It’s weird to watch him grow up so fast. This week we discovered that he loves peaches. Loves them. Despite the faces he makes sometimes when gnawing on them. We’ve been peeling the skin off little slices and sticking them into a mesh-bag like pacifier, and he goes to town. We had tried banana in the past. He didn’t dislike them, but he never got into it either. The peaches he can’t keep out of his mouth. After we finish eating our dinner, we give him a slice or two to let him chew on. Tonight, for the first time, he swallowed some and didn’t spit it back out a few seconds later. So, I think he’s finally had some of his first solid food – though we’ve been encouraging him for nearly two weeks now. Here’s his angry face:

The other big development is that he’s trying really really really hard to breakdance crawl. Laying on his belly, he’ll get up on his arms, pushing himself really high up, and then drop himself onto his face and kick his legs. It’s almost like he’s learning to clutch, and hasn’t quite gotten out the terrifying-your-parents-in-the-parking-lot phase yet. Once he’s on his face and kicking, though, it’s really cute. He gets crazy, rocking his body all around, and it looks so much like those videos of kids from the 80’s busting a move. We of course, can’t stop laughing.

In all of this we’ve noticed that he’s starting to become very independent. That’s not really the right word for it, but it’s the best I can think of. If we’re trying to feed him a slice of peach, he wants nothing to do with it if we’re holding it or trying to put it in his hand. He turns his head away until we’ve put it down on the tray in front of him, and allow him to pick it up, and try to eat it. Of course, half the time, he drops it on the floor (which Greta loves), but he’s got to be the one doing it. If you try to give him a toy, often he won’t gnaw on it unless it’s in his hand, under his direction. Thankfully he will still take toys handed to him, but it’s going to be tough if he decides he needs to pick everything up as well.

I often wonder where I had been standing when I took a picture, and what was around me. I’m getting close to 40,000 images in my Aperture library, and so many locations are now lost in the hazy reaches of my long term memory. There’s a solution to this problem – geotagging – embedding location data in the EXIF tags of photos, and the good news is that it’s getting more and more popular these days. So popular that Nikon has released a dedicated GPS tracking device that looks pretty slick and interfaces directly to the newer DSLRs. The bad news is, that like all of Nikon’s branded accessories, they want an outrageous price for it: MSRP $249.99

The good news is if you’re willing to do a little extra work, and you have an iPhone 3G, you have already spent all the money required. First get a copy of EveryTrail for your iPhone, and head over to EveryTrail and setup an account. Load up the application, associate your account and do a test trip to make sure everything works as expected. Once the trip is saved and uploaded to the EveryTrail server, you’ll get an email with a link to the trip on a google-maps mashup. At the bottom of the screen is a “Download GPX” option. This is the GPS data in an XML feed, suitable for use in the last step.

Once you know it works, and you are comfortable with the app’s interface, get ready for your photo tour. Make sure that the time in your camera matches the time on your iPhone. The iPhone can set it’s time automatically so you don’t have to do this before you leave your house. In the field, launch the app, start recording location data, and use the lock button within the EveryTrail app. (This keeps your phone from going to sleep and losing track of where you are.) Take as many pictures as your battery and memory card(s) will allow, unlock EveryTrail, and go home. On the drive back, go ahead and upload the saved GPS data to the EveryTrail service.

You’ll need another freeware application for the last step – GPSPhotoLinker – and the GPX file you can download from your saved trip on EveryTrail. Simply plug your camera into your Mac, and it should show up as a USB drive. Load those pictures into GPSPhotoLinker (with the “Load Photo” button on the right), as well as the GPX file (with the “Load Tracks” button on the left), go into Auto mode, and select “Batch Save Photos”. It will grind away for a few minutes, and embed GPS data into the files on the memory card.

Now, when those images are brought into Aperture or iPhoto, they will have the location information stored within. When you upload them to flickr, FaceBook, or Picassa, etc, people will be able to see where they were taken.

Note: This also works with the 3GS, but not so much with the original iPhone or the iPod Touches. You really need the GPS in this case – the SkyHook wireless location service just won’t cut it for what we’re trying to do. And yes, I’ve been muling over this post for awhile, which is apparent if you look at the post ID for this post (868) vs the previous post (1014).

I write tasty words. Sometimes I have to eat them. The next Halo game is coming out. Looks like I’m going to figure out a way to work some console gaming into my daily routine, starting in October sometime, as well as making sure the TV still works – and maybe try to hook up some proper sound.

I have SSH opened on an external port to make my home network available to me when I am at work or on the road. Instead of paying my ISP extra $$$ every month for a static address and a DNS entry, I use DynDNS to keep a DNS entry pointed at my cable modem’s external IP address. I wrote an SMF service to manage ddclient on myOpenSolaris boxes to ping DynDNS whenever my address changes.

I’m using ddclient to keep everything up to date. Here are the non-comment lines in my /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf file:

`I have SSH opened on an external port to make my home network available to me when I am at work or on the road. Instead of paying my ISP extra $$$ every month for a static address and a DNS entry, I use DynDNS to keep a DNS entry pointed at my cable modem's external IP address. I wrote an SMF service to manageddclient` on myOpenSolaris boxes to ping DynDNS whenever my address changes.

I’m using ddclient to keep everything up to date. Here are the non-comment lines in my /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf file:

``

Apple released a new Airport Extreme earlier this year, with a dual band antenna. This may not sound all that special, but it allows the unit to broadcast an 802.11n network and an 802.11g network with the same SSID (network name) and run each network at full speed. Typically when you run a mixed-mode network, and a slower device joins, the whole network slows down to accommodate it.

As my iPhone only runs on 802.11g, I had given up on running my 802.11n network at full speed – until I read a paper written by a guy trying to solve this very problem. Sadly, I can’t find a link to it now. In short, you simply run two devices: one with an 802.11n network and one with an 802.11g network. You make sure the frequency’s (2.4 ghz and 5ghz) don’t overlap, assign the same SSIDs and passwords, and you’re in business. One is set to run a DHCP server, and the other is set to bridge the wired network. One is plugged into the other, and then from the end user’s point of view, it’s the same network. Since you are bridging one network to the other, from the network it’s a transparent shift as well.

It’s an elegant solution, other than the fact that you can’t do range extension (WDS) with the Airport’s anymore. I realized that we don’t need the range extension I had setup with our Airport Express, as this house isn’t that big, and I never bothered to use the XBox, which would benefit from using the bridged network mode of the Airport Express. Further, I really wanted the backups run over the wireless network to be faster and video playback to be smoother, and I wanted to get my iPhone on wireless at home. 10 or 15 minutes of fiddling around until I got all the settings the way I wanted them, and I was done. It would have been a lot faster if I didn’t have to reboot the devices every time I made a configuration change.

Well, the stone in them, more specifically. Yesterday, just before I left work I had a sharp pain in my side – it left like I had pulled a muscle or something. I thought nothing of it, and went downstairs to meet Charlotte. That wasn’t fun at all. I got outside, and leaned against the building for a few minutes, and it didn’t hurt quite as bad. Once Charlotte got there to pick me up, the pain was back. A few minutes into the car trip, and I was in agony. I’ve only ever hurt worse once before, when I had a migraine at UNCA that was so bad I lost big chunks of my vision to the pain.

Charlotte turned around, and took me to the Emergency Room. Got there about 5:30, was admitted into triage at 5:45. Didn’t actually go into a room until 6:15-ish. They gave me some anti-nausea medicine and some painkiller, and I got to talk to a doctor about what was wrong. He asked a bunch of questions, and then poked at my side and stomach. It didn’t hurt all that much when he was poking, but shortly after he left the pain came back, incredibly bad. This is when they gave me the narcotics.

After a while, I was wheeled into another room, and got a CAT scan. They told me it was either a kidney stone or my appendix, and the CAT scan would be able to help tell which. Pretty soon, they told me it was kidney stones, and there wasn’t much they could do, other than prescribe me painkillers.

We left the hospital, went to a 24-hour pharmacy CVS, and got the prescriptions. We finally got home at 11:15 last night, having not yet eaten, and with a 6 month old child who was pretty angry from being kept up all night.

This morning we decided not to get on the plane to Florida to see my grandfather. I’m going to be too drugged up to be much help or conversation. Combine that with a grumpy 6 month old who is teething and shrieking and a wife who hates to fly… yeah. We’re staying put. Now that this is written, I’m going to pass the boy off and take some more painkillers.

The Wife is out of town for a few days, visiting friends, and I’m here, working. I had thought, with the house to myself, I’d throw some movies into our upscaling DVD player and watch them on the television. Today I watched parts of 4 movies I’d seen before, and all of a suprisingly good sci-fi film called “Primer“. None of them, of course, on the television itself. I found myself resisting the urge to go into the living room, because watching the movies on my computer is easier, faster, and when I need a break, I can command-tab over to Safari or a number of other useful distracting applications.

This set me to thinking – will my son ever watch movies or television shows on the actual television? Probably not. Computer monitors are getting bigger and better every year, and while they are not the size of HDTV’s, they are close. Further, video is a very passive broadcast device, and I think my son’s generation will never get into it the way mine did. Sure, they’ll watch television programming, and movies, and whatever else, but it will be via Hulu, NetFlix’s pretty cool Watch Instantly and YouTube. They will probably also surf the ‘net, play video games, and chat with their friends, while they are consuming broadcast media. They will happily context-switch away when the forced advertisement comes, and then tune back in once their interest is caught again.

The times, they are a changin’. TiVo has proven this time and again. Why would you want to watch something when you can’t control what, when and where you watch it? Why do you really need to be home at 4:30 PM to catch your favorite bit of entertainment? For my generation, when we were growing up there never was an option, other than laughably trying to set the VCR’s timer to get the show for you. With broadband internet access getting faster every year and hard drive sizes tracking Moore’s Law closely, media is becoming more and more unchained from the television and more adapted to the user’s particular whim of consumption. It’s a (now classic) question of atoms versus bits – and Nicholas Negroponte’s ‘Being Digital’ is still as good a read as it was when it was released, 13 years ago.

Not that this doesn’t scare the bejeesus out of the broadcast industry and government run media everywhere. Just look at the Boxee/Hulu integration mess from earlier this year. In a nutshell, people are running Hulu Desktop out to their televisions, via set-top boxes running free OS’s. The content producers gave Hulu a very specific license – that doesn’t cover ‘televisions’ as a playback device. Boxee tried to get it worked out, but in the end Boxee lost, the customer lost, and in doing so, the content producers lost. They seem to have lost touch with the fact that the people who are consuming Boxee represent the next wave of consumer spending – and pissing them off makes for a wary purchasing public. Now, instead of watching through Hulu, they are back to their BitTorrent clients, downloading the shows to watch later. This is bad in a few senses, outside the legal aspect – once downloaded, these shows will never be purchased by these consumers.

It’s the music industry versus Napster all over again – and we can see how well this is going for the music industry. Consumers have realized that they don’t need Big Content, and Big Content doesn’t yet realize how badly they need consumers. For many years, the only way the media was distributed was in channels that were strictly controlled, monitored and monetized. Those channels are now dying – digital downloads are set to pass CD sales in $/year this year or next. For $1/month, you can get customized radio through your web browser that is tailored to your listening needs. Who needs Clear Channel in this world?

UPDATE: iTunes Music Store now has %25 of the US music market