nuxx.net blog

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been contemplating an iPhone 3G as a replacement for my aging (and failing) Nokia 6600. Today I went by the Apple store at the local outdoor mall^†, Partridge Creek to spend some time playing with one. Unfortunately, I crashed it hard once and made the UI slow horribly another time. I also ran into one other potentially show stopping bug.

First, 3G was a lot slower than local wireless. When using 802.11 things zipped along nicely, but 3G was still wholly acceptable on both web pages and maps. I think it’d be just fine for mobile use.

I then wanted to try to see how it renders my personal site, including my photo gallery, so I loaded up a few things. Everything worked great, except for when I’d try and visit a full size image in the gallery, then the image wouldn’t display. For example, take this page. It worked great, except that large image of the P3 case just simply wouldn’t display.

Thinking that maybe the iPhone had problems with large images I then browsed to http://nuxx.net/images and tried to view this image. While downloading and rendering it (via 802.11) the phone got really slow, the volume buttons and ringer switch stopped responding, and then phone laggedly noticed that I’d turned it sideways. The whole phone was very slow, and after four or five minutes of being nearly unresponsive it gave up. The phone was displaying partially downloaded image and half-heartedly rotated screen (it must have noticed that I’d been moving the phone around) when it went blank and rebooted, displaying the screen shown above.

After the phone rebooted I made a point of disabling 3G, thinking that maybe the phone was somehow failing over to it and just let it go with 802.11. (This is done by turning on airplane mode, then turning WiFi on.)

The image was then able to load and display, although it took quite a bit of time. I can’t help but think that the iPhone just isn’t set up to deal with / display images of this size. With how popular digital photography and things like Flickr in particular are, I’d hope that Apple would have found a way to deal with it. Wanting to break things further I loaded up this 9.7MB JPEG panorama of a part of the USAF Museum at Wright-Patterson. This too caused the iPhone 3G to lag horribly and the UI to become unresponsive, but eventually (after maybe four minutes) it acquired the image and displayed it. This time the phone didn’t crash.

While I can understand that a mobile device might not be able to handle images of this size, I think there should be something in place to ensure that the end user experience doesn’t turn to crap. Also, I really don’t like how the image in my gallery silently failed to display.

^† Speaking of outdoor malls in Michigan, check out the map of Twelve Mile Crossing at Fountain Walk, aka The Fountain walk, in Novi. See all the empty space? I don’t know what developer could possibly think that an outdoor mall in a state with Michigan’s drawn out, harsh winter and frequently rainy summers is a good idea.

This is more reference to myself, but others may find it useful. Here are the measured diameters of the three models of bike tires which I own:

· Continental Travel Contact (26″ x 1.75″ / Wire Bead) @ ~55psi: 2027mm
· Specialized The Captain Control (26″ x 2″ / Aramid Bead) @ ~40psi: 2110mm
· Specialized Fast Trak LK (26″ x 2″ / Wire Bead) @ ~45psi: 2104mm

In case you are wondering why I’d measure this, these numbers are needed in order to calibrate a bike computer so that it may be reasonably accurate in measuring speed and distance.

The measurement was taken by rolling the tire (fitted to the wheel and inflated as listed) along the basement floor and measuring with a metric tape measure. Yes, I know the diameter will vary some as the tire is slightly flattened while rolling, but finding that variance will require some long distance straight line riding with a GPS and then a comparison. I may do that later on the smooth tires (Travel Contact), but not on the knobbies.

Last night after Danielle and I met up with replika at Dragonmead we swung by IPM for a couple hours. While there I found out that one of the folks there named Dave, who I’d met previously, runs Rouge Roastery doing coffee. There was a bit of talking about coffee, and I ended up being given a few servings worth of Big Dave’s Bag of Angry Beans and Sumatra Gayo Mountain Organic Beans.

I used my trusty Aerobie AeroPress to make up a cup of the Angry Beans this morning. The Rouge Roastery site describes this flavored blend as follows:

…spicy beans from South America and Southeast Asia, mixed with a hint of cayenne pepper. It’s a nice mixture of smooth spice in the cup, but finishing with a kick.

As can be seen above there is definitely chili in it, as it settled to the center / bottom of the pile of grounds while using the AeroPress.

Perhaps it’s just be, but I don’t really think of coffee + spice as “flavored”, but I guess it’s not pure coffee and has things added for flavor, so it is. Maybe I’m just more familiar with coffees called “flavored” as having lots and lots of odd, sickly half-flavors (hazelnut, vanilla, etc) added ruining any actual coffee taste.

Despite the description on Rouge Roastery’s site indicating that the Angry Beans are “Particularly good with creme and sugar - hot and sweet. Just like Big Dave himself.” I first tried it black.

This coffee seems to start out nicely smooth before the cayenne starts to bite. After swallowing the burn moves down the throat but isn’t too much. The coffee part of the flavor is fairly smooth, but not as smooth as some of the oilier coffees I’ve had. If you are someone who likes Vosges’ Oaxaca or Red Fire candy (chocolate) bars and you also like coffee you’d probably like this.

After finishing half the pint glass of coffee I followed this suggestion and tried it with just half and half, then also with sugar. The dairy alone definitely added something to the coffee, but it really is best with sugar in it as well.

I’m going to have a hard time knowing exactly how to drink this coffee because it seems that there’s a bunch of different ways that I enjoy it. As I said, I normally drink coffee black, but for the Angry Beans I may even end up having a whole serving with both dairy and sugar, which would be a first for me.

All said, this is a great coffee. After this sample is gone I’m going to have to secure some more of it. The Sumatra Gayo Mountain will probably be tried this afternoon or maybe just later in the week. I have high hopes for it as well.