Today I connected the iPhone to the Mac Mini for the first time.  I had to update iTunes, but that was relatively painless, other than dealing with having forgotten my login password on the Mac (necessary for software updates).

Once iTunes was updated, I plugged in the iPhone.  I told iTunes that I do NOT want to automatically sync the iPhone.  I went to the Applications tab, and clicked that I wanted to sync all applications.

Apple’s idea of what “Sync” means is clearly completely different than mine.  Rather than copying the applications I’d purchased on the phone over to the Mac for safekeeping, it started deleting them, starting with Super Monkey Ball!  As nearly as I can tell, Apple’s idea of “Sync” is to try to make the phone contain ONLY the content that is on the Mac.

I found in a fairly non-obvious place an option to “Back Up” the iPhone to the Mac, so I tried that.  It took a while, and when it was done, it told me

Some of the purchased items on the iPhone ‘Eric Smith’s iPhone”, including the item “Enigmo” could not be transferred to your iTunes library because you are not authorized to play them on this computer.

What a crock!  I’m not trying to run them on the Mac, I just need to save a backup!

It occurred to me that I might have better results if I downloaded applications in iTunes rather than on the phone itself, and they sync them over to the phone.  I downloaded a free application “Tris”.  Then I went to the “Applications” tab, and told it to sync “Selected applications” and checked “Tris”, rather than “All Applications”.  It immediately deleted my rotary dialer application, and I stopped the sync before it could delete more.  Apparently syncing “Selected applications” means “delete any other applications you haven’t selected.”  Now I had “Tris” on the Mac with no apparent way to get it into the iPhone without losing more of the applications already on the phone.

I finally tried the backup again and noticed in the fine print that I could “Authorize” the Mac.  Once I did that, the backup worked, and now it looks like I can sync my remaining applications without them getting deleted.  Apparently if I really want Super Monkey Ball and the Rotary Dialer, I’ll have to buy them again.

I thought Apple products were supposed to be easy to use, but this is about as counter-intuitive as it gets.

Only after I got home did I discover that Apple overcharged me $16.50. The receipt shows the price of the phone as $299.00 and the sales tax rate as 8.25%, but the amount of sales tax charged was actually $41.17, for a total charge to my credit card of $340.17. The correct amount of sales tax at 8.25% is obviously $24.67, and should have resulted in a total charge of $323.67.

In the store, I didn’t really see what they were charging me. They had me sign for the credit card transaction using a stylus on a handheld point-of-sale terminal, and it might have shown the amount on the LCD, but it was very hard to read, so I (foolishly) assumed that they were competent and honest.

I wonder how many people have fallen victim to this without noticing. Are they actually remitting the full amount of tax they’ve charged to the state of California, or are they pocketing the difference?

Update: As Dan pointed out in a comment, this actually is legal in California.  If a cell phone is sold at a discount, it has to be taxed at full price: State Board of Equalization Publication 120. I think Apple should have indicated on the receipt that the tax was based on a phone price of $499.

I’m not willing to pay today for the privilege of waiting two weeks for the phone to arrive.

Given the feeding frenzy that occurred at the introduction of the original iPhone, I’m surprised that Apple didn’t do a better job of stocking the stores this time around. Perhaps they think that the limited supply will add to the hype and eventually generate more sales. Or perhaps they simply don’t believe that a customer that wants to buy a phone today might choose a different brand. Certainly the AT&T salespeople were quick to recommend other phones that they actually have in stock.

I ordered the PAS410B-5V and it arrived yesterday. I was hoping it would awaken me this morning, but I woke up well before its alarm went off, so I don’t yet know whether it will be satisfactory. For the last year or so I’ve gotten out of the habit of wearing a watch, and I never used to wear one to bed, so it will take some getting used to.

The watch displays the phase of the moon, sunrise and sunset times (rounded to the nearest five minutes), and the times of the moon’s upper, lower, east, and west transits. You have to enter your longitude, latitude, and GMT offset (time zone) for that to work. In addition to displaying that information for the current date, you can have it display them for any date from 2000 through 2039. It has five separate alarms, each of which can be set to occur every day, or on a specific day of the week. It also has a stopwatch, and allows storage of up to 40 “time memos”. It is rated water resistant to 100 meters.

The backlight can be activated by pressing a button, or can optionally be configured to activate automatically when the watch is moved into a viewing angle.

As far as I can tell from the manual, the only difference between the fishing and hunting is whether the display has fish or pawprint icons.

In the old days, back when there was just The Phone Company, they maintained better than five nine’s reliability.  Nothing would cause a widespread outage, and local outages didn’t last for more than a few hours except in natural disasters.  Post-divestiture, they’ve neglected to maintain and expand the infrastructure in such a way as to avoid single points of failure that can take down large service areas for extended periods.

Oh well.  At least when they’re not delivering the world, they’re not delivering it to the NSA.

The contents of the ebook seem OK, other than that it doesn’t include the 27th Amendment. But the info page was very interesting:

(click photo for larger version; red highlighting and photo copyright notice added)

They categorized the Constitution as fiction!  I guess that’s not too surprising, as that’s how the current U.S. administration views it.

Unfortunately I did not have time to get a photo or record the license plate, nor have I seen the car again. It’s a neat hack, and I’d like to meet the person that created it.

Update, May 28:

Several people have pointed out to me that it was a Geo Metro that was actually featured in a brief article in Make magazine Volume 09, pp. 153-154. It was created by Sunny Armas and Paul LeDuc.

I’ve had a PowerShot G2 for about five years now, and it’s about time to replace it.  I’d like to get a digital SLR like the Canon Digital Rebel XTi for digital photomicrography of integrated circuits, but for my initial experiments a friend has offered to lend me his Nikon.

For general daily use, though, I don’t want to carry around a digital SLR.  I like the convenience of the LCD viewfinder on non-SLR digital cameras.  I’m tempted by the PowerShot SD900.

Seen in Boing Boing post by Cory Doctorow, referring to student reactions to the Neuros OSD set-top box:

I’ve had a couple of these circulating in my class at USC this semester and some of the students have had a complete nerdgasm over them

The earliest occurence Google finds on Usenet was in a sig on 9 May 1998. The earliest usage in the body of a Usenet post was 11 August 2004, having to do with Lord of the Rings action figures.

Although I think the Neuros OSD is a neat gadget, it will take more than that to give me a nerdgasm. Maybe when they have an HDTV version…

Charles H. Duell, commissioner of patents in 1899, is apparently misquoted as having said that “everything that could be invented has been invented.” However, maybe everything that should be invented already has been.