Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about TomTom’s new iPhone application, now available in iTunes for just $99. It’s the first true GPS navigation software available, a massive 1.1GB download that boasts stored maps of the entire US & Canada. No reception? No 3G or Edge? With TomTom, there’s no problem, as long as you have clear line-of-sight to the GPS eyes in the sky. Is it as good as their YouTube advertisement? I’ve bought it, driven 500 miles with it, and lived to tell the tale:

The simplest feature is navigation. You can find a place to go by entering an address, choosing a contact from your iPhone, browsing the map and picking start/end points, or searching through nearby points of interest. Once you’ve figured where to go, the TomTom app knows where you are and gives you a route:

Along the way you have a few route options:

The most useful of these is the list of instructions, which is a turn-by-turn summary of your drive:

The “points of interest” search tool is also quite nice. Here’s a list of restaurants near where I was at the time:

The application itself launches and calculates quickly, generally has OK GPS reception, and is lightweight enough to keep the heat on the iPhone 3GS to a minimum while allowing you to place music in the background without skipping. For $99 though, I’m not sure it’s entirely worth it. For example, the TomTom ONE-S 3.5″ is also $99, and it’s the full unit, not just the software. And, there are some missing features / problems:

• The TomTom application kills the battery, you’ll need a car adapter. I was running low after just 2-3 hours.
• GPS reception is best when the iPhone is held upright, near the dash. Holding it down in your lap or a cup tray doesn’t work well, so you’ll need a dashboard mount.
• In Manhattan, many times the application cannot find a GPS signal for some time. Driving through overpasses/underpasses confuses the GPS, causing it to sometimes issue false directions.
• While the turning directions are spoken, the street names are not. This is a software feature–why not include it?

If TomTom can improve the signal quality and add spoken street names to the application, I would value it around $60. However at $99, it’s a tad expensive, and only useful if you refuse to purchase a full GPS unit–say, because mostly you rent cars.

Update:

After being out for a couple months, a new update has come out that promises more accurate GPS fixes, and the reviews on iTunes have placed the TomTom Navigator application at 2.5/5 stars:

The primary complaints are:

• Slow time to acquire GPS, bad GPS accuracy
• No spoken street names (this bugs me too)
• The high price, lack of updates, huge file size
• Applications crashes

Thanks to a 50% off $50 coupon on Groupon I became aware of this cute little place downtown called Color me Mine, where you go to paint pottery. First, you pick your white, unbaked clay piece from a shelf with a large selection. Then, you choose your glazes and colors, and begin painting. When you’re done, your piece is sent to the kiln to be dipped in a clear protective coat and fired. About a week later, you can pick it up!

The reviews on Yelp are overwhelming fantastic–yuppies love this place:

Places that give me options allow me to customize, and they allow me to personalize the product to my tailored desire. When you walk in here, you’re not buying an ‘Off-the-Rack’ ceramic piece; you’re ‘Making it your way.’ This is a great place to create a gift for someone special.

Now, I want you to disregard all the reviews talking about how this is a great place to catch up with your girlfriends. Because painting pottery is manly all the way. So next time you’re going out to a sports bar with your buddies, step up. Be a MAN. Say: “Guys. Screw the game. Let’s go paint ceramic teapots.”

When you first come in, there’s a few tables for painting, and a wall of pottery to choose from on the left. I decided to paint a box and a 1L water jug.

Here’s the jug and my paints, fresh and ready to start. I wrapped some parts of the jug with tape so will be highlights in white!

Halfway through painting the jug. Green handle and bottom. White strips along the sides. Red on top / bottom, blue in the middle. Should come out like some kind of gradient!

Evil box. Black top. Red bottom inside, and the walls are dripping blood!

Update: Less than a week later I got the final results back. Here they are!

I think the jug turned out nicely!

And here’s the box…

Recently I switched to the MediaTemple Grid Server, which at $20 a month, is much cheaper than a dedicated host. Although with ~15,000 hits a day I’m running close to the GPU limit, moving to a dedicated-virtual server is also just $50 a month. So–how well does Media Temple stay online? Do they suck like Dreamhost and 1and1?

The answer is no: Media Temple (MT) is pretty reliable. When I say pretty, here are some numbers from Pingdom, via their new free service:

Checks with downtime
Check name Uptime Downtime Outages Response time
Wordpress 99.55% 3h 14m 52s 10 672 ms

This meant approximately 200 visitors would have missed out on my website–not a bad amount of downtime at all. However, this is just one month, and we’ll have to see if anything particularly disastrous shall happen in the future. I’ll keep you all posted!

Update: here are stats for August:

Check name Uptime Downtime Outages Response time
Wordpress 99.92% 0h 34m 57s 6 905 ms

Update: here are stats for September:

Check name Uptime Downtime Outages Response time
Wordpress 99.77% 1h 34m 36s 14 981 ms

Update: here are stats for October:

Check name Uptime Downtime Outages Response time
Wordpress 99.50% 3h 39m 28s 15 582 ms

So far YTD my uptime is 99.69%, according to Pingdom.