Waiting is good for you

Dear future self,  Please don't melt down if your Nexus S phone freaks out with a dead battery and refuses to charge. If this happens, please remove the battery, wait 5 minutes, and put the battery back in.  It will then decide all on its own to recharge just like to uber cool phone that you've enjoyed so much. kthxbai, me. 

I recently went a while without charging my Nexus S (a week as a juror on a really disturbing jury case, but i'll save that for another time). My phone's battery was very low. When I turned it on, it let me unlock it, then it threw all of its toys out of the pram, and pitched a fit. The screen went completely black, and no combination of plugging it in to the USB port or to its wall charger would convince it to charge. I even popped the battery out and put it back in. Nuthin. Finally in an act of desperation, I removed the battery, and let it sit, sans battery, for 5 minutes. I put the battery back in, and Shazam! It happily started charging.

So sometimes waiting does help. Now if I could just spin that into procrastinating being good, i'd be set!

UPDATE: Another phone that I have started refusing to charge, so I plugged it into the wall charger, and also read that you have to wait for it to reach 10% charge b4 it will boot. See? Another indication that waiting is good.

Google MyMaps... So close, and yet so far.

We're taking a trip overseas this year, and I'm in full planning nerd mode. I won't have cell phone or 3G service where we'll be going, so I'm trying to look at ways to utilize a mobile device for helping with directions and routes when we will only have occassional wifi access.

I've been tinkering with Maps 5.0 on Android, especially its caching functionality. The caching seems to work pretty well. I think if I spend some time roaming around in google maps on the device with wifi access, it will work well when I dont have wifi.

The problem is in geotagging and routing. While I'm offline wandering around a city, I won't be able to look up the place we're headed to, or get routing information to guide me to the location. So I need some system of locally stored/cached items that have longitude/latitude data with them, and it would be sweet loveliness if I could also have a locally stored/cached routes for our plan for the day.

I was so close with built in Google Maps features of MyMaps for routes and "starred places" for individual locations.

I am able to 'star' something on a map, and Google Maps will sometimes sort of cache my list of starred places (but not reliably caching)... But... While I search for the item by the English name, in my "Starred places" list, they tend to be listed in kanji (we're going to Japan). I can't find a way to rename a spot I have starred. That's going to really limit my ability to use this feature.

MyMaps would be perfect for planning siteseeing, except it doesn't cache at all.

i'm almost tempted to build a PhoneGap app that pulls POIs from locally stored stuff, and then invokes Maps with it. Mmmm... would I still be able to have fully functional Maps 5.0 caching? Is there a way to plop a route on it? Before I launch off on that, I'll probably poke around and see if anyone else has already coded up something.

The power of creation.....errr.... Programming

I recently took phonegap for a spin around the block. I've found that I learn best by flinging myself at something and doing/creating/making something. Phonegap is pretty cool. It creates platform independent hybrid apps for mobile devices. It basically uses JavaScript as its programming language, and provides APIs for using all the sensors on your device. That means you can use whatever JavaScript libraries you want, and you can compile your app for android, iphone, and blackberry.

One of my pain points in developing augmented reality apps has been that getting camera access meant developing a native app, which in turn meant porting waz painful. Granted, I think for vision based AR, a true native app is still the way to go because you usually need to do some crunching on images that you grab from the camera. But once video support is added to phonegap, things get really interesting for location based AR.

Anyway, I created a simple phonegap app that grabbed a picture from my camera, displayed it in the app, and then used jquery to push it to my waiting php script on my server. I learned a lot from it, and was struck by one thing. I realized that in the space of an afternoon that I had sort of implemented a rough cut version of what my Eyefi setup does. My Eyefi pushes images from my camera to my NAS, and the phonegap app does a similar thing, using all open source. Open source is so cool that way. It's like no matter what I need, there is always a waiting set of open source power tools for the task.