Although this was good, I was really looking forward to using the maps on the new iPhone 3G with true GPS. I brought a new 3G iPhone home last week, gleefully clicked on the Maps and “locate me” buttons, and instantly found myself on a map centered on Wayzata, Minnesota. I’m sure it’s a fine place, but unfortunately, I’m 1300 miles away in Utah.

It seems the “assisted GPS” in the iPhone 3G is getting the wrong kind of assistance. It uses cell towers to locate itself before using GPS, in order to speed up the normally slow GPS satellite lock process. This works for most people, but some of the 3G towers are incorrectly listed. The one near my house, apparently, is listed as just outside of Minneapolis. This “assistance” overrides the GPS chip so I’m completely unable to get an accurate GPS location anywhere near my home.

At first this seemed like an odd defect in my phone, but several other Utah locals, including my wife, have the same problem. In addition to Utah, it looks like there is at least one other glitch in the database: several people in Oregon have iPhones that believe themselves to be in Texas.

As reported elsewhere, turning off 3G solves the problem. If you turn off 3G, then locate yourself on the map, it will correctly lock on. Unfortunately, as soon as I turned 3G back on and opened the map, it did a lightning-fast scroll across the country and brought me back to Wayzata, MN.

Several of our friends say that resetting or restoring their phones solved the problem, but that hasn’t worked for us. I think it occasionally works because the phone reaches a different tower, or a non-3G signal, after resetting.

I’m sure this can easily be fixed with a software update, but in the meantime, I’m not exactly thrilled by the iPhone’s GPS performance. Considering the lack of press, I think it’s a very isolated issue. Is anyone outside of Utah or Oregon having similar troubles?

Update 2008/10/07: As of a few days ago, the problem is fixed. 3G gets me an estimated location quickly everywhere I’ve tried it, and GPS locks in shortly thereafter. This did not coincide with an iPhone update, so I think AT&T fixed something in their network.

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It makes me happy to see spam like this—it means spammers are resorting to behaving like illiterate morons just to get past the filters. That or only the spammers who are illiterate morons are getting through. In either case, the money they make from the spam has to be going down. Who would buy drugs after reading this sales pitch?

On a related note, a lot of you were alarmed to see that we had removed the Apple headquarters off our map. Our full plan is to of course remove each of our competitor’s headquarters from the map, but we just didn’t have time to get to this in the beta. By the time we get to our final release, we’ll have this feature nailed down. ;-)

…and on a completely unrelated note, from today’s Mozilla press release:

The Mozilla Corporation was established to support the Mozilla Foundation’s mission to ensure choice and innovation on the Internet by leveraging the economic value of Firefox which has resulted from its growing marketshare.

Mozilla is talking like a big business and Microsoft is talking like a small one… Interesting times.

Microsoft’s Digital Media Pro Keyboard is the cheapest of their new line of keyboards. The more expensive ones are wireless, and while I’m sure there’s a huge group of people I haven’t met who want to use their keyboard wirelessly from 10 feet away, I just want mine to sit on my desk and never require batteries.

The keyboard has a great feel. Apparently the “natural keyboard” fad is over—most of the new models have the old-fashioned layout, and I have to admit I’ve had no increase in wrist strain or sore fingers since abandoning natural keyboards a few years ago. I’m sure they work fine for some people, but I’ll stick to the standard layout for now.

Along with the usual buttons in all of the right places, it has a “zoom slider” on the left, which I’m sure will disappear from the next batch of keyboard models. More buttons include volume, mute, play/pause, stop, previous/next track, five programmable “Favorites” buttons, shortcut buttons for things like My Documents and Mail, a dedicated Calculator button next to the numeric pad (one of my favorites).

It also makes a gesture toward making the almost-worthless function keys useful again—they default to things like Undo, Open, Close, Save, and so on (and seem to work in just about every program.) You can lock them to act like traditional function keys too.

Since this is a Microsoft keyboard, I expected some trouble customizing all of the buttons. Surprisingly, this hasn’t been an issue—the control panel lets you reassign just about everything. Even more impressive, the media buttons worked in WinAmp with no configuration, and the “Web” button pops up Firefox by default since it’s my default browser. The zoom slider controls the font size in Firefox. The control panel lets you disable the Windows and Application keys, and assign the functions or programs of your choice to the “Enhanced F-Keys”. Kudos to Microsoft for not trying to lock me into their applications with this keyboard.

The Digital Media Pro Keyboard supports USB or PS2 connectors, and includes software for Windows and MacOS. I haven’t found a problem with it yet. Highly recommended.

Now the same thing is happening to a few “amateur photographers” (or professional ones, presumably) who try to get prints at Walmart and other retail shops.

I have no problem with the enforcement of copyright law, but assigning the employees of a supermarket photo lab to determine whether photos can be printed or whether they look “too professional” is ludicrous.

I suppose I’ll consider myself a success as a photographer when nobody will print my photos…

[via]

[This article has been updated and moved to The Gadgets Page]

2004 has been an especially rich year for new techno-jargon. So, in the spirit of full disclosure, here’s a guide to some of the terms that made it big this year.

While the list includes such obvious memes as “phish”, “offshored”, and “podcasting”, some are a bit more obscure. The word “gatesed” (meaning affected negatively by microsoft) only appears a few times in Google, the word “mouselexia” appears only once, and the word “netlag” means something else to us geeks. But it’s fun nonetheless.

[via PaidContent]

Fortunately, T-Mobile has around 1000 ringtones available for purchase and download. They have extra-cheesy MIDI versions of all the latest pop hits and an astounding collection of classics ranging from Bohemian Rhapsody to Theme from Knight Rider. Unfortunately, not a single one of them sounds like a ringing phone.

Since my wife has the same phone, we really wanted two different ring sounds. Fortunately, after an extensive Google search, I found this page at my610 with four nice professional ringtones. Since it was hard to find that page amongst all of the cellphone and ringtone dealers, I loaded the title of this post with keywords. Maybe it will help someone else restore sanity to their T610. Presumably these will work on some other phones as well.

Judging from the demo, this won’t be replacing real singers anytime soon–except possibly Cher. Nonetheless, it’s impressive by speech synthesis standards, and as a musician, I can imagine it being very useful for prototyping vocals and backup singing.

Since this isn’t exciting enough to make news outside the music geek community, the New York Times had to exaggerate a bit. Their article calls it "exceedingly lifelike" and "concert quality" and ruminates about how it could be used to "reanimate" Elvis or to forge audio recordings of George Bush and Tony Blair. It makes its final departure from reality with this classic line: "In fact, in today’s world of computer-produced music, who needs humans at all?"