Another day, another abuse from your friendly local cell phone company. T-Mobile is increasing their text messaging fees from 15 to 20 cents each next month. They are the last company to do so - apparently they wanted in on the action.
Can anyone say "Anti-Competitive Price Fixing?"

Of course, text messages really costs 40 cents - you're just splitting the cost with your friend who is also paying to send you the sms message.

So for 42 cents you can have someone physically hand deliver a letter anywhere in the country courtesy of the United States Postal Service, or you can lease your phone carrier's line for a fraction of a second to transfer so bits around - a cost that to them is so miniscule it is basically free.

The biggest scam of all is that you can't turn off the option to receive text messages on T-Mobile. Essentially, you could be receiving 500 spam messages a day and T-Mobile would bill you for each and every one, with no recourse and no way to solve the problem.

This is the subject of a new class action lawsuit that aims to take down T-Mobile's unfair practices. Once the lawsuit was filed, T-Mobile quickly released a new feature that allows users to turn of text messaging all together. "I'm going to take my ball home! Nyah!"

Well that's not good enough. The appropriate answer is to NOT CHARGE for incoming text messages. Shouldn't it be illegal to be charged twice (send + receive) for the same thing anyway?

Text messages should be next to free or cost you 1/10th of a minute off your monthly plan. Period
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"Thank you for calling AT&T, your expected wait time is 32 eons."

"Thank you for calling Apple, your expected wait time is sometime after the earth spins down and is swallowed up by the sun. If you'd like to schedule a callback to your distant evolutionarily advanced superhuman future posterity, please press 1."

I went to Lake Tahoe this last weekend. I couldn't help but notice that the incredible natural beauty of the place was ruined by the droves upon droves of annoying mouth-breathing tourists - of which I was trying to act like I was not a part. I feel the same way about Apple.

The latest nightly build of Webkit features a new Javascript Interpreter called SquirrelFish. Despite the weird name, the bottom line is that it is going to make Safari faster.

I put it to the test against the current official Safari build. Here are the results:

Current Safari Build

Latest Webkit nightly Build

As you can see, the latest nightly is way faster than the current Safari build. Also, SquirrelFish has yet to be speed optimized, so by the time these changes hit Safari, it will be even faster. This will effect Safari on all platforms including the iPhone.

To put this in perspective I ran the same tests with various browsers, here are the results:

Firefox 3 Beta: 417ms
Opera 9: 838ms
Firefox 1.5: 1974ms
Firefox 2: 1093ms
Internet Explorer 6: 1622ms
Internet Explorer 7: 2218ms

This is what I saw when trying to enter a comment on boingboing today. Apparently they have a machine that instantly fact-checks your comment and then refuses to post it if it is wrong. And no, there was no captcha involved here, just a comment box.

By way of followup to my SMS Texting article, it seems a few readers are taking it seriously and have filed a class action lawsuit against all the major carriers for price gouging. The suit appears to be focusing on the fact that people are getting charged to receive messages that are unsolicited and cannot be blocked (I assume they mean selectively).

For the last few days, I have been riding my bike to work. I'd like to say this is a choice I have made for health and wellness reasons, but I won't deny that there are economic factors weighing in far heavier than any desire to stop being such a fatty. Well, I guess being a fatty weighs in heavy too, but in a different way.
Apparently there is some rumor going around that riding a bicycle is actually less efficient than driving a car. People argue that the amount of food (extra food?) you have to eat to propel yourself around town via pedal is enough to offset any money you would save. At least, that's what I got from skimming over the argument. That's right, I didn't even dignify it with a "peruse."

A few people have done the math and discovered that this, of course, is not the case. I want to go one step further in the same spirit as my "True Cost Of SMS" article and do some really elementary math (as it is all I am capable of) on the subject.

So first, let's compare fuel sources.

A car requires gasoline. As of today, the average price for a gallon of gasoline is $3.80 and will propel you, on average, 25 miles. The average driver racks up 12,000 miles per year or 32.8 miles per day. In what is probably the most advanced math ever featured on these pages, that comes out to $4.99 in gas per day.

If you want to get down to it, a gallon of gas contains about 31,000,000 calories (ref). If we could live off of gasoline, it would be the cheapest food in existence. The daily recommended caloric intake for humans is 2,000-2,500. According to the United Nations, the average American actually consumes something more like 3,770 calories per day (ref). No wonder we're a bunch of fattys.

So first let's get the most obvious statement out of the way: Humans are much more efficient then cars.

The average American eats the number of calories contained in a single gallon of gas every 8,223 days. That's 22 1/2 years. $3.80 for 22 1/2 years worth of food? Suddenly gas isn't sounding so expensive! To put it another way: One gallon of gas could power a human for over 22 years, or a car for 30 minutes.

But, since we can't eat gasoline and we're talking about daily costs, that's not really a fair comparison.

So we're spending $4.99 a day on gas, how much are we spending on food? A lot less than you might think, actually. According to the Buereau of Labor Statistics and their 2004 report named "blah blah blah something really boring;" the average American spends $6.33 a day on food. That's $3.67 on food at home and $2.67 on eating out, in case you're wondering (ref).

So, if we trust the math we are spending $6.33 on 3,770 calories of food per day. To answer how much it costs in terms of food to ride your bike to work, we'd have to know how long it takes you to get to work. For me, it's about 3 miles or 15 minutes. But feel free to do your own calculations.

Alright, so biking along a flat surface for one hour will burn 441 calories (ref). That means I'm burning about 110 calories to get to work. Let's also add in the return trip, bringing us to a total expenditure of 220 calories for my trip to work and back.

Applying our math from above we find that every penny we spend buys us about 5.95 calories worth of food. Some simple division (well, simple for a calculator anyway) tells us that the cost of the 220 calories I need to ride my bike to work and back is $0.37. Here are is a table showing these results:

Roundtrip Cost of Riding Your Bike To Work If it Takes You...
30 Minutes (6 Miles): $0.37
60 Minutes (12 Miles): $0.74
1.5 Hours (18 Miles): $1.11
2 Hours (24 Miles): $1.48

To compare that to driving:

Cost of Driving Your Car To Work (Assuming 25 MPG and $3.80/gal)...
6 Miles: $0.91
12 Miles: $1.82
18 Miles: $2.74
24 Miles: $3.65

In real world examples, I think you tend to use up a lot more gas simply because you're sitting there in traffic, starting and stopping, and generally getting much worse gas mileage.

Also, if you're the average American you probably have some extra calories stored away and could ride your bike to work plenty before ever having to spend an extra dime on food. Speaking of which, people who drive cars also have to eat - meaning that you're paying for food anyway - you're really not spending anything more than you would anyway by riding your bike, bringing the actual "cost" to virtually nothing (except the feeling that your insides want to be on the outside).

I also didn't add in the costs of buying your car, taxes & registration, maintenance costs, or repairs. Let's just say that driving a car is not an efficient way of getting around, although it is highly effective in terms of speed.

When people call Apple users elitist snobs, one only needs to look at Microsoft's attempts at being "cool." For example, here is a video promoting one of their early versions of Windows. Skip to about halfway through to get straight to the good stuff.

You soon realize that a Windows user calling a Mac user an elitist is just like a retarded person calling a super-genius elitist. It's cute. No, really. If this was an episode of Full House and Michelle just told Uncle Jesse his music was immature, the audience would produce the very same "awwwwww...."

Okay, to be fair - that video was really old. It's not like Microsoft is still so out of touch. Surely now they can afford to hire competent advertising agencies.

Ehh.. Nevermind.

Maybe for Apple's next ad campaign they can just run Microsoft's own advertisements.

Warning: the above videos are not suitable for people suffering from a heart condition, likelihood of aneurism, or anyone who is conscious. They should not have been watched.

Eat is a small application that will permanently delete files that are dragged onto it.

This is good for two reasons:

1. You are deleting a file off of a removable disk.

A really annoying problem with OS X is that files are not deleted from a removable disk until you empty the trash. So if you're trying to free up space on your 1GB thumbdrive, you'll end up needing to empty your entire trash which you just might not want to do.

This is also good for circumventing the trash for any other large file. If you're deleting files to free up space, it's best to just delete them rather then delete them then empty your trash.

2. It shreds

Eat will shred documents (delete by overwriting). You cannot restore the files once they have been eaten. This is good for any type of sensitive documents.

Usage suggestion:

I like to keep eat up in my Finder toolbar like this:

You can put it there by simply dragging it up and hovering for a second or two.

Other features:

-Eat will warn you before permanently deleting files

-Clicking on eat (as opposed to dragging something onto it) will eat all the files in the trash (with warning).

This program is adapted from a script by Jayson Kempinger.

DOWNLOAD

I just noticed that Microsoft's live.com has gotten pretty smart. Go ahead, hand it an algebraic equation and watch it solve for X.

That's pretty snazzy, eh?

But wait! There's more!

"More?"

Much more!

MS has launched a SMS search service much like Google's (46645). You can now text search, queries, and yes - algebraic equations to 95483 (WLIVE) and get back the answers post haste. Follow that link to see what all 95483 can do for you (here's a few: local search queries, reverse phone number lookups (!), area codes, word definitions, math calculations, spell-check, etc.)

I imagine this will be great news for any kid with a cellphone taking an Algebra test.

I'm particularly excited to be able to do reverse phone lookups. Next time someone calls me and I don't have their number programmed in my phone, I can find out who they are by texting the number to WLIVE.

Despite the way I feel about Microsoft, their mobile guys are constantly impressing me.

Samulator is my very first Mac application. It sounds really cool but it's actually a really boring calculator. But for anyone who collects simple calculator programs, here is one to add to you collection.

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