Mike's Stuff

How to get a iPhone 4S to work with a TomTom iPhone car cradle

2012-01-01T14:45:00.000-08:00

I like the iPhone products a lot. I personally find them beautifully designed and highly functional.

Before I got my first iPhone - a 3GS, I had written off podcasts as something that was niche that geeks listened too. I was soon to discover that the podcast world has many mainstream and niche offerings which I became addicted to listening too and the iPhone made podcasts easily accessible, just subscribe, and they turn up on your iPhone after a sync.

The issue was that I wanted a handsfree car kit that could hold the iPhone in the car, charge it up, allow it to be accessible in horizontal (for mapping) and vertical configurations (for selecting music), that complimented the iPhone design and didn't look completely ugly.

To my great surprise I found that there were very few iPhone holders for cars available. The best one was one from TomTom that could be purchased with or without car navigation software.

I ended up picking one up at the Apple Store in Sydney for AUD180 for my iPhone 3GS. It's expensive, but this is due to it being a "smart" bracket that includes a microphone, loudspeaker, GPS, line out, and charger.

I mounted a suction mount plate from a custom L-bracket underneath my aircon section in my Toyota Hilux.

This solution has worked well for the last few years, and recently I was lucky enough to upgrade to a iPhone 4S.

Unfortunately the iPhone 4 and 4S have a slightly different profile to the 3GS and don't quite fit. The 3GS has a curved back and the iPhone holder follows this curve to the base where the connector slots in. The iPhone holder contains a small area that pivots to make it easier to insert the iPhone.

When the iPhone 4 came out TomTom sent me a plastic adaptor which attaches to the front of the iPhone holder near the base. This piece of plastic pivots the connector at the bottom to enable the connector to engage with the iPhone 4 profile better.

However when I tried to use this with the iPhone 4S, it still does not connect to the connector and this is made worse if you have a case around your iPhone. I checked TomTom's website, and they have now discontinued the car cradle and all support for it.

However there is a way to make this work - I had to cut out an area around the base of the case, and I had to add a small

thickness (in the order of 1mm) to the plastic adaptor. In the photo to the right you can see that I attached a ridge of fluffy thickness with an adhesive on one side. From experimentation, too much thickness makes it difficult to insert the iPhone and too little does not allow the connector to engage. So some tuning is required.

With this, the iPhone 4S now works with the TomTom car cradle.

Two Extraordinary Entrepreneurs I Admire Most

2011-10-25T02:37:00.000-07:00

The two entrepreneurs I admire the most are Steve Jobs and Richard Branson. Whilst they have a lot in common, they also have very different leadership styles. When it comes to personal or business goals, neither of them would take no for an answer. They create an audacious vision and do not let facts or "realists" get in the way of achieving it. This is summed up well by the phenomena known as Steve's "reality distortion field". He had a way of convincing people with his charisma and force of personality that anything was possible, even if it did not make much sense at the time. It was common for people on the outside to be confused at why those that were indoctrinated were doing what they were doing. More often than not these visions would lead to disruptive innovation and products.

Neither one of these entrepreneurs made a product for the sake of it, or because a new technology became available. At the very heart of their drive was the customer experience, such as making airline travel better, or making computers that everyone can use. I like that they were not afraid of getting into industries which they knew very little about such as the wide ranging Virgin empire including airlines, music, retail stores, mobile phones, space travel, or in Steve's case movies, music, and books. Entrepreneurs are not limited to channels or markets they are currently delivering into, they will seek out new opportunities across the board, often leveraging existing experience into adjacent fields.

I am impressed by how much they achieved in their early years. In many cases I think to be a successful entrepreneur you need to start young. If you end up in permanent employment in a medium to large company then it is too easy to get comfortable. As you gain experience you become aware of all the risks of what can go wrong in a business and this makes it even harder to leave and start something new. There is freedom in naivety!

In reading Richard Branson's book "Losing my Virginity", I was struck by how Richard had gone from school dropout, to creating a magazine, to creating a record store (to be more accurate, creating a place where people can hang out and enjoy music, a destination rather than a focus on retail sales - sounds a bit like an Apple store) to setting up an international airline. And he did this all before he was 30!

Likewise, Steve had created the Apple II and Macintosh and grown a company from a few people in his garage to several thousand all before he was 30.

Where they differed was in their leadership styles. Steve was an autocratic leader with a product vision that he absolutely believed in and delivered through force of personality. Steve had marvellous design taste - as Bill Gates once said, "I wish I had Steve's taste. In people and product. It's magical." -- from the AllThingsD interview. He was a difficult person to work for, that expected complete commitment, but when he delivered it was magic. Very few people could get away with calling their product "magical and revolutionary" - but when Steve introduced the iPad, he was bang on.

Richard Branson is more of a delegator, surrounding himself with highly competent people. This enabled him to scale and develop many businesses, and focus on the vision and promotion. Richard compares his and Steve's leadership style in this post here.

Interestingly, Steve also admired Richard's style too. Here is a clip from "Here's to the crazy ones" advert from the 80s.

One of Steve's most outstanding contributions is not a product, but a speech that he gave at Stanford. This is short, but well worth watching - Steve at his most articulate, honest, and charismatic. And it makes perfect sense - do what you love.

My first exposure to Apple products was when I was 7 and it was with an Apple IIe. A friend used to have one, and I used to have a Commodore 64 and we used to have endless conversations about which was better. I liked the Apple IIe, with its slots promising expandability, and its fast floppy drives, but ultimately it was too expensive and its star was fading. My friend eventually went on to an IBM and I onto an Amiga. I was not a fan of the original Mac's, as they had too small screens that were monochrome, and a limited range of software whereas the Amiga had much promise with its pre-emptive multitasking and wide range of coprocessors that provided excellent graphics and sound. Years later I worked at Symbian, with Nokia on the first smartphones to enter western markets - the Nokia 9210 and 7650. Even after leaving Symbian, I stayed loyal to Nokia through to 2007. However I could no longer ignore the iPhone with its outstanding ease of use and growing ecosystem of apps. It wasn't the first to market, most of these technologies Symbian and Nokia had 7 years earlier, but the iPhone integrated the user experience and ecosystem in a way that even my mum could use - the technology transcended geeks to be the phone for the rest of us. Since then the halo effect has worked a treat, and I am a happy owner of an iPad and MacBook Pro too.

I was sad to see Steve pass away. We need more leaders like him and Richard Branson that can stand up against the status quo and try new things. There is no doubt that there will be many new fantastic and revolutionary products produced by other talented people, but there is a little less magic in the world now that Steve is gone.

Here are a few of my favourite quotes from Steve Jobs -

“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. … To design something really well, you have to get it. ... It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.”

"Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."

"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

"Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me ... Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me."

"Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

“We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?”

"Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

- Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

The violence of Earthquakes

2011-06-26T01:18:00.000-07:00

Much has been written about Christchurch earthquakes and the massive impact it has had on peoples lives. For those outside New Zealand, many do not understand why these earthquakes, which seem relatively low on the Richter and Moment Magnitude scales, have caused such widespread destruction. Are New Zealand's building standards poor? Was something amiss in a relatively wealthy western nation?

My view is that this is not the case and that the Christchurch earthquakes have been some of the most violent in the world. The Richter and Moment Magnitude scales measure the total energy of an earthquake across the entire fault. Christchurch's earthquakes had relatively short faults, but they occurred directly under the city and surrounding areas, and hence the energy was concentrated.

A different way of looking at ground movement is to look at Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA). This is the ground acceleration in a localised area.

Here is a table reproduced from Wikipedia on the top 10 PGA events:

PGA single direction (max recorded)	PGA vector sum (H1, H2, V) (max recorded)	Mag	Depth	Fatalities	Earthquake
2.7g^[8]	2.99 g^[9]^[10]	9.0	30 km ^[11]	>15000 ^[12]	2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami
2.2g^[13]^[14]		6.3^[13]	5 km	181	February 2011 Christchurch earthquake
2.13g^[13]^[15]		6.3	6 km	1	June 2011 Christchurch earthquake
	4.36g^[16]	6.9/7.2	8 km	12	2008 Iwate-Miyagi Nairiku earthquake
1.7g^[17]		6.7	19 km	57	1994 California earthquake
	1.47g ^[18]	7.1	42km^[19]	4	April 2011 Miyagi earthquake
1.26g^[20]^[21]		7.1	10 km	0	2010 Canterbury earthquake
1.01g^[22]		6.6	10 km	11	2007 Chūetsu offshore earthquake
1.01g^[23]		7.3	8 km	2,415	1999 Jiji earthquake
0.8g		6.8	16 km	6,434	1995 Kobe earthquake
0.78g^[24]		8.8	23 km ^[25]	521	2010 Chile earthquake
0.6g^[26]		6.0	10 km	143	1999 Athens earthquake
0.51g^[27]		6.4		612	2005 Zarand earthquake
0.5g^[17]		7.0	13 km	92,000-316,000	2010 Haiti earthquake

As you can see, out of the top 7 events, 3 of those are from Christchurch including #2 and #3.

Not too surprisingly that there was so much damage when buildings are being accelerated at 2.2g.

The Cloud is here!

2011-06-21T03:08:00.000-07:00

Recently I upgraded my iPad 1 from the latest public release of iOS4 to the developer version of iOS5.
There are a few interesting innovations in iOS 5 that make it compelling, particularly the beginnings of Apple's iCloud implementation. However what really surprised me, is how much I currently operate in the cloud already.

I use a Windows based server with iTunes to sync with my iPhones and iPad. So, before upgrading my iPad, I sync'ed with the server and made a backup of the device. To develop for iOS, you need to use a Mac, and I upgraded my Mac based iTunes so that I could upgrade my iPad 1 to iOS5. On Apple's developer site they state that once you go up to iOS5, there is no going back to iOS4 - nothing ventured, nothing gained I figured. So I went and updated my iPad.

Starting the newly updated iPad, it took me through the new "non-tethered" start up wizard, where it became apparent that it had cleared everything from the internal flash memory. I began to get this sinking feeling as I realised that I had not thought this whole process through. My backup was on my Windows PC which I could no longer sync with. My Mac did not have an iPad backup. And I soon discovered that iOS 5 is not compatible with the latest version of the Windows version of iTunes. Argh!

Slowly I began to reconfigure my device, and surprisingly discovered that things were not quite as bad as I feared.

the iCloud functionality built into the latest versions of iOS4 and iOS5 allowed me to restore most of my applications
I re-set up Mail, Calendar and Contacts to talk to GMail and my work Exchange account, which repopulated these applications
Most commonly used files I store in DropBox. So these were all accessible once I relogged into the DropBox app.
I store all my daily notes, todos, and any knowledge I want to capture in Evernote (an absolutely fantastic tool). Once this client was reinstalled, I managed to access all this data once again.

So in the end, stuff that I lost was:

Photos, music, and videos - these will sync across once iTunes for Windows gets updated. In the meantime I can stream some of these from the server
eWallet - this data was stored locally and I lost most of my passwords. This was the most painful loss.
saved games - I am not a big game player, but my daughters lost their saved games, scores, etc

What surprised me was how much I already rely on the cloud and the benefit it provides as a failsafe medium.

Devman

2011-06-02T03:35:00.000-07:00

DevMan for Symbian Series 60 and Series 80 devices is now end of life.

It gained about 160k users since 2003, however I have now decided to stop supporting it.

If you are interested in the source code to port to another platform, please drop me an email.

Thanks Mike