I’ve had my eye on the well rated BlueAnt Supertooth3, but haven’t gotten around to ordering one yet. Instead, on impulse, I picked up the super cheap Roadmaster VR3 at Costco this weekend. Somehow I got it in my head that it was a Motorola product, which made me feel better for some reason. As it turns out, cheap applies to more than just price with this product.

Pairing was simple enough, and making and receiving calls was a no brainer, but here are the deal-breaking issues for me:

• There’s a bright blue light that flashes repeatedly. I suppose it’s indicating that your phone has an active connection (in addition to the indicator on the LCD display), but with this thing mounted on your visor, it’s horribly distracting. Particularly at night time. I thought for sure there would be a way to disable this light, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
• Even with the thing probably 8 inches from my face, I couldn’t be heard by the caller.
• The flip down, backlit LCD display is almost useless. Caller ID numbers that pop up are somewhat hard to decipher because they’re so closely kerned together, and there’s no logical spacing for the area code and prefix.
• General build quality is weak. From the creaky construction to the sickly sounding audio feedback when pushing buttons; it’s embarassing to have hanging in your car.

So there ya go. I’ll be returning this POS to Costco ASAP. Honestly the built-in speakerphone on my iPhone has been better than all other speakerphone devices I’ve tried in the car. So ultimately, I’ll probably stick with the iPhone and occasionally using the earbud headset for longer calls. I really can’t be bothered with one more device to charge anyway.

Since Leopard was released, I would occasionally google to try to find a solution to this problem, but have never been able to find a fix. Until today, when I had an epiphany. OS X has a command line screen capture tool. “Perhaps I’ll find a clue there,” I thought. Sure enough - pay dirt. Look what I found in the man page…

-o In window capture mode, do not capture the shadow of the window.

That right there tells me that it’s an option, and that there’s at least a workaround. So I coupled this with two other options, interactive mode, and clipboard (rather than save) and voila! It works!

screencapture -ioc

Using the command above, I was immediately presented with Leopard’s screen cap crosshairs, so I then hit the spacebar to switch to element selection mode, moused over the window I wanted to grab, then clicked. This then put the image in my clipboard, so I switched to Preview.app, and opened a new document, which automatically inserts the contents of the clipboard. Without the useless drop shadow.

This is definitely a workaround for now. I’m hoping there’s a preference file somewhere that can be modified to omit the drop shadow from screen caps by default. Until then, I just wrapped the command above in some AppleScript for ease of use:

do shell script “screencapture -ioc”

Saved as an AppleScript app works great because you can invoke it by name via Spotlight.

Have fun, and let me know if you figure out where this default preference resides.

Previously you’d only see real spam once every month or so, with an occasional spammy (or was it just annoying?) event now and then. Today alone, there have been approximately 80 or so spam entries and the number is still climbing; and not just short items - but long ones that fill my Google Reader screen, and then some.

It’s obvious someone has figured out an automated system to post spam events to Upcoming. Or should I say, a spammer just turned his attention toward Upcoming, and realized it was an easy mark?

Or so I thought at first. I’ve been flagging events as spam whenever I could, since this started, but it finally got annoying enough that I sent the powers that be a terse message about getting a handle of this and maybe “using captcha or something.” And what do you know…they do! You see, you don’t need to bother w/ captcha when entering a new event, but you do need to when creating a new account. Here’s a sample below:

It seems some crafty spammer has figured out how to automagically read this type of captcha? It was just a couple weeks ago that I saw an article asking “Has CAPTCHA Been Broken?” It went on to talk about a Chinese hacker that had a complete pricelist of captchas that could be countered, but that Yahoo’s was currently unbreakable. Well…it appears things have changed.

Or perhaps they’re getting paid enough by their advertisers nowadays to hire an army full of people that know one English character from another. Either way, it’s obvious that the current state of human verification just isn’t good enough. Perhaps RSS spam filter services are just around the corner? Hrumpf.

Street View Sub-Contractor?, originally uploaded by chrisr.

Spotted this vehicle today on the way to Molly Stones. I’m guessing it’s for creating the pano photos for Google’s Street View, but perhaps someone else is deploying something similar. Earthmine.com has nothing beyond login and email links. The domain is registered to some dude in San Francisco at a company called SurfaceWise.

Some decent signage, finally., originally uploaded by chrisr.

It looks like with the addition of the new (and now infamous) T Line, SFMTA has actually hired a graphic designer! /boggle

Here’s a radical idea: I bet 99% of the cars currently on our public roads with spoilers don’t need ‘em. Why not save yourself some gas money and leave the stupid thing at the dealership? You’re not impressing anyone anyway, Mario.