I’m pretty happy I didn’t use MobileMe (since I was already a subscriber of .Mac) to keep my contacts, calendar and email in sync, and rather chose mail2web’s hosted Exchange option. With Exchange, my contacts are synched from Entourage to my iPhone and other Macs instantly, and so does my email, calendar and invitations to events. It has a rock-solid feel that right now MobileMe cannot seem to provide. I’m sure Apple is working hard on their own version of ActiveSync for OS X Server, which I’m also sure will work wonders, but right now, if you want Blackberry-like experience on your iPhone, go for Exchange (hosted or otherwise). The motto should have been “Exchange for some of the rest of us and only sometimes”.

We were given a demo of the Pro/Pak portable foam generator by the sales rep, who came by our firehouse a couple of weeks ago. There is a serious intent on purchasing one of these, as it would help us off-load the pumper by 400 liters of foaming agent that we carry on top of the 2600 liters of water. One of these portable packs can deliver up to 10.000 liters of foamed mix for every 10 liters of agent! In reality, you would use medium expansion at 0.3% to 0.6%, which still provides a few thousand liters of foam. The unit is a bit heavy on the shoulder, but adequate for moderate work, such as car or garbage fires, or K type fires that are not involving other parts of the compartment or structure.

As you can see in the videos and photos, the unit is a self-contained shoulder-carried case, with three snap-on nozzles for different attack modes. One provides high-pressure, low-volume foam for long reach, the second provides also low-volume but higher concentration of foam in the stream, and the largest nozzle gives a good flow of medium-expansion, higher volume foam. The flow is controlled by the twist handle, and there is a selector for the percentage of foam mix. Using special foam agents, you can go from 0.1% to 0.6%, while standard foam requires a change in the selector by unscrewing it and screwing it back on turned 180 degrees, so that the mix ratios are 1% to 6%.

Here is a video of the unit in action:

And a picture of the demo – click on it to visit the Flickr photo stream:

I would really recommend you consider adding this to your arsenal for quick interventions, which do not require large volumes of foam projected at a distance. It’s excellent for quickly delivering a sizeable amount of foam with limited manpower and/or water supply.

Can Padro, located in near Barcelona (click for Google satellite map), is a huge fire training facility that teaches firefighters how to combat a wide range of scenarios they are likely to meet. They also have a driving track, where dangerous goods drivers take their mandatory courses, and police recruits learn how to drive defensively (but fast!).

We are considering a two-day course for our guys, which would involve LPG fires, boil-overs, fires on multiple floors, and victim search & rescue, and so we went for a visit. One of the lead instructors was kind enough to give us a tour of the facility, which has one of the biggest ship fire simulators I have personally seen. There are bigger ones, I believe the US Navy runs a full-sized one, but this one was very scary. Below is one picture in the photo set I’ve posted on Flickr, click on it to go and watch the whole set.

The HP 5850 committed suicide, and decided it would start printing stripes across documents even after changing ink, cleaning contacts, and so on. One thing I used to like about HP printers was that their ink cartridges came with their own print heads – meaning that on each change, you’d get brand new heads. Other manufacturers suffer from heads that eventually clog or need specialized cleaning, so even though the ink was more expensive in comparison, to me it was worth the stretch.

With the new Vivaro inks, however, HP has moved onto printer-bound heads, and simple cartridges. From a business perspective it makes sense – the ink feels cheaper than before to the user (9 Euros per color, or 35 for a six-color pack plus 150 10×15 photo paper sheets), and the printer can be sold for more just by adding some trimmings, such as the huge touch screen of the 8180. This printer rocks – really. It connected to my WiFi network with no hassle, and was setup and configured with the HP driver on my Mac Pro, thus giving me access to printing, scanning and even the memory card reader, over WiFi.

One thing I didn’t appreciate, but which fortunately you can turn off in the preferences, is that after each printing action, the LCD  display starts showing a “tips slideshow”, which tells you how good HP’s photo paper is, how original supplies are way better for your printer, or that you can actually use the memory card slots to print your photos directly (duh! I thought they were just convenient holders for my cards so I would not missplace them!).

Just check out this page, which lists device & software manufacturers who have licensed Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync protocol (starting at a measly $100.000 a year!). Surprisingly, they don’t list Apple or the iPhone / iPod Touch. The last update on the page is March 2007, so it’s about time they check it over.

Last night the most annoying thing happened – two of the four drives I have in my Mac Pro failed, within 30 minutes of each other. What is even more annoying is that they are two Western Digital WD RE2 WD5000YS, supposedly server-grade drives particularly suited for continuous duty and RAID use. Well, I had the two 500GB drives partitioned in two volumes, and one volume on each drive setup as a slice in a RAID 1 soft array. First, one of the slices failed. When I tried to rebuild from the second slice, it failed too. Finally, the two ‘normal’ volumes remaining on each drive also failed. Disk tools reports the drives, and the partitions, it even tells me the space used correctly, and Finder will even show the folders when you connect the drives – but there is no way to access the data.

These drives carry a five-year warranty, and they were just under one year old, so I guess WD will replace them with new ones. I’m going to send them to a recovery lab to see if they can pull any of the data. Most of what I don’t have backups of are ripped movies, which would be annoying to have to re-rip again.

Last time I had something like this happen was when the desktop and laptop’s drives failed within two hours of each other. In those days I was keeping crossed-backups, so after the event my paranoia level increased a few notches.

If anyone knows exactly what the “network settings” are, feel free to comment. This was pushed to my iPhone by iTunes a few minutes ago, without further explanation.

Today I finally managed to get my hands on a 16GB black iPhone 3G. It almost didn’t happen, and the story is long, so maybe I’ll write another post about it – but suffice to say that it has been yet another day of missinformation, lack of professionalism, and general crappy image given by Telefonica Movistar.

To be honest, the thing that had me intrigued was how much one would have to pay were the contract terminated before the 24-month commitment was over. It turns out that it’s 400 Euros if you have the 20 + 15 contract, and pay 200 Euros for the iPhone at the store. So, for 600 Euros you should get an unlocked iPhone 3G. I think by law operators are forced to unlock your phone if you pay the termination fee, but I am unsure about this – anyone know for sure?

TrunkSniffer is an application I wrote a few years ago, which allows you to track MPT-1327 trunked radio networks using nothing more than a radio receiver and a soundcard. I managed to make the decoding algorithms the best in the industry – they would take any kind of audio, even noisy speaker audio from distant control channels, and successfully decode it. It was initially released as a commercial product, and amongst my clients were nationwide trunked network operators and military intelligence agencies from several countries.

Analog radio networks have slowly been replaced by digital ones, such as TETRA, and tracking MPT-1327 is not the fun it used to be, unless taxi firm traffic is your thing. There are still several interesting networks out there to track, and thus I have decided to re-release TrunkSniffer as freeware. Simply visit the TrunkSniffer page, where you can read a lot more about it, and what it can do, and download the installer plus the unlocked executable file that will allow you to run it unrestricted. Enjoy!

Just got off the phone with OtterBox, who confirm that they don’t have plans to make an Armor case, the fully waterproof case for iPhone 2G, in a version compatible with the iPhone 3G. This is sad news, as I was looking forward to taking my iPhone with me while on watch, but it’s looking like I will have to look for alternatives. Nothing would have looked better than a ruggerized iPhone in the middle of a big fire.