Why?

Groundspeak have geocaching apps for iPhone and Android that doesn’t require the cacher to have a login name at geocaching.com. Anyone that can install the “Geocaching Intro” iPhone app may as a result find my caches, potentially destroy their hiding place and take any TBs and coins out of the box for their keeping. With the increased mainstream interest in geocaching I am seeing this as an upcoming larger problem.

Some people say “The risk for those things to happen are close to zero”. Not really. I had a cache hidden in a stone wall where an iPhone cacher tore down half the wall to get to the cache, and he never put the stones back in place. I have had trackables suddenly disappear from caches, once by one noob cacher that actually had a login and stated in the log for the cache that he had retrieved my coin. That cacher only logged four caches, and my coin is gone.

I am getting tired of this, and since there is no mechanism for consistently confirming finds or for marking a cache “visible only to cachers with 300 confirmed finds” I am now relying on that one indicator showing a persons interest and dedication for geocaching: A paid membership.

Unfortunately, this approach has one serious flaw, which I am prepared to overlook. Families where one of the parents have a premium account and the spouse and all the children have free accounts will not be able to have the spouse and kids log my caches any more. I can see that this is irritating, but one has to blame Groundspeaks policy for forcing cache owners into doing this. I wish it wasn’t so.

So, as of today, all caches I own that are big enough to put trackables in them will be for Premium Members only. Micros and nanos will still be available to unregistered cachers and those with an unpaid membership.

I recently had some use for a program that could download a RSS and then notify me over SMS if there were any new entries. I could not find anything useful on the internets except rssdler – but that one is just geared towards content download as far I could see.

So I remembered an old script I made back in 2005. After ironing out some bugs I got it working again

Without further ado: RSS Action Daemon 0.2

The blog URL is intranet.domain.tld, and the allowed IPs should be 12.34.32.10 and the range 23.45.54.0/24. If the remote IP is not in the allowed range please go read the news…

The following snippet must be placed FIRST in the WordPress multisite .htaccess file

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !12\.34\.32\.10$
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !23\.45\.54\..*$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} "intranet.domain.tld"
RewriteRule .* http://www.reddit.com [last]


So, how does the HTC Desire HD stack up to the iPhone? We’ll find out.

Exterior

The Desire HD seems quite solid, it’s frame is carved out from a single block of aluminium. However, they are using two very cheap plastic lids to cover the battery and SIM/SD card slots. The cover for the SIM/SD cards stands out from the back of the phone, and the battery lid is very difficult to open and close. What is far worse is the buttons on the Desire HD – it has quite rounded edges and the low-profile buttons are placed on the screen-side of the body’s rounded edges making them horribly difficult to locate and press. It’s very very annoying compared to the iPhone’s very easily located buttons. The only thing the Desire HD has got going for itself in this category is the placement of the 3.5 mm audio jack, which is at the bottom where it should be. However, this does not matter as I use a Jabra BT3030 over bluetooth both for music and hands-free anyway.

And what is up with placing the speaker on the back side of the phone? It’s unusable for conference calls where you want to lookup things on the phone while you speak, and for watching Youtube with my little kid it’s equally unusable. Not good.

Winner: iPhone.

Battery Life

The battery life on the Desire HD is a joke. If one is to actually use it’s smartphone features like the sync, notification and network connectivity the battery drains in a matter of hours. To make the battery last any longer than 5-6 hours before recharge one has to turn down screen brightness to a minimum, turn off all kind of network connectivity, never make any phone calls and religiously kill applications with a third-party application like Advanced Task Killer. To be able to use this phone as a business phone one needs to have an abundance of chargers and plug it in constantly. Not a very mobile phone, really. Even the iPhone will last you 14 hours and then some without being constantly recharged.

Winner: iPhone.

PIM Applications

Address book and Calendar applications are very important to me. The address book on the Desire HD is quite OK, but synchronizing private contacts is a mess if you do not want to import all private contacts into your corporate Exchange server or give Google control over your data. I had to shell out a lot of pennies for MarkSpace Missing sync in order to sync my contacts from my Mac over to the Desire HD. With the iPhone this is completely seamless and does not require any third party apps or vendors.

Getting Caldav calendars to work on the Desire HD is a no-go. The only way is with Calendar Sync BETA from Hypermatix, which does not work on the Desire HD. On the iPhone? Guess once.

Do you want to cancel a meeting on the Desire HD? Ok, you can delete the Calendar Event, but the organizer of the meeting will not get notified that you canceled. Seriously. This alone makes the Desire HD unusable as a business phone in my not so humble opinion.

Winner: iPhone. By far.

Email

Exchange email works well on the Desire HD, push mail is supported and works. IMAP IDLE is, as on the iPhone, not supported in the default email client. But unlike the iPhone there are alternate email clients that supports IDLE and gives you push functionality even for IMAP. The ability to save and attach any file type is also a plus on the Desire HD.

Winner: Desire HD

Third party Applications

Installing apps on the Desire HD is a breeze, since Android Market downloads and installs apps in the background. However, the general usability, look and feel of applications are way better on iPhone. On Android, developers are given a lot more freedom to cook up their own “usability” schemes, so usability is radically different from application to application. Quite annoying.

Also, everyone is at the moment developing iPhone (and iPad) apps so the selection of quality apps are better on the iPhone, and they get the new apps first. This may change as Android is more widely adopted.

Also you will have no guarantees as to what the hell you are REALLY installing on your Android, there are no quality or security control done on Android apps like on the iPhone.

Winner: iPhone

Customizability

Should be a walk-over for Android. Steve is the ruler of the iPhone, and he decides how things should look. No themes or tweaks are allowed on the iPhone, and for those that like that kind of fun the Android is the way to go. Some of us, like me, is quite willing to forget customilization over other functionality. But Android can have this small and unimportant victory.

Winner: Android

Freedom

The Android zealots are touting that Android is Linux and Linux is Free as in Freedom etc etc ad nausaeum. But you still have to root your device in order to get, say, something so basic as the possibility to take screenshots. And rooting your Desire HD involves a LOT of work, while rooting an iPhone is mostly done by downloading an application for your PC and pressing one button.

Winner: iPhone

Accessories

The accessory market for iPhones is huge, and you can get stuff for almost free from Asia, like from DealExtreme. HTC Desire HD accessories are harder to get by, and if you find any you’ll need to get them at a premium price from an authorized dealer – the shadow market aren’t really THAT interested in making a lot of accessories for phones that are only sold for a limited time before a new model with different physical appearance is released.

Winner: iPhone

Price

The Desire HD and a iPhone4 costs roughly the same. However, if you get an Desire HD you have to invest in extra software for sync and a lot of chargers for your office/home/car/laptop bag and extra batteries so the total price tag is much higher than for the iPhone.

Winner: iPhone

Conclusion:

Get an iPhone. The Desire HD eats battery, has poor build quality and the PIM applications that you rely on aren’t as good as on the iPhone. The iPhone, well, just works.

Same goes for GPS apps, getting a proper fix takes almost 15 minutes in some cases, how can one find out if the app is good enough in such a small time period?

Please, Android Market developers, don’t ruin the buying experience. If you need to lower it from 24 hours, how about giving us at least 12, 6 or 3 hours refund time? 15 minutes is a joke for people testing more advanced applications.

More to come later!

First, make sure you have an available http/https proxy. Setting up one of those is beyond the scope of this little reminder-to-self, so JFGI. Then, connect to the remote host with this command:

ssh -R 8080:<Adress to proxy server>:<proxy server port> root@remotehost

Then, on remotehost, make sure /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date contains the following (if your proxy needs authentication you will need additional configuration, that file is properly documented so just dive into it.):

# grep -e enableProxy= -e httpProxy= /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date
enableProxy=1
httpProxy=localhost:8080

Now you can run yum to your hearts content.

Why?

The reddit admins are supporting drug use. Condé Nast, who owns reddit.com, has given orders that they do not want to benefit financially from ads for sites supporting Prop19 as they probably do not want to be thought of as pro-drugs. The reddit admins then proceeds to go public with this and then circumvent the pro-prop19 ad ban by running the same ads for free – “Since we’re not allowed to benefit financially, reddit is now running the ads for free.”

Other things like this artwork displaying the Reddit Alien holding a bag of weed on their blog, and the subreddit /r/trees just makes me very disappointed. I have been using and endorsing a drug lover site for 4 years without knowing it.

Actually, I got that refund for the $15 I donated, so after posting this I’m leaving reddit for good. Not that I really care what happens to Reddit now, but if I were Condé Nast I would try to get return of investment by selling reddit.com. Firing all the employees of reddit and shutting the whole thing down would probably be the right thing to do, but selling it off is also sufficiently making the statement “we do not support drug use”.

Goodbye Reddit.