Kenny’s Website

I have had several friends and family asking me to post pictures of my Mexico trip. Man - what can I say? I just dropped the ball. I’ll figure out which ones are best and post them. If I ever get some free time, I need to make a photo gallery online, or start uploading to Flickr… Summer is almost here and I’m going to try to post updates as we do things. Camila will be coming in a few weeks and we are all looking forward to that. Shaun and Erika will be going to Mexico too with the church. We’ve not even planned a vacation. All of these trips to Mexico have me wanting to go back down there to a beach or something. Who knows :) 

The Internet is buzzing over Microsoft offering Yahoo! $44.6 Billion for the company in an effort to keep up with Google. There have been dozens of articles about the implications this could have. You might wonder why Microsoft would be worried about Google - the answer is because in a few short years, hardly anyone will buy programs anymore (like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc…) Instead, they will use a web application like Google Docs (word processor and spreadsheet) so Microsoft HAS TO make this move now. It is not that they can not do it without Yahoo! (they can). This move is a ploy to siphon off some of the ad revenues that is feeding the growth of Google.Speaking of Google - what about them? No one is speculating on what the response will be for them. In my opinion, this move by Microsoft is a shot across the bow of the Google ship.I think that Google and Apple will formalize a union that has been in the making for years. If you look at the board of directors for both of the companies, you will see several of the same people on both boards. These two companies are close and will only get closer now that Microsoft has made their intentions clear. These are indeed interesting times… 

Shaun and I will be going to Mexico (separately). I will be going in April and she (and Erika) will be going in July. We are serving as volunteers with Mission Discovery and the project we are working on is building houses for the needy down there.

For all of my friends that drop by here from time to time - please stop for a second and consider how blessed we are to live here in the USA. Many of the “poor” we know have plenty of food, plenty of clothes, and a roof over their heads. They sleep comfortably at night. Many of them even have cars!

Just a few hundred miles away in Mexico, there are children that go to bed every night wearing the only set of clothes they have. Their “house” is made of scraps of wood and cardboard. Many of them go to bed hungry every night. The family’s only means of transportation is their feet.

Just think about that…

The guys at TouchMods released their software today (actually, around 5pm New Year’s Eve for me!)

I’ve used it quite a bit and here are some observations I’ve made (posted on developer’s site to hopefully assist them):

I wanted to post a pic of my finished unit. As you can see, I have connected a strand of 30 gauge wire from the post of the LED to the leg (nearest to the amplifier) where the resistor was.

Earl (uphi) has mentioned that he used a strand of a single wire out of CAT5, so if you have some of this laying around (who doesn’t?), that will be perfect.

For the short while I’ve had my iPod Touch, I have said that the “holy grail” for this device would be VoIP. In the past few days, not only has a team of coders worked hard to bring software to the platform that does just that - but another group of individuals

A fellow by the name of Earl has been posting comments on the blog over at touchmods.net, and according to this post, he has been able to successfully activate the iVoice microphone sold at Wal-Mart for $25. What this means is that those of us in the USA will be able to have a working unit available (without having to construct it ourselves) on January 1, 2008, when the touchmods.net guys release their software!

I plan to purchase one of these immediately, but still plan to get the mic being manufactured by the touchmods.net guys because they are the ones that are really spearheading this endeavor and I feel strongly about supporting them as much as possible.

I’m now building up a site for our church, and I am really excited about it! Here lately, I’ve been listening to some podcasts on how to administer a Drupal site. These podcasts are designed to teach you to do some really neat things with Drupal, especially for use in a ministry. Hopefully, we’ll get to put a lot of what these guys are teaching to good use.

The church website is http://www.TreesBaptistChurch.org/

I’m hoping to eventually have podcasts on the site (sermons and lessons), user blogs, forums, and a photo album. I’ll update things here as it continues to grow.

Well, maybe soon. Since I hacked my iPt last week, I’ve been reading up on all of the forums to gain a better understanding of what this device is capable of. For starters, it is one of the most impressive devices I’ve ever carried in my shirt pocket. Its almost paper-thin. It came with a web browser, but the first thing I did after hacking it was to install the Mail.app for the iPhone, as well as the Notes, Maps, and some other things (all from the iPhone). So basically, it has now become a paper-thin computer that will fit in a pocket and has a full-blown web browser (Safari). The only thing lacking is the ability to use it as a VoIP device.

But that may not be too far off. These guys have been hacking away at the iPt, trying to get it running a SIP client. Yesterday, they successfully managed to get a program initiating and accepting calls through a SIP gateway. In layman’s terms, this means that instead of buying the iPt and getting an iPhone without the phone - you now have an iPhone that works over WiFi, instead of through AT&T. The SIP gateway connects your device to the phone network and lets you have a unique phone number, as well as placing and receiving calls (and routing them to your device).

As good as that sounds, there are still some issues. The biggest issue is getting audio (in and out) working. This will probably be solved rather quickly.  The next issue goes along with getting audio working - and that is to have a device that will handle the audio. It turns out that Apple has audio in on the doc connector, and there are some folks that have already used it on the Touch for audio in. I’m assuming audio out will be trivial, after all it comes with this capability

So basically, stay tuned for more developments! I thought it would be summer before VoIP was working on the Touch, but I really underestimated the hackers. I’m guessing it will be working before the end of January.

I played with the Touch for a whole 3 days before I decided to hack it and get the 3rd party apps running on it. Talk about something totally brainless to do - this device was begging to be hacked. I mean, c’mon Apple - why did you have to cripple it! Once it has been “jailbroken”, it becomes one of the most incredible devices I have ever owned.

For starters, what is the process for jailbreaking? Simple - first, you just downgrade to the original firmware that Apple released by downloading the file and using iTunes to restore it. Step two is to open up Safari (web browser) and go to a website (http://www.jailbreakme.com) which will cause the browser to exit and the device to restart. Step three is… wait, there is no step three! At this point it is “jailbroken”. There is a new icon on the iPod that says “Installer”. You use it to add as many applications as you wish.