The New Hampshire House is considering a ban on texting while Driving. Please, no.

If the news is to be believed, separate teams have found hardware and software-based solutions to unlock an iPhone.

It’s worth noting that all this is legal because of an exemption, much needed and hard fought.

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Old instructions that connect the Mac OS X Address Book app to a phone via Bluetooth from O’Reilly and SillyDog. Once paired, the Address Book can initiate dialing, notify the user of incoming calls, and send SMS texts.

Bluetooth Texter SMS Widget, message2net, and BluePhoneElite all offer further tools to interact with your Bluetooth-connected mobile phone. The list of compatible phones (BPE & m2n) offers some leads for those trying to make the connection.

Finally, Simon Winter offers some tips on interacting with SMS via AppleScript.

bluetooth, mac, mac os x, sms, texting, applescript, cell phone

I’ve been talking up the Pepper Pad and Nokia 770 a lot, and I’ve mentioned a moment of lust for the LifeDrive (despite my complaints against PDAs), but today I bought a Treo 650 (even though I had doubts).

My decision surprised me, but the following factors all weighed in its favor:

• My cell phone contract expired. Verizon was dangling their standard $100 discount (on top of other discounts) on a new phone if I renewed. That, and Palm dropped the price on the 650 a lot recently.
   
• My Clie TH-55 is kaput. Yeah, I had complaints, but it turned out that I missed the damn thing.
   
• With the Clie out of commission, I was also in need of a small camera/video camera. I was thinking of getting a refurbished Stylus Verve for about $150 (when you can find them). The Treo’s camera can’t match the Stylus, but it’s better than the Clie’s and will do the job.

Well, that’s how I justified explained it to Sandee anyway.

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Though we imagine the Dutch to be a rather unexcitable lot, I did anyway, it turns out they have a history of getting rowdy at football games (yes, if this all happened back in the States I be calling it “soccer”). So it can’t be so much of a surprise that fans rioted again in April. What is surprising is that mobile phone companies got involved in the investigation. This AP report tells the story:

Phone companies voluntarily handed over the mobile phone numbers of people who were in or around Feyenoord’s Kuip stadium on the day of the match — traceable using broadcasting masts in the area.

So that’s what the aGPS sticker on our cellphones is about.

Via Engadget.

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Geolocation by GPS my be the most straightforward approach, but we mustn’t forget the other ways to get lat/lon coordinates.

All current cell phones support aGPS positioning to comply with federal E-911 mandates, but not all phones make it easy for the user to get that information out of them. Still, some do and GPS-enabled moblogging is becoming common in Asia and Europe, and there’s at least a public proof of concept going in the US.

Then there’s ethernet/WiFi. Plazes is a kind of social networking application that allows users identify their location based on their network fingerprint. Using the assumption that networks are typically stationary, Plazes then associates lat/lon coordinates to that network based on information submitted by user who ‘discovered’ the network. Plazes’ real trick, however, is to show me who else is online nearby. Problem is, I live and work in New Hampshire where I appear to be the only user online north of Virginia.

But the Plazes folks didn’t invent the concept of using network information to identify location. If I wasn’t so lazy I’d find the story I read a couple of years ago that mentioned it, but this June 2004 article in New Scientist tells the story of one such effort: PlaceLab (extra coverage at Engadget and ExtremeGPS). A Google search turned up Herecast and now Engadget is reporting on AllwaysOnGPS, a replacement GPS driver (for Windows PCs) that mixes GPS and WiFi derived location data to provide the most accurate info despite changing coverage.

Finally, one of my favorite solutions is to use Earthcomber in manual mode. The Palm application allows you to scroll around a map and mark locations as though they were waypoints in a GPS. And though that’s neat, it’s the mapping features that make it a winner. It’s far better than those lousy tourist guides in cities. I used to go to AAA for maps and guides in preparation for a trip, but now I check Earthcomber for area maps and updates.

Technorati Tags: agps, cell phone, coordinates, geolocation, gps, lattitude, longitude, map, mapping, maps, moblogging, network, networking application, palm, picture phone, social networking, wifi