There is this annoying thing where if you send an email from your iPhone (and maybe other smartphones?) via Google’s Exchange service it’ll put line breaks in for you, which is okay when your recipient views it on a wide enough screen, but if they read your email on a phone or other small screen then the email wrapping is terrible. Here is a workaround by ryanschmidt:

The way I did it was to add a space to my email signature, select the space and make it bold. This won’t show to the user unless they are reading it as a plain-text email. That’s why it’s not 100% perfect but it’s much better than before.

You need iOS5 to add formatting to an email.

Ran into this recently, with a buddy of mine recommending an old Fresh Air episode that didn’t show up on the list of available episodes in iTunes. I wanted to get it on my iPod in with the other Fresh Air podcasts, rather than dumping it into the “music” folder (which would have worked, if you aren’t compulsive about where things go).

Download and install an MP3 tag editor that can view/edit extended tags. I use Mp3tag.

Download the old podcast you want, and open it in Mp3tag. Pick “extended tags” and create the following tags:

PODCAST = 1
PODCASTDESC = episode name
PODCASTID = episode URL
PODCASTURL = podcast subscription URL

You can look at the extended tags for an existing podcast to see sample values.

Save the tags, and then drag and drop the podcast into iTunes. It should appear where it belongs.

I like the look of the Wolfram Alpha Course Assistant apps. This has got to be a great time to be a student.

Square, wow:

It’s essentially a small magnetic reader that plugs into the headphone jack of an iPhone. When a credit card (or a debit card) is swiped through the reader, it reads the data and converts it into an audio signal. The microphone picks up the audio, sends it through the processors and then is routed to Square’s software application on the iPhone. From there the encrypted data is transmitted using either Wi-Fi (for iPod touch) or a 3G Internet connection to back-end severs, which in turn communicate with the payment networks to complete the transactions.

Basically, ultimately, anybody with a wireless device can accept credit cards. I’d like in on the ground floor of that venture.

Shazam is this ridiculously cool service where you hold your phone up, record maybe 10 seconds of whatever song is playing, and the service identifies the song for you with uncanny accuracy, even in rooms with lots of background noise. Slate has a piece on how it fingerprints songs to work its magic:

OK, but how does Shazam make these fingerprints? As Avery Wang, Shazam’s chief scientist and one of its co-founders, explained to Scientific American in 2003, the company’s approach was long considered computationally impractical—there was thought to be too much information in a song to compile a simple signature. But as he wrestled with the problem, Wang had a brilliant idea: What if he ignored nearly everything in a song and focused instead on just a few relatively “intense” moments? Thus Shazam creates a spectrogram for each song in its database—a graph that plots three dimensions of music: frequency vs. amplitude vs. time. The algorithm then picks out just those points that represent the peaks of the graph—notes that contain “higher energy content” than all the other notes around it, as Wang explained in an academic paper he published to describe how Shazam works (PDF). In practice, this seems to work out to about three data points per second per song.

Proving that it’s about the artist, not the tools, Jorge Colombo “painted” the 6/1 cover of The New Yorker on his iPhone.