Nothing funny about feldspar

I bought an iPod touch before I went to SXSW, but I never really used it to its full potential. Part of the reason is that I haven’t found comfortable headphones. Plus, I’ve been using Plagioclase’s iPhone, so I get spoiled by having access even through the cell network.

However, with the advent of the App Store, I’m using my iPod Touch so much that I’m having to recharge it daily. Here’s what’s draining my battery (all free apps):

• Aurora Feint: This is my favorite find. It’s basically a multiple mode game, with an endless resources-gathering stage (the mine), a timed/specific goal stage (the smith) and a strategy game (the tower) all based on position-switching-and-matching (like Bejewelled). The fun part of the game is the use of gravity in order to develop the matches. The graphics are really beautiful, and the game is quite fun (if you like this sort of matching game, which I do). I have heard that the music is rather overbearing and loud, but I never have the headphones on when I’m playing. I suppose if you were playing on an iPhone it could get annoying. There are occasional visual glitches (supposed to be fixed in the next release), and a distinct lack of documentation, which forces you to the forums to find out why you’re not getting the level you expected. I was going to say that it’s also a big battery suck, but it could be just that I play it for hours without noticing the time.
• Blip Solitaire: Pong for one. It’s very simple — you have paddle in the shape of an arc and you hit a dot. When I first played it, I dragged the paddle along the circle, but I learned quickly that tapping the screen in the appropriate place makes it much easier to hit the dot. As you go longer the dot speeds up. My “high” score (hit count) isn’t very because the edges of the paddle are porous (my story and I’m sticking to it).
• Bloomberg: A news reader for business data. The headlines are from Bloomberg’s news service. The best feature of this app is the charting. You can see the various international stock market indexes as a list, and as you explore further you can see charted historical data on a user-zoomable scale. You can also add your own stock holdings (whole numbers only) but you can’t see an aggregate of your portfolio’s performance. The biggest issue I have with this application is it’s portrait-only views for reading the news. The text is just a bit too small for my aging eyes to read comfortably.
• Bubbles: Just a little game that creates swirls of bubbles as you drag your finger over the screen. It respects gravity, and you can pop the bubbles, too! There’s no scoring. The most common use I’ve seen is for entertaining a toddler. It’s a nice exploration of some of the features of gaming on the iPhone/iPod touch.
• Check Word: This uses a wordlist (TWL or SOWPODS) to report whether a word you’re playing in one of those word games is acceptable. Very simple, but some of the comments in the app store suggest that it’s not entirely accurate.
• Cube Runner: A game which uses the accelerometer for steering an arrow through a field of cubes. Again, it’s an exploration of game mechanics. I found it much easier to play in landscape mode (which you must select from the options before starting). One nice feature is that you can calibrate the accelerometer to your personal vertical.
• FiatLux: This app gives you a blank white screen to act as a flashlight. There is another free flashlight app (as well as one that costs!), but I like this one because you can change the color to red, green, blue or white as well as adjust the intensity of the light.
• Google: This is kind of like “Google Desktop” for your iPhone/iPod touch. It’s primary purpose is for search (including your contacts), but if you click on “Explore more Google products” you can get to the mobile version (in Safari) of the Google apps that you subscribe to. However, you could keep a couple of bookmarks and get the same effect. Since I don’t use Google Desktop, I’ll probably end up removing this app when I need the space.
• Jirbo Match: I don’t know who Jirbo is, but they’ve got a lot of iPhone/iPod Touch apps. This is one of the free ones — it’s a pair-matching game featuring a bunch of similar-looking animal characters.
• NY Times: A news reader tied to the online version, with the same categories. It’s incredibly slow to update.
• PangeaVR: Another app linked to online content. You can download optimized copies of 360° panoramic photographs and look around them. It’s fast to download, but difficult to browse — you have to pick an album at random and hope something interesting is in it.
• Pocketpedia: This is related to the Book- CD- DVDpedia family of cataloging software. You can sync your collections from your *pedia desktop app to know if you’ve got that DVD already (no backwards sync yet). You don’t have to have any of the *pedia apps — you can run Pocketpedia independently, but you’re limited to searching Amazon for your stuff (you can’t type in items). This app may be the thing that makes me break down and get the *pedias. Maybe.
• Remote: This Apple-supplied app turns your iPhone/iPod touch into an iTunes remote control. I love this app. In fact, I’m using it right now as I type this. You pair your iPhone/iPod touch with a particular iTunes (7.7) library, and then you can see everything in that library and playlists to play through anything that that particular iTunes is connected to. For example, I’m in the same room as the iTunes computer, so I’m listening through that computer’s speakers. If I go downstairs, I can turn on the speakers in the family room (which are already connected to the iTunes computer through an AirPort Express) and change songs at will. Really nice.
• Weather Bug: This cute little app gives you the current conditions for a location you set (I don’t know if it will read your location, since I don’t have GPS). It will also give you a couple of days forecast and a snapshot of the current radar picture (mashed to a Google map). The unexpected thing for me is the webcams. There are three webcams associated with my location (I don’t know how they are chosen to be part of the app, since I know of at least four more in town) which show the real current conditions. The one feature I would really like is an animated radar. But this is an awesome start.

I keep checking the store because lots of new apps are added all of the time. I’m limiting myself to free apps at the moment, because I’m afraid of buying something that I hate — even at 99 cents! Luckily there are other people braver than I who test these things out and then give reviews.

That insomnia thing? Not so fun. I’m to the point that I feel like I’ve gotten a “decent” amount of sleep if I’ve managed three real hours in a row. I don’t feel particularly rested, but I’m not entirely zombie, either.

Tonight’s episode is just so frustrating, though. There I was, sound asleep, when Albite got up and started scratching. And fussing. And scratching. And by the time he finally settled down (only about 3 minutes) I was fully awake.

At least this time I got up after only 10 minutes of not being asleep, rather than an hour. An hour of trying to sleep makes me feel worse.

Dear Citibank Online Customer:

It has come to our attention that your Citibank account information needs to be updated as part of our continuing commitment to protect your account and to reduce the instance of fraud on our website. Due to your recent account activity, we are kindly asking you to confirm that ONLY you manage your Citibank account, and the recent money transfers were made by you.

If you did not effectuated the money transfers, you can confirm by logging to your account and filling up the verification procedure here:

[redacted]

Once you have updated your account records, your Citibank account be fully protected.

Thank you for banking with Citibank.
Citibank Security

I wonder how many people were involved in writing this message? The grammar and word choice is ok in Paragraph 1, awful in Paragraph 2, and moderately bad in Paragraph 3. I’m guessing our intrepid phisherman plagiarized the first paragraph.