Earlier today, the city of San Francisco held a ticker tape rally and a ceremony to hand over the key to the city to the Giants, the 2010 World Series Champions. I’ve uploaded a number of the photos I took at the event at the Civic Center and City Hall to Flickr; unfortunately they had the areas with the best views cordoned off for VIPs.

It was rather exciting for them to go all the way this year, having just moved to San Francisco in September. I had never been a Dodgers or Angels fan in Southern California and opted to support the Giants some long while ago. There’s that great feeling permeating the city, bandwagoners and all.

What’s even more shocking is that it all works together flawlessly, links to an online service to share and compete with others and is completely reasonable in price. It may not be a personal jetpack or teleportation, but sometimes you have to take what you can get. With respect to Apple in this scenario, it’s a testament to the restraint to adopt and innovate new and existing technologies to make complex ideas into simple and compelling features for the end-user. It’s not about being first to market or designing a device that wins on a spec sheet alone; it’s about offering features that translate into practical usability.

And speaking of usable futuristic technology gone mainstream, how about that iPhone 4 FaceTime ad? Or Face/OffTime, if you will.

Today, I received a nondescript brown parcel from the UPS guy. Little did I know that it was in fact my Secret Santa gift. Please join me in the unboxing, don’t skip to the end – spoilers stink.

Sure thing, internet stranger.

It’s a book. Not another copy of “Freakonomics”, please.

This poorly written dialogue looks familiar. I’m glad somebody finally found a good use for a printed copy of Twilight.

Sh**, it’s the third Twilight book. Dick move, sir.

Well, you put the effort into sending me the book. Might as well read it. Wow, this Edward fellow sounds like a dreamboat.

Turning the page to page 54… Wait, what?

Page 179.

Page 293.

That just happened.

I believe in the magic illusion business, they call this misdirection. Try as you all might, but I don’t believe there will be a Secret Santa gift for this year that will be able to top this. It has everything. Mystery, suspense, brooding vampires, Star Trek, Adam Sandler, and a battle-scared iPhone. Dennis (coderascal), that was awesome. Higher-resolution images are available by clicking each photo or by going directly to the Flickr set.

Apologies in advance to my Secret Santa recipient. It doesn’t have one tenth of one percent the creativity that this did. And now it’s time to go watch Funny People.

Example: Andy Baio was totally just ‘boinged, but it’s totally fine because BB is hip and so-not-corporate.

So – who wants a steampunk waffle-iron?

First, Matt Santos was a character on the West Wing played by Jimmy Smits. Santos was a Democratic senator from Texas who ascended to the presidency on the show. Writers on the West Wing noted that Santos’ character was based on upstart Illinois senator and President-elect Barack Obama.

Jimmy Smits has a recurring role as Miguel Prado on the Showtime drama Dexter. He plays a District Attorney who has become quite fond of Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who only kills those who kill others. Next, Sarah Palin, running mate of John McCain, stated in the final weeks of the election that “[Obama] pals around with terrorists”.

Therefore, “Matt Santos pals around with serial killers” is funny.

In some basic testing with the HDTune benchmarking utility, the Samsung drive performed admirably. With an average read speed of 67MB/s and a peak speed of 88MB/s, the drive offers about twice the performance of a standard 5400RPM SATA laptop hard disk. Where the drive really shines is the almost non-existent access times on your data. In this test, the average seek time was 0.3ms where a traditional notebook is comes in at 15-20ms (or about 50-60x slower). Read/write performance also does not suffer from the pitfall that platter-based drives do, which is that information reads at the same speed regardless of where the data is physically on the drive.

The file read/write benchmarks told the same story as the standard read test. When using the 64MB file size, the drive offered consistent performance peaking at about 100MB/s reading data and 90MB/s writing. Comparing this to the tests of the reference Seagate hard-disk drive, it was consistently more than twice as fast as the traditional drive peaked at 40MB/s (HDD benchmark charts are provided at the end of the article). Boot times are not a terribly relevant or accurate way to gauge a computer’s performance, but since gamers/nerds are always clamoring for them, I’ll include them anyways. With the SSD, a the laptop booted to the Windows login screen in 34 seconds and at the desktop with all startup items loaded in a total of 39 seconds. With the HDD, those same tasks were completed in 46 seconds and 58 seconds respectively. Both of these tests were with the same drive image running Windows Vista on an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz notebook computer.

As for the SLC vs. MLC debate referenced earlier, it’s all a matter of cost. The best performing SSDs on the market are SLC drives. SLC drives offer better performance, lower power consumption and a longer-lifespan (100,000 write/erase cycles per sector as compared to 10,000 cycles on an MLC drive). MLC (multi-level cell) drives are cheaper to manufacture and are quickly becoming popular because of the lower price point. The lifespan argument loses its utility when one takes into account that 10,000 write/erase cycles is averaged/leveled out through the drive’s own firmware so the same cells aren’t constantly being rewritten (and since SSDs have a near-instant access time, there is no ill-effect on performance). Also, the useful life of a consumer notebook computer is surely less than that of the drive. In either case, a solid-state disk can greatly enhance the performance and battery life of a notebook, but it does come at a hefty cost.

Seagate HDD Benchmarks

While OS X 10.4 and 10.5 have built-in support for ExpressCard and USB 3G networking devices, it does not give you all the features of the card nor the ability to complete the initial service activation. Earlier this year, Sprint began to offer companion software and drivers for their EV-DO equipment for OS X users called “Sprint SmartView”. The software gives you access to more detail about your usage, what network you’re connected to, and GPS services (which we’ll get into later). With this software, you can now complete data card firmware updates and activate service obviating the use of virtualization of Windows or borrowing a friend’s computer for that. My only real issue with it is that doesn’t act like a Mac application, as you can tell immediately when it installing a desktop shortcut (not a dock shortcut, a desktop shortcut) and by the various interface inconsistencies. Otherwise, it’s a pretty good step by Sprint – you can download the SmartView software here – Sprint Downloads.

However, GPS is the main point of this post. With the new connection manager comes the ability to use the A-GPS functionality of all Sprint EV-DO cards to locate yourself. To use the basic location function, launch the SmartView software and click on the “GPS” drop-down and it will acquire a signal and locate you. You can click the shortcuts there to find yourself on Google Maps and each icon will take you to a different search such as restaurants and Sprint locations near you. Neato. But the most useful function of this would be to get directions and track yourself. Since the software will create a NMEA port on your device that will pipe the location data into another program that can use it. For this tutorial, we’ll use Google Earth since everyone loves Google Earth. The only sticking point here is that to use GPS, you’ll have to subscribe to “Google Earth Plus” which is $20 a year – $1.67 a month, don’t be cheap, pay for it.

To enable NMEA output, click the icon that resembles a ‘play button’. Now, launch Google Earth Plus and wait for it to load completely and log-in. Now go to the “Tools” menu and  and select “GPS”. This will bring up a settings window like the one pictured on the right. Click on the “Realtime” tab and select “NMEA”. From here, you will want to check the “Automatically follow the path” radio box and choose how often you want to poll the card for new location coordinates (six to ten seconds works well). Click “Start” and you’ll see Google Earth pan to your current location and follow you as you move in your car and of course this works on the go as your EV-DO service is more than sufficient to pull down the maps/satellite imagery on the fly.

Google Earth Plus with Realtime GPS

Now you’re ready to use this to get directions and find businesses around you based on your current location anywhere you go with your Mac laptop. Don’t forget that you can also track a trip by saving your path in the “Places” menu. The GPS function does not eat much of your battery, however, Google Earth can be CPU intensive at times, so it might be advantageous to bring a charger or second battery along with you.

Have questions? Leave them in the comments and I’ll try update the post.