New scanner arrived today 
Click on the pic for the Amazon page.
Aside: I’m now using Flickr to store all the little pics on Scripting News. As before I just drop them in a folder that my script is watching, and when it sees a new pic, it uploads it and puts the HTML for the image in a little window for me to copy/paste.
Later: The scanner is here. An example of a scan.
David Bianculli on the Sopranos finale
Fresh Air TV critic has a great summary of how fans view the Sopranos finale.
Just saw an iPhone ad on CNN
And it’s good. Really good.
Here’s how it goes…
Narrator: “You’re watching Pirates of the Caribbean (on AppleTV of course), and someone says they’d like calimari.”
The user clicks a button. Google Maps comes up. Click. A keyboard comes up. Types C-A-L-A-M-A-R-I. Enter.
Pushpins appear on the map. (The phone knows where you are?)
The user touches a pin. A small card with a phone number pops up. Clicks the number. The phone dials. Hello, please send over some calamari.
It’s a subset of the Knowledge Navigator without the guy in the bow tie.
Quite compelling. My Blackberry can’t do it. Okay maybe I just decided to buy one.
Ooops. 🙂
PS: Rich Karpinski says my Blackberry can do it, and iPhone doesn’t have GPS. At least it’s a good ad.
PPS: The ad is on the Apple site, along with all the others.
Party fire pit
I tried to post a movie of a fire pit at a party I went to last night, but YouTube doesn’t seem to like it. So I put it on blip.tv. That’s better. 🙂
Posted by Aaron Pressman on June 12, 2007 at 10:43 am
I’m really interested to hear about the scanner. I’m considering buying the exact same model to scan a huge pile of old-fashioned photo negatives. This model has some kind of built in negative plate and software to let you scan multiple pictures at once. I’d love to know if it works as advertised…what are going to do with ours?
Posted by Derrick Schneider on June 12, 2007 at 10:53 am
Were they cooking with the fire pit or just using it for warmth? They should have at least given people sausages and skewers or s’mores makings if they weren’t going to throw a lamb on a spit over the fire.
Posted by Dave Winer on June 12, 2007 at 12:47 pm
Aaron, I just want the scanner to send documents back and forth to my accountant and lawyer, and for the occasional hand-drawn diagram for Scripting News.
Derrick there was no cooking on the fire pit, but we did have a huge BBQ before.
Posted by Rich on June 12, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Of course your Blackberry can do exactly that with Google Maps or Blackberry maps…..iPhone doesn’t have GPS, but Google Maps mobile can store your default location. Same number of clicks, exact same UI.
Posted by Paolo Valdemarin on June 12, 2007 at 2:06 pm
It will probably work better if you spell it C-A-L-A-M-A-R-I
😉
Posted by Steve on June 12, 2007 at 2:14 pm
yeah my windows mobile smart phone can do it to, thing is, in the commericals (I saw a few at lunch today too), the web comes up faster than you can blink ,that for sure isnt going to happen on the phone, doesnt have 3G. It’s like false advertising.
Posted by Vitaliy on June 12, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Google Maps Mobile (http://google.com/gmm/) is supported on most phones that can run Java ME and have data connectivity (read: almost every modern phone).
Touch screen UI certainly looks nice, but there is nothing revolutionary in seeing Google Maps on a phone screen. In fact, people who have phones with GPS built-in are probably laughing at these ads. And yes, I can search for a restaurant and then dial the number right away, even on my fairly basic Sony Ericsson.
Posted by Dare Obasanjo on June 12, 2007 at 2:52 pm
You can find all the ads at http://www.apple.com/iphone/ads/
Posted by John Starta on June 12, 2007 at 4:14 pm
The absence of a GPS receiver in the iPhone shouldn’t necessarily prevent you from buying it.
The FCC mandates all cell phone handsets be capable of providing their location to within 50 to 100 meters. This functionality is required by law for purposes of E911 service (i.e. the 911 dispatcher will know your location).
Whether location is provided via a built-in GPS receiver or via carrier derived techniques is insignificant. The fact remains that the iPhone knows where it’s at and therefore can provide/map location specific recommendations as demonstrated in the commercial.
Posted by Bingo on June 12, 2007 at 4:17 pm
The guy actually types SEAFOOD…
Posted by foleo on June 13, 2007 at 1:53 am
Just wondering if posting the “little pics” voilates the flickr Community Guidelines described here: http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne
I guess it’s how you interpret “Don’t use your account to host web graphics like logos and banners” and “must provide a link from each photo back to its photo page on Flickr”.
Maybe you could ask Russo & Hale for advice… 😉
Posted by Dave Winer on June 13, 2007 at 6:08 am
Foleo, good question.
Right now I’m mostly doing it to burn in some code I’m working on.
And I bet that term is there just so that if a really big high flow site took advantage of them they have a basis for shutting them down. We’re not using even a fraction of the bandwidth I’ve been paying for.
Posted by Googlaxy on June 13, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Flickr to store Scripting News images? What’s wrong with your Amazon S3 experience? :O
Posted by Erik on June 14, 2007 at 4:12 am
What they edited out of the commercial is the ~10-20 seconds of dead time while EDGE initiates communication with the network.
As far as knowing where you are, I assume what the ad was showing was google knowing where you usually are.