Marco's hideout

Well, that was quick, after ordering the Peak on Tuesday, it already arrived via UPS today (Friday). Nice small recycled packaging as well.

After the first start, immediately 2 updates were available, one system update and a map update. The system update triggered a package manager, not something you see often on a smartphone:

When setting up the Peak, you get the option to import contacts from Facebook, which is pretty nice.

The UI feels a bit sluggish and apps are slightly awkward. Definitely developer preview status. A lot of options you find on an iPhone are not there, like setting 24H clock instead of AM/PM. Some trivial items seem to be overlooked, probably because they are easy to overlook.

Some nice backgrounds available.

Even though this phone uses Firefox OS and Firefox browser, I cannot find any option to enable Mozilla Sync service. Odd.

I expected the Peak to open as a generic USB device on my Mac, and it does, after you enable USB Mass Storage in the Media Storage Preferences.

Here's a first bug. The EXIF in the images is incorrect. The date is set at a default value 12:00 at 8 dec 2002.

Also, it seems that the camera (and software) struggles to get the right whitebalance. The images turn out way too cool.

Also, why are the images recorded at 1280x960 and not full resolution? Kind of a waste of 8mp camera. I did not find a camera setting (yet) to change this.

Video is recorded in crappy 3gp format, in low resolution. Don't expect to record HD movies with the Peak.

Try the obligatory cat movie for yourself here.

I tried opening forecast.io in Firefox and although it is fully functional, the site is opened in desktop view, which is annoying on a smartphone.

Hardware wise it seems like a pretty nice phone, although I've managed to let it slip from my hands twice already, due to the plastic back and rounded edges. It's a bit soapy for my feeling.

I applaud the initiative and I hope developers will flock en masse to Firefox OS and get some interesting apps on the device.

There's still a lot of work to do, especially on the apps side of things. See the screenshot of Zombie Lines, a puzzle game.. Somehow it doesn't take up the whole screen, but only a very small part of it.

The one thing I really like is the multitask view, where you press & hold the home button which will then show the currently running apps.

Pretty nifty and useful.

Anyway, these were my first impressions, more to come, I will try to get a SIM and use it as a phone as well. Funny though, the Peak takes regular SIM cards, and of course, after iPhone 4 and 5 those sizes do not live in my house anymore :-)

Here is a picture of the Cygnus Mass Simulator just after separating from the Antares upper stage.

Somehow this reminds me of the early space age images of years gone by. In fact it is not dissimilar, since for Orbital Sciences it is a first.

The EU wants to block porn. Based on so-called "equality" initiatives.
Hangon a moment!
 
First of, porn is fiction. Just like Pinocchio is fiction. So that's out of the way.

Let's talk about equality a bit.
Let's look in real corporate business.
Women are paid much less than men in the same roles. Sometimes even 50% less. Some equality eh.
In porn, women are generally paid much more than men. Woops.. doesn't sound to bad for the women, right?

Maybe, just maybe we should focus on equality in the REAL world instead of make-believe stories.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130306/15203822230/european-parliament-considers-banning-all-pornography-blocks-emails-eu-citizens-protesting-against-censorship.shtml

Imported my old Posterous posts and changed DNS to point to Posthaven.

Let's hope this will remain online forever, like they claim to be.

I checked my iTunes library and 255 songs were not matched/uploaded. Out of 11752 total tracks this ain't too bad.
Reasons for not matching are shown when you hover the little cloud symbol:
* duplicate
* ilegible (mostly for Voice Memos)
* videoclip
* digital booklets

Looks like actually all my content has been uploaded and matched properly. Yay!