Fnord.

Subtle, eh? From the back of a foodie magazine. Yeesh.

Been remiss on albums, so here’s one for y’all - Alessandra visited, and we went to a nice park on the Point Loma. Lots of Anna pictures for the grandparents out there. Enjoy!

Via TidBits, news that the new Apple Time Capsule is shipping. Its a combination device with a WiFi router and internal hard drive. The WiFi is the new 2.4/5GHz 802.11n, which increases both the speed and the range of the network. According to the Wikipedia page, going from 802.11g (which most computers made in the past 3-4 years have), you go from 38m to 70m in range and 19 to 74 megabits of usable throughput.

I’ll pause so that the nerds reading this can cease drooling. That’s a big jump in range and speed, which naturally leads to the question of ‘What do I do with that much bandwidth? I mean, my internet connection is much slower than that.’

In a word: Backups. OSX 10.5 introduced TimeMachine, integrated backup software of stunning polish and elegance. I’ve spent years with software of varying capability, so trust me when I say that stunning is not an exaggeration. cpio, tar, rsync, unison, windows backup (shudder), ufsdump, Retrospect… it’s a long list. I still use cron and rsync for Debian on this server, but it’s got serious limitations and my main defense is to replace the hard drive every two years. TimeMachine solves all these, in an automatic fashion that’s tied into the operating system itself.

Let me explain. If you use a third-party backup program, consider what happens when the drive fails. You have to reinstall the operating system itself, usually a manner of hours, then install the backup/restore program, then restore the backups. With OSX, you boot the install DVD and select the ‘Restore from TimeMachine backup’ option. Vive la difference, baby.

So, motivation established, you consider 802.11n routers. However, if you’re like me you have older machines that don’t have 802.11n and can’t afford to upgrade them all. You’re then faced with the hassle of running two wireless networks, one slow and one fast. Double the fun it ain’t.

Time Capsule (seemingly) solves a lot of these. And some others. Right now, I use an older Airport Express (802.11g) plus a LaCie NAS drive. It mostly works, but since the LaCie is RAID0 I’m actually more at risk; if either drive in the NAS fails I lose all my backups. And it’s slow as well, even over gigabit. In contrast, the Time Capsule uses a single drive, which is server-grade:

Chulani clarified that the “server-grade” drives in a Time Capsule are the same 7200 rpm drives used for Apple’s Xserve servers, and that they have a higher mean time between failure (MTBF) rating than consumer drives. The MTBF for server-grade drives is often 1 million hours (114 years), which is a measure of probability; in this case, that out of a set of drives with similar properties, an extremely high percentage will still be fully functional after several years.

(That’s from the TidBits article)

The phrase from TidBits that got me really interested was this:

AirPort Utility 5.3 also adds setup features that enable you to migrate settings from an existing base station into the Time Capsule; to set up a dual-band network, with an older base station operating at 2.4 GHz and the Time Capsule set to 5 GHz; and to set up a roaming network with multiple base stations connected over Ethernet.

If I’m reading that correctly, it sounds like the TC can run somehow with another WiFi router? Hmm. I don’t have Airport Util 5.3 and can’t find a download URL, so this is hard to verify.

The TimeCapsule costs $299 for 500GB and $499 for 1TB, which is quite good. If I can get it to replace or complement my Airport Express, it’d be fabulous.

Update: Nice review and walk-through on Gizmodo.

Via DRB, this made me smile:

I also loved this one, picture links to source page. Magnificent!

As a renter in one of the nation’s most overpriced markets, I’ve been reading about real estate since before we moved here. Piggington, Calculated Risk and many others. It doesn’t take too many graphs like this one to make one wary:

Anyway, a couple of days ago a thought-provoking essay “The Next Slum?” was posted on The Atlantic positing that the detached-house suburbs would become the new ghettos:

…A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound.

Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has looked carefully at trends in American demographics, construction, house prices, and consumer preferences. In 2006, using recent consumer research, housing supply data, and population growth rates, he modeled future demand for various types of housing. The results were bracing: Nelson forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) by 2025—that’s roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.

It’s an interesting essay, and I recommend it to you. I debated posting it, but it kept running around my head as I tried out his arguments, so perhaps that’s a good sign. His data seem solid, but the argument he makes about desire to return to urban life is more sketchy. Personally, I couldn’t agree more and often have the same debate with exurb co-workers, but that’s beside the point. Question is, do large masses of people really want to desert the burbs and go urban?

Even if they don’t, will economics force the issue? The article quotes Arthur Nelson of Virginia Tech as projecting a surplus of 22 million suburban homes by 2025; 40% of the volume in existence today. That sort of surplus would crush pricing, and the article also explains the progression from vacant to crime statistics; it rapidly becomes a self-reinforcing rout.

If you read pessimists like JH Kunstler or The Oil Drum, this sort of scenario is old hat. I was quite surprised to see it in the mainstream media, well backed up with statistics and experts. Chaotic times ahead, I fear.

At a friends’ party a week or so ago.

The Economist magazine now has a bunch of free audio/video guides to different cities online at http://audiovideo.economist.com/

Downloadable, or as RSS feeds, or viewable on the web. Oriented towards business, but interesting for culture/climate and logistics too.

Roughly following the vendor-linked instructions here…

1. Backup via iTunes
2. Download various ipsw firmware fils from here.
3. Looks like I need to ‘revirginize’, or undo the unlock that I did before. Hmm.
   1. Tool here from ipone dev elite, their FAQ re-virginize link is borked.
   2. Looks like the latest iNdependance can do some of this too… Let’s try that first, it’s the simplest. Trying the ‘prepare for upgrade’ option…
4. Using iTunes, ‘check for upgrade’, upgrade to 1.1.3, seems to work.
5. Using iNdependance, activate and jailbreak - OK, done.
6. Install trick SIM chip, using scissors to cut SIM card and tape to attach it. No work, no network shown, no error message. Hmm.
7. Try installing SSH/SCP/SFTP using iNdependance. Nope.
8. Try iNdependance’s SIM(software) unlock in desparation… Unlock succeeded, but with the ‘next sim’ in place the phone shows no network.
9. Re-flash 1.1.3 using iTunes, try with and without SIM present, before and after restoring data…nope.
10. Remove next sim, try old SIM card… same thing. Symptoms: IMEI 00 499901 064000 0, no signal on cell meter.

Time to RTFM, and according to this TurboSim doesn’t work with 1.1.3. Which means that my $20 ‘next sim’ probably doesn’t either. Damnation. The instructions claim 1.1.3 works, but a re-read of the poorly written paragraph seems to imply only that ‘works’ means ‘downgrade to 1.1.1 and unlock’ that works:

Safe unlock for OTB iphone 1.1.2 and 1.1.3. Just tested with 1.1.3 works great. Buy now and I will include free tech support, just call us. We will walk you through installation! Won’t void apple warranty. Works with boatloader 4.6 and 3.9. Guaranteed or 100 percent refund! No programming knowledge required. 3Easy steps to unlock the iphone 1.Downgrade your firmware from 1.1.2 to 1.1.1, follow the link for the Tutorial 2.Jailbreak and activate, install ok to prep and iworld if needed. 3.Cut your sim as shown in picture. Stick sim and next sim together and put back in sim tray and into iphone. Now your ready to use your unlocked iphone!

Hmm. From reading this page, maybe I should try iJailbreak instead. It WORKS!

What’s more, it installs the AppTapp installer for you; nice touch.

OK, verdict is this:

1. Use iNdependance to ‘prepare for upgrade’, not sure if this is necessary
2. Use iTunes to sync for a backup.
3. Use iTunes to update to 1.1.3
4. Use iJailbreak to activate and unlock.
5. There is no step five.

That’s it! And, what’s more, the GPS-lite WORKS!

It took all damn day, but I’m a delighted nerd. Off to donate to iJailbreak!

(And yes, the 20 bucks for the ‘next sim’ hardware was a waste. Save your money.)

I rotated this to the “correct” orientation and discovered that it works better this way.

Via ArsTechnica, news of a free open-source PC emulator for OSX called VirtualBox.

Right now, it only runs on Intel-based macs, but I gave it a quick test with DamnSmallLinux and it runs quite well. I’m impressed, and will experiment more with it. It’s really amazingly polished for OSS, professional as hell.

Excellent news, this. Screenshot of DSL running with Firefox: