If you’re an Honorary Old, as I am, I know you’re thinking “what? Don’t I need a microphone and a headset and etc. etc.?” But no. Here’s what you do:

You open your Gmail.

In the Google Chat panel in the left rail, you click “Call phone.”

You enter the phone number.

The party answers and you hear their voice coming out of your computer, and you just, you know, talk, in the general direction of your computer. Your built-in mike is just fine. It’s not pin-drop quality, but it’s, you know, FINE.

I’ve been keeping my landline phone active for two reasons: “what if there’s an emergency and the power goes out,” and “what if I decide I hate the cable company and I need DSL.” But I’ve made a grand total of EIGHT outbound calls in EIGHT MONTHS on the landline, and received ZERO yes ZERO inbound calls. The $38 a month that I’m paying is starting to seem ridiculous. Is it time to give the thing up?

The latest entry in the “hey, when did all this stuff happen?” sweepstakes is Voice Control on the iPhone 4. Press and hold the home button for a minute, and your personal digital assistant waits for your command. “Play artist Alison Krauss,” you can command. Or, “What song is this?” Or, “Call Martha Jones.” And it actually works!

Yes, I got an iPhone 4 this week (somehow all the queues and secret lists and 24-hour windows are now yesterday’s news; I walked into the Upper West Side Apple Store and had one in 15 minutes). And yes, I’m amazed — FaceTime and the super-sharp screen and the two cameras and all that stuff, it really is remarkable. Video, with editing right on the device! Multitasking! I can listen to Sirius XM radio while converting between ounces and grams! (And it comes with a free iPod Touch, in the form of my defunct iPhone 3G, which still works perfectly well via wireless and continues to do everything it ever did, except make phone calls — which I don’t do much of anymore anyway, and neither do you, but I digress.)

But the innovations are turning up fast and furious these days. Take Dragon Dictation, which is available for iPhone and iPod Touch and iPad and BlackBerry, and soon for your toaster and electric toothbrush. I like the idea of voice-to-text, but I type fast and accurately, even on small devices, so the value hasn’t been evident. But Dragon’s accuracy is now so good that, for certain situations in certain circumstances, I could imagine choosing to use it. Look at these two passages I dictated last night (in the first, I was just riffing, in the second I was reading from this story on The Awl about freelancing, which you should read anyway):

Once upon a time there was an angry dragon. The dragon was very, very angry.
One day, the dragon was walking down the street, and he came upon the lion. Lyon, he said, what say you?
John, said the lion, I am very happy to see you.
And thus ends the lesson.
***
But the sword of Damocles isn’t what’s most toxic to the freelance experience. What’s worse is that, in order to be a freelancer for very long, you have to think of yourself in certain ways. You know what they say about beautiful people? That every pretty girl or gorgeous man is someone’s ask, was too much hassle for someone.

This is raw and unedited. Everything came through as I intended. The punctuation. The paragraph breaks. It got “thus.” It got “freelancer.” It got “Damocles”! The only problems were “Lyon” for “Lion” in the first passage, and “ask” for “ex” in the second. That is a level of accuracy I can live with.

Or try SoundHound. Nevermind holding it up to the radio speakers to identify a song; that’s kid stuff. It identified Nessun dorma from my humming. And I’m no Pavarotti. This isn’t beyond incredible?

(And we’re nowhere near the bleeding edge. Have you heard of Google Goggles?)

Think of the last cellphone you had. Not the first one — just the last one. (Or, if you were an early iPhone adopter, the one before that.) The one I had was a Nokia e62, running Symbian — which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, I detested every moment my fingers were on it. It did hardly anything except make phone calls, download my email, and make me wait while it swapped data in and out of RAM. Put it next to the iPhone 4, and it’s like setting down a lawnmower next to an Audi TT Coupe. If not for the fact that both of them make phone calls (something which fewer and fewer of us bother to do), they might as well be the products of parallel UI evolution on distant planets. And I carried that thing around in my pocket all day, every day, in 2007! I think I have mayonnaise that’s older than that.

So, if on some day in the distant future, when you are an old, old man, a little child asks you when the past ended and the future began, you can tell them with confidence that it was yesterday, August 2, 2010, when Rich Mintz got his iPhone 4. Or something like that.

From the start, I was an XM loyalist, and not just because I knew several people who worked at their headquarters in DC (although that was part of it — and I loved the company’s roots in the District itself, where they outfitted studios in a then-ratty neighborhood off New York Avenue NE before it was obvious to everyone else that the gentrification of that part of DC would actually work). XM was the purist’s choice; in their founding narrative, which I’m sure was more than a little true, they amassed a stupefying collection of recordings, hired the world’s best music curators and on-air talent, and set out to make something worth our loyalty, in response to the appalling field of steaming manure that commercial radio had become in the ClearChannel era. Sirius, by way of contrast, always felt like a naked money play.

So XM raised a stunning amount of money (there were satellites involved, after all — and if I recall correctly, one of the early ones went off course toward Mars or fell into the sea or something, and they had to build a new one — I’m sure it’s on the Internet, you can look it up), and over the next several years, they stumbled in the direction of profitability without ever quite losing their soul. I remained a subscriber for 8 years (!), upgrading my radio once or twice. I’m no music snob — I’m not even that much of a connoisseur — but there’s music I just plain like that you can’t hear on commercial radio and that’s too much work to steal off the Internet or rip from CDs. And besides, part of the point of radio has always been that an intelligent editor programs it for you, at least in theory, so that you can learn about things you’ll like but wouldn’t have found otherwise. Services like Pandora achieve a similar aim in a different way, but I find they require too much thinking to make me happy.

With XM, I was able to indulge my love of legitimate bluegrass, and dance and electronica, and even (to my secret shame) kickass Nashville country music. (Anyone who doesn’t like Kenny Chesney after listening to this or this, or Tim McGraw after this, or Trisha Yearwood after this, needs their head examined.) I bought multiple boomboxes and accessories so I could listen in the car and at home and especially in my bookstore (Peachtree Highway Books, in Atlanta’s Candler Park, 2002-2004, R.I.P.), where I spent most of my waking hours for two years. (Yes, XM, I was an occasional terms-of-service violator, as were many, many other intown Atlanta small businesses in those exciting entrepreneurial years.)

When I moved briefly to Little Rock in 2003-4, I discovered other XM loyalists among my friends. So apparently it wasn’t just me! We traded tips and occasionally even shared equipment. XM kept me company on those long, long drives from Atlanta to Little Rock (usually with an overnight in Tupelo). And in 2005-6, as friends and I founded BusyTonight in New York and tried hard to make a go of our technology business, XM was one of the things that kept me sane during that turbulent period.

I ended up canceling my XM for a combination of cost reasons and lack of use — for a period of several months, I just wasn’t home much, in that way you can get in a city like New York before you get your grownup footing. But now I’m feeling the hankering. Among other things, I feel the lack of editorially programmed bluegrass in my life, and the podcasts I listen to aren’t doing it for me. So I think I’m going to resubscribe. I just passed four hours on JetBlue in the past 24 hours with satellite radio playing in my ears continuously — and I like it. I was worried that the Sirius/XM merger would wreck everything, but most of my old favorite channels are still there, so it’s time to give it another try.

I give this thing about a six-month lifespan before it falls to pieces. Then again, the iPad inside is absolutely pristine AND much more usable with these new configurations available, so it’s doing its job.

Relatedly: I did set out to do the upgrade last week, only to find myself stalled during the backup phase like this guy. I’d already concluded that a wipe-and-restore — or, more gently, a “delete all apps, upgrade OS, then restore apps one by one,” assuming it works — would be my next step.

I am generally speaking an adherent of the Getting Things Done tracking philosophy (slightly modified to fit my own personality a little better). If you’re feeling reductionist, this reduces to five principles:

• Keep only one* queue of “things to be processed/evaluated,” and process it regularly (e.g., daily) and systematically, into…
• One master list of things to do, ordered by project, on which you…
• Clearly identify for each project what is the single next action you need to take;
• Review the master list on a schedule (high-level review daily, detailed review weekly) to prune it of cruft;
• When processing the queue, do right now anything that you think you can finish in less than five minutes.

*I actually have more than one queue, but I process them into a single list.

(I won’t get into the philosophy or practice behind this, which are amply explored in David Allen’s books and in a host of cultish Web sites all over the place. But I will say it feels right to me.)

I had a pretty good system going, using the spectacular open-source Taskwarrior command line app. Unfortunately, two things happened. First, my task list got way too long to handle effectively inside a terminal window; and second, I got this iPad, which has Changed Everything.

Now I’m all about the cloud — about finding ways to make my data accessible from anywhere, on any device. And so I’m afraid that a command-line app that ties me to my laptop probably isn’t the right answer anymore.

The Evernote Web site turned me on to Nozbe, a GTD implementation for Web and iPhone that has a new iPad application that launched this week. Like Evernote, all your Nozbe data syncs magically across all your devices. I haven’t had much luck with task management software, which always feels way too heavy, but this one seems a little gentler, so I’m trying it out.

I’m testing it first as a blog workflow management tool. Right now I have my blog post queue stored in about five places: in Taskwarrior, in Evernote, in Google Reader, in my WordPress drafts folders, and in my head. That’s way too many places. I tried centralizing in Evernote, but Evernote (just like Gmail) is more useful as a storehouse of heterogenous, unstructured information that’s universally available and easily searched than it is as a taxonomic tool. So we’re going to test things out in Nozbe and see what happens. So far I’m optimistic. It can’t be any worse than my current tracking tangle is.

Nevermind that — the first cellphone I actually owned, which was very similar to the one changing the lives of the people in the video below, cost me 99 cents a minute to use — and everyone thought that was normal!

More retro phone porn here.

I think the machine is out of AppleCare at this point, not to mention out of warranty, so I’m particularly impressed. When those people are good, they’re good.

I have friends who swear by Freedom, Fred’s previous creation (for Mac and Windows), which disconnects the Internet on your computer entirely, for whatever interval(s) you specify, so you can get work done without distractions. Anti-Social is a narrower tool, locking you out of social media sites in particular, but leaving the rest of the Internet available.

We will leave as an exercise for the reader the question of Where This All Might Lead.

1. I remember more PHP than I thought. When I dug into the theme files to make a few UI changes, just by examining the context, grepping in the theme directory, and combining some simple trial and error with light Googling, I was able to figure it all out. I cleaned up half a dozen small things that had been bugging me for ages, and uncovered a few more to deal with later.
2. WordPress functions seem well thought-out and well-documented.
3. Boy, do I need some CSS training. Trial and error works, but it’s not the most efficient way to figure out what the hell is going on.

I also had some fun at ColourLovers.com, browsing other people’s palettes and experimenting on my own.

It’s incredible to me that only three or four years ago, I was still waiting out my 2-year contract on a Nokia e62, a smartphone only in name, with a slow and unrewarding email client and a temperamental browser, really best suited for, you know, “talking on the phone” (remember that?).  (Although before that I had a Sidekick, just like Paris Hilton! Remember her?) I could not wait to get free of that device — which, ironically, I acquired in the first place because tech-savvy friends of mine told me I’d love it. Some friends. (Guys, if you’re reading this — I forgive you.)

Now I have the whole Internet in my pocket: the Web, Twitter, Foursquare, maps to everywhere, document readers, and so forth.  The screen is small, but it works. And in another device a little smaller than a magazine, which I can tuck under my arm and carry everywhere, I have a full-screen experience, including data entry and manipulation ability that’s more than adequate for light tasks, even over an extended period.  And it’s all so purty!

Last weekend I had my first experience in ages (how long? 3 years? longer?) of going away overnight, with some serious business obligations to take care of, and leaving the laptop at home.  The iPad was more than adequate (much improved by the Macally BOOKSTAND case, which I can’t believe I’ve only owned for 8 days).  The quantity of “mobile Internet” I’ve consumed in a month or so on the iPad vastly exceeds the quantity I consumed in two years on the Nokia e62, and the user experience is vastly more rewarding. And, except when I’m in Canada (which is a conversation for another day), I almost never need to keep track of how much data I’m using.

So thanks, CTIA and your member companies, for making all this possible.  I realize you’re gigantic faceless corporations, but thanks anyway — this revolution wouldn’t be happening without you.

Hat tip: Michael Rose.

YouTube – CTIA: Freedom is Wireless

Install it; then, anytime you want to save copy from a Web page into your Evernote notes stash, just highlight it on the page and click the Elephant button.  A note goes directly into your Mac desktop Evernote client (and is then synchronized elsewhere), with the URL and everything!

That product is Evernote, and you should go download it right now on every device you own. More about why in a future post; in the meantime I’ve got to go finish purchasing my “I (Evernote) NY” T-shirt and my “I’m not being rude, I’m taking notes in Evernote” laptop stickers.

After exhaustive research, I’ve concluded that it probably doesn’t matter in normal household use — the risk of truly negative consequences from mismatched batteries (e.g., your Apple MagicMouse explodes) is vanishingly low, and the incremental energy savings probably isn’t noticeable. (Really, if you asked me “how long do your mouse batteries last?” my guess would probably be wildly inaccurate.)

However, I have no practical way to know the “residual voltage” left in each of the batteries in a device that’s stopped working. And batteries cost like 50 cents each! So, Duracell, you’ve won this one by default, it seems…

The ergonomics of the pad are much better for a train seat than the laptop. The Macally BOOKSTAND case helps a lot with both typing angle and lap slipperiness mitigation. Internet throughput feels exactly the same (or maybe better) than 3G on the laptop.

The Gmail app for iPad is good but not great (in trying to fit all that Gmail goodness into a small screen, they’ve had to make things too small for my fat fingers). So I mostly am using the built-in mail app, which is quite good but involves efficiency tradeoffs. (No threading, and message archiving is 2 or 3 clicks instead of 1.)

Very hard to do composing on the pad, hard or impossible to do things that involve multiple apps or windows.

I’m still getting a lot done — I would say I’m 80% as productive as on the laptop, while being 50% as distracted, which is not a terrible tradeoff for these 3 hours. And the physical experience of using the thing is itself pleasurable.

There was a time when this technology, if not actually customer-friendly, at least felt like a legitimate response (albeit a heavy-handed one — this kind of stuff, which felt to me kind of “off,” was one reason I discontinued my own account relationship with Earthlink six or seven years ago) to a real problem. Spam certainly felt out of control a decade ago. And the brew-your-own vibe inherent in this approach to spam wasn’t entirely off-brand for Earthlink in, say, 2002 — although they were never a Panix or Pair.com (or even a Netcom), a decade ago Earthlink still had at least a whiff of popular-tech credibility about them.

But come on. Predictive spam filtering, at a whole-system scale, works much better now than it did in 2000. It’s based on Bayesian filters, vast collaborative databases of spam rankings, much better whitelisting and blacklisting at the domain level, and I don’t know what else — that in fact is my point. I’m pretty broadly technically knowledgeable about the Internet, and curious, and I neither know nor particularly care exactly how spam filtering works anymore. I just know that it does. I do see spam in my Gmail inbox, but not much, and it’s exceedingly rare that the spam filter is too strict.

I suppose people have a right to use a whitelist as their first line of defense, just as people have a right to keep rifles by the front door and to make a big deal about not picking up the phone when the caller ID is blocked. But having that sort of siege mentality is a pretty good indicator that a person and I probably will not be the best of friends.

Certainly if I try to reach anyone by email who makes any sort of pretense of being publicly available, and the first thing I get back is a set of tasks I have to complete before they may or may not see my message, I just throw the whole exchange in the garbage and give up on them, with prejudice.

And if someone emails me and I email them back, and then I get a spam challenge — well, that’s just pitiful. I understand how it happens (like most Internet grownups, I have a bunch of identities, and the Internet doesn’t necessarily know they all belong to me) …but come on, that seems to be the very kind of unfortunate customer experience with your product that you should aggressively plan for and mitigate against.

The various Google apps’ iPad-optimized mobile versions all seem to “just work” on the iPad — and some of them, like the Reader app, are obviously custom-built to work better on the iPad. But these are feature-limited apps, and sometimes there are things you want to do that you can only do in the full version. (Example: manage your subscriptions in Google Reader.).

You can switch to the Desktop version (inside Safari) of these Google apps on the iPad, and almost everything works, with a few exceptions. (Example: when attempting to retag Google Reader subscriptions in the settings, you can’t do it using the column of pulldown menus on the right; instead, you have to select the subscriptions one or more at a time and use the “More actions…” menu at the top.)

On the Yahoo side — aside from the extremely limited and awkward Mobile version of Yahoo Mail, none of the existing versions of Yahoo Mail seems to work right on the iPad. Problems range from display and redraw issues to not being able to edit at all inside text fields. This is really appalling — we’re not talking about a startup here, it’s Yahoo, and everyone knew the iPad was coming for months. Even a bunch of volunteers were able to pull together a WordPress app in a few weeks that’s largely elegant and functional on the iPad.

Unfortunately the color and material (microfiber), and the light brown leather strap, give an impression that I can only call “Julia Sugarbaker’s Filofax,” which (although it will work for some people) doesn’t work for me. Fortunately I’ve hit that age where for things like this, function trumps form. It doesn’t look actively ridiculous; and functionally, it delivers. The tilted typing angle does indeed improve speed and accuracy, by a large margin; the thing can stand up by itself for watching streaming video or typing on an external keyboard. When in typing position, the tongue of the strap protrudes a little below the bottom of the device (below the space bar), and I was afraid this would make it jiggly, but it has no meaningful impact on the effectiveness of the thing. And it improves the lap-typing experience noticeably.

Here are a few views of the object just removed from the packaging:

And here are before-and-after views of Netflix streaming of “Monarch of the Glen” streaming on the kitchen table. The “before” braces the naked iPad awkwardly against a bunch of glass IKEA tea light holders.

And some typing views:

Since my iPhone 3G can’t run OS 4, looks like I’m going to be getting in line with all the rest of the sheep sometime later this summer…

He doesn’t think so, and I don’t either.

The way he put it is this:

If I place a bet, it’ll be that the desktop negotiates its place among tablets to settle on a role we haven’t seen in a while: the workstation. As for interface designers, we will sometimes shift out of the one-size-fits-all mindset to ask ourselves: Which device is this app really for? The workstation or the tablet?

Agreed on both counts. From the user perspective, as I’ve gradually incorporated the iPad into my lifestyle, I’ve found myself bifurcating what I reach for and when. The type of interactivity made possible by the two devices is different, and so they’re good for different things.

The laptop (which, since it’s a 17-inch, 7-pound MacBook Pro, is effectively a “desktop, which you can use on your lap if you are in the mood to have a giant robot in your lap”) is for complex or fine tasks, for extended composing, for anything that demands task-switching, and for efficient processing of small tasks in volume. (It’s also for Civilization IV and SimCity 4.)

The pad is for light or casual Internet use — the more consumption-oriented the better — and for light composing (including many blog posts, though not this one). It also works for processing tasks (“doing email”), up to a point.

So, for tasks involving a lot of picking and poking and turning and manipulating (not to mention hunting and pecking), you’ll be happier on the laptop. But the pad is great for activities involving a lot of pointing and sweeping, which (as it turns out) is what a lot of our consumptive Internet use is made up of. Safari on the iPad, in its best moments, is a physical and immersive experience, much more different from a laptop browser than I would have expected — it gives us a taste of what virtual reality will be like when it goes mainstream.

Yes, I caved. In my first month of data, in which I was very careful to use free wireless rather than 3G whenever it was available, I used about 140 of my 250MB. It’s not inconceivable to imagine myself going above 2GB if I let myself go — not likely to happen, but not inconceivable. So there it is.

So it was with not a little joy that I watched Kevin Tofel’s video review of the Macally BOOKSTAND case. Not only is this made of masculine gray or black microfiber with leather trim; it also folds up neatly, in the same triangular way that the Apple case does, into a typing support and into a landscape viewing stand. I’ll be stopping by J&R tomorrow to pick one of these up.

I always assumed that the “regression” part involved something recursive or asymptotic — something infinite — but no, apparently all it means is that at later stages of development you go back and rerun all the previous test cases, to make sure that you didn’t break any of your earlier fixes as a side effect of a later one. Sounds sensible to me, and it probably wouldn’t even be a particularly interesting topic if not for all the various ways that people have automated the storing and rerunning of test cases to help bake regression testing into an effective production process.