Personal

Motorola S9-HD, fails the sweat test

As predicted, the Motorola S9-HD finally failed today. As everyone said on the web, the buttons stopped working today. None of the buttons on the left work and the top two buttons on the right are the same now (skip forward) while the bottom button doesnt work at all. I'll return them now. It's a shame though, they work very well, Motorola screwed this up huge by not fixing this well known problem. Corporate quality control at its finest...

Deleting large numbers of files from Amazon s3

I was using jungledisk to backup my home machine. I was backing up about a million files or about 120Gb. I was getting expensive and I just bought a Drobo instead. The problem now is I'm paying 80 bucks a month for that backup data and Amazon offers no easy way to delete it.

I tried using s3fox (a firefox plugin) but this is way out of its league. I next tried s3cmd which works. I did a 's3cmd ls' first to get the buckets and then a 's3cmd rb -r -f bucketname' which deletes the bucket and all nested buckets/files.

It's just SLOW. JungleDisk makes about 8 files on s3 for each file. There is one for the file contents, another for mtime, another for ctime and so on. I stopped this after a day and then started an EC2 instance. I then uploaded s3cmd to that and did it from there. Much faster (10x at least). No network latency slowing it down and now a day and a half later, the buckets are finally gone.

Amazon, give us a way to easily remove buckets!

First impressions: Motorola S9-HD Stereo Bluetooth Headset with an iPhone 3GS

I started running recently and wanted some headphones to use while running. The standard apples ones keep falling out of my ears and that gets annoying very quickly.

I've seen review of the S9-HD headphones and while the reviews are mixed, decided to buy them. I paid 70 bucks in BestBuy. They said if I had problems then I could return them. The problems I've read about are they while they claim they are sweat proof (right on the box), I've seen countless web reviews claiming as soon as you sweat then the buttons on the phones start acting up. Time will tell.

On the first day, I'm very happy with them so far. Sound quality is ok, they are isolating to a degree also. They include a mic so you can easily take calls while wearing them and it works well for calls.

They are very light and you can forget you are wearing them. Battery life is 6 hours or so and they should be enough for what I want. No cable is very cool.

Pairing with my iPhone 3GS went ok but not smooth. They paired initially very easily but music wouldn't play through them for a few minutes and after I cycled the power on the headphones then it started working. They work fine now.

The right hand trio of buttons over the ear are supposed to be TOP (forward) middle (PLAY/PAUSE) and bottom is backward a song. The forward and backward buttons do not work on the 3GS. The left ear trio is volume on top and bottom and call answer/hangup in the middle. These all work fine.

They come with extra ear buds in a smaller size but the default larger ones work for me. I'll try running in them tomorrow and report later.

UPDATE: One major issue is forget watching videos with these. There is a 1/4 second or so lag which means the sound is always behind the video, this gets real irritating, real fast.

UPDATE: Exercising with these is interesting. Riding a bike with my phone in the side pocket on my shorts, the audio breaks up continually where it just doesnt work. Putting the phone in a arm band solves that but it still breaks up when there is a lot of tree cover it seems. I havent pinned it down yet but bluetooth seems super sensitive to the environment even when there is less than a foot between the phone and the set like on your arm.

UPDATE: Ran 6 miles with them today and was very happy with them. The break up problem only happens when the phone is on my right bicep. Moving it to my left bicep solves the problem. Besides that, they worked very well.

UPDATE: Walking this morning with my iphone in my left jeans pocket. Worked ok until I put my left hand in my pocket and then no signal. Take my hand out of my pocket and the signal returns. Put my hand over my pocket, no signal. Clearly, it doesn't take much to cause drop outs. Best advice is in your computer bag or on the left bicep.

Review: Brookstone iPhone extended battery (616672P)

I bought one of these last week and have been playing with it since coupled with my iPhone 3GS. Basically, it's a small ish 1200ma Lithium Ion battery and a USB charger. It charges quickly in under 4 hours for a full charge. Once charged then it can bring my iPhone up maybe 50% before it's empty. 50% isn't bad, I'd have preferred it to be capable of fully charging a 3GS but it may be better on a 3G or original iPhone which have smaller internal batteries I think.

There isn't much else to say about it, it's definitely something that I'll use as it's very handy on trips having it. Something I'd like to see is a cable to attach it to the iPhone rather than plug straight in, then I could attach it and keep in my bag or something without them separating.

For 50 bucks, its not bad.

Sold my iPhone 3G on eBay and bought a 3GS instead

I just bought the 32Gb iPhone 3GS and am very happy with it. It cost 320 with the activation fees. I then sold my old white 16GB iPhone 3G on eBay but it wasn't smooth. My first auction sold for 330. The buyer had zero feedback and ended up being a Nigerian scam artist. He tried sending me fake paypal payment emails etc and a fake legal letter demanding shipment. I did a second chance auction and someone in Florida bought it for 280. That seems all sorted out now.

The remaining issue is eBay fees. They want 60 bucks for one auction! This is on top of the 15 bucks paypal charged me. Looks like they charged me three times for the same item. I'm trying to get it resolved now.