bem's blog

During March and April, we spent a day testing the major 3G services in 13 cities across the United States. Verizon's service showed a combination of speed and reliability, Sprint's results lent credence to its 'most dependable' claim, and AT&T's network showed fast upload speeds in most cities.

As an AT&T subscriber, I'm completely unsuprised that AT&T's network is less reliable than Sprint & Verizon. I would have been really curious to see how T-Mobile's network stacked up.

The premise is simple: The player uses the touch-screen to help their character, Maxwell, acquire the star in each level by solving a series of puzzles. The twist is, in order to solve each puzzle the players use the notepad to write down objects that are used to reach the goal.

This game is all about experimentation, imagination and endless replay value. Think of any person, place or thing, write it down, and watch it come alive! Write Anything,
Solve Everything!

This sounds intriguing. It might just make me dig out my DS and attempt to actually spend some time playing a game. We'll see. I've been so bad at that gaming thing lately... But Scribblenauts sounds so... compelling.

Opera has taken the wraps off a new service called Opera Unite, which allows users to transform their personal computer into a Web-connected media and information sharing service. Opera Unite is part of the latest beta version of the Opera 10 browser, and allows inventive Web developers to create just about any Web app they can imagine, and then enables users to host the app themselves.

Opera Unite basically turns your personal computer into an ad-hoc Web server. Various "services" can be loaded and activated via the browser, allowing your machine to share files with friends, stream MP3s, or even serve a full website. One service, Photo Sharing, lets you simply point to a folder full of photos on your own hard drive and serve them as an online photo gallery.

This sounds quite brilliant. I wonder how long until every web browser has a feature like this. I guess it's somewhat too bad that coming up with the cool new features before everyone else doesn't actually convert to market share.

iotop is a console application for monitoring the I/O usage of processes on your system. It is especially handy for answering the question “Grrr, sloooowness, why is my disk churning so much?”

Where has this been all my life?

That puzzling line from an e-mail my running partner Janet Bowman sent me a few days ago leaps to mind as we struggle up a trail pitched at the angle of a ski jump. Perspiration streams off my head like a hard rain as I gasp for air, even though we're moving at a pace that might be generously described as a determined shuffle. In fact, just minutes into a 9.5-mile trail run across Northern California's Golden Gate National Recreation Area, I'm wondering how many anaerobic-thresholds lie ahead. I'm here for an adventurous four-day, 42-mile run through Marin County, a place with a reputation for fearsome hills and arguably the country's best trail running. More than 500 miles of footpaths spiderweb through 40 federal, state, and county parks covering some 170,000 acres. The parks contain forests of towering redwoods, a coastline where elephant seals bellow on secluded beaches, and hills harboring Tule elk and half the bird species in North America.

I *so* need to do this sometime. It sounds like amazing amounts of fun. (Having a subscription to Runners World can be dangerous, I'm thinking of signing up for this half marathon, because I saw the ad in the magazine...)