Chad Things

Shayna and I decided recently that we’re gonna have no alcohol for the month of april. Wha?? I know, i know. I enjoy a delicious Racer 5 beer as much as the next guy, but i like to change things up. Plus i’ve been running alot and maybe this will get me to my next level – so i’m ready for the SF Marathon August 3. Our friends Jason and Monica did it in January – and they felt great. Now its our turn. We still got the last weekend in March to have a brewski (or seven) down in LA. Thats right, going to LA this weekend with Juan (birthday Friday 28th). So untill April .. Bring it.

I just got an iPhone, and its great, but Apple does not allow 3rd party applications out of the box (games coming soon). So what to do? Well, if you want more apps, you must jailbreak your iPhone. Before Feb 2008, it was a bit complicated, but since apple released 1.1.4, its easy as apple pie – here’s what i did:

Following instructions from iPhone Atlas, I changed Settings/General/Auto-Lock=Never, downloaded and ran ziphone app on my mac, doing jailbreak-only (i’m already using the official AT&T carrier). It took less than a minute to reboot back into iPhone and there i saw 2 new apps – Zibri’s Blog and Installer. The Installer app is how you easily install your favorite games, utilities, and other apps. Hurray.

After browsing top 20 apps, I installed these (and you should too, copycat)

1. Sources/Community Sources – do this first, gets list of available apps (packages).
2. System/BSD Subsystem – some other apps need this first, including OpenSSH and NES. If you install this, change password from default “alpine” using openssl. Do not use passwd – you may get stuck in “edit home screen” reboot loop
3. Games/Caissa Chess – better graphics than other chess
4. Games/Chess – not sure if its better than Caissa
5. Games/FiveDice – Yahtzee
6. Games/HuaRongDao – puzzle game, simple yet hard
7. Games/iCave – simple, reminds me of vanguard
8. Games/iSolitaire – you know it
9. Games/Labyrinth – tilt iPhone to guide marble around labyrinth
10. Games/Mahjong – classic chinese game
11. Games/Othello – another classic
12. Games/PuzzleManiak – combo of different games, online scores
13. Games/Sudoku – latest fad
14. Games/Tris – one of many Tetris games
15. Multimedia/CameraPro – like default Camera app, but you can zoom, black and white,
16. Multimedia/MobileScrobbler – last.fm client
17. Multimedia/TuneWiki – play music with this, and it downloads lyrics and advances them to the music
18. Multimedia/iFlickr – upload to .. you guessed it
19. Productivity/WebSearch – shortcut to searching on google, wikipedia, ebay
20. Productivity/Sketches – like the old “paint” .. you can take a pic of your friend, give’m a mustache, then email it.
21. Toys/Flashlight – very simple – get a bright screen to find those keys you dropped in the bar
22. Utilities/iSpit (geeks only) – turn your iPhone to a simple HTTP server
23. System/OpenSSH (geeks only) – lets you wirelessly connect to your iPhone like its a computer (copy/move/delete files, etc).
24. System/Term-vt100 (geeks only) – get your xterm on. if you got login problems, try this vt100 fix.
25. Development/Perl (geeks only) – installs perl 5.8.8-2

You got any cool apps? leave me a comment.

NOTES: More info on jailbreaking from crunchgear, from lifehacker, for iTouch, . If you can’t wait for Apple’s iPhone SDK, there’s already an O’Reilly iPhone Development book to help you write your own application.

ISSUES:

First time i did all this I ran into some issues, had to restore back to 1.1.4 (damn broken passwd). Second time was no issues – so you prolly won’t have any. But here’s notes on what happened to me in case it happens to you:

First was that calling/SMS didn’t work. On the ziphone app i clicked “Help & Info”, then Troubleshooting, and found the following which fixed it.

1. Tap on Settings from the home screen.
2. Choose General
3. Choose Reset (all the way on the bottom)
4. First try “Reset Network Settings” – The phone will reboot. If things still aren’t working, go back and try “Reset All Settings”.

Phone rebooted and now i saw my AT&T and Edge network logos again. Hurray!

The second issue was that the installer could not install anything, which turned out to be a temporary issue. The first time i ran installer, it updated itself (checking sources, refreshing sources, update, restart) .. which is normal. As soon as installer works, the internets say to install Sources/Community Sources, then System/BSD Subsystem, then System/OpenSSH. “Community Sources”, which contains list of things to install (games/utils/etc), installed OK, but i got stalled on BSD with a “Package Download Failed (null)” msg. I did alot of digging, found and did this troubleshooting checklist, but still no luck. Then i figured out I was in a temporary vortex – others noticed as well – and waited till the next morning when I had great success installing many packages.

I finally broke down today and got a 16GB iPhone. I mean, seriously, a geek like me waiting like 9 months to own an iPhone? WTF? Well, not not a big fan of the phone and SMS part – the main reason I bought it is to have a mini web browser internet device with a nice user interface. I’ve always loved the iPhone interface – half my friends have iPhones and i’ve been jealous for a while. I considered waiting for next generation iPhone (3G phone, GPS, etc), but according to appleinsider, it’ll be summer/fall before they come. I just couldn’t wait!!

I bought it at the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. It took about an hour from walking into the store till chadPhone was totally up and running. Breaks down like this – Buy iPhone .. 5-10 mins. Open iPhone, plug into your mac (I brought my macbook pro with me, so i could register it quickly). iTunes notices iPhone, leads you down registration process. I chose the $59/month (450 mins, unlimited data, 200 SMS TXT msgs/month). For $10/month more, you can get 1500 SMS msgs/month, or unlimited SMS for $20/month. I love SMS but i’m pissed that Apple/AT&T are charging that much for SMS when it basically costs them nothing. I much rather use safari/gmail. Anyway, registration ends with giving AT&T your credit card, and done – 10-15mins. So less than half hour my iPhone was registered and i could make outgoing calls. They said up to 6 hours to route incoming calls to my new iPhone, but really it took another 20 mins. Total .. 50 mins.
Already found these 22 tips, what are your favorites? anything to avoid?

Update – Download hundreds of cool games and applications from people besides apple by jailbreaking your iphone.

How much electricity do you use? I mean, how much do all your various gadgets and appliances use? I recently came across this blog on kill-a-watt, where he measures how much power various devices use, like his HDTV, lamp, blow dryer, etc.  Since I’m into saving the planet and I like to geek out – I figured I should investigate.  I now have 3 (buy a new kill-a-watt), I i figure i should do the same.

First off, let’s ballpark how much power we use. PG&E (electric company for SF) shows how much power (Kilowatt/hours) is used per day, on average, with every monthly bill. Our “Kwh per day” in september was 7.5, in December it was 18.9 (bad electric heating). And it comes out to about 12 cents per Kwh, so thats about $1 to $3 per day in electricity. As a side note, half of that money goes to getting the power to your house (transmission and distribution) – makes locally installed solar panels seem quite attractive. To the numbers …
Now here’s some standard stuff, in kwh used, averaged over (x) number of hours.

• 0.95 kwh – 1999 Toaster Oven, Toasting, $80
• 0.68 kwh – Holmes 1500W Heater Fan, highest setting
• 0.27 kwh – 300W Halogen lamp
• 0.10 kwh – 2007 40″ Sony Bravia HDTV
• 0.075 kwh – 75-watt incandescent bulb
• 0.020 kwh – 23-watt CFL bulb
• 0.035 kwh – 2007 Refrigerator, $500 new
• 0.005 kwh – 2001 Cambridge Soundworks Model Twelve Portable Stereo

Here’s some Geek stuff

• 0.073 kwh – 2001 Windows PC
• 0.054 kwh – 2007 LCD 24″ monitor, Samsung 245T
• 0.046 kwh – 2005 Buffalo Terastation 1TB
• 0.024 kwh – 2006 15″ macbook pro

“Understanding Green Business” was my goal last fall. As i mentioned in Green Abort, it was a project that involved (a) me learning about green, and (b) creating a little web site to share what i learned. As I said, I aborted it, because I realized I’m just too new to the space to say something significant in a website. And being the efficient perfectionist I am, I don’t want to waste time doing what others have already. However, there a few things I learned which I will share with you now.

One of the first things i researched was schools and getting a Green MBA. I realized MBA programs fall in 2 categories – these new green-to-the-core schools, and those from standard schools that integrate “social and environmental stewardship”. For the first, there’s basically 3 – Presidio MBA, Bainbridge MBA, Dominican University of California MBA. These schools are fairly new, so its hard to track how good they are in the traditional sense (practical business knowledge), but they do have a green and sustainability focus built into every class. This is in contrast to the second group of MBA programs, which generally have just a few classes in things like sustainability and green business. Most MBA programs reside in this second group. Instead of listing these (I will say Stanford is number one), I will bow to Beyond Grey Pinstripes ‘Top 100 (way awesome). They do a more thorough job then I could ever do, a must read if you are considering a MBA. After I bit of uncertainty on whether i should goto MBA, I decided to wait.

Around this point I came to differentiate between the Green Movement and Green Business. I volunteered at the Green Festival in San Francisco (November 10, 2007) where I was surrounded by the Green Movement. I’ll define the Green Movement as more grass roots and consumer driven – people buying because “it is green” – organic and/or sustainably produced goods (food, coffee, hybrid cars, etc). Green Business is more business first, green second – about operating a business in a green way, applying standard business practices but always aware of the green impact. These consumers or clients may not even know about the green-ness. For example, a restaurant may recycle their water and buy organic, but you may just go there cuz the food tastes good. These groups do overlap in some areas, but not always. What’s important is that Green Businesses should be able to be competitive with non-green businesses, preferably better in ways besides just “Being Green.” Here I concluded I’m interested in only green business. Maybe I *should* get a green MBA?

The rest of what I learned, and I am still learning, is that there are tons of green sites out there – news/blogs, portals, social networking, business related, etc. I could try to categorize them, but being the thorough guy I am, I wouldn’t want to list a few guys and miss an important one. That said, I will say that all people interested in green business should check out these

• Cleantech Network
• Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is an investment group that has invested $200 million on greentech since 1999
• Co-op America does greenfestivals.org
• Eco Labeling directory of logos that “identifies a product or company that has met an environmentally preferable standard”
• SF Bay Area Green Business Program “verifies that businesses meet higher standards of environmental performance. .. Over 1,000 businesses and public agencies have been certified since 1997.”
• Natural Resources Defense Council (protects the environment using lawyers)

That’s it. If you’re really bored, you can check out the unfinished green business site

This here is an update on one of my winter projects – “Understanding Green Business”. In short, its an attempt to by me to paint a picture of the current green landscape fueled by my interest in a green career. My plan was to put together a mini website with information I’ve learned over the last few months about green mba’s, non-profits, events, and other things. However, I realize that I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg and am definitely not qualified to paint any kind of accurate picture. Instead, i will summarize what i’ve learned in my green business blog post. This post i’m going to give a little more on why i’m aborting my original plan.

First I’ll go into a little background. In 2006 I quit my job in order to try new things, travel, spend time with family, and possibly switch careers. In 2007 I spent 6 months traveling around the world, returning to San Francisco in August, with a desire to make a difference. My trip reinforced that the world still needs alot of work, and i’m educated and living in a wealthy part of the world (read: lots of resources), why not apply myself to something that makes a difference?

Green Business seemed like a logical choice – its growing in popularity and lines up with some of my values like sustainability, social equity, and harmony with our environment. But what does it mean to be green? Do I need a degree? what jobs are out there? what can i do to help? What types of people, organizations, and events are in this space? These are not easy questions, and at this point i’ve come to realize that it is not a good time for me to jump into that. When it comes to careers, financials, and my life long-term .. I’m quite conservative. It’s totally different when it comes to fun, but i digress. Basically I concluded it’s better for me to gradually try new things – first get a job where my experience and skills help, learn new skillz, then slowly green myself.

On that note .. I am now considering jobs. Let the games begin.