I knew when I bought my Yamaha V-Star motorcycle, I wanted to figure out a way to tie my iPhone into it in such a manner where it was functional. It seemed like a perfect device for motorcycle riding. Before I go much further let me just say, “Always ride Safe”. I honestly believe that nothing I did here jeopardizes my safety on the motorcycle and this system was implemented with safety in mind.

I was surprised to see very few systems out there that allowed you to incorporate your iPhone onto your motorcycle. I came across several people who kind of winged it and threw something together but nothing I wanted to do. My criteria was simple, it had to be clean, functional, and safe.

My first purchase was the most expensive one. I purchased two ChatterBox XBi systems at around $200 for each unit. The ChatterBox system ties into your iPhone’s bluetooth system and allows you to listen to music and even take phone calls (again please use your head and be safe). I purchased two systems because I wanted to leverage the intercom system but this was not needed for the iPhone integration so you can save some money here.

The ChatterBox addressed around 90% of my needs. I could start some music up, throw my iPhone in my pocket and life was good. But I was really looking for more, I wanted my iPhone accessible while I was riding. My next purchase was a RAM handlebar mount (RAM-B-149ZU) and a RAM iPhone cradle (RAM-HOL-AP6U) that ran me about another $40 from Ram Mounts Web site. This combination made a wonderful product. Extremely simple to install and very sturdy. The iPhone latches in there pretty snug and I have never had any problems or concerns about it coming loose. Just a great product. This got the iPhone out of my pocket and it was now accessible and visible. Now I could listen to my music and if someone called I was able to tell who it was and if I need to take the call. I could also start to use other application such as the TomTom navigation app.

I still had one problem, long bike rides listening to music, using the navigation, and taking pictures really drained the battery. I didn’t want to end up in a situation where it was late at night, broken down, and the iPhone with no charge because I was listening to music. I needed power. Took me awhile, but I found Pashnit Moto who offered a couple of solutions of which I settled on the Apple 3G, 3Gs and iTouch Battery Harness PPC-026-DB which ended up running me around $43.

That was all it took and it completely changed my riding experience. I now have music and navigation all in one small device. There are a few drawbacks. For example, the way you have to manually connect the ChatterBox and the iPhone is kind of a pain, seems like they could do a better job with that. Also, when its all said and done, your iPhone is still exposed to the elements. I happen to have a windshield but if you didn’t then it would be exposed to all the elements at 80MPH which is probably risky and generally not good for the device. Also certain situations, like navigation, where it would be nice to turn the iPhone to landscape, the RAM mount does allow for this, it isn’t as simple as just twisting it back and forth, there is a lot of tightening and loosing that needs to happen.Also, the RAM mount is so snug on the iPhone that there is no room to accommodate and additional case that you might have on the iPhone. But all and all I am very happy with what I have.

Besides the built in applications such as music, mail and camera, here are a couple of other applications I have found beneficial while riding;

• TomTom Navigation – I debated a long time on this because of the hefty $100 price tag but it is nice having navigation when you are not 100% where you are going.
• Pandora / iheartradio – I have a pretty good collection of music but these apps allow me to listen to other things when I want.
  
• Trapster – Just so I know.
  
• OSMTrack – Good for capturing routes taken.
  
• TrafficInfo – For when I am heading into town
  
• Brightkite – The social networking guy in me. I like to pictures and location of where I am.
  
• AutoStitch / Flickr – If I am going to take picture of the wonderful landscapes might as well make them panoramic and upload them to Flickr
  
• AAA Roadside – Just in case.
  

A little over a year ago, I started wearing a blazer to work. Originally I did it to try a new look. The more I wore blazers, the more I found myself keeping more and more things handy. It was nice to always have things within hands’ reach like a pen or chap stick. Also, I discovered I liked not having my wallet in my back pocket.

As time passed, I found myself carrying mints with me on a regular basis. I also ended up buying an iPhone and it was really was no big deal to carry my iPhone and my work Blackberry with me. At work we have a fairly large campus and I find myself having to walk from building to building and it’s nice to always be able to whip out my sunglasses.

Depending on what I am doing, like traveling or attending a conference or even just an off campus meeting, I will carry some additional supplies like hand sanitizer, tissues, business cards (forgot to add those to the picture), a camera, usb stick (another thing I forgot to get in the picture) and/or a notebook.

One of the added benefits to a blazer is that when I am at my desk I can take my blazer off and I am comfortable. I’ve taken to wearing blazers even when I am not necessarily at work. There is also the “gentlemanly” aspect of it. It’s so nice to be able to offer my jacket to the wife or my kids when we are out and they find themselves with a little chill.

I live in southern California and I wear a blazer year round. It doesn’t really add any discomfort from a heat perspective. Keep in mind, I work in an office and am not exactly out jogging around town in it.

I think more guys should think about wearing blazers, it’s way better then carrying around a murse.

I’ve stated before how I am fortunate to be in a position where I typically work on a Linux, OSX, and Windows desktops on regular basis. Depending on what I am doing and my location I might spend a good amount of time on any of these systems. For the most part, my life style makes this pretty easy. I live in “the cloud” a lot for things like email and even documents. I keep things standard complaint and use tools that are typically cross-platformed or have counterparts on other platforms. This has afforded me some great freedoms and have allowed me to unchain myself and not be too dependent on any one solution. Instead my life has become one of preference and knowledge.

However, with everything there has always been pain points, one for me has been IM. While yes, it no longer matters which platform I am on at any given time I am still able to access my Yahoo, AIM, MSN, Gtalk accounts, the issue comes into play when I move from one machine to another and forget to sign out of IM on the previous machine. Some of the IM services alert you when you are logged onto one accounts from multiple systems and allows you to decide what to do, like AIM which gives you an option to send it a command to log you out of your previous session. Some just don’t care, like Gtalk which doesn’t seem to be concerned with how many times and from how many locations you are logged in, I don’t particularly like this approach. Then there are services like Yahoo that just get upset and decides to log you out from one of your accounts, couple that with IM clients that battle to keep their connection like Trillian and you can end up in a situation where you can’t log into your account because another is already logged in and wont let go.

I’ve come up with a few approaches that have made this situation somewhat manageable. On my Linux and OSX box this is pretty simple, there is a command line command called ‘killall‘ that comes to the rescue. With the line ‘killall pidgin’ or ‘killall Adium’ my IM clients on Linux and OSX respectively, end. Add the ability to ssh into these systems and if I forget to log out I simple do a quick ssh connection to these boxes, run my command and I am done. Furthermore, I typically have a good idea when I wont be at those computers, so with that information and the killall command, I am able to add crontab entries to automatically run my command. So for example, I know at 3AM I don’t want to be up IM’ing with anyone so I run that command at that time in case I left my IM client running before going to bed. I also know Monday through Friday I am typically at work and in my office around 8AM so I run that command on my home systems at that time too in case I left the house without logging out. The command ends up looking like this in crontab, 00 03,08 * * * /usr/bin/killall Adium > /dev/null 2>&1 Worse case scenario, I ssh back to the system and manually run the command. Its a great system and works like a charm.

At work the story is a little different. First off, the system I run IM on is a Windows machine which doesn’t have the cool ability to just SSH to and even if I did install an SSH server on the machine it is located behind a corporate firewall so I wouldn’t be able to get it anyways from the outside. I do have the ability to log in via VPN but that is a lot of work to log into the corporate VPN and RDP to my desktop just to turn off an IM client. Windows also doesn’t really have crontab, it does have a “scheduler” which acts kind of acts like crontab but that coupled with the fact that Windows doesn’t really have the same powerful command line tools that Linux and OSX have makes this simple task a little tougher to accomplish.

I have come up with a solution however, there’s a command on my Windows XP called ‘taskkill‘, I am not sure if this command is available on all Windows platform but it is on mine so I use it. Now with this command, I am able to write a small batch file that has the one line in it like this taskkill /f /im trillan.exe. When ran this behaves very much like killall on my other machines. I then use the Windows built in scheduler to run this batch file every day, Monday through Friday, at 6:30 PM because if I am still at work at this time, I am done talking to people and need to finish up work and get home. Now for whatever reason, this doesn’t always work or maybe I leave work early and need to get on IM at home. Because of the before mention firewall issue, its not as easy as just SSH to the box and running the command manually. So I had to come up with a solution to reach into my computer at work from outside to kill my IM if needed. To do this I created an Outlook rule. Since I almost always run Outlook 100% of the time when my work laptop is on, so Outlook seemed like the best vehicle for this effort.

To accomplish this, in Outlook I’ve defined a rule that looks for emails from specific senders (for example my personal email address), looks for a specific subject line (like “Turn off IM”), and checks for something special in the body (example “Trillian”). If all these conditions are meant, then it runs my aforementioned batch job and kills Trillian.

That’s about it, that’s how I manage my IM needs that run of various different OS in various different environment during various different times and allows me to stay unchained, mobile, and free. Hope you found some of this information helpful.

Recently I got my invite to try out the new Dropbox service. I am a long time Folder Share user and had heard some good things about Dropbox. I have to say, I am very happy with the performance of Dropbox and was even more pleased when I found out there was a Open Source Linux client. Figured I wouldn’t be a good geek if I didn’t do a quick install and see how it performed. Here is a video of that effort.

Dropbox has clients that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux
http://www.getdropbox.com/

I was asked to speak at a small event here is San Diego about a week ago. I quickly came to the realization that I am not much of a public speak, sober anyways. It’s not that I was nervous or anything, I just suck at speaking to large crowds.

Now, it’s typical for me to rant and rave and yap about myself here on my blog, but I was extremely surprised and honored when Michael Baum, the CEO of the company I did the speaking for (Splunk), gave me a generous write up on his blog. Check it out http://blogs.splunk.com/thebaum/2008/08/15/splunk-live-southwest-2008/

Sometimes it’s the simple things that amaze people and leave them thinking you are some type of computer genius. My daughters have grown up with computers, and I mean hardcore. Their first computer was a SUSE Linux machine; they’ve worked on Windows and OS X boxes and they know their way around them all. At 10 years old, they’ve taken over the IT tech support duties for my wife. Next, I am going to install a phone line in their room so other family members can call them when they need help. What I am trying to say is, their Dad’s vast knowledge of computers doesn’t impress them. Whenever I think I’m showing them something new and cool on the computer, they have an attitude of “huh, I just didn’t know how to do it, now I do and its not that cool”.

I myself get kind of like that too, I am pretty hardcore geek and bells and whistles on computers don’t really impress me. I typically look at things on a much deeper level. That’s why when I read an article sometime back called “Having fun with the SAY command in your Terminal” I thought to myself, “Cute” and filed it away in the back of my mind thinking I will never have a use for that command.

The SAY command on OS X is a Speech Synthesis Manager. If you own an OS X machine, open a terminal window and type “man say” (minus the quotes) for more information, or just type “say Hello. do you want to play a game” and start having fun with it.

One day, one of my daughters and I were having somewhat of a disagreement on if it was more important for her to clean her room or finish watching TV; guess which side I was on. As privileges started to get stripped away, right after “no more pool time” but before “no more Playstation3 time”, she stomps off into her room. Knowing she wasn’t in her room doing what was asked of her, and knowing I was probably too mad myself to try to talk to her, I sat at my laptop tapping the space bar. Then it dawned on me; I fired up a terminal session on my Ubuntu laptop and made a ssh connection to my daughter’s computer in her room and proceeded to test out that SAY command. It went something like this;

say Why are you so mad

I hear a deep synthetic voice mumble come from behind my daughters’ door followed by a somewhat confused sounding voice of a little girl.

say Didnt your dad ask you to clean your room? I like a clean room

Some more little girl mumbles. Is she arguing with the computer now?

say Your dad is probably the smartest man I know, and may be the smartest man on earth, you should listen to him

OK, that last one might have been too much and may have tipped her off. I hear her door open and she yells, “I don’t know how you are doing that but you better show me”

Anyways, SSH with SAY and you can have all sorts of fun with co-workers, family, and friends. Further more they will think you are truly 1337.

My wife has been preaching to me for awhile to establish an ‘ICE‘ number on my cell phone. ICE stands for In Case of Emergency. This is a standard that emergency response units like police, paramedics, and fire have been working on promoting. The idea is, if you are ever in a situation where you are not responsive and require help, your cell phone will be checked for this ICE number and it will be called. Ideally, the person who you have listed as your ICE contact will know enough about you to help with any treatment and assistance you might need.

Cell phones have become so much more than just phones anymore, they are our cameras, how we check emails, chat, manage our calendars, keep track of our friends’ phone numbers, and I’ve even “Twitted” once or twice from my cell phone. It’s very easy for me to leave the house and forget my wallet, but rare for me to forget my cellphone nowadays.

I personally have my ICE number so it is displayed on my screen when you look at it but if you don’t have that functionality or just don’t care to have an ICE number displayed on you phone, then it is recommend you make an entry in your address book under, you guessed it, ‘I’ and make the entry ICE. It’s simple and extremely helpful if ever needed.

I’ve actually got a friend who has taken this to another level and has published an iPhone application that brings a lot more than just an ICE contact to your phone. If you are lucky enough to own an iPhone, please check out Polka’s iPhone Emergency Card for sale in the iTunes App store. You can read more about the application on Polka’s Blog.

Been a big fan and user of OpenID for sometime now. What is OpenID you might ask, well if you don’t know then you can read about it on their site.

Anyways, I was IM’ing with a good friend of mine and I just mentioned I saw a plug in for it. He asked me to install it on his blog and I did, then installed it on mine, and it was so easy I accidentally installed it on another blog I run. Within 15minutes I had OpenID installed, enabled, and configured on three blogs.

So go and get your OpenID now, I recommend MyOpenID but there are plenty of providers out there, and then you too can log into the world (un)known blog which is VanJohnson.com.

Interesting, something to think about

Funny comic, I love UserFriendly.org