If you need a helping hand, you don’t have to build your creature from scratch. Spore Creature Creator 2-D lets you tap into the Sporepedia, an online gallery of creatures designed by Maxis developers and other Spore gamers. Simply load one of the pre-existing creatures and then tweak it to assemble a totally new organism.

Once you’re done, it’s time to name and describe your creature. You can then take it for a workout in the Creature Trainer arena, where you move it around the screen to catch bouncing balls with its mouth, hands, or other parts.

The Chamelon

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

If you’re proud of your new creation, you can e-mail a postcard image of it to a friend or save it as a PNG file for your own picture gallery or Web site.

A variety of Spore masterpieces are viewable at the Sporepedia Web site. And for all you budding Spore artists, Maxis is offering a Creature Creator challenge. Recreate one of your favorite Spore creatures using Creature Creator 2-D for a chance to be featured on Spore.com.

Caryl Shaw, a senior producer at Maxis who helped bring Spore Creature Creator 2-D to life, told me the game came about because Maxis wanted to make Spore more accessible and let anyone with a Web browser experience the same creativity that Spore gamers enjoy. As one of the most popular features of Spore, the Creature Creator seemed a natural.

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Originally posted at News – Gaming and Culture

Around the corner from the PCMag.com office is a construction site for a hi-rise apartment complex. Last Tuesday, when I passed it on my lunch hour, I noticed one of the workers pointing his iPhone’s camera up at the structure, so I tried to see what he was aiming at.

Above the building, I spotted a rainbow-like arc that I immediately recognized as a portion of a solar halo, and snapped a number of pictures of it (such as the one above) mostly with my Canon SD990 IS. (I even got a few good shots of it with my iPhone.)

In observing and photographing solar halo phenomena, the biggest obstacle, ironically, is the Sun itself. You must avoid looking at the Sun–even when partially obscured by thin clouds, looking directly at it can cause eye damage. As for photography, the Sun’s glare can wash out much of the detail of the delicate arcs, and spots, as well as the structure of the accompanying cirrostratus (and sometimes cirrus) clouds. So be sure to hide the Sun behind a tree, a building, a street sign, or other object–even a hand will do in a pinch.

Note that in photographing a halo, you’ll need to focus on the sky rather than the nearby object, or else the halo will be blurred. You can do this by pointing the camera at the open sky and engaging the autofocus if you’re in automatic mode–usually, a green box will appear when the shutter is half-pressed. Then, while keeping the shutter half-pressed, you should return to your initial framing with the nearby object in view, and press the shutter fully to complete the shot) It’s a good idea to move the camera around a bit to find the place with the least glare before you shoot. Although it’s good to try both, I find that wider-field shots often work better than close-ups–for one thing, if you want to capture the entire solar halo, it may be necessary to go as wide as you can.

It’s great that the Nano now has a video camera, but it really should've been able to do HD.

In the course of testing standard-definition camcorders, more often than not, I stumble upon a user review where the person complains that their cell phone takes better video …

First, an apology to all those who supported the Save the Massi Campaign. Your protests to protect a lovely, 1990s Italian road bike were heard, but not heeded. But in pre-emptive response to the hate mail that will surely follow this post, no bikes were hurt in the making of this conversion.

The conversion is, of course, the final stage of the Gadget Lab fixed-gear project. Despite the passing of many months, it has been surprisingly easy, and the results is a fantastically fun bike which is both light, strong and, like Derek Zoolander, ridiculously good-looking.

The final stages involved stripping all extraneous parts. Off came the back brake, cables, gears, handlebar-tape and frame-mounted brackets. The only things left are the front brake, and the addition of a new, small brake lever. On went the new wheels — Velocity Deep Vs, and on went a new, color-coordinated half-link BMX chain. Why the half-links? Read on.

The one thing that made me reluctant to convert this bike to a fixed-gear machine was the rather vertical rear dropout. It turned out, though, that it wasn’t quite as vertical as it first appeared. It runs at a steep angle, but there are a few millimeters of front-to-back play. Enough, I thought, to allow proper chain tensioning if the chain had half-links. Two adjustment screws run through the frame into these dropouts, to allow fine adjustment before finally tightening the wheel-nuts.

Going carefully, I removed the old wheel and took a spare wheel with a fixed track hub and sixteen teeth (the chainring choice is 42 or 52. I went with 42 for easy city riding). I also unbolted the rear derailleur to give me some space, leaving everything connected for easy replacement if things went wrong. Placing the wheel as far forward in the dropout as possible, I got the chain as tight as I could. This is the reason for the half-link chain: because you can take out a single “half” link at a time instead of two links on a normal chain, you can get a much finer adjustment. you can also buy a single half-link and add it to a regular chain.

Pushing back on the wheel showed me that I had (just) enough play to make it work. I broke and connected the new chain, bolted on the wheel and set about removing everything else.

The weight of the components is surprising, even before you figure in the rear cassette. As previously mentioned, the groupset is an old Shimano 105 setup, which these days costs around $1000 new. This version has “brifters”, or brakes and shifters combined. I gathered everything up, including cable sheaths and nipples, and put them away safely in a box. For those of you now horrified, know that an afternoon of tinkering would restore the Massi to it’s former gear-burdened glory.

After some pumping and tightening, I took it out for a spin. Over the last weeks, I have put a lot of miles on the bike, just to see if I should keep it as it was. It was never as much fun as a fixed, and I would come back from an afternoon long ride with energy to spare (for touring, a bonus, but for keeping fit, it’s a waste).

In it’s new, simpler incarnation, I love it. The feel is completely different, and as you can see from the pictures, the very steep angle of the seat-tube means it handles a lot like a track bike.

Sacrilege? Perhaps, but the point of a bike is to ride it. In its road-bike form, the Massi wouldn’t have seen much use. And if I do ever regret it, the operation is reversible. Apologies to the purists, and thanks to everybody who helped out.

See Also:

• Gadget Lab Fixed-Gear Update: Donor Bike Acquired
• Gadget Lab Fixie Project Update: Things Are Going Slowly, But They …
• Fixie