Archive for August, 2008

I want a Spam button on my iPhone – for Calls

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

While I wish I had a way to quickly mark an email ‘Spam’ on my iPhone’s Mail client, even more useful to me would be a button that would hang up on a telephone call AND mark the number as ‘Spam’. That would help everyone by minimizing the amount of solicitation they got.

My guess is that the Apple SDK does not provide any sort of API for plug-ins into the Phone application, for obvious reasons. Something like this would have to come from on high and be coordinated with the phone company.

In the meantime, I’m going to take some advice I saw online and create a ‘spam caller’ with a custom ringtone, and every time I get a spam call I’ll add that number to the same contact on the phone. But it’s more work for me.

History and the exploring of it

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

I’m not very good at remembering lists of names, dates, and so forth. I think that history is fascinating and agree that it should be studied, lest it be repeated (or forgot), etc. But I’ve always had a hard time with it.

I think that a lot of that has to do with my learning style. I am a pretty visual learner, at least about things like this. Reading history like it’s a story is one thing, but usually it’s a bit too dry and factual to be taken as a story. I’m sure it was with the best intentions that my high school humanities teacher tried to get us to read Michner’s The Source, but it was like pulling teeth at the time.

Below I list some of the ways that I’ve imagined using modern tools like Google Earth or dynamic flowchart-style graphs.

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