Massive Mileage

Having fun with the HP41CX emulator for the iPhone

If there's one person to blame for my addiction to to portable, battery-operated gadgets, it's my uncle, who had access to the latest scientific calculators by HP or Texas Instruments through his job. We're talking here about expensive little computers with memory in the KB range and 10-digit 7-segment red LED displays.

1980 he would show me the HP 41C, which was a break-through device. It sported a alphanumeric display, which allowed to enter commands by its name and hence not limit its functionality by the number of keys on the keyboard. Users could redefine the keyboard and there were expansion modules for adding more scientific and financial functionality.  I wanted to have one so badly, but there was no way to justify this kind of expense for a sixth grader.

Fast-forward 30 years. The coolest handheld device is the iPhone with memory in the gigabytes. And there's an awesome HP 41CX emulator (iTunes Store link) available in the iPhone app store for $10. The look is absolutely authentic (the feel, of course, is lacking the characteristic plop of an HP keypad) and, for $5 extra, you even get a virtual dot-matrix printer. 

Between the original HP 41C and the iPhone are pretty much 30 years of progress. A 10-character black-and-white LCD display is replaced with a high-res color screen. Kilobytes with Gigabytes, multi-assigned keys with a touch screen and an optional magnet-card writer with high-speed wireless network access. Only the battery life suffered greatly: the 41C was able to operate for a few more days after the low battery warning - with the iPhone you better rush to the next power outlet right away.

One could imagine, if HP engineers in '79 could have dreamed up hardware, they would have ended up with something close to the iPhone: with its touch screen, it perfectly supports the user-definable keyboard without the plastic overlays that were shipped with the 41C. But what do modern calculators look like in 2009? Interestingly the current top model, the HP 50 is a pretty boring piece of technology, with a monochrome low-res graphical display. And the iPhone App Store sports only a few emulators and variations of the build-in calculator. The HP 41CX emulator is the only programmable one (which is technically a violation of the iPhone app agreement - but in this case Apple probably didn't mind too much).

I guess, the top-notch app would be Mathematica. It should be too difficult to port Mathematica to the iPhone, and I'm sure that somebody at Wolfram Research has probably already running it. The main issue with it is probably the $999 price limit in the App Store.

How I rate songs and albums in iTunes

ITunes allows an up to 5-star rating for every song and album. I know many iTunes users wouldn't go through the hassle of rating all their songs, but for me this is an important tool on selecting the music I want to hear. As of this moment I have 7,492 songs in my library and I need to select those that get a place on my iPhone. Also, I want random playlists, where I like every single song. And the best way of accomplishing this is by rating each and every song.

Obviously my library is biased towards songs I like, so a rating has mostly a positive meaning as there's no point of separating bad and very bad songs. So here we go:

• 1 star goes to songs I don't want to hear. These would be candidates to be deleted from the library if it was worth the effort. An example is No. 1 Song in Heaven by the Sparks, which makes me feel like drowning in melted candy. Interludes that only make sense in the context of an album also go into this category.
• 2 star goes to songs I don't dislike, but which fail to hook into my mind, so that I forget them 30 seconds after they have finished. That doesn't mean it's a bad song, but I would only play it in the context of an album or a genius playlist.
• 3 star goes to songs I like and which I would put in my playlists.
• 4 star are my favorites, outstanding songs that I would just search and play by themselves.
• 5 star are the rare songs that have a special effect on me, such as this one.

Since some time iTunes also allows ratings on an entire album. By default it calculates it from the average ratings of the songs, but I need it for with slightly different meaning:

• 1 star goes to albums I plainly dislike. There may be an outstanding song on there, but I most of it I don't like.
• 2 star goes to albums I wouldn't listen to on my iPod or iPhone, but maybe as a background soundtrack at home.
• 3 star is for a good album I like sometimes to listen from begin to end.
• 4 star is for an outstanding album. These are the ones that are synced to my iPhone. Since space is limited, I try to keep all 4-star albums below 10 GB.
• 5 star is for all-time favorites.

I do regularly review my ratings as my musical preference changes. Since this can be done on the fly on the iPhone or iPod it doesn't take too much effort. Also I have the ongoing project where I try to listen to each song at least once a year, also for adjusting the rating when necessary.

Massive Mileage: digital tools for improving your life

So what is this? This is a spin-off of Elke's and my main blog NYDiscovery, which we maintain since 2001. Over there we want to maintain a more New York and entertainment centric focus and my blog entries about software, web and the iPhone didn't really fit in.

But I want to continue to document my endless journey to the perfect organization of our lives, using available web tools, software and devices. Here's my general approach:

• I like to digitalize as much as possible. Get away with paper and plastic for storing information. I am aware that certain physical media contribute positively to the quality of life, but at the bottom line the advantage digitalized media on efficient mass storage outweighs.
• I like to dump information as much as I can into some sort of digital repository. I don't want to remember certain information, I want to rely on tools to present it to me when needed. Basically, I like to occupy my mind with creative thoughts, not with phone numbers, appointments and which chore has to be done at which time.
• I like to have access my information from everywhere. This means data have to be in sync between multiple desktops, laptops and mobile devices.
• I like to have my information in the cloud as much as possible. This guarantees availability from everywhere and simplifies the sync scenarios.

We're not there yet. Lots of pieces are missing. But it is exciting to follow along and see how software and the Internet is changing our lives. And I'm convinced in the very end it's for the better.

So what Massive Mileage? I leave this open, but it's borrowed from a different project of Elke and me and we had the domain hanging around. So here we go.