It’s actually making me crazy that I’m saturating our office firewall at 822 Mbps. I’m trying to convince myself to not worry about it, and that 822 Mbps is really, really fast, but this might turn into a “thing” that I’m not going to be able to leave alone.

iMac:~ mclark$ iperf -c iperf.phyber.com
————————————————————
Client connecting to iperf.phyber.com, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 129 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ 5] local 207.171.12.201 port 58948 connected with 207.171.11.14 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 5] 0.0-10.0 sec 980 MBytes 822 Mbits/sec

Personally I like Apple’s new maps app for the iPhone. It’s fast, responsive, and gets me where I need to go. I understand and appreciate the underlying reasons for why the Google based maps had to go (read Ripping Off The Bloody Band-Aid by MG Siegler). I also realize that not everyone is having a positive experience with Apple’s application. Having access to some iOS 5 phones I ran my own personal test between the two. If you take away the POI differences, Google’s maps feel slow and clunky.

Today Tim Cook posted a public apology for the shortcomings of Apple’s new maps app. I was surprised to see it, and it makes me love the company even more. I absolutely believe and trust that Apple is working to produce the best possible product for their customers. It actually reminds me of Google 5+ years ago when the “don’t be evil” motto actually meant something.

Google has made it a point to keep the experience on an iOS device inferior to an Android device. It’s corporate strategy to force consumer adoption of their phones. This has placed Apple in an interesting position, the company simply must de-Google itself and its products. In my opinion this has created a golden opportunity for Yahoo.

Yahoo has an excellent maps platform with years of development and data. Yahoo has an email platform with millions of users. There’s even these other things called search, travel, news, flickr, etc… But Yahoo needs to become relevant again. Some have floated bold acquisitions of properties like Pinterest to jumpstart the process. My thought is slightly different – deliver to the iOS user what Google is abandoning. Win the hearts and minds of the millions of iPhone and iPad users on this planet and it will be a very different landscape on the Internet. Change the equation, instead of Apple vs. Google (with Facebook trying to straddle the fence and Microsoft/Bing completely irrelevant), why not Apple/Yahoo vs. Google? Then throw a crazy curve ball and make your Android apps just as good.

Yahoo deliver me a good, Ad de-cluttered product and I for one will use it.

A little over a decade ago I unplugged the Cable from my TV. It was an awesome, liberating experience. I still remember the initial feeling of not knowing what to do with myself, this quickly was replaced with reading and fun, exciting outdoor activities that actually involved doing something. Unfortunately I plugged the TV back in for a Superbowl and fell back into old habits.

Fast forward to the present. Over the past year or so I’ve noticed that I’ve been “watching” less and less TV. My DVR is set to record fewer shows – and even those I don’t seem to care that much about. Most of my TV time has been background noise while I’m sitting at the computer working on something. So after talking with my brother (who cut his TV and Internet this year) I found myself fixated on the idea of cutting the cable again.

This time my transition has been more gradual. I’ve removed most of the DVR subscriptions. Instead of channel surfing for noise I’ve gone to my Netflix queue. And I’ve been reading more at night. The less present the TV has been, the less I’ve missed it and I decided to take the plunge.

After researching I settled on a outdoor HD Antenna by RCA (see bottom of this post for more details) which I purchased from Amazon. My barometer for success was an indoor test. Namely if any signal was picked up sitting on my floor haphazardly pointed towards the source I would be in business. Not only was the test a successful by my standards, the signal was clear and beautiful. Last night I had the antenna installed on the roof, and didn’t even bother with directional tuning – my TV reports 98% signal strength. The NFL season opener with the Cowboys @ Giants was gorgeous – better in fact than the HD feed on the still plugged in Cable.

Today I called Verizon and cancelled my Cable service. That was the adventure that I expected, with a few surprises:

1. According to Verizon they cannot generate a bill if you only have one service (in my case Internet) without a phone line, and that the only way is with Credit Card billing. Fine if you want to pay the fee I’ll gladly take the Amex points.
2. My TV+Internet Bundle was $99.99 / month. The Internet only (same speed) cost is $89.99. I considered keeping basic Cable for the extra $10 bucks except you need to pay an additional fee for the box. That’s right, you can’t actually watch TV if you have a TV package without an additional fee.
3. Not really a surprise but I spent 61 minutes on the phone (mostly in hold waiting) to cancel service.

What did this cost / what am I saving?

• RCA ANT751R Outdoor Antenna $40.77 via Amazon
• 50ft Quad Shielded RG6 Cable $14.52 via Monoprice
• Installation $120.00 (easier and probably about the same as buying the ladder)

Total Cost = $175.29
Estimated First Year Savings = $1,128.36

TL;DR

I cancelled my cable, installed an HD Antenna and will save over $1,000 this year.

Thank you Mark Cuban, I’m sick of hearing people talk about how the IPO failed.

“Have you ever been to an auction where the selling party told a buyer to reduce their price because they were worried that the item might not hold its value ? Neither have I.  If the CFO of Facebook came on SharkTank and told me that he was able to sell his shares to the public for $38 a share, but turned down the opportunity, I would crush him for being an idiot.”

via Facebook Handled their IPO Exactly Right « blog maverick.

So much easier than running lsof. This works on Linux.

netstat -lepunt # Show the TCP and UDP ports being listened on and if you’re root, also show the process associated, user, etc.

via Twitter / climagic: netstat -lepunt # Show the ….

If you are running OSX 10.7 or newer and X11.app use:

defaults write org.x.X11 app_to_run /usr/bin/true

For XQuartz.app use:

defaults write org.macosforge.xquartz.X11 app_to_run /usr/bin/true

Ever since the switch from MobileMe to iCloud and the elimination of Keychain syncing I have become a huge fan of 1Password by AgileBits. Plus as an added benefit my passwords sync between my Mac and Windows machines.

Anyways after installing 1Password I wanted to stop storing passwords in Safari. If you are like me just follow these steps:

1. Open Safari
2. Go to Safari -> Preferences
3. Click on the AutoFill icon and uncheck “User names and passwords”
4. To clear any saved usernames and passwords, click “Edit…” to the right of “User names and passwords”.
5. Select the website(s) and user name(s) to remove and click “Remove”. Or if you’re like me click on “Remove All” to clear all saved user names and passwords.
6. Click “Done” and close preferences.

Thanks to MIT for reminding me how to do this late at night.

Once a Social Media Star, Digg Sells for $500,000 to Betaworks – WSJ.com.

Digg has been in the news a lot today – some positive, some negative. Probably the best news for the current ownership is that they are selling the site and getting something for it.

Digg was an amazing site. A few years ago I used it more than Facebook. Today it’s not even in my browser history. The real lesson from Digg is that it’s hard to build a community, but it’s real easy to kill it.

Look at the Netflix fiasco. At least Netflix finally figure out that their users were carrying pitchforks and torches in the street and backed down reversing their mistakes. Digg alienated their users and pressed forward. By their second “redesign” I like lots of other people were gone never to return.

Create the product that you want to use. Chances are your customers will like it as well. If the majority of them don’t and leave, admit your mistake, roll back and move forward.

What a great image showing the various undersea fiber routes.

Just shows why the Russian paths under the North Pole are so important for speed.

From Mapping the internet

Just because I constantly Google for this:

Alt+Cmd+Enter