sheldon – Page 11 – youfailed.us

Prius Solar Roof scam, Dealers are useless

My wife’s like Hyundai Accent is almost 10 years old and it’s falling apart. Still runs but we have to start looking.

I want three rows of seats AND 50 mpg but that’s not an option we have to settle for one or the other. So I start looking at the Prius.

prius Right from the Toyota website the lowest model with an “Available Solar Roof” is $23,000. I looked all over to find out how much the solar roof would add to the cost of the car but it was nowhere to be found.

So we decide to go to the dealership . . . it was 112 degrees outside but at least we would be in a showroom. We walk in and a guy greets us at the door. He asks if he can do anything and we say we want to look at the Prius and head over to the one in the showroom. The sticker price is $29,xxx and it’s the Prius IV which has leather seats and all these upgrades we didn’t want. So we ask for the cheaper Prius and one with the solar roof. The guy tells us that the one on the showroom floor is the cheapest one he’s got and that none of them have the solar roof option. I tell him I can’t believe that in AZ where in the summer it can be hotter than 150 F in a car that none of the cars he has have the solar roof. He said that the solar roof doesn’t work if it’s hotter than 104 F. I try to get more details like if it’s a safety thing or if somehow the fan can’t keep up with the amount of heat in the car but he doesn’t know much about it. He does know enough (in that we were not going to buy that day) to send us to the used Prius area to look at the cheaper options. The used area is outside. We left and will never go back to San Tan Toyota.

I read “The Machine that Changed the World” recently and it was about how lean production is why Japanese companies were doing so well and would continue to erode the market share of Ford, GM, Chrysler. The book “ends” in the 1980’s and after all this time I thought that more of the principles of the book would be true now. One is how dealers had to be lean too and respond to customer needs and bring customer feedback all the way up the line to the designers of the next model year. It may be that way in Japan but in the US the dealers for lean producers (even Ford is probably considered lean in the factory now) are just as backwards at the people at any other dealership. Why does buying a car have to be such a horrible experience?

Sheldon

Google Voice SMS is broken

I don’t have a texting (SMS) plan on my phone . . . it’s $5/month for 200 messages and $20 for unlimited (AT&T) and though it would come in handy sometimes I refuse to pay for something that should be free! Also I never think to use it because I just use the SMS feature of the Google Chat app from within Gmail. It’s even more useful now that I have an Android phone and all my contacts from my phone are synced with my contacts in Gmail so I have all my phone numbers right in Gmail and can text when I need to.

Anyway . . .

When the Google Voice app for Android came out I was excited because I could send AND receive text messages from my phone . . . I just had to let people know about my alternate SMS phone number. That part was easy since I could make phone calls from my cell phone and choose to use Google Voice for that call. All the app does is call your Google Voice number, press 2 and then the number you want to dial The effect is that a) the phone call is delayed a few seconds and b) the recipient sees your Google Voice number on caller id. There are a couple of problems with Google Voice SMS though:

When I send a message from the phone it seems to arrive pretty quickly for the recipient but when someone replies there is a *huge* delay . . . more than 5 minutes most times.
You can’t text to 5 digit numbers (called “Short Code” I guess) from within Google Voice SMS either online or with the app. I keep getting the error “Error: this message was not successfully delivered.” That sucks because to set up Twitter you need to send a verification to a 5 digit number and I bought Axe deodorant from Target just to get the 300 MS points and I had to text a code to a 5 digit number and it didn’t work.

There are other issues with Google Voice but overall it’s really cool. I just can’t wait until I can port an old number from Vonage!

Sheldon

Android Root

Okay, so the hackathon of my Google Phone is over. I decided to “root” my G2 (Google Ion, myTouch, whatever) phone so that I can install other versions of the operation system. The primary reason was the speed advantages but I was also interested in wifi tethering. There are a ton of options but I went with Cyanogenmod (at the time it was v4.0.1 but a few days later I installed v.4.0.2 and it was easy) because it has the most “play” (i.e. I read about it all over the place).

It’s funny because supposedly it’s a “one click” process but wherever you read that headline you’ll see 50 links and 10 pages of text.

Advantages:

It does seem faster but it’s no iPhone (probably not even as fast as the first iPhone let along the 3GS)
Wifi tethering! I can tether with a laptop or netbook to my data connection using just wifi. The irony is that I would need to plug the phone in with USB anyway for power but still, tethering!
Multi-Touch browser. Again, not as responsive as iPhone be still nicer than the +/-. Would be really nice in maps and I suspect that might come soon.
More “screens” so I can have more widgets and icons in the locations that I want. Not all that big a deal as 3 was enough, really, since I could get to the stuff I didn’t use much from the “pull up” menu
Couple of new apps I couldn’t have gotten otherwise . . . pdf viewer and an office viewer.
Discovered “MyBackup” which is an app that takes care of backup for apps and data so at the end of it all restoring back to the phone I had before took about 10 minutes . . . with the exception of my background image, ring tone, and some setup inside a few apps like latitude. I had to install all of the apps one but with MyBackup I just had to okay each install one by one but it all went really fast . . . at least I didn’t have to remember what I liked and download it all one by one.
Three keyboards to choose from . . . though, I already had two after installing an alternate a while back.

Disadvantages:

Takes forever to boot up (but that was just the first time . . . it has to run some script)
It was kinda scary though it was actually one of the easiest hacks ever. More scary that most other projects because I *need* my phone whereas if I bust a PSP or my Wii or an XBox I’m just out some entertainment which is no big deal.

Sheldon

I accept!

Not sure if this came after www.stackoverflow.com but it’s horrible!

http://www.justanswer.com/

No mention that you have to pay to get an answer. And, just out of curiosity I decided to go ahead and offer $9 for an answer to my question (it was about my garage door and how it won’t close at around 5pm because the sunlight hits the censor at just the right angle) and the answer was useless (“How about shading the sensor”). Below is the dialog box for my reply. If I press accept then my $9 “deposit” is used up and I accepted the answer. Whack! I can’t wait for stackoverflow for home improvement!

Reply screen from the JustAnswer.com website

Great Phone . . . or Greatest Phone

Some background first . . . .

I got my wife the iPhone 3G the day it came out. Waited in a line for a few hours and everything. She had been using a Razr for about 3 years and it was time. And we were already on the AT&T network so it was easy. I would have gotten one for myself but a month before the 3G was announced I got myself a Blackberry Pearl so I wasn’t eligible for the $199 new customer price.

At the time the biggest problem with an iPhone was the $30 mandatory data plan. It’s the only phone on any network that requires you have a data plan. I like the idea that even though I’m locked in for 2 years I can get the $40/month voice plan to lower my bills just in case. And a year ago the iPhone was a 10 and there was nothing even close from what I could see.

Anyway, a few months ago I went to Google I/O and got one of the G2 HTC phones (it’s called a Magic or myTouch or something like that on T-Mobile). It was a dream come true . . . a chance to use “the other cool phone” without paying for it. And the best part is that I got AT&T to give me a data plan for $15 a month!! Please don’t call AT&T and ask for that plan and ruin it for me. No, seriously . . I’m glad that no one will be reading this. And it sucks that I only get “Edge” speeds because apparently 3G isn’t a standard and AT&T and T-Mobile do 3G data in different ways so if I want 3G on AT&T’s network I have to wait until an Android phone comes out for AT&T.

Okay, so that’s the background info out of the way . . . I’ve never had an iPhone personally but being the techie of the house I do get how the iPhone works and use it occasionally and I always know about cool apps for it before my wife does. And I’ve used a Blackberry for over a year. And now I’ve had the Android phone since May. Here are the results:

If you are a non-tech person, the iPhone is a 10.0 and sets the bar incredibly high. If you can afford that phone, ignore all the stuff about how crappy AT&T is and just get that phone.

If you are a tech person it’s a much harder call because although the iPhone is great . . . it’s locked down! So, a phone like the G2 or any other Android phone (once they come out!!) has an incredible appeal since they are so hackable. It’s an 8.2 to the 9.0 of a iPhone (not a perfect 10 because it’s missing concurrent apps and no Google Voice app but those things don’t matter to a casual user). The old blackberry I had would be a 5.0 at best . . . I mean, you can use maps and check gmail with those apps but getting the apps in the first place sucks because you have to get them directly from the vendor (although this is different now from what I understand) AND it’s still a locked down OS that no one want’s to develop for.

The apps and the speed of the iPhone is why it has any chance against an Android phone . . . and both of those problems will fix themselves if someone releases some decent hardware. It needs to be powerful and WITH a headphone jack (even though bluetooth noice canceling headphones have got to be in the pipeline somewhere at Bose, right?).

I’ll do a pro/cons list about my Android phone some other time, maybe.

Sheldon