Josh Highland’s Blog

C-Low is one of the best dice based street gambling games there is. I have been know to play some mean C-Low in my time, in ghetto situations (random fact: I am in a gang)

Here is how you play:
Gather your homie in a circle, everyone places a set betting amount on the floor. Dollar bills work great.

Everyone rolls one die to determine the rolling order. The higest rolling player goes first, then second highest, etc.

The point of the game is to roll 3 dice until you get a matching pair of three of a kind, what ever happens first. You keep rolling until you get double or triples.

If you roll doubles, your score is value of the dice opposite the pair. Triples (”trips”) beat any doubles. The highest trips win.

Special dice combinations:
1-2-3: “crap out”. auto lose. You are out of the game, your money is gone.
4-5-6: known as “c-low“. Auto win. The game stops, you win all the money. Other players lose their turns.

Game Play Example (5 players)

Player one:
roll 1: 1-4-3 = no matches, roll again
roll 2: 3-5-2 = no matches, roll again
roll 3: 6-6-2 = MATCHING PAIR (6), FINAL SCORE = 2

Player two:
roll 1: 3-3-3 = TRIPPLE 3’s (”trip3″), final score = 333

player three:
roll 1: 5-6-1 = no match, roll again
roll 2: 1-2-3 = SPECIAL DICE COMBO! crap out. Out of the game, no more rolls

player four:
roll 1: 4-5-6 = SPECIAL DICE COMBO! C-LOW! AUTO WIN! no other player is allowed to roll, you take the $$$

player five:
does not get to roll, player four got a c-low.

its that easy!

Wait! What if 2 players recieve the same score? (4 and 4) or (222 and 222)

This condition is called a “push”. The players with matching high scores stay in the game, all other players must double their initial bet. If the buy in was $1 for the first round, the buy in for round 2 = $2 (the losing players now have $3 on the floor, the winners of the first round only have $1 on the floor). The game starts again, giving all players another chance to play.

Why am I posting rules on how to play street gambeling dice games on a mainly tech related blog? Simple, I no longer have to carry dice around to hustle suckas with! Say What? damn straight, with MotionX Dice, a free app for the iPhone, I have a sweet pair of dice to play c-low (or yahtzee) with when ever I want. All you have to do is change the setting to 3 dice, and shake the iPhone.

If playing illegal dice games on your iPhone doesn’t make you feel thug enough, you can always pour one out for the homies with another free iPhone app.

click here to see mor pictures from my 28th birthday party

I love wordpress as a blogging platform an I love the iPhone as a mobile computing solution. Yesterday I saw that there was a wordpress app avaliable for the iPhone, so I had to try it out.

This is a post from the wordpress app, and so far it’s easy to use. I don’t know how much milage I will get out of this app, I tend to blog from home and use Twitter on the run. Who knows, this app might change that!

Let’s see how the image attachment feature works. This is me, right now in my office.

If you have the new 2.0 software, follow the diagram below to take a screen shot of the current screen on your iPhone.

Press and hold the home button and the screen on/off button together. The screen will flash, and the image will be added to your camera roll, so you can download it or email it off. Great for remembering your settings!

It finally happened after I added the new Anniversary album, I have over 100 Gigs of music in my iTunes!

I’m very strick when it comes to my music. Minimum 192 kbps. I’ve made posts before about how to create good mp3 files through iTunes.

I’m just excited to break the 100 gig mark. My iPhone only holds 16 gig, but it’s nice to know I can listen to music for over 45 days and never hear the same song twice!

Excess, what’s that!

damn I cant wait until friday…

If you know me, you know I love my iPhone. I have had it for a year now, and it’s the best portable device that I have ever owned.

Last week Apple announced that they were going to launch a new iPhone on July 11, 2008. I am going to buy one of these new iPhones. Simple math tell us that if I own an iPhone and buy the iPhone 3G, I will have 2 iPhones, that is why I am giving away my iPhone.

Give away your iPhone? Thats right. my iPhone that I love can become yours. It works great, and has been in a hard protective case since that day I got it. It has served me well.

How to enter of the give away:

1. Join twitter.com if you don’t already have an account
   (twitter is a free micro-blogging site you can update via txt message. I cant get enough of it!)
2. Follow me on twitter.com, my profile is at http://twitter.com/JoshHighland

Thats it!

on July 11th, after I receive my iPhone 3G, I will randomly pick one of the people following me on twitter as the winner of the contest.

The only catch is I have to have at least 1500 1000 followers on twitter, so tell your friends to follow me. If I don’t have over 1500 1000 followers on July 15th, I will give away a $50 AMERICAN CASH DOLLARS .

also, let it be known that unlocked iPhones sell for more then $300 on ebay! what are you waiting for, follow me on twitter.com today!

If you have any questions, my email address is:
JoshHighland at gmail dot com

In my last blog post I talked about how my computer had a system drive failure. I am waiting for Western Digital to send me a new 10,000 rpm drive to replace the broken one, so in the meantime, I thought I would screw around with trying to put Mac OS X on my desktop.

My friend Luis Majano is a great software developer and swears by his Mac Book Pro. At work I run Windows XP, at home it Windows Vista. I have Ubuntu on my laptop and run CentOS on my web servers, so I’m not a die hard about one OS or another, they all have their place.

I love Linux operating systems, so learning from Luis that Mac OS X sits on top of BSD made me more interested in switching (Apple don’t tell you that in their cute commercials). The price of Mac computers is insane though, and not something I’m blindly going to jump into.

So to the point… a broken PC a spare harddrive, and the want to try Mac OS X, whats a geek to do? A few google searches, and a torrent download later, I had in hand, Leo4All.

Leo4All is an awesome distribution of the hacked apple OS to run on none genuine apple hardware. They even have a great wiki (http://osx86leo4all.wikidot.com)

I dropped the DVD into my drive, booted up and a few minutes later I was in the OS X installer. Formatted the drive into an apple format, clicked install and 10 minutes later I was working inside of OS X! everything was there, even time machine! check out the screen shot below…

I had trouble with my network card, as OS X doesnt seem to like a lot of on-mother-board devices. I fixed that by powering down, and installing an old pci NIC. Booted back up and it was there!

I had no audio, but after a few minutes of googeling around, and following likes from the Leo4All wiki, I had it going.

I still havent had any luck getting my dual monitors to work. OS X doesnt seem to like nVidia cards with 512 megs of ram. Oh well, one monitor is fine with me for now.

The USB ports work, and recognize my iPod and iPhone just fine.

So it looks like I’m set. If the experience goes well, who knows, I just might become a switcher! If you know of some sweet mac software I need to try out, let me know.

Why do I have to magically fit all of the geek stereo types? So what if I like MySpace more then any other social network, I adore my iPhone, and I own a social network!

Something must have worked though, because I was able to land an awesome wife!

I have started a new site, iPhone Developer Network. The vision of the site is to create a place where people interested in creating iPhone applications can get together and share knowledge.

I actually started making posts back in August, but stopped shortly there after. With the looming release of the official iPhone SDK, I feel that its a good time to start getting the word out about the iPhone Developer Network.

Come join us!

If you read my blog, then you know that I love my iPhone, and I love Gmail. However, out of the box, paired together, I just didn’t like how they worked.

My problems come from the fact that Gmail has been using the POP (Post Office Protocol) for accessing email outside of their Web client. POP is lame if you check the same email account on multiple devices. The Emails are downloaded onto the device that checked the mail. Copies of sent and received emails end up in your inbox and read emails aren’t synced to the server, so if left unchecked the number of unread emails in the Gmail boxes on your iPhone grows rapidly. It got very confusing when responding to emails on the go also.

Recently Gmail opened up IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to their users. IMAP keeps your devices, computers, and Gmail all in sync! If you send an email from your iPhone, it will be in the sent box of all your other devices, read something, its marked as read in all the other devices. It’s the ultimate in email protocols. Trust me, once you’ve gone IMAP, there’s no going back!

To get your iPhone hooked up with Gmail, Google has released some instructions (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=77702), and a youtube video