Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Last night I started a project I’ve been thinking about for a while – going paperless.

No, I’m not talk about files of paperwork, old bills, medical records etc. I would love to get rid of those – move them all into Evernote and not have to deal with my huge filing cabinet again, but that would require an immediate investment of at least $200 for a decent scanner with a multi-sheet feeder and Evernote functionality.

No, I’m starting, at least, with books.

This was somewhat spurred by My father-in-law bringing 10 bagfulls of books for my 6-year-old daughter after Thanksgiving.  A couple times a year he gets books from his wife who is a librarian and has access to lots of extras that the library can’t use. My daughter’s bookshelves filled up at least a year ago and excess books have been in various piles around the house. When the latest selection of 100 or maybe even more books came a couple of weeks ago, a kind of answer for this accumulating sea of clutter dawned on me.

But first, let’s flash back fifteen or twenty years, when CDROM’s were just coming out, and about as cool as tablets are today.  I remember having a dream (yes, the sleeping kind), that I walked into a “book” store, but instead of books on the shelves, there were  CD jewel cases presumably holding CDROM versions of the books that would have taken up more (although admittedly not THAT much more) space. While this interesting vision might have come to pass had technology more or less stood still for another 10 or  20 years, it’s obviously now somewhat anachronistic now that we can store the equivalent of 10,000+ CD’s on a thumb drive the size of a thumbnail that costs $10 or less retail, and now that we have the Cloud and instant purchases and transfers of large amounts of data in the form of content (movies, mooks, music, you name it), and apps, a variety of subscription, rental, and ownership models models, etc.

Now that eBooks have really come into their own as a sustainable retail reality (albeit one that still sorting itself out with respect to the future of publishing houses), the idea of putting all of my books in digital form and accessible not just in my house but anywhere I go, is kind of irresistible, albeit monetarily impractical for all but the most dedicated, or wealthy, or uncaring towards the legal ramifications of piracy.

Being a technologist and computer owner since the 1970′s, I’ve never had a problem with reading things on a screen vs. paper.  Indeed I find it a more powerful experience, although admittedly with some glitches and without the tactile and olefactory niceties that paper provides.  But to me the advantages in functionality and space-saving far outweighs those niceties, and really aren’t those things that we just associate with books because they’ve just happened to come with them?  If we’d somehow managed to make a plastic version of paper that was easier and cheaper to manufacture 50 years ago, would most of us then associate some plastic sent and feel to our reading?  I’m sure of it.  I don’t think there’s anything inherently great about whatever those chemicals or textures happen to impart, they just are what we are accustomed to, and that’s all.

That being said, I’m not suggesting that paper books have no value, or no value above their electronic counterparts.  Indeed, for now anyway, I’m not buying eBooks for my daughter.  Ok, I bought one, kind of as an experiment.  But it was one that she probably won’t be able to read herself for another year or two anyway.  I do think books have value as physical objects in that they contain artwork, size and shape, occasionally binding decorations, etc., that do not require us to turn a device on and search through a library to enjoy.  One can enjoy seeing a book on a shelf just in passing and remember when you first read it, etc.  You can do something similar with eBooks, but it’s not quite the same.  Then again, maybe that’s just because I generally don’t own eBooks and haven’t had the opportunity to have this experience.

In any case, let’s get on with the story already!

So my project started thus: I brought up a couple of shelves worth of books into my office and one by one entered their ISBN numbers into Amazon and then added them to a private wish list I named “Library.” I used ISBN numbers for the most part because, as it turns out, I have a lot of books that have had new additions since I bought them and I wanted to have a record of the exact edition on my shelves.  Simply adding these books to an online catalog is enough to placate my immediate digitization jones.  And really, it’s probably many, many years late.  I pretty much always had my DVD’s cataloged, albeit with some holes here and there, but never my books, probably because I have way more of them than I ever had DVD’s.  It’s nice to know that even if we have a flood or fire and everything is destroyed, I’ll at least have a record of the books I used to own.  Is that too morbid?  Maybe.  It just feels like a kind of insurance, if only informational insurance, since I’m guessing these books are not worth enough to claim much, given that the fast majority seem to be available for twenty five cents plus shipping used at Amazon!

We know a couple who have actually tackled this job for real – converting all their paper books to eBooks (if it wasn’t obvious, they have the financial means to do this), although rumor has it that they still read paper books.  I haven’t talked to them about this, but perhaps their strategy is to do the initial reading of the content via book, but once complete, the book gets sold or boxed or given away and an eBook version gets purchased and archived for when needed.  I’d love to be able to do this, but then I’d also love to have several tablets, a few smartphones, a new kitchen, and a few other small items.

But here’s the thing.  Honestly, I don’t read all that often.  Not books anway.  The vast majority of what I read are articles on the web, blog entries, and Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ feed items.   I mostly stopped buying books (other than programming books for my profession) 10 or so years ago after discovering Audio Books via Audible.com.  Since then, any fiction, or even non-fiction long-form that I’ve attempted, with a few exceptions here and there, have been through Audio Books.  This is because of being increasinglty busy, but also due to having a slow reading speed.  The ability to listen instead of read also means I have opportunities to “read” an audiobook that I wouldn’t have with paper – while doing something else, like driving, taking public transport, washing dishes, doing yard work, etc.

So I guess if I could, I would even opt for audio books rather than eBooks.  Optimally it would be great to have both so that I could listen to audio book but then have the eBook handy if I wanted to find a specific passage via searching.  Even if all the books I own were available in both forms, buying these would most assuredly bankrupt me.   I think if you’ve already purchased a book in paper form, you should be able to get 90% off it’s eBook price, and perhaps 50% off it’s audio book price!

I guess I’ll have to be content knowing that in some distant future there might actually be a time when content is essentially free (and legal), and one can find at least eBook versions of everything in print and out.  It doesn’t seem that outlandish.  At that time I can then start bemoaning the fact that there’s no way I’ll every be able to read or list to all the books I have, let alone all the books that I’d like to own at some point.  But until then, I’m at least boxing and/or donating 95% of my books – so that I can make room for 20 more bags of new books for my daughter each year until she decides that finding something on a 7-inch tablet is a whole lot easier, albeit less fun and fortuitous, than finding it among the hundreds of other books scattered in various rooms of uncategorized shelves throughout our house.

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I bought my first Android phone in June, the HTC Evo 3D, and have mostly been pleased with the experience.  Before it, I’d used many other types of smartphones, including Windows Mobile Treos, PalmOS Treos, and an old Danger Sidekick, finally ending up with a Palm Pre that lasted me for two years until the Evo 3D.  Going from one phone platform to another to me is not a big deal. You get accustomed to one way of doing things, but it’s not THAT hard to retrain yourself – or at least so far it hasn’t been for me!

One of the nice things about Android is the degree to which you can customize the user interface.  It’s somewhat the opposite of the iPhone’s philosophy  that there is a “perfect” design, or at least universal rules of design that one can use (or “dictate” depending on your view) to make an easier interface for 90% of users and discount the other 10% as freaks.  Ok, so it’s probably true that you can follow design principles to come up with a general “best fit” way of operating a cell phone for most people, and this often just means simplicity. But for those 10% of us who like to tweak things, it’s nice to be able to have a phone that you can monkey with, even if you end up spending way more time tweaking things than you would ever save by having an interface more conducive to your brain.  In other words, Google does not dictate design, they suggest it and let users change things around, even if those changes are bad for most people.  To a certain extent it’s democracy vs. tyranny or perhaps letting your kids make their own choices (and mistakes) in order to learn things for themselves, instead of making all their decisions for them.

Unlike with iPhones, there are many tools made by Android developers that offer enhancements to the user interface, including folder apps, widgets, etc., etc.  One could seriously spend a life time looking at these and evaluating them!  The most complex of these add-ons is the “launcher” which replaces the main interface of the device – the home screen, app drawer, etc.  IE what you see when you exit out of all apps and are facing the main user interface of the phone itself.

When I got my phone, I knew that these launchers existed, but I resisted the temptation to play with them.  My phone comes with a “skin” which is a kind of launcher itself, but one that has been installed by the phone’s manufacturer, often embeded in the phone’s Read Only Memory.  My phone’s skin is HTC’s “Sense” and it is pretty good as these go, having gotten pretty good ratings overall.  Still, I knew that eventually I would feel compelled to look for more sophisticated launchers and so decided to finally embark on this project.

There are probably a couple of dozen Android launchers available for download, maybe more.   But there are a “Big 3″ that normally get discussed most in Android circles because they have a large set of features and are very popular compared to the others. Those Big 3 are ADW Launcher EX, Launcher Pro, and Go Launcher.  In addition to these, there’s Zeam, which some people seem to like because it is lighter on their older, less powerful phones that can’t handle all the sophisticated features (and memory requirements) of the Big 3.  There’s another launcher I decided to look at as well, but kind of from “afar” – SPB Shell 3D.  The company that makes that launcher has been around for many years, well before the first Android phone, makeing similar products for PalmOS and Windows Mobile. The reason my look was from “afar” was that SPB Shell 3D is  priced well above the average Android app (launcher or not) at $15.  That price might be reasonable if some of its competitors were anywhere close, but that’s not the case – it’s more than triple the price of any competitor, and I doubt it’s really more than three times as good as any other launcher out there.  Without any way to actually try the app out, I refuse to shell out so much for the app.  There are many, many more launchers out there and I tried several others, but none of them seemed to have half the features of the Big 3 and there was something not quite as polished about most of  them, so I stuck to ONLY 5 launchers.

I won’t include a big descriptive piece about each launcher in this article – that’s been done on many similar posts by other authors who try to distill a given launcher into a long paragraph that’s supposed to summarize its strengths and weaknesses.  Instead, I will share a link to a Google Docs spreadsheet I created that attempts to seperate and organize the various features for each launcher.  This spreadsheet is far from perfect or complete, I’m sure I missed many features and possibly it has some inaccuracies due to my not being able to figure out how to accomplish a given feature. And for SPB Shell 3D, I had to simply leave much of the features blank because I couldn’t play with the app myself.

So, because there are probably lots of deficiencies, as well as features which will be added to some of these Launchers after this article is posted, I’m hoping that you the reader can enlighten me so that I can continue to make this spreadsheet more accurate and complete.

I often find making these kinds of spreadsheets helpful because they can quantify features in a way that is hard to grasp by simply using these apps for an extended period of time.  To quantify things a bit further, I also created a kind of scoring system where I assigned points based on whether a feature existed, didn’t exist, or existed but in a less complete way than others.  All of this was very arbitrary of course, and I didn’t assign any weighting because I knew what is important for one person may not be for another.  So while my spreadsheet gives a big point advantage to Go Launcher EX, I still haven’t decided myself whether I’m going to choose that over the others.  Rather, this is the starting off point.  I personally won’t use Zeam because I think it just has too few features for me, and I won’t use SPB Shell 3D because of its price, but otherwise I still need to decide which features are most important to me and pick one of the Big 3.

I have actually been using a “launcher” app for a few months now that is different from all of the ones in the Spreadsheet.  It has no home screens, dock bars, app drawers or the like.  It exists simply as a way to quickly launch apps, shortcuts, and more recently widgets.  It’s called WaveLauncher and I won’t say much else except that I find it so useful and well thought out that I will continue to use it no matter which other launcher I eventually switch to, because it can be used on top of any of those as a great supplement.

Whatever launcher you pick I’d love to know why.  What was the killer feature that it had that the others didn’t or did you just try one out first and after using it for a while just stuck to it out of habit?

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Many people who know me both online and off will know that I’ve been somewhat of a diehard webOS user for the last two years – since Palm came out with the first Palm Pre in June of 2009 and I picked one up on the day it launched on Sprint.  Since then I got to know many of my fellow webOS users and many webOS developers through Twitter, podcasts, meetups, and the Developer Day event in New York last year.  In fact I’ll be heading to the Baltimore meetup this Saturday to meet up with some of these great people and to get a look at the Touchpad (which I’ve yet to go to seek out at a store).

Despite my love of the community, a couple of weeks ago I traded in my trusty Palm Pre 2 (“FrankenPre”) for an…. shudder… Android phone!  The newly released HTC Evo 3D.  This phone boasts some of the best specs in terms of hardware, including a 3D screen for viewing video and stills in 3D, as well as two cameras that can actually take said video and stills.

While some may consider this “disloyalty” to a cause (that of webOS), my reasons were mostly financial.  I’ve been a Sprint customer just about as long as I’ve been a Palm smartphone customer, and frankly their prices are hard to beat.  But also I’m tied to some degree by the fact that I’m on a family plan, with some of those lines not transferable (without fee) until September.  Sure, I could have waited till then, but I like Sprint for other reasons as well (they aren’t quite as monopolistic-minded as their larger brethren, and don’t donate to political causes or candidates I disagree with).

Aside from the financial aspects, I’ve been continuously disappointing with how sluggish things have been since HP took Palm over (not that they were speedy to begin with).  There was so much talk about how HP would save webOS because of it’s huge size.  “Scale, scale, scale!” they chanted.  And yet it took them a year to come out with a tablet that seems to be a generation behind at least in terms of hardware.  Their flagship Pre3 phone (which, while a spec improvement over the Pre 2 and Veer still lags behind many current Android offerings) now looks to be delayed from its targeted summer release to “the fall” if reports are to be believed.  There was so much waiting and hope that HP would produce something impressive, but from the February event onward, there seem to have been so many bumps that it was getting difficult to maintain much hope.  I’ve been through so much of these dark times with the platform, part of me simply needed a break, a rest.  I think many webOS faithful would understand the term “exhausted” when used in referring to being a webOS user.  Not to say there wasn’t a lot of fun and excitement too, but if nothing else, it was a bit too much of a roller coaster ride!

I still with webOS and HP/Palm the best with it.  I hope it quickly grabs the foothold that so far has remained illusive, but this time around I wanted to watch from a bit farther of a vantage point, so as not to avoid that queasy feeling that I got it seemed every other day when being a full member of the community.

With that out of the way, I thought I would jump into some initial impressions of the Evo 3D that I’ve had for the past two weeks.

Hardware

In general my sense is that the hardware is very solid.  It doesn’t feel cheap or plasticky, and so far I’ve not heard of others having developed any hardware issues.  It’s only been out a couple of weeks, but this hasn’t stopped other phones from developing problems in this short a period.

Not having a physical keyboard is difficult for someone like myself who’s had one for the last 8 years on one device or another, but not insurmountable, and really I think cuts down on the potential problems that come with sliding mechanisms not to mention keys that are being pressed many, many times each per day.  So far I’ve only played with the standard Android keyboard and it’s mostly effective with it’s predictive functionality.  I tried Swype on a different Android phone I was playing with a while ago and never could quite get the hang of it, but there are many alternative Android keyboards out there and I’m sure one of them (if not many) would allow me to become more efficient at typing.

The phone is big!  At least compared to the Pre and Pre 2.  I have an Otterbox case on it, which admittedly ads even more bulk.  It is difficult to one-hand the thing, especially for someone with smaller hands like myself, and this for me is reasonably important, but I suppose something I’m going to have to sacrifice for having such a large screen.

As most reviews point out, the Evo 3D is fast!  This is both hardware and software-related, I suppose, but it’s normally credited to the tremendous processing power of the dual-core 1.2Ghz Snapdragon processor .  Generally there is no or very little lag to doing anything.  Really the only waiting is for stuff to download, not anything as far as displaying stuff that’s already on the phone.  Restarting the phone takes maybe a minute or a minute and a half max.

The screen is qHD (960×540) and is pretty bright, except outside in sunlight, where it’s kind of hard to see.  Not much else to say, everything I’ve viewed on it, from pictures to web pages, etc., looks great.

There are actually three cameras on the phone, a front-facing (1.3MP) one meant for video-conferencing (which I haven’t used yet)  and two (5MP) cameras on the back meant for both 2D and 3D still image and video capture.  I have only taken a couple of 3D images and 1 3D video with the phone, so I can’t really vouch for quality quite yet, although having a dedicated camera button is definitely a lot nicer than having to hit a button on the screen.  The thing that would really make it nice would be an optical viewfinder so you don’t even have to use the screen, but I think that’s not a feature we’ll see any time soon on a phone!

The battery is one that is a good deal larger than what comes with most devices, rated at 1750mah.  There are lots of ways to drain the battery, and 3D is of course one of them, the 4G (Wimax) radio another, and bluetooth yet another.  I haven’t done a great deal of testing, I really try to keep it charging whenever possible, as I’ve done with most of the phones I’ve had.  I’ve found that battery life ratings are in general all across the board, not just for this phone, but for almost any phone.  Mainly this is due to to how a person uses the phone, but I think another aspect that’s probably even more a factor but not mentioned nearly enough is simply what kind of cell reception one gets.  I’ve had phones that could make it 20 hours or more at home die after 6 hours at the office (uncharged) because reception was so poor.  I’ve often gotten extended batteries because I know I’m liable not to always be either at the office, at home, or in the car, but so far it hasn’t become an issue.  In fact, even with trying to keep it charging much of the time, there are points where hours will go by without charging and the battery meter seems to rarely go beyond what looks like 50%, but again, take that with a big YMMV!

 Tweaking

Most people could care less about “tweaking” their phones.  For those people, iPhones are great because it’s designed for people who don’t want to tweak much, they just want something that’s designed well for most people to be usable.  Apple is good at that.  But for some of us, it’s fun to modify our OS (whether on the desktop or phone) to enhance efficiency as well as aesthetics.

Many people call Android “clunky” compared to iOS and webOS, and while I can understand that perception, after using the Evo 3D for two weeks, I don’t think it’s really fair.  Perhaps out of the box with plain vanilla Android, and maybe not even the latest version (Gingerbread), Android is not as elegant, and actually requires you to go into settings to change things more than I’d like, rather than having apps to do the same thing.  But Android also makes up for this in it’s “widgets” which are essentially pieces of live app functionality running on it’s screens (without having to open the apps themselves).

With HTC Sense or any of a variety of 3rd party launchers (none of which require rooting), you can get things working in a way that provides a great degree of ease of use and functionality, and suited to almost any taste. There’s an application I’ve become enamored with called Wave Launcher which adds a webOS-like draggable launchbar, infinitely more configurable than webOS’s ever was, even with Homebrew patches.

Speaking of Homebrew, much of what I loved about webOS was really Homebrew – the ability to tweak the phone in ways that Palm didn’t initially provide for (not to mention the overclocking without which the original Pre was almost unusable).  Without these patches, webOS was an elegant but pretty limited mobile operating system, not even providing a way to add new launcher pages until 2.0.  Although 2.0 allowed for more customization of the launcher, it also locked some things down so that a lot of the patches no longer worked to tweak things like icon size.  My point is that on both platforms, the out-of-the-box system is only going to suit a select group of users, and most who consider themselves ‘power users’ are going to take to tweaking things pretty quickly.  I’ve never written patches, but as an avid consumer of them, it feels like there are some that on Android would require rooting, while a lot would not -  you simply download an app of one kind or another to change things more to your liking, or just change something in the built-in settings, or use the integrated UI of the Android screens which are inherently more configurable than webOS’s.  In that sense it’s even easier to tweak Android than webOS, albeit perhaps not as emotionally satisfying

Synergy

A word about synergy, since it’s relevant to the webOS perspective.  Android has it’s own system of Synergy that includes your various online social media accounts, Gmail, Exchange, etc.  Personally I find it just as effective, perhaps even moreso in some areas, than webOS’s Synergy.  Synergy was probably the “killer app” for me in convincing me to switch to webOS in the first place, and while HP/Palm still touts it as one of their selling points, I don’t see how it is effectively different from what you get on Android at this point.

Software:

Not much to say here, the catalogs for the two platforms vary dramatically, not just in the number of apps, but in the offerings of big name apps.  If you need something on Android, it’s likely to be found.  With webOS, this still isn’t the case, unfortunately.

3D:

I guess it’s not too surprising that there’s been a lot of criticism of the 3D aspect of the Evo.  It’s really both Sprint and HTC’s fault for marketing it with such an emphasis and hype around that one feature. On the other hand, as many have noted in various reviews,  it is one of many aspects of this phone, and one that you can simply avoid by not taking or looking at 3D video or images..

And while some may consider 3D a “gimmick” I don’t. I consider it a feature that still has more potential than real usefulness. My main issue is being able to transfer the image or video to a larger screen so more than just one person at a time can view it. When we all (or a big chunk of us) have monitors or tv’s that can view this stuff natively, then it will be a different stoyr, but even without that, it does add a great deal of visual interest to both stills and videos. Sometimes it looks a little cheesy, but sometimes it really does add to the feeling of reality. I’m wondering if this is something that our eyes simply need to get used to. I’m sure that the early color TV’s and even photos were scoffed at by purists for adding colors that were not true representations of real life, but rather garish faximilies, making the image less artistic and more of a “gimmick.” This was probably due in part to an immature technology but also due eyes that were used to seeing things in black and white.  I wonder if there’s similar phenomenon going on with 3D and our eyes still need years, perhaps even a decade or more to adjust to an image that carries more depth. I also wonder if it’s just a subjective thing. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how it makes their eyes or head hurt, feel queesy, etc.  But I’ve never had that experiece, even watching 3D video for upwards of 20 minutes streight (the Green Hornet movie that comes with the phone).

Did I miss anything?  If so, please add your own additions (or questions) below!

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Ok, well, maybe not exactly, but more or less. At least that’s my fervent hope. As readers here may have noticed, I have not posted an entry here in over a year! That is a long time to go without blogging, especially for someone who tended to post not every day, but at least a couple times a month in most months, and often more than that.

2007 was a busy year for me personally. My daughter turned two, and rapidly demanded more attention as she became totally super-mobile as well as agile enough to climb tables, leap tall buildings, or at least cushions with a single bound, etc.

I also started a new job in 2007 where I’ve been kept very busy. Previous jobs have almost all had some serious downtimes, especially the job previous to my current one. The business at work means I’m sometimes working late and/or on the weekends. Since many of my previous jobs were for government contracts where you really couldn’t work overtime, this is definitely different!

But the blogging bug has been gnawing at me for a while. I’ve actually been keeping my writing going by participating in a number of discussion forums, and a recent reply to a message asking me if I was a professional writer (incredibly flattering to someone who’s never had a piece of writing printed other than a couple of college paper editorials!) has given me that much more motivation to get this thing back on the tracks again. I really want to put some thoughts down here and there if only in a paragraph or two. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately for some of my readers – the long tomes you may encounter by viewing the archives here probably will not occur again, or only on very rare occasion. I’m going to attempt, however, to at least start scribbling down a disjointed thought or two on a more regular basis – well, hell, on ANY basis – and we’ll see what happens.

I did feel like I needed to write SOME kind of intermediate message, though, explaining my absence for over a year, so here it is.

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I’ve only had my Treo 700wx for about 4 months now, but it works very well for me. Now Palm is finally unveiling a decent successor, the Treo 800W. It has just about every enhancement I can think of outside of a multi-touch iPhone interface, and a bigger screen. The only thing I don’t see mentioned is GPS capability, but given that other Palm devices are including this and the wealth of all other features, it seems pretty likely. The only thing that I’m a little sad about is the microSD, since both my cameras and my phones have taken regular SD now for the last 2+ years. But maybe by the time I actually get this phone, the 8GB microSD will be affordable. You can now get a 16GB SD card for half the price of an 8GB microSD… Oh well, I don’t even use more than one quarter of my cheap 4GB SD card in my current phone, so I guess I should stop whining!

http://blog.treonauts.com/2008/01/more-treo-800w.html?utm_source=tnemail&utm_medium=daily

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I’ve been shopping at Whole Foods (a health-oriented grocery chain with many stores across the U.S.) for a good ten years now. We’ve had them in the DC area since I came here 13 years ago. It is definitely more expensive to buy things there, but my perhaps naïve assumption was always that the things I bought were hopefully a little healthier – without the preservatives, chemicals, high-fructose corn syrup, aspartame, trans fats, and other junk that’s rife in products at mainstream supermarkets. At the very least, their hot food bars supplied me with many lunches and breakfasts throughout the years at pretty reasonable prices and offering what I thought were great and healthy options.

Perhaps it was the naïve assumption that most products in Whole Foods were healthy that made me a bit lax about looking at ingredients lists, or perhaps it was just that Whole Foods did not have ingredients listed for most of their prepared foods until recently. In any case, I’ve been reading these labels recently and have come to the conclusion that just about everything that Whole Foods makes (there prepared foods you buy for heating up at home as well as their hot-bar items) has canola oil in it! It is already very difficult to find packaged products containing an oil other than canola or a similar vegetable oil in them, but seemingly this is also the case for many non-packaged items as well.

Now, many of you may be saying “so what, isn’t it the saturated fat that’s bad, not the unsaturated stuff”? Well, not exactly. Check out Gary Taubes’ “Good Calories Bad Calories” and you will see a great outline about how this myth came to be. Even the traditionalists have disembarked from the pure “eat more unsaturated fat” to just “eat more MONO-unsaturated fat.” Monounsaturated fat (MUFA) is the type of fat that olive oil is primarily made up of and presumably the healthfulness of the Mediterranean diet is based on this. A diet high in polyunsaturated fats (PUFA’s) has been linked, albeit tenuously, to increased risk of cancer. It’s true that Canola oil does have a decent amount of MUFA (60%), but it also has a lot of PUFA (almost 40%).

There are other potential health concerns specific to Canola. Apparently processing of the oil involves a “deodorization” process which converts omega-3 fatty acids into harmful trans-fatty acids.

Of course not everyone will believe that Canola oil is unhealthful. There’s certainly no incontrovertible truth and intelligent people can still disagree about whether canola oil increases risk factors or decreases them. Still, because this oil is a bit controversial, especially among what is probably one of Whole Foods’ target audiences, my thought is it would behoove them to use an oil that is less controversial.

Olive oil is seen almost universally as, if not a perfect oil, at least one that is acceptably low in potential health risks. The advocates of the Mediterranean diet of course contend that the MUFA’s in it are exceedingly healthy, as are its low levels of saturated fatty acids (SFA’s). Those on the other side of the spectrum who believe that SFA’s are healthy while PUFA’s are not, view olive oil at worst as a neutral oil, since it’s mostly MUFA with just a tiny percentage of PUFA.

Likewise, butter is a great option for many items that require fat, especially baked goods. When I’ve looked at the ingredients of baked goods at my local Whole Foods they invariably list canola and not butter, although very occasionally I will see something that doesn’t have it – for example a pound cake I picked up last night. Of course, butter is relatively high in SFA and so for the traditionalists who still believe in the diet-heart hypothesis (that SFA’s increase cholesterol levels and that increased cholesterol levels increase coronary heart disease risk factors) despite lots of evidence that refutes this theory, it isn’t acceptable. Similarly the tropical oils that used to be used a great deal in baking had their reputations tarnished (I believe wrongly) because of the whole saturated fat scare of the 80’s and 90’s. Only in the last 10 or so years are we starting to see reports about how some of the fatty acids in these oils can actually be heart-protective.

Even if we just concentrate on olive oil as the least controversial alternative, it is a lot more expensive than canola, and there’s the rub. If it wasn’t for this factor, we might be seeing a lot more olive oil in Whole Foods’ prepared foods. As it is Whole Foods charges a premium for their food, and using olive oil would probably make their food that much more expensive. At this point, though, I don’t even have the option of buying most of their prepared foods because I don’t care to consume canola oil. So Whole Foods is losing sales because they’ve made it too hard for me to buy lunch there, given the small number of options that don’t contain added canola.

Sadly, few people care enough about this stuff to be aware that there’s anything controversial about canola, and others simply won’t believe that there’s enough evidence to implicate it in health issues. I contend, though, that the people who pay a premium at Whole Foods for presumably healthy food are probably more aware of the controversy and more likely to use that as a factor when making buying decisions. Still, I think this issue needs a lot more exposure. Optimally, I should be preparing all the food I eat myself, of course, but being a busy parent this isn’t always possible, and I would like to not be so constrained in my choices when going to a store that is supposed to be carrying products that are healthful…

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My first transaction ever on eBay, back in 1997, was selling an old VCR to some guy in Texas. The guy sent me a bad check, but I didn’t quite understand how banking worked back then and after the amount showed up in my account several days later, I assumed it went through ok and sent the VCR. Then I learned it bounced and I was charged $5. He eventually sent another check which bounced as well for another $5 fee. After that he basically told me that it was my fault for sending him the VCR before the check cleared and I didn’t hear from him again.

I didn’t use eBay again for another year or two. We did trade negative feedbacks for each other, but in any case, I think it’s a little odd that if a buyer rips you off, you can’t mark them as being just as dishonest as a bad seller. Both sellers and buyers have responsibilities and you can usually tell if a seller gave a negative mark just in retaliation to a buyers if that buyer has an otherwise prestine record…

Quoting from techDirt:

eBay has been making some changes lately that aren’t sitting well with eBay sellers. First, it announced fee changes that initially were promoted as “lower fees,” but the details showed were only lower for goods that didn’t sell. The fees on sold goods were actually higher. Now, the company has banned sellers from giving “negative” feedback on buyers.

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In The Omnivore’s Dilemm a, journalist and author Michael Pollan takes us on a journey through four of the main kinds of meals that are generally get eaten here in the U.S.: a fast food meal; an “industrial organic” meal; a meal from a non-industrial, sustainable, local farm (self-labeled “beyond organic”); and finally a meal for which Pollan provides the majority of the ingredients himself – by hunting and gathering. The book is not only about the meals and their ingredients and preparation, however. Rather, Pollan tries to take us from the very beginning of how the components of each meal, to the end product. Thus he traces the cow, chicken, or pig from its origins and life on the farm (or forest) to its slaughter, preparation for sale or cooking, and final preparation by the Pollan himself or McDonalds. He also traces other parts of the meal, most notably corn (for the fast-food meal) and mushrooms (for the hunter-gatherer meal). Along the way, we Pollan gives us the history of various kinds of agriculture, discusses much of our historical and prehistoric relationship to food through the anthropological record, and even how animal and plant species have evolved to defend against predation but also to survive with the help of humans or other animals. The book is not purely one of information, though, but also a very personal account of Pollan’s own journey as he immerses himself in the details of what most of us take for granted as simply the food we buy and eat every day.The title of the book refers to the fact that humans, like some other primates, rats, pigs, chickens, bears, and a bunch of other species, are “omnivores,” meaning that they (we) are generalized feeders that can eat both animal meats as well as plant foods for our nourishment. Other species have a more specialized diet, and can only survive by either eating meat (carnivores) or plant foods (herbivores). While being an omnivore gives distinct advantages, allowing for a wider assortment of nourishment, the flip side of this increased number of choices is the problem or dilemma of what to eat. Koala bears know they can eat eucalyptus leaves, and that’s it. Omnivores have to figure out what they can eat, making sure not to eat something poisonous, and also trying to determine the most nutritious animals or plants (or parts of these) so that they don’t waste their limited capacity to consume and fill up on ones that aren’t as very nourishing. Also, since we’ve developed culture, language, philosophy, and religion, we also need to deal with the decision of what we should eat. Should we eat meat, for example, or is that “immoral.” Should we eat by the rules of kosher or halal? Should we eat organic or conventional? Should we eat something that authorities tell us will eventually be detrimental to our health despite no immediate or obvious danger? These questions, although they perhaps only infrequently come up for most of us, are ones where we differ from other species, and Pollan demonstrates throughout the book that these decisions can be at times very difficult ones if one really chooses to contemplate them seriously.

The first section of the book details industrial agriculture. Specifically, it describes everything about the biggest single crop that the U.S. produces – corn, or more accurately the species zea mays. The history of corn is a fascinating one as Pollan tells it. He describes how in the last fifty or so years it has become part of an absurdist spiral that has bankrupted huge numbers of farmers, made the U.S. one of the most obese countries on the planet, and has usurped the vast majority of our arable land. Most of this, Pollan writes, is due to government subsidies that compel farmers to grow corn over anything else. Government regulations also favor corn, industrial methods of farming, and the largest of operations. These regulations are no doubt affected by the lobbying dollars spent, and campaign contributions given, to government officials on behalf of the manufacturers of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and huge industrial farms.

Corn has become such a cheap commodity, Pollan tells us, that new ways are constantly being devised to deal with the ever-increasing yields and surpluses that would otherwise rot on the silo floor. So corn goes into all processed foods for various purposes – bulking, sweetening, preserving, or adding this or that quality. Sweetening, of course, is one of its main functions, as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) found in soft drinks and desert foods and in many other non-desert foods that one wouldn’t expect it to be in. The escalating consumption of soft drinks with HFCS has been proposed by many as a major causal factor in the U.S. epidemic of obesity and diabetes – especially childhood diabetes.

In addition to corn, Pollan also tracks a steer he purchases that will eventually be slaughtered in a factory farm, or has the industry calls it, a Confined Area Feeding Operation, of CAFO. The steer gets to have a happy few weeks with his mother, eating a natural diet of grass, after which he is shipped to the CAFO and subsequently made to eat a completely unnatural diet of corn, soy protein, and the fat from fellow slaughtered cows. Corn is the carbohydrate of choice, of course, because it is so cheap, but also because it fattens the cow very quickly (not unlike how it fattens us), and produces the marbling affect that the USDA uses one of its two main variables in how it rates rate cuts of meat. Such cows are routinely given antibiotics as part of their regular diet due to the unsanitary conditions of the industrial feed lot as well as their unnatural diet. They are also pumped full of hormones to speed their growth even more.

Aside from the humanitarian, health, and economic issues involved, there is even one of geopolitics. This is because industrial farming is based around petroleum, and according to Pollan accounts for 20% of the United States energy expenditure! Not only does this industrial system involve shipping food products across the vast distances of our country, but the fertilizer itself requires a great deal of petroleum to produce. While technology like genetically modified organisms and new farming methods have made the yield per acre of corn very high indeed, the efficiency of producing it in terms of resources needed is still low. According to Pollan, it takes something like 50 calories of energy (mostly from oil) to produce a single food calorie from corn. Of course, all this government subsidizing, and hence cheapening of corn, means that corn and the animals raised on it have become much cheaper to eat. But, Pollan argues, there is a tremendous hidden cost, or costs, the two major ones being public health and our increased dependency on foreign oil.

The second part of the book is devoted to “industrial organic.” This might seem like a contradiction in terms and Pollan argues that this may be the case. He describes the origins of the organic movement in the 60′s and 70′s and how part of the tenets of the movement was about “sustainability” – the ability for a farm to sustain itself without a significant amount of outside “inputs” – chemical fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) The first farms of this movement grew haltingly, but eventually took off, mainly in the 1980′s, after which their products were in such high demand by national chains like Costco that their demand could not be bet via the original ideals of organic movement. So a more “industrial” approach was adopted. Still, neither the animal feed nor the crops grown for human consumption via industrial organic can use chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Antibiotics can only be used in case of an illness rather than as a preventative, and hormones cannot be used at all. While this takes care of many of the problems of pure industrial farming, it does not deal with the problem of sustainability that was a major part of the movement’s initial focus.

The third part of the book centers around the self-labeled “beyond organic,” movement, which aims to reinvent the original movement’s ideals, although some of its origins hark back even further to the 1940′s, when industrial farming was really starting to get started, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides were starting to be used. The movement preaches sustainability and imitating nature in the closest way possible within the confines of a managed system. The practice is exemplified by the colorful farmer Joel Salatin in his 100-acre farm in Swoope, Virginia, about two and a half hours west of me here in the Washington DC suburbs. Salatin has been a tireless crusader for the rights of small farmers like himself, who are often given the short end of the stick because they do not have the lobbying dollars of the industrial organic sector, let alone the non-organic industrial. Pollan actually spends a week working at Salatin’s farm, “Polyface ,” for a week, involved in many of the aspects of farming, even including the slaughtering of chickens. As Pollan describes it, just about everything at Polyface is sustainable. The Cows graze on a given pasture and fertilize it with their manure, then they are moved to another pasture and chickens are brought in as a “clean up crew” eating the larva that has been growing in the manure. The chickens in turn deposit their own waste, and in another day or two the grass has grown back to the point where another group of cows can be brought in to feed. This cycle where different plants and animals participate in a system that helps all involved without the need for external materials or forces (except the farmer to move the animals) is such a huge savings in terms of fuel, raw materials, etc., that one can really see how incredibly wasteful the industrial systems are in comparison.

The final part of the book concerns itself with Pollan’s efforts to make a meal that he has hunted and gathered himself. A friend mentors him both in hunting feral pigs as well as finding wild mushrooms. Much of this portion of the book is devoted to Pollan’s own philosophical and moral meanderings about whether he can justify killing an animal and eating it. Pollan corresponds with Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation , and has debate both with Singer and with himself about whether eating meat is justifiable. He does end up going on his hunt, and we get to experience the exhilaration that this brings, as well as the disgust when it comes time to dress his kill. Foraging for mushrooms, does not elicit any moral dilemmas, but does provide some interesting information about an organism completely separate from both that of the animal and plant kingdoms, and one which we apparently know comparatively little about.

On the whole, The Omivore’s Dilemma is a fascinating book that will make many people rethink their entire relationship with food. The vast majority of us think little about food other than perhaps the cost, the calorie content, the taste, and occasionally the number of grams of fat or carbohydrate contained in it. This book provides some great insights into aspects of the food chain that most of us know little about, perhaps enough to prompt those who read it to start thinking and caring how the food on their plate got there enough to ask more questions about that food, be it from a grocery store or a restaurant. Perhaps some will even start to demand more from the restaurants and food shops they patronize. And perhaps some will even ask themselves more about what they are willing to sacrifice in an effort to eat what they think will be healthy for them, the country, and the planet.

As much as I enjoyed The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I did have a couple of problems with the book, and I’m apparently not alone, given some of the reviews on Amazon.com . Let me first mention that I listened to this book as an audio book downloaded from Audible.com , so my experience is, I’m sure. slightly different from those reading the book in paper form. Nonetheless, one of the main complaints about the book I would have to agree with – I think Pollan could have gotten his point across within 3/4 of the pages it actually took, perhaps even less. The first parts about industrial non-organic, and industrial organic, are very informational. In the third part, Pollan puts himself into the story, which in itself is fine and gives us some of his personal insights by letting us experience what he did on the farm, but at a certain point, especially around the issues of killing, Pollan becomes so entangled in his own conflicting emotions and tortured thinking about it, that eventually gets repetitive and you feel like you are reading the diary of a tortured soul. This continues and perhaps even worsens in the final part of the book, where Pollan debates vegetarianism with himself and with Singer, tries to deal with the guilt over having fun while hunting and killing his pig and his revulsion during the dressing of the animal. Although these moral musings aren’t prevalent in the chapters on hunting for mushrooms, Pollan seems to find other things to wax philosophic about, fluffing the pages out way beyond what they should be, especially at the end of a long book.

Aside from the length issue and some inaccuracies and inconsistencies pointed out by other reviewers on Amazon, my other major issue with Pollan’s book is one that might not be an issue for most. It relates to Pollan’s ridicule of restricted carbohydrate diets – Atkins in particular – and disdain for fat in general and saturated fat in particular. I find it disappointing that Pollan can debunk so much of the standard line about food, even about the “organic” label that marketers would have you believe is the healthiest food there can be, yet he seems to accept all the old dogma about low-carb and saturated fats despite there being tremendous evidence that supports the healthfulness of that way of eating. Instead he more or less calls Atkins a “quack” and bases this, it seems, on the oft-repeated erroneous claim that Atkins eliminates an “entire food group” – by which he means carbohydrates. This of course is incorrect, but Pollan, like many, seem to have a bias against diets, and specifically towards Atkins that clouds objectivity and careful research. This bias seems to infect other ideas of Pollan’s. The most blatant example of this bias (perhaps also combined with some sloppiness that Pollan shows elsewhere when dealing with other technical subjects) is when he claims that the human brain can get glucose only from carbohydrates. Any first-year biochemist will tell you that this is false, and that protein can easily be converted to glucose as well – Eskimos have survived for hundreds of years on a diet of pure protein and fat (from seal and caribou) for hundreds of years.

Finally, as at least one Amazon reviewer points out, Pollan doesn’t really fully deal with the issue of the price of doing things in an organic and sustainable way. Organic, and “beyond organic” foods are generally much higher in price than their conventional competition. That’s not to say they aren’t worth that price for those who can afford them, but Wholefoods, CSA’s, and Farmers Markets are often more patronized by those on the upper end of the income scale. Those who make minimum wage, or even a bit more, would probably have to spend a huge portion of their paycheck in order to buy most of their food as organic. They simply don’t have much choice in the matter. Pollan suggests that Pollyface’s customers didn’t seem like the well-healed customers of Wholefoods. Still, Swoope is a pretty rural part of Virginia, and so those more well-to-do people just aren’t there in large numbers, and those who are probably are not trying to stand out as such.

Theoretically if the government would stop subsidizing corn and instead used that money to support small sustainable farmers so that their food could be sold less expensively and locally(but without the regulatory requirements that often come with such funding), the food supply might be turned on its head. This of course, is a pipe dream. I’d love for it to happen, but how practical is it in a country as large as ours? Can all the farmland be reconverted into lots of Polyfaces that could serve the entire country? Even if it could be done, the monumental market forces needed for getting this change to occur just aren’t there. It would take a huge rethinking on the part of most of citizens of this country about the food they eat. Even if everyone read Pollan’s book (which I don’t think is a bad idea), there would still be plenty of hold outs who simply don’t care about their own health, let alone the health of others, the environment, or the health and well-being of the animals they eat. I think the best we can hope for, at least for the foreseeable future, is just a level playing field, where small farmers are given the same rights and opportunities as the giant industrial ones and still get to produce their crops and livestock in the way they choose with as little regulation from the government as possible. This is all that Joel Salatin wants, according to Pollan, and I don’t think it’s something unreasonable to ask for, even from those who couldn’t care less about “organic,” “beyond organic,” or any other fancy label we might choose to give our food in the future.

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I grew up in New York City, home to thousands of wonderful, and not-so-wonderful restaurants, food stores, diners, coffee shops, fast food joints, hot dog stands, and just about any other kind of eatery you can imagine. Luckily, my parents took us with them to eat out starting from an early age, and this continued until I left for college. When I got to college, I learned that we ate out much more often than did others – particularly those growing up in the suburbs. This was back in the 80′s, and even 70′s, so things were a little different then today. I think kids generally eat out much more than they do. But city living seems especially conducive to this, especially in New York, where there are so many wonderful choices.Garlic and Sapphires is Ruth Reichl’s fourth and latest book and it describes her six or so years as the restaurant critic for the New York Times in 1990′s. She had previously worked at the LA Times and as she writes, was more interested in reviewing a wider range of cuisines and price ranges. Up until then, she contends, the reviewers concentrated mainly on the very high-end restaurants like Le Cirque or La Caravel. While this may be the case, I found it a bit odd, since 90% of the places she talks about in the book seem to be expensive to super-expensive.

Reading Garlic and Sapphires wasn’t quite like a trip down memory lane, since so many of the restaurants were the very high-priced ones that we never ate at growing up, or they were simply restaurants that were established after I left the city or that I’d never happen to patronize. The one exception to this was Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. I went a few times back in the 80′s for special occasions, but only for brunch, which I believe was much cheaper than their dinner menu. Also, as Reichl explains, Windows On the World was renovated and received a new chef and emphasis after the first World Trade Center bombing in the early 90′s. So for all practical purposes I ate at a different restaurant.

Despite the fact that I have little chance of eating in most of the establishments described in the book, it was wonderful, as a foodie, to listen to Reichl describe in poetic detail how various foods would melt in her mouth, revealing layers upon layers of different, sometimes subtle, sometimes very blatant flavors. Reichl also gives us many of her own recipes (she was a chef and co-owned a restaurant in Berkeley in the 70′s), some of which sound great. The book is also nice for those simply interested in New York City, as Reichl describes a good deal of it – not just the restaurants – in this book.

But this isn’t just a book about food or restaurants. It’s also one about human nature. Reichl describes at the beginning of the book how she’s spotted by someone who works for a restaurant on one of her first flights to New York when she is preparing to move. She’s told that every restaurant in New York probably has her picture taped inside the kitchen with a reward for spotting her. Because of this, she decides she will enlist the help of an old acting-teacher friend of her mother’s to create new identities. She is given wigs and makeup and different clothing to transform herself into everything from a sexy blond divorcee to a meek, impoverished older lady, to even a replica of her own brash and demanding mother. She uses these disguises to try to understand how others may experience the same meal. And she discovers that, as we expect, that restaurants (especially the high-end ones) do play favorites and discriminate quite liberally in how they provide service to different people, and even whether they will permit someone to patronize their establishment.

Along with exploring how waiters and other diners react to her in her various disguises, she also has revelations about herself. She admits to being able to assume particular personas very easily. It’s almost as if she is channeling different aspects of her personality, some of which may be well hidden and seldom seen. Through this she has some self-discoveries and eventually decides to leave her post at the Times.

We also get to read about various political maneuverings within the Times, stories about her husband and son, and about coworkers and friends who accompany her to restaurants. There are also memorable parts where she is both fooling the restaurant, but also fooling her guests, who are unaware of whom she really is.

In general, I found it a very enjoyable read. There were times where I thought she might be exaggerating some things for effect, or even making some stuff up (they just seemed too “perfect” or “predictable” in a kind of theatrical way), but for the most part these were few and far between.

I actually listened to an unabridged audio version of this book via Audible.com which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). Bernadette Dunne does a good job of narrating the book and I don’t recall any pronunciation errors in all the descriptions of food, restaurants, or place names in New York. Although I will admit I didn’t care for her rendition of Reichl’s young son. Reichl also narrates an abridged version of the book if you’d like to hear the author read her own book, New York accent and all. The book is available in print as well, of course.

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Since Google Maps exposed their API (translation for non-techies: published a way for programmers to interact with the Google Maps site), lots of sites have come out with “hacks” or “mods” to the Google maps interface. There was Frappr , which enjoyed a splurge of popularity earlier this year that seems to have died down a lot. It allowed you to create a map around a common interest or site, where members could put themselves up as if putting a thumbtack on the map with a note with their name, picture, and whatever else they might deem to add. There are all kinds of interfaces which showed various points of interest, and of course there is the housingmaps.com site, a fusion of Craig’s List’s housing classifieds in various metro areas with Google maps – so you can graphically browse a map and see what houses are for sale at what price on what street. There are even sites which came about whose sole purpose was to catalog these various mods to Google Maps, including Cool Google Maps and Google Maps Mania .For a long time with a mapping program I’ve wanted the ability to figure out exactly how far something was from me. I try to walk for exercise when I can, and we also sometimes walk to nearby stores instead of driving when the weather is nice, we have the time, and we’re not exhausted from the myriad of chores and duties that keep us busy most days. Using a standard mapping interface like Google Maps itself doesn’t quite cut it. For one thing it means knowing the address of where you are coming from and going to, which is not always known, so you have to spend extra time looking this information up, and it might not even be completely accurate (for example, according to most mapping programs which use the same data source, my house is actually almost a block from where it says it is!). Secondly, there’s no guarantee that the mapping program will design a route that is the same as the way you walk. It often chooses some other route that it deems faster by car. Of course, this doesn’t even account for some routes which cars simply can’t traverse because of a road that’s one way in the wrong direction or even no road at all! I’ve always wanted something akin to a graphics program where you draw a polymer by clicking multiple times to form the shape. In my mind, the lines would automatically stick to the roads that were closest to them.

More recently, I’ve been trying to get more exercise in during the day, and since it’s been so nice and unseasonably warm here this week, I decided to skip lunch and just walk around the neighborhood. I was wondering how much I walked, but other than the amount of time and a vague sense of how fast I was going, I really couldn’t gauge much. So I thought I’d start looking for something akin to what I’ve described above and maybe, just maybe I’d find something. Well, I was shocked that I found something perfect almost immediately!

Gmaps Pedometer is the site/hack, and it is great for anyone just wanting to know how far it is from one point to another on a map, to someone who wants to get detailed information for a walking program, a cycling route, etc. You can very easily create a walking path and Gmaps Pedometer will show you dynamically not only what the distance is, but even how many calories you will burn on this path. I’m not sure about how accurate the calorie count is, though, since my 3-mile path I created around my office was rated at 368 calories, which seems a bit high. Gmaps Pedometer even gives you a graphic of the elevation levels your path is traversing, but as much as I’d like to believe it, I don’t believe elevation is taken into account for calories. The only forum message from the author about this on the site mentions not wanting to use the elevation markers for anything else because elevation data is not available everywhere – it seems to be available mostly for the U.S.

If you can time your walk, and Gmaps Pedometer gives you an accurate measurement of the distance, you can figure out your speed and then you can plug that, the time, and your weight into some other tool to get a more or less accurate representation of you calories burned. I tried to find such a calculator on the web, but all the ones out will only let you plug in pre-specified numbers for your pace, like 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, etc. mph. I did find one shareware application you can download that does seem to have the degree of flexibility I was hoping for.

In addition to what I’ve mentioned so far, Gmaps Pedometer also lets you save a given route, so for example, this is one route I created . Also, it lets you export to GPX format with a third party bookmarklet . GPX is a format for sharing GPS data, so potentially you could load this into your GPS and use it as a way to navigate. This might be very valuable for hikers, or just walkers or cyclists who are unfamiliar with an area and want to make sure they are taking the right path. Theoretically, one could use Gmaps Pedometer to design city walking tours and make those available for people to download, along with a set of MP3′s for each of the points of interest on the path. Really, the possibilities are endless with this thing!

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