It’s been some time since my last post. Many things have happened – started working on wifi.com, some developments at Whisher, and have also started to look into HDR photography. HDR stands for high dynamic range, and it is best explained while following the tutorial by Trey Ratcliff, who creates frames like this one:

My first attempt at HDR is below – first, the normal exposure photo, and then the HDR result from composing three RAW images with Photomatix Pro (the crap on the top left is some fluff that made its way onto the camera sensor somehow – easily taken out with Photoshop):

Yes, I know the sky is grey and has halos, and Trey states that this will lead me to end up with no friends (who will curl up into a ball and cry, apparently), but I have to get good at masking on Photoshop first. You will find my HDR stream here. For these I’m using a Nikon D70 with a 16-80 VR lens. Here is another attempt:

Case example: the Sony SPK-HCE waterproof case for video cameras. I tried to find a good, in-depth review, or even just a blog post by someone who had used one and could shed some light into wether dumping over 200€ on this thing is worth it. However, searching for “SPK-HCE review” on Google returned 1660 results, of which the third goes to ZDNet, in fact, the Google summary says “Get the full unbiased review of SPK-HCESPK-HCE at ZDNet Reviews. Each review comes complete with video or image galleries, Camcorder Waterhousing …”. Bullshit! Click on the link, and land here (click for full-size version):

So…you are showing me ZERO ratings, and ZERO reviews, but at least a dozen links to online stores where I can’t even buy this accessory, but a whole different camera!! Google: you suck, you cannot tell SEO-laden pages apart from good review sites, and ZDNet: you suck too, for polluting the Internet with shitty useless content designed to fool users and drive revenue.

Went to the Madrid colo on Wednesday to shut down Whisher’s servers. As some of you may know, Wifi.com, backed by Rob Monster, acquired Whisher in mid January. I have joined Wifi.com as CTO, and continue to improve upon Whisher’s offerings – the main aim now is to make social interaction possible through the wifi.com website.

It was a sad moment – they had been churning for almost three years, and have been the most reliable I have ever worked with. Four Dell boxes, one for the Whisher authentication server, another for Oracle (by -far- the most stable database server I have worked with, almost zero downtime during three years), and two for RADIUS and our Apache web server. The Whisher website and blog will continue to live on a shared hosting for the time being. Wifi.com is hosted on new servers in Seattle.

When I have some time I’ll write the Whisher story, but for now, it’s time to move on. The rest of the Whisher team will go on to pursue new exciting opportunities, as it’s usually said – in this case, with reason, they are all in other exciting startups – wish you the best!

It looks like tricks will no longer fool the Spotify client – it was until recently possible to create an account over a tunnel to a UK IP address and set your country to UK, in order to access a lot of the blocked content that people in certain countries are not allowed to listen to, based on the whims of the copyright holders.

I guess I’ll have to cancel my paid subscription – it was a tit-for-tat as far as I was concerned, willing to pay but only if they allowed a loophole. Bye Spotify, we hardly knew ya!

There news have made several rounds already, but there wasn’t any specific guide on how to get MMS and network tethering working on the new 3.0 iPhone 3G firmware, released to developers a few days ago.

Several guides have been posted, but they all more or less copy & paste what is found in the original instructions, for example, CrunchGear posts this but doesn’t credit the original source. It’s not their fault, as these kinds of stories get posted and reposted so much it is hard to know where they originated. Anyway, here is a guide to make your iPhone 3G send MMS and tether on Movistar Spain. All images are thumbnails, click on them to see a larger version.

Warning: Before you start, remove any Bluetooth pairing between your Mac and iPhone – the pairing needs to be done after this procedure in order for the Blueetoth PAN network adapter to be recognized. Make sure you remove the pairing on both your Mac and iPhone.

1. Update your iPhone 3G to firmware version 3.0

Unless you are a registered iPhone developer with Apple, you don’t have access to this firmware. Don’t even ask – if you are a developer, you already know where to get it. Simply extract the firmware image to your desktop or other folder, and Option-click the ‘Restore’ button in iTunes’ ‘Summary’ tab. The rest is self-explanatory. As I’ve reported before, it’s better if you setup your iPhone from a previous backup after the firmware upgrade completes, rather than as a fresh new device.

2. Download the updated carrier settings file for Movistar

For your convenience, download this file, Telefonica_es.ipcc, which contains updated settings which enable MMS sending (not tested receive yet), and tethering on your iPhone. Save the file to ~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Carrier Support.

The file adds the MMS APN configuration, the tethering mask (-2) to the Internet APN, and various settings that enable MMS and the editing of the APN on the iPhone’s Network Settings.

3. Update the carrier settings

With your iPhone connected over USB, Option-click the ‘Check for Update’ button in iTunes’ ‘Summary’ tab. Browse to ~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Carrier Support and select the file Telefonica_es.ipcc. The update takes only a couple of seconds.

4. Reboot your phone

5. Enable MMS and send a test message

Go to Settings -> Messages on your iPhone, and turn on the MMS Messaging option:

On your Messages application, you will see a new icon when you write a message:

Tap the icon to bring up a menu which lets you take a new picture, or select an existing one. Results for taking a new picture are flaky, and for me they didn’t work, so I just took a picture using Camera and chose it later:

Type any text you want to add and hit Send. This is the result:

6. Tether your iPhone to your Mac over Bluetooth

First, you need to pair your iPhone. From the Bluetooth menu on your Mac, select ‘Set up Bluetooth Device…’. Choose ‘Any device’ from the options, and follow the normal process, entering the PIN code when requested. After your device is paired, leave the ‘Use this device for networking’ option checked. You will get a message telling you a new network device has been added, ‘Bluetooth PAN’. Go to Network Preferences to see the new adapter:

7. Connect to the Internet

Simply click the Bluetooth menu, and the Connect to Network option in your device name’s submenu:

The iPhone’s screen will shortly show a blue bar at the top indicating you tethering is active:

That’s it! I ran a DSL speed test on the connection, and this is the result:

Quite impressive!

After I wrote about how unstable iPhone OS v3.0 is, I’ve been testing it with a fresh restore, but this time setting up the iPhone from one of my previous v2.2.1 backups, and I have to say that for whatever reason, it is much more stable. There are still some silly bugs, but also some upsides – the graphics are notably faster, particularly in games. So, if you see your 3.0 iPhone too unstable, try to restore it from a backup, it may make things work better.

So I went ahead, ignored all good sense, and updated my iPhone 3G to the new iPhone 3.0 Beta, released by Apple to developers a few days ago (I’m a registered developer, so I have access to the firmware).

The first two restores, which I did not choosing to configure from a 2.2.1 backup, caused the phone to become almost unusable. There were bugs everywhere, such as:

• Headphones not recognized, needing a reset.
• Failed connections to Exchange email accounts, and a few times, the complete loss of contacts and emails on the phone. Connectivity with Exchange is clunky.
• Safari text input freezing.
• Phone not allowing dialing, the keypad frozen.
• Ringtones playing back broken and with awful noises and sparks.
• Slowing down of the whole UI, needing a hard reset.
• Connection to a dock resulted in ‘Accessory not recognized’ messages (yes, I use the latest dock model).
• Screen stuck in the Search page, needing a hard reset to fix.
• All icons on the home screen disappearing, including the dock ones, needing a hard reset to fix.
• The Network options menu gets highlighted in blue for a few seconds until the options screen loads, as if the UI was frozen.
• Sometimes the headphones are not recognized when plugged in, or the phone thinks they are still connected after unplugging them, it seems the plug/unplug interrupt is getting lost somewhere, or not processed.

This afternoon I decided to restore once again, and this time setup the phone from a previous backup. Things are more or less normal so far, some of the bugs above are not happening, although I’ve not extensively tested them. This being a first beta, it leaves out some of the features announced in the keynote, mainly:

• No MMS for now. There isn’t anything special about the SMS menu other than the new icon, and copy/paste (which is awesome, with one caveat). The MMS enable/disable option is present in Settings though.
• There is no paste into Safari. For example, if you get a UPS tracking number through email, try to copy it, then paste into UPS’s tracking site loaded in Safari…nothing happens. Safari seems to just pick a block of content to copy, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to paste into form fields.
• No Notes sync that I can see in this release.
• There is zero information in the documentation about the WiFi auto-login feature. Is it WISPr? Is it some custom thing for AT&T and other partner networks? Time will tell.
• Copying a single photo by holding your finger on it doesn’t work. The popup comes up, you tap ‘Copy’, and it remains highlighted for a few seconds. There is no paste available in, for example, an email after that. You can copy/paste into an email by clicking the action button and selecting the image, then the Copy button.
• Bluetooth tether – while the iAP profile is present, and you can set it up on OS X, the connection to the phone fails. I assume there will be an OS X update to include the iPhone in the DUN devices list.

iPhone 3.0 is very promising, adding features long missed, and long present in other phones, but for now it’s not even a stable platform to develop on. Unless it’s my particular phone that is screwy of course.

These are the specs of a maxed-out Mac Pro in the Apple Store, after the desktop line of Macs has been revamped:

• Two 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
• 32GB (8x4GB)
• Mac Pro RAID Card
• 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
• 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
• 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
• 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
• 4x NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB
• Two 18x SuperDrives
• Apple Cinema HD Display (30″ flat panel)
• Apple Cinema HD Display (30″ flat panel)
• Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse
• Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (English) and User’s Guide
• AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi Card with 802.11n
• Quad-channel 4Gb Fibre Channel PCI Express card

The price of all this? Just shy of $19.000 – a bargain!

I read TUAW’s review of Vocalia with great interest, went to the App Store, only to find an average 2.5 stars, with the bad ratings being really bad. Before sinking $3.99 into an app like this, I would like to be able to test it, particularly based on the bad reviews. Since apps are wrapped in store DRM, it would be simple for Apple to add a trial mode which gives you say 5 days to test and review an app. They could even make the charge automatic after the trial has expired, unless you have uninstalled the app.

A company-owned Nokia N82 happened to have a failed LCD display module when it was returned, and since replacing it yourself is an easy task (pop the screen cover off, unstick the LCD, disconnect the cable, replace with the new LCD, and close the cover), I went looking for spare parts. Nobody seemed to have the display in stock, other than DataKits UK. I placed an order for the LCD and a set of new covers, as the ones on the phone were quite damaged from use. First sign of trouble was when I checked the order, and the site detected either the language setting of the browser I was using, my IP address, or both – and it tried to load the site in a language that was not configured. There were tons of not found PHP includes, and when HTML was loaded it was full of default text strings.

I emailed the sales address telling them about this, and got an auto-reply a few minutes later: “Sorry for any delay in receiving your order. we will check the status and follow up the delivery company straight away. Thanks DataKits.co.uk” Second sign of trouble, an automated reply regarding possible delays in shipping. This can mean only one thing: they receive a ton of questions and complaints about shipping schedules.

On the order comments, I had specified that they should send me the Royal Mail tracking number once shipped, but last night I saw they had updated the online order status to: “19/02/2009 Dispatched rm”. Not very useful. After some googling, I came across this forum thread on PriceRunner, which details the many problems people have had with this company. I honestly hope they send me the LCD and covers, and have left them a message on their answerphone plus another email (which was auto-replied again with the same text), and have heard nothing back.