My temporary setup: AT&T GoPhone + iPad + Google Voice

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You may have seen a Tweet from me mentioning that the backlight on my iPhone 3G finally kicked the bucket. I used it for two weeks and couldn’t stand it anymore, so I started thinking about alternatives.

I’ve got an old Motorola AT&T GoPhone I bought back when I was doing a lot of biking and needed an expendable backup phone, but I hate using it for two reasons: (1) it doesn’t have any of my contacts, and (2) I hate texting with the tiny numeric keypad. However, it dawned on me yesterday that I haven’t even been using my phone for most of my texting in the last several weeks. More often than not I’ve used the excellent free Google Voice service on my recently-mobile-data-plan-enabled iPad. It further dawned on me that I can do almost everything I do with my phone on my iPad instead, except for actually making and receiving calls.

So, I’ve dusted off that old GoPhone and swapped my SIM card in there. When I need to make a call now, I bring up Google Voice on my iPad, click Call, choose the contact, and instruct Google Voice to ring my cell phone. It’s actually a great little setup and I’m sure it will serve me fine until Apple finally decides to release iPhone 5. 

Justification and hyphenation

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Why is virtually nothing on the web justified and hyphenated? Grab any book off the shelf in your home or office and I’ll bet you it’s justified and hyphenated. In fact, I challenge you to find me a book that isn’t.

Hundreds of years of making books and it seems to me everyone agrees justified and hyphenated is the way to go. Now all of a sudden it’s controversial whether or not it’s really better for reading, easier on the eyes, &c. The technology exists to easily hyphenate any website or app,1 but many developers either aren’t aware it’s possible or choose not to do it because they somehow think ragged-right is better.

And I’m not just talking about average blogs or news websites. I’m looking squarely at sites like Instapaper and Readability, and apps like Flipboard and Articles, who claim to offer a superior reading experience (and for the most part I think they do), yet continue to feature rag-right text. I’m also looking at e-book readers like Amazon’s Kindle or Apple’s iBooks,2 or Bible apps like OliveTree BibleReader or Crossway’s ESV Bible.

For all this new-fangled technology we have, e-reading is just not like reading a real book. It seems to me justification and hyphenation are a cheap and easy way to get closer to the real thing, so why aren’t they being utilized more universally? 

  1. For example, I use the excellent hyphenator.js right here on this site. [↩]
  2. Although, for all I know Kindle and iBooks may very well have justification and hyphenation baked in as options and the decision not to leverage those features could be up to publishers at the level of the individual books, in which case my complaint is still valid, but should be leveled at publishers, not the platforms they publish on. [↩]

My only iPhone 5 prediction

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As should be patently obvious, this prediction is not based on any inside information.

I’ve read some rumors to the effect that the next iPhone will be half an inch wider and half an inch taller than iPhone 4. I’m trying to imagine how Apple could increase the size of the screen without compromising their much touted Retina display. Apple’s always bragged about iPhone 4’s display being greater than 300 dpi, which is supposedly some kind of sweet spot where the human eye can no longer perceive individual pixels. Setting aside the possible dubiousness of that claim, it’s inescapable that increasing the screen size by a half inch on each side without also increasing the resolution would decrease the dpi to around 280 (by my very rough calculations) and basically ruin their whole marketing shtick.

So here’s my totally half-baked prediction: iPhone 5 will have a 720p HD display in order to preserve the 300+ dpi on a larger display. I imagine this will ruffle the feathers of a few iPhone app developers who’ve had to work over the past year to redesign their apps for 960×640, since now they’ll have to turn around and redesign for 1080×720, but wouldn’t it be a fantastic blow to all the competing handset makers who seem to be standardizing around qHD?

My setup: Password Hasher and KeePass

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Padlock My friend Aaron recently blogged about an innovative way to generate and remember many passwords using convenient password cards. His post has inspired me to share my own method for randomizing my passwords across many sites. Let me say at the outset, though, I really like Aaron’s approach, and don’t mean to imply by this post that I think my approach is superior to his (in fact, for portability and forward compatibility, his solution is perhaps superior to mine). The point is to find a method that works and then discipline yourself to stick to it.

Let me start with a short story. You may remember that I used to be the proprietor of the Homestar Runner Wiki and its accompanying discussion forum. Well, there was some drama there one year (as there was every year and as there is with all online fora) and one of our members decided to start his own forum and tried to persuade other members to leave us and join him since we were so dumb and he was so cool. I almost signed up on his forum just to see what all the fuss was about, but before I got around to it, one of our forum’s moderators signed up on his site. Shortly after she signed up, he was able to retrieve her password from his own forum’s database, and, since she had used the same password for his site as she had used on our site, he was able to log into our site using her password.

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“Blessings” by Laura Story

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My new favorite Christian music track is “Blessings” by Laura Story. Here are the lyrics:

We pray for blessings,
We pray for peace,
Comfort for family, protection while we sleep.
We pray for healing, for prosperity,
We pray for Your mighty hand to ease our suffering.
All the while, You hear each spoken need,
Yet love us way too much to give us lesser things.

‘Cause what if your blessings come through raindrops?
What if Your healing comes through tears?
What if a thousand sleepless nights
Are what it takes to know You’re near?
What if trials of this life are Your mercies in disguise?

We pray for wisdom,
Your voice to hear,
And we cry in anger when we cannot feel You near.
We doubt Your goodness, we doubt Your love,
As if every promise from Your Word is not enough.
All the while, You hear each desperate plea,
And long that we’d have faith to believe.

‘Cause what if your blessings come through raindrops?
What if Your healing comes through tears?
What if a thousand sleepless nights
Are what it takes to know You’re near?
And what if trials of this life are Your mercies in disguise?

When friends betray us,
When darkness seems to win,
We know the pain reminds this heart
That this is not, this is not our home.
It’s not our home.

‘Cause what if your blessings come through raindrops?
What if Your healing comes through tears?
And what if a thousand sleepless nights
Are what it takes to know You’re near?
What if my greatest disappointments
Or the aching of this life
Is the revealing of a greater thirst this world can’t satisfy?
And what if trials of this life,
The rain, the storms, the hardest nights,
Are your mercies in disguise?

His oath, his covenant, his blood

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Yesterday morning in Bible study we discussed Luke 22:14-20 where Jesus institutes the Lord’s supper and asserts that the new covenant is sealed with his blood:

And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.” Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for you.”

In our study we then connected that back to the new covenant promises found in Ezekiel 36:22-38:

Then I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

My forgiveness, my assurance of salvation, my living a new life, my having God’s spirit in me, is all grounded upon an oath, a covenant that God has made and which has been sealed with Christ’s blood shed for me.

With all that in mind, I was particularly struck by the third verse of the hymn, “The Solid Rock”, which we sang in worship service this morning:

His oath, His covenant, His blood
Support me in the whelming flood;
When all around my soul gives way,
He then is all my hope and stay.

On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand;
All other ground is sinking sand,
All other ground is sinking sand.

Are we leaning on other people in our lives—parents, spouses, friends? Are we leaning on ourselves and our own abilities? Or is our salvation built on Christ and Christ alone, his oath and covenant sealed with his blood, which is our only “hope and stay”?