I am currently writing this post lying down in bed. As I usually do each night, I'm reading a book from the Amazon Kindle app on my iPhone. One thing that many iPhone users will agree on is the annoying way the accelerometer works when you're lying down. For instance if you lie on your side, it's impossible to keep Safari in portrait mode. The Kindle app made a super simple and elegant feature to solve this, the lock icon. If you click it, it locks the app into whatever mode you're currently on. Click it again to unlock and the accelerometer behaves as usual. The thing I like is that the icon disappears after a couple of seconds so you're never bothered with a persistent button. I hope Apple decides to incorporate this into their native apps like Mail and Safari.

There's been a lot of chatter re: the iPhone leak and the raiding of certain "journalist's" homes. I won't rehash here so feel free to read up on the current situation.

I feel bad for Jason Chen and his wife for having their door kicked in. But I most definitely don't think it's unjustified. What should he have expected when he paid $5K for a stolen phone? I guess what pisses me off the most is how some people can't seem to understand that freedom of the press and crimes committed by journalists are two separate things. He's not getting his door kicked in because he leaked the next iPhone but because he PURCHASED STOLEN PROPERTY. If he had found the iPhone himself or if the person who found it gave it to Gizmodo to do their story, I'd have no issue. The fact that Gizmodo was willing to break the law to get the scoop on a story pretty much moves them out of legitimate journalism to tabloid fare for me. Michael Arrington writes a pretty reasonable post of how he would handle the situation - one I agree with in terms of the bounds of responsible, professional journalism. Unfortunately, the way the world works there is always an incentive to push and break the boundaries of the law in the name of "journalism". We as readers are just as responsible. How many outraged people did NOT go to Gizmodo to see the leaked iPhone photos/video?

In the end, I hope Jason Chen doesn't go to jail or face any type of punishment. He was only doing what the bosses at Gawker expected and asked of him. As for the guy who sold them the phone.........

So my car was broken into on Friday and my Macbook was stolen.  This isn’t a post to discuss that incident.  What happened has happened and in honor of the fast approaching lunar new year, I’ve decided to be more Zen – Possessions Are Fleeting.  This is more about the events after the theft. 

I did the usual things like filing a police report, getting my window fixed, and cleaning up the car.  Next, I needed to get my digital life back on track.  First, if I had actually used Time Machine like I was supposed to, the backup process would have been super simple.  That was strike one.  I use Mozy to backup my work files so those were easy to retrieve.  Since we migrated to Google Apps earlier this year, all of my email was stored on their servers so getting access to that was easy.  What was not easy to get back were my personal files – mainly music and photos.  Luckily, I sync those items with my iPhone so technically I have a copy of those on the phone.  The difficult part is actually getting them off the phone and onto my spare laptop.  Every time I try to sync with iTunes, it tells me that it’s going to wipe all these items off my phone and replace it with the items on the laptop (which at this point is nothing).  I’ve got a Genius Bar appointment tomorrow to try to figure out how I’ll be able to have my photos and music somewhere other than my phone.

So the morale of the story is back-up your computers.  Don’t rely on copying files periodically from your laptop or desktop to an external drive.  That’s a very ineffective way of doing things.  If you have a Mac, use Time Machine.  Have it set to backup at least every 24 hours.  If you have a PC, use Mozy.  It’s free for the first 2GB and only $5 a month for unlimited storage - use this link and promo code "FEBRUARY" for a 10% discount!  $5 people.  That’s less than two lattes or one lunch out or half a movie every month.  The point is it’s not much and well worth it.

TechCrunch posted an article and the video below about a concept Google Tablet OS based on Chrome. My reaction? Eh...

To be honest, I haven't been very impressed with any of the products that Google has released besides the dominating trifecta of Search, Maps, and GMail. Pretty much every other product that Google has released is pretty ho-hum. I'm not counting services that Google has bought like YouTube, Picasa, Blogger, GrandCentral (Google Voice) etc. which are great products. To name a few in no particular order:

* Orkut
* Android
* Google Shopping
* Google Checkout
* Google Finance

The telling one here is Android. I have used an Android phone (not the new Nexus One, but the Droid) and found it to be supremely disappointing versus the iPhone. Supposedly, the Nexus One is supposed to be better but from all the online demos I've seen of the Nexus One, it's incrementally better than the Droid but not by leaps and bounds. Unlike Microsoft, I don't see Apple getting complacent about their product development and Google has a lot of ground to make up.