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The day my G1 arrived in the mail, I discovered that it was useless without activation and that I needed a data plan to activate it. Now I’m fulfilling all my mobile networking needs over WiFi, as well as using the G1 as a phone. Though this has been confirmed many times, the issue is complicated by contradicting claims by T-Mobile.

This Should Not Be Possible

According to T-Mobile, the G1 would not be functional without their G1 data plan. Even if you have an activated phone, it would stop working the moment you disable the data service. But who would want to use a phone that becomes a dead brick the moment one enters the subway system or goes on a plane trip? As implausible this sounds, many people still believe the claims of the company that’s trying really hard to sell their value-added services.

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This is not a story about how Facebook makes me painfully aware of my inability to control myself. One out of every fifty people on the planet uses Facebook and most users belong to Facebook. I can truthfully say that I’m not addicted to Facebook, and I’m proud of that.

Not MySpace

In high school, online social networking was an easy way to quickly gain new contacts. We didn’t go crazy with it, but it was just cool to have an online profile. It was slightly amusing to those of us who had been building websites, but we hopped on the bandwagon anyway. MySpace was the most popular social networking website but Facebook was the friendly new kid on the block. It felt good to be part of something new, something exclusive. As our ambitions grew, Facebook grew with us. Unlike MySpace, Facebook had a simple and consistent user interface. Unlike MySpace, Facebook takes care of most page design and presentation. Unlike MySpace, Facebook was open not to the world but only to students. In short, Facebook was everything MySpace was not, and we identified with it.

As version after version of Facebook rolled into existence and new features were added, it quickly became clear that Facebook’s signature lack of customizability was also its greatest strength. Fewer design concerns meant better focus on content. Less variety of page components meant the ability to quickly find things on anyone’s profile. And a simple email notification system kept everyone up-to-date on what friends were doing.

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Most embedded mobile devices have an option to automatically lock the interface when idle to prevent accidental access, and the Android-powered G1 is no exception. Interestingly, some people actually want to disable this feature. There’s no direct interface to this setting, however. While tinkering with the Setup Wizard applet, I may have stumbled upon a hack.

1. using AnyCut, create a shortcut to the activity “Setup Wizard”
2. launch “Setup Wizard”
3. unplug+replug the battery and power on the device

The applet apparently disables the lock and re-enables it when it finishes. I wanted the screen lock back so I simply ran “Setup Wizard” again, this time completing the procedure.

Note that this method also disables the manual lock triggered by pressing the End button.

December 29th, 2008: Incidentally, other people have noticed strange effects after a botched Setup Wizard. The folks at xda-developers have experienced similar effects, but their connection to Setup Wizard is at the moment unconfirmed.

History is, and has always been, misunderstood. Retrospectively, we view history as a linear progression that leads logically from event to event to event, from fact to fact to fact. While such a simplification is often necessary for historical instruction, it masks the true complexity of history.

When we study history, we often ask, how did we get here from there?, where here is the state that we are in now and there is some state that we were in previously. Rarely do we ask, starting from there, where could we have gone? Historians do not concern themselves with possibilities; what could have been is not nearly as important as what has been. As far as we know, there is just one timeline linking our very beginnings to now, and we invest quite a bit of effort into linearizing our account of the past. If it did not happen to us… if it did not happen in our universe, we should not care. After all, we are a selfish people.

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I’d known from the beginning that KDE 4 libraries and applications could be installed on Windows. I hadn’t actually tried installing them on Windows because I’ve been warned that they’re unstable (Windows support is new), bulky (there’re many dependencies), and inefficient (KDE is not just a widget library). I’ve also heard reports of excellent integration and ease of installation, so I decided to give it a try. The test system is a virtual machine running Windows XP SP3 with no theme.

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