Searches for "iPhone slow" make huge spikes right after every new iPhone release

Just for good measure:

"Come bomb the Little Mermaid"

Right now smartphone-armed guerrillas battle from street to street in Copenhagen. Google made them do it.
It has been dark for a few hours. The temperature is falling to minus ten degrees, just as the forecast promised, and there is plenty “fresh wind from the east and northeast” this January evening in Denmark. A small group of men are standing on Langelinje harbor in Copenhagen all staring at their smartphones. They can already feel the cold in their toes and fingertips, but they remain in the area for several hours. For they are on the warpath.
“You think it's a game. But it is not.” So warns a female voice at first run of the Android application called Ingress. Maybe there's some truth to that. Is Google subsidiary Niantic Labs' new, mysterious, worldwide game created to entice users themselves to collect even more data for Google?
In Ingress two competing factions color the world map green or blue. This is done by physically visiting local area landmarks and special buildings, in the game called portals, and conquer them through the app. So, if there has been a little silent in online games like 'World of Warcraft' at the latest, it may be because many of the players has risen from the cushioned chairs and now are all biking around between all sorts of sights while waging a virtual war – and sending photos and location data to Google.

The frogs against the smurfs

During the day, the Copenhagen Ingress street fighters Ttgeek and gnomen work as a web developer and a child educator respectively. A few weeks ago they did not know each other. Both were inspired to apply for access to the game after watching a YouTube video. In it a physics project goes horribly wrong and mysterious energy - called Exotic Matter - has been blown out across the surface of the earth.
Team Enlightened is trying to expose the public to as much radiation as possible by coloring the map in green. Ttgeek and gnomen was among the first who joined the team Resistance who defend humanity by coloring in blue. The two teams have nicknamed each other “frogs” and “smurfs”.
“The video poses questions. You don't know what the game is when you see it, but it's something with GPS, a “capture the flag” thing. And it's a spiced up geocaching thing,” says Ttgeek with reference to the better known and more peaceful way to go on a treasure hunt with GPS equipment.
Ttgeek have reached level 8, which is still the highest that can be achieved as a player, or “agent”. But with great fervor he helps other Resistance fighters to obtain higher ranks and keep Copenhagen blue. This evening among others Agent gnome has appeared on the agreed venue.
“I think the movie looked really good. They have put a lot of energy in the history. And then I needed to get out, I have lost several pounds. People ask why I bother. But before I sat and played 'World of Warcraft' for twelve hours straight. And smoke cigarettes,” laughs gnomen.

Skirmish near the Royal Palace

The Little Mermaid on Langelinje,
Copenhagen, Denmark.
Here as a level 4 Resistance portal.

The troops have assembled, the equipment is in order, let there be gaming. Ttgeek have a Motorola tablet with large battery and gnomen have a HTC with small screen and thus low power consumption. Both can mount their Android weapons to the handlebar of their bikes in waterproof casings.
The two leads the charge against the evening's target. Without getting off their bikes eagerly hacking the portals that the flock passes. Like this, they will be able to continue for more than six hours. Google could hardly have designed Street View bikes better themselves.
Tonight the Resistance attacks the many statues of Langelinje, held by the Enlightened. By Gefionspringvandet, a fountain at one end of the harbor, Ttgeek gives instructions: He goes first to bomb portals into a weak state. Then the lower ranking teammates reap points by conquering and rebuilding the portals.
But it's not as easy as it sounds because the frog portals shoot back. The little smurfs are repeatedly drained of energy and must commute to the Amalienborg palace square, where many blue portals are spewing out so much Exotic Matter that one trip around the equestrian statue of King Frederik V is more than enough for a full recharge.
“Come bomb the Little Mermaid,” writes invulnerable Ttgeek impatiently while his foot soldiers are cycling a second round among the guardsmen on the palace square. Hopefully the communication channel of Ingress isn't one listened in on by the police intelligence service.

Melee on the memorial column

Suddenly, the otherwise bombed-out memorial column for Ivar Huitfeldt turns green again on the Android screens. Ttgeek rapidly returns. Immediately he recognizes a white car that he knows belongs to a member of the Enlightened. The frogs have noticed one of their territories is being taken over by keeping an eye on the Ingress intel website, and one member has rushed to defend it.
But after a short time the car disappears. Tgeek is too strong.
“Close combat is the most fun. The first four days that I played, it was all on my own. I walked around two o'clock at night in complete darkness with headset on and heard the eerie sounds from the app,” laughs gnomen.
“I like getting more about, experiencing the city, and Ingress has helped. I also think it's a fun collaboration, dealing with strangers,” adds Ttgeek.
But the game can get out of hand sometimes, says gnomen:
“Yesterday, when I went to bed, I saw that my portal outside the front door was about to be taken over. So I went over and took it back. Afterwards I went somewhere else. And it ended with a walk on a total of three hours as I recaptured all that they had taken. And when I got up next morning, they had taken over everything once again.”

---

To get started, visit the official websites:

• www.ingress.com

...and...

• www.nianticproject.com
  

---

The above report is from late January 2013. It was originally published in Danish. and is now cross-posted to Newsvine.
Since then both gnomen, the reporter and several other Copenhageners have reached level 8. As a consequence the game has changed. But it has also changed because many more portals have been added to the map and because Niantic Labs have let gameplay evolve from user suggestions.
A couple of practical considerations that may have seem obscure and geeky are common knowledge to the hard core Ingress agent. For example:

• GPS is tricky. Ingress is using a routine less stressful to the phone and/or servers than regular navigation apps so you will see your position fly about on the scanner. And moving just on the northern side of a massive structure, you can hide entirely from the satellites to freeze your position. Usually just incredibly annoying.
  
• 3G uses a lot of battery. If more than one agent operate together, just one device should communicate with servers and share a local network. Then the other agents should turn off 3G and log onto the shared network using wi-fi.
  
• Even when properly protected in waterproof bags, devices will not immediately recharge after ten hours out in the rain. Has something to do with the moisture.
  
• Using a bit of wire you can make your own external phone battery from a scooter battery carried in a shoulder bag.
  



News from Kenya: food price spike worsen hunger, smartphone sales skyrocket

While the emergency in the Horn of Africa was triggered by prolonged droughts, especially in areas struggling with conflict and internal displacement such as Somalia, food prices that are near the record high levels seen in 2008 also contributed to the situation.
- The World Bank, Food Price Watch report according to The Guardian, August 2011 / Africa famine: soaring food prices intensifying crisis, report warns.

In a related news report by France 24 a 14 years old is armed with an AK-47 when herding his skinny goats in drought stricken northern Kenya.

Earlier this year, the Chinese firm Huawei unveiled IDEOS through Kenya’s telecom titan, Safaricom. So far, this $80 smartphone has found its way into the hands of 350,000+ Kenyans, an impressive sales number in a country where 40% of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. The IDEOS’s success in this market firmly establishes the open source Android as the smartphone of the people and demonstrates how unrelenting upswings in price-performance can jumpstart the spread of liberating technologies.
- Singularity Hub, August 2011 / $80 Android Phone Sells Like Hotcakes in Kenya, the World Next? (via Slashdot).

The tecnical specs are just slightly below those of "our" iPhones, Samsungs and HTCs but the price is about one tenth (yes, 1/10). In other words, Huawei and Google just saved Kenyans (800 USD minus 80 USD) times 350.000 equalling 252 million USD. At least. (Shows how incredibly conservative my 3 billion USD estimate on how much Linux has saved people and business recently was; see Apple, PCs, Linux and the economy.)

An entrepreneurial conference in Nairobi called Pivot25 showcased some of the most innovative Android apps in East Africa. Among these include M-Farm, an app that allows farmers to broadcast product prices and locations to the world via SMS. Another agri-app developed by Makerere University helps diagnose and track the spread of crop diseases via crowdsourcing. In a nation where agriculture accounts for nearly a quarter of GDP, apps like these could prove invaluable in maximizing harvests and facilitating the spread of precision farming.

[This blog post has been cross-posted to Ecowar and TH!NK3.]

Skype and Facebook woes, Google+ to the rescue

Twice did I nearly punch my keyboard in frustration recently: First Skype was bought up by Microsoft then Facebook deleted all photos uploaded from KDE Linux.

Evil, dumb or both?

Granted, Skype merely went from proprietary and closed to proprietary, closed and owned by the evil ones. I did consider looking for an open source, cross platform alternative and so did others. The Skype protocol was reverse engineered and there was some downtime issues shortly after. But I haven't cared enough about the issue yet.

And granted, the deleting of photos uploaded with a common KDE plugin used by some photography software (including my beloved Digikam) was temporary. Others were quick to complain. Imagine the uproar if it had been all photos uploaded by iPhoto that had been removed. But apparently, Facebook has people working for them that think stuff coming from this Linux-something is too suspicious and will actually hit the red button.

Add to the above that Facebook - with its history of privacy issues - are working with Skype to integrate their networks. We should all be panicking for alternatives and reverse engineered protocols. But then again...

Google: Not evil, not dumb

Google+ has something called Hangouts which is actually group video chatting. They are not open source but they have a history of being not evil and they are fully cross platform in being a cloud service. Their Picasa, neatly integrated in G+, beats Facebook's photo albums by any measure. So, Google+ is if not a full solution, then at least could be a great relief. And some badly needed competition.

Add to that this interview with Googles Open Source Boss, Chris di Bona: Besides creating Android, a major Linux success story, Chris tells:

"We have released something like 1,300 open source projects to the outside world in the last five years. That amounts to 24-25 million lines of code, using a variety of licenses. So basically whatever device or computer you use it most likely has some code from us in there, be it through our compiler or our application work. [Among the projects Google contribute to are] GCC. But also the Linux kernel and all the compiler tools, languages like Java, C++ and Python. Also we found that things like OpenSSL is super-important to us, also FFmpeg [...] We have Linux, a very very small amount of Windows, and a fair number of OS X machines. If you'd look at laptops it's maybe 70 percent Mac OS X and most of the rest is Linux, we are a huge customer of Apple. Engineering Desktops are overwhelmingly running on Linux. We have our own Ubuntu derivative called "Goobuntu" internally for that, integrating with our network"

Shouldn't the caption go "I can't wait for Google+ to let me spam everyone that blocked me on Facebook"? Which the creep will have no success with due to the Circles concept at G+ :-)

Now, if G+ will be "successful" or not? I predict a crowd of communication people and social media experts (people in need of getting head butted) giving Google+ bad reviews. Simply because Facebook was finally a service they could figure out using. Don't trust these pro spammers. Many people will join G+ because if you already use one or more Google services there really is little reason not to.

I already got the protest a couple of times that, since everyone's already on Facebook why should anyone create a G+ profile? Besides the arguments above, I'll throw out an example of how it adds to the services: I have a public album of my own wallpapers on Picasa (Google+ Pictures). These will not fit on Facebook in any way, because there pictures can be no larger than 600-and-something pixels on either side (can't even be full size of most wide screen monitors are at Flickr). And they don't need to be on Facebook because there are no people to tag in them - even if they had I still can tag in Picasa. That doesn't mean I'll head over and delete all my photos on Facebook though.

Linux vs Mac usage share pie chart - and how to make one with Google Docs

I'm a great fan of Google Docs and have been using the spreadsheet function ImportHtml a lot. Just playing around here is two usage share pie charts drawn up from data at Wikipedia:







If the data at Wikipedia is updated, so is my chart without me doing anything. If the page and table at Wikipedia is changed too much my chart is wrecked.

Simply put the formula "=ImportHtml("web address with your data","table","number of table to import")" in a cell and your desired table is copied to the spreadsheet. First table on the web page you are importing from is counted as 0 (the Usage share of operating systems page has my required data in tables 0 and 5). Obviously, it's possible to manipulate the data once it's inside the spreadsheet - in my case I simply copied the values of the cells I needed to a little convenient area. Mark the area with the data you wish to display then click the 'Charts' button (between 'Functions' and 'Filter'). Try to have the dialog window cooperate to draw up the chart needed then select 'Publish chart' from the drop down inside the chart box. I'm not entirely happy with the share data being converted to relative percentages (unfortunately Microsoft OSs do claim some 86%) - any tips on changing that?

This comic explains tech innovation

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From The Joy of Tech at Bloomberg Businessweek via Geekosystem.

Apple = Evil

The link to a "comment" at The Guardian, Forget Google – it's Apple that is turning into the evil empire by John Naughton, is trending at Slashdot (/.) under the headline Is Apple Turning Into the Next "Evil Empire"?. Time to kick back with the Macbook on the lap for some entertaining geek commentary!

Begins with an anecdote I never heard before...

"Very nice, Steve, I guess you'll sell it in 'boutiques'."
 - Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer.

Funny because where is Commodore now? Dead and gone. But Mac freaks, some of whom I believe like to boast Apples had windows before Microsoft Windows, should get reminded that Commodore Amiga had windows before Apple existed. But in a way Jack was right - Apple sells in the App(le) Store. Hardly in average "stores".

John Naughton's opinion article ends with a great Umberto Eco observation:

The Apple Mac [is] a Catholic device, while the IBM PC [is] a Protestant one. [...] like the Roman church, Apple offer[s] a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users [have] to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven.

Eco hadn't heard of Linux, I assume. Anyway, the comment lists how Apple is now financially bigger by both Microsoft and Google, frequent competitors for the "evil" scapegoat status, and lay their hands on more and more sources of revenue much to the disgruntlement of many other businesses.

Most of the reader's comments at The Guardian are - predictably - either pro-Apple, pro-Microsoft or silly. At least two comments hint at conspiracies mentioning there is an apple in the bible too and at least one is lashing out at everyone else arguing any discussion about computers is irrelevant because gender equality and poverty is more important. But not all comments are stupid:

[Apple's censorship of 3rd party applications] constitutes abuse of market position using a dominant proprietary system and far worse than Microsoft's 'bundling' of software with its OS which at least did not block its competitors products, but was enough to provoke game-changing anti-trust suits against it.
 - ColonelCallan

Record companies failed time and time again to grasp the importance of satisfying the increasingly connected market and Apple saved them at the last minute.  The record company attitude always was (and still is), "How do we stop customers doing what they want?". They failed time and time again to ask the question, "How do we make money giving people what they want?" iTunes [...] answered it well enough to satisfy a lot of people. [...] Now we may be seeing something similar happening with magazine and possibly aspects of newspaper publishing.
 - RichardGE

/.'ers begin with stating the obvious:

Present continuous tense is unnecessary. It is not an ongoing process. You should use past perfect tense.
 - unity100

A sentiment that is repeated by many but also opposed by a handful. Personally, I'm a bit in between. They are not nearly as "evil" as Microsoft were trying to be about a decade ago. Anyway, let's finish with Hognoxious' joke:

Q: What's the difference between the Pope and Steve Jobs?
A: One of them has a load of sexually deviant followers who obey his every word without question. The other wears a funny hat and lives in Rome.