Undercover for iPhone

A while ago I was interested in Undercover for Mac OS X.  This application is supposed to help you recover a stolen computer.  It connects to their service periodiocally.  If your computer is stolen, you contact the service and then the next time your computer connects to the service, it takes and uploads a picture of what ever is in front of the computer and the service logs the location of the ip address.

It looks like they now have an iPhone application. It pretty much has the same functionality (I don't think it takes the photo though).  The problem that I see with this solution is that it requires that the person to launch the Undercover application in order for the information to be logged to their service.  I don't see people launching random applications if they steal an iPhone.  Most likely, they will wipe it, and get a new SIM card.  This will make Undercover pretty much useless.

Also, in my case, I lock my phone.  So there is no way that the Undercover application will be launched for the service to log the iPhone's location.

Ideally, for this functionality, iPhone would allow applications to run in the background.  Then it wouldn't require that the user launches an application.  Alternatively, this could be a service that the cellular provider would provide

VMWare Workstation Unity

I use VMware Workstation everyday.  I run Windows XP in it for running iTunes for my iPhone and for playing XM Radio online.  Today I tried out VMware's Unity.  This makes the Windows XP windows appear along side the Ubuntu windows. Also when Unity is enable, the KDE task switcher also shows the Windows programs.

I am happily surprised about how well VMware's Unity works.

Stopped using Google Friend Connect for comments

I have stopped using Google Friend Connect  for blog comments.  There are several things that Google could add to make this more usuable

1. It should be possible to specify a home page when submitting an anonymous comment


2. It should be possible to configure the wall to not truncate the messages


3. It should be possible for the user to configure the what happens when a user clicks on their urls for their authenticated comment (link to Google Friend Connect profile, or blog)


4. Google should, and maybe already do, process the javascript and index the page using the content of the comments.  There could be a unique comment that someone leaves, and if Google doesn't index it, people will not be able to find the comment.

Seesmic Desktop

Seesmic Desktop is a pretty cool twitter client.  It seems to me to be a cross between Twhirl and TweetDeck.  It has a nice UI and it doesn't use that much screen real estate.

I am running this on my Windows XP virtual machine.  I haven't tried to run it on Ubuntu.

Comments switched to Google Friend Connect

As I was thinking about before, I have disabled comments on this blog, and enabled Google Friend Connect for comments.  I am interested in finding out how well this will work.  I am still not requiring authentication for adding comments, in the hope that Google will still do spam filtering.

Playlist mode with USASpec dock

The USASpec adapter was included as part of the iPhone dock install.  The USASpec adapters have several ways of accessing the music on the iPod or iPhone.  You can access the media either by:

• Direct - where you need to select the music to play on the iPhone/iPod


• Folder - where you can browse the music collection by Artist or Album


• Playlist - where you can preselect some number of playlists that will be easily playable on the headunit

I decided to use Playlist mode, as it also offers the ability to play 6 playlist, also "all songs" and a direct mode.  For the six playlist, it looks for playlist named HONDA1 - HONDA6.  If not all six are found, then it will randomly pick other playlists to fill in the missing spots.  If the adapter is connected to the radio through the XM interface, the playlists are accessed by tuning to channels 1-6.  When using CD changer interface, the playlists appear as CDs.

In addition to playing user playlist, number 7 is used to play all tracks.  And number 8 is for direct mode.  (This is the mode that is used if you want to play Pandora.)

TunerFree MCE

As I have mentioned before, one of my eventual goals of switching to Windows Media Center is to stop paying for cable TV. TunerFree MCE is a Windows Media Center plugin that lets you play video content from various web sites.  In the US this content includes Hulu content.

I installed this on my media center, and it worked fine.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to full screen video to work.  When I selected the "full screen" button, the video appear to be scaled incorrectly. 

The video is too small when it is normal size, and since I can make the video full screen, I have uninstalled it.  I will be watching this project, and hopefully use it to help cancel my cable TV service.