I’ve now been living with an iPhone 4 for a month.  I’m sure few would be surprised for me to call it a great smartphone.  As I said in my previous post, the screen is the outstanding feature.  I am truly amazed at this “Retina display”.  I actually carry 2 iPhones (work-issued and personal).  My work phone is an iPhone 3GS.  So, I’m reading each on a daily basis.  When they were both 3GS I was a happy camper (except for having to carry 2 phones).  Now, every time I check e-mail on the 3GS I’m reminded how poor the screen is in comparison to the 4.  The difference is striking.  I’m a gadget freak, so I would have picked up this new version anyway, but the screen itself is totally worth the upgrade.  In fact, it almost makes me disappointed in the the iPad 3G, which is nearly as new.  I know — totally different beast.

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I waited in line to get the iPhone 4 today and came away successful. I don’t yet know if this is a great new phone, but it has an amazing screen. I am blown away by the clarity. It’s like going from an SDTV to an HDTV. Text looks like it’s back-lit print — just amazing.

The purchasing experience was great too. Note that today is the second day of their availability. My working theory was that there would be some reservations that weren’t picked up on day one and those go in the available-to-walk-ins pool. I was sure others would be thinking the same way. I’m not totally nuts, though, so I got in line at 7am (for a scheduled 8am early opening). I was about number 20 in line. I talked to the folks around me and it seems everyone had been there the day before. It sounds like that had been a real zoo. It took about 30 minutes for me to get inside once the doors opened. I spent another 30 minutes getting and activating the 2 I was after. Not too bad. Now what do I do with 2 iPhone 3GS?

I’ve seen repeated over and over that the iPad has poor wifi reception, but our iPad 3G seems to defy this. I dare say that our iPad is the best wifi device we have. I haven’t seen it drop signal anywhere in our house (even the driveway). Our iPhones are a close second, but none of our notebooks are even in the same realm of reception. So far 3G reception has been great as well.

It should go without saying — grab the right lens. We went to the Memphis Exotic Italian Car Show today and I just grabbed my camera on the way out. I only have 2 lenses and I figured that the one already installed would be “good enough”. Well, that was a big mistake. It wound up being my 50 – 200 lens, which is fine, but a bit too much zoom on an APS-C sized sensor like I’ve got. I kept finding myself trying to step back in places I couldn’t. It was really frustrating. Neat cars, nice show, a little small, especially for $10/person, but nice place to take Grandpa on Father’s Day. There are truely some cool cars in town.

I’m giving in. I’ve set my camera clock to GMT. The timestamps in the EXIF data on most of the pictures I take are only good for picking out what day it was taken, maybe even localizing to morning or afternoon. The problem is I almost never remember to change it’s setting when we have the DST transitions or travel to different timezones. If I never remembered I guess it wouldn’t be quite as bad. So, today is a flag day — all of my primary camera pictures after 6/11/2010 are stamped in GMT.

So, I was one of the crazy people that was in line for the iPad 3G’s release at 17:00 yesterday. I had been debating it most of the week and made a last minute decision to go for it. I did a quick check of the Macrumors iPad forum to see how the lines might be and they seemed to be pretty minimal. So, I made a break for it just after 16:00. It took me about 25 minutes to get there, so I didn’t get in line until about 16:30.

At that pint I was probably about 50 back people in line. That caught me by surprise. As we approached 17:00 the line quickly doubled. Demographic make-up was across the board. This product seemed to have a broad appeal. One guy I was standing near already has an iPad and was looking for the extra mobility of the 3G. With so many people in line we were all a bit concerned about availability. Shortly before 17:00 an Apple employee started working down the line surveying us with an iPod Touch. He’d ask us which model we’re looking for and enter it in his little application. After a second or two it would report back if there was availability for that model and he’d move down the line. The 64GB model was available. Yes. We could start to hear cheers of jubilation coming from within the store. What was going on up there?

The line moved pretty quickly and when I got up to the front there were a lot of people coming up to the line-minder asking about availability. He couldn’t reveal inventory levels, but there were a lot of folks concerned they’d wait in line for an hour and go home empty handed. One lady wasn’t even interested in a 3G model, she wanted a plain iPad, but was driving to Hattiesburg next and wanted to know whether or not it would be worth waiting in line or if she should already hit the road. Pretty much everybody in line was after the 3G, so she shouldn’t have much to worry about.

Then my turn came. I was assisted by Helen (one of two Helens, apparently). She took me inside the store and it was obviously all-hands-on-deck. That was a bustling storm of activity. There were people everywhere. Money was flying at Apple. I got one the 64GB models and the dock and was outta there almost exactly at 17:30. As I walked out the staff erupted in cheers — nice touch.

We went to the Apple store today to see/play with the new iPad. Much to my surprise, we had to wait in line to get in the store. Apparently, it was fire code compliance, but I think I’ve seen the store more crowded before. Despite the line, we were inside in under 5 minutes. Then we spent about 15 minutes with a demo unit. In some ways it was like big iPod touch, but the extra screen real estate can be put to great use. I’m primarily looking at it for web surfing and for that purpose it seems to excel. The vocal critics citing a lack of Flash is not something that dissuades me. Having had numerous BSD/Solaris/Linux systems without Flash over the years, it just doesn’t bother me. Maybe I just don’t spend enough time watching embedded videos. I’m hoping this device gives critical mass to HTML5, and the decline of Flash (but I’m not holding my breath). Being that the base OS is shared with the iPhone I thought the Thai support would be the same, but it’s not. Thai does appear to be supported in Safari. I pulled up Thairath and did a bit of browsing. Wow, that’ll be perfect for grandpa. Going into the settings applet there was no Thai option for setting up an additional keyboard like I can on my iPhone. That’s not a dealbreaker, but I hope it returns. So, I’m looking forward to probably picking up the 3G version when they come out later this month.

My big ZFS pool on my SageTV server recently hit 2/3 capacity.  It’s amazing just how big HD shows are, and I record a lot of them (probably too many).  I needed to do something before I ran out of space, so I ordered 4 more 2TB Hitachi drives.  This box doesn’t have hot-swap capability, but if it had I think I could have done this with 1 reboot.  So, I pulled out 2 of the 1TB drives from separate mirrored pairs and replaced them with 2 2TB drives.  Then I ran ‘zfs replace’ for each missing drive and in about 3 hours it was done resilvering.  I did this again for the other 2 1TB drives from those 2 mirrored pairs.  A reboot later and my array now shows 5.44TB capacity.  It appears throughput has increased as well.  So, this is my 3rd capacity expansion on this pool and I think ZFS is indispensable for it.  There’s no doubt that 6 hours of resilvering better than having to find some place to back up everything (if I even have that much space anywhere), backing it up, rebuilding the array, and then restoring.

So we got a good deal on a 65 inch plasma at hhgregg.  They included a Blu-ray player as part of the package.  I’d thought to myself that someday when I got a Blu-ray player it’d probably be a PS3, but I guess not.  I ran and picked up the BBC’s Planet Earth box set to have some content.  I’d seen it on Discovery when it was first released and was amazed.  I knew I had to have it in HD someday.  We’ve now rented several movies on Blu-ray and my verdict is that it can be quite amazing (like Planet Earth), but mostly not so much.  This has to be a big part of the low adoption rate.  I’ve got to rent some more  to see if I’ve just made bad picks, but so far — I’m not that impressed.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been very interested in ZFS lately. Well this week, the hypothetical happened to me and ZFS was there to make it a non-event. I was checking up on my newest ZFS’d filesystem (a pair of 1TB drives in a ZFS mirror). I ran ‘zpool status’ to see how the health of the pool was and it reported that one drive had had a checksum error. I’ve been processing gigs of log files from it, so one block error isn’t much of a pattern. I ran a ‘zpool scrub’ to check everything out (it was clean), and I’ll certainly watch that drive a little closer. ZFS made it simple and seamless.