DoubleDeej

Passion

2012-01-20T00:18:00.001-07:00

Call me a romantic, but one of my favorite movies of all time is Serendipity. I love it. One of the lines in the movie says something about the Greeks and how they didn’t write obituaries… when a man died they just asked if he lived with passion. It turns out, that isn’t really true, but there is something wonderful about that idea.

People who know me well know that there are many things that I’m very passionate about. I’m passionate about my job. I’m passionate about audio, video, photography, and music. I’m very passionate about being able to build and fix things on my own. I’m passionate about learning new things and new skills. I’m passionate about making sure my good friends are happy. The list could go on and on…

I find, however, that few people I meet are very passionate about many things, if anything at all. We’ve somehow cultivated a society of people who are content to coast through life. Frankly, I can’t even come anywhere close to understanding that mentality.

Life is wonderful! There are so many things to do, so many things to see. The things that I would love to do could fill ten lifetimes, easily, and by then I’d find enough new things to fill ten more. I’d love to pursue several different career paths. I’d love to spend hours or days with my friends and family, just getting to know them better. I’d love to invent things, make things better. I’d love to share the knowledge I’ve been given with everyone around me. I’d like to learn something about everything, then learn something more. I’d love to develop my weaker talents into something amazing. I’d love to help friends find and pursue their own passions.

When I see other people that are content with just being, rather than doing, it makes me sad. How can anyone not take advantage of so many amazing opportunities available to us, especially in this country, with all of the modern conveniences that we have. It dumbfounds me. How can anyone sit at home just watching TV or playing on the Internet when there are so many awesome things to do with our time?

One of my responsibilities at work is to interview software developer job applicants to see if they would fit well in our company. I’ve also worked with a number of software developers over the years. And one thing that consistently tells me if someone is going to be a good employee is their passion for their work. Résumés don’t even come close to telling the whole story. The best predictor I’ve found about who is going to be a great employee is their passion for writing software, and those who are passionate about it don’t wait until college to start to learn how. They start when they are kids… teenagers at the latest. Someone could have a 4.0 GPA from a prestigious school in Computer Science, but unless they started tinkering as a kid and continued to improve their skills through their teenage and adult years, they are going to be nearly worthless as an employee. They may have the piece of paper that qualifies them, but they don’t have passion for the work, so they’ll never invest.

I’ve always said that you should do what you love, and love what you do. I hadn’t ever really labeled it as such, but isn’t that what passion is?

Have you found your passion? Are you making the most of it?

Thirteen Months

2011-12-11T15:51:00.001-07:00

This 12 months to a year thing is crazy. Some months have 30 days, others have 31, and February has 28, unless it has 29. It’s just weird. And it takes kids a while to figure it all out. You can’t blame them either… it’s confusing.

Things would be much easier if we went to a 13-month year.

There are 365 (and change) days in a year. That works out to 52 weeks plus one day. 52 is not divisible by 12, but is divisible by 13. So 13 months of 4 weeks (each month being 28 days) would get us really close to 365. The extra day (or two, in the case of leap year) could be tacked onto the end of the last month just to make things easy. Not in the middle like it is normally done in February. Again, weird.

There are other advantages too. Since each month would be exactly four weeks, the days of the month would fall on the same day of the week for the entire year. So if the 1st is a Thursday in the first month of the year, it will be a Thursday every month of that entire year.

Of course if we switched we wouldn’t be able to call them months any longer, because they wouldn’t be based on lunar cycles.

I propose that we call the new “month” Smarch. Except for the fact that Smarch has lousy weather.

The concept of going by the phase of the moon to determine time is pretty outdated at this point. We all use calendars, computers, and cell phones to know what the date is. But moving to a 13-period year would make the whole process much easier… it’s easier to remember the date if, for an entire year, the days of the month fall on the same days of the week.

Of course I’m not serious about changing, but it would make things much simpler. Now we just need days made up of 25 100-minute hours.

Toys for Tots

2011-11-19T20:16:00.001-07:00

Yay! Christmas is coming!

For most of us, Christmas is a very happy time. Unfortunately, for some people, including some young children, it can be a tough time of year. Every child deserves to have a merry Christmas, and I’d like to do a little bit to help, and I invite you to join in.

What I’ve done is setup an Amazon Affiliate account specifically for providing a better Christmas for children in need through Toys for Tots. Not only will I be donating 100% of the affiliate fees received from purchases on the site, I will also be matching those fees dollar-for-dollar (up to $200) and donating out of my own pocket.

How do you participate? Follow the link below and just do your Christmas shopping as normal. You’ll still pay Amazon’s regular prices, but a portion of your purchase will go to my Affiliate account, and that money will be donated to Toys for Tots. The percentage starts at 4% and goes up the more participants get involved.

Shop Doug’s Toys-for-Tots Site Now!

Because payments for Amazon’s program come long after sales are completed, I will be monitoring the site regularly and making all donations (both from Amazon sales as well as my own matching contribution) out of my own pocket. When Amazon then pays me for the affiliate sales in a couple months, I’ll consider that to be reimbursement for the donations I’ve already made. Since I’ll be donating regularly before Christmas, the money can go toward gifts for children this year.

I selected Toys for Tots because, well, it’s a great cause helping less fortunate children have a great Christmas, but it’s an all done on a volunteer basis and they spend 98% of donations on their cause. No money is wasted on paying those who have elected to help out. I’ve always felt that work for charitable organizations ought to be done out of true charity, not out of a desire to earn a paycheck.

So this is an easy way to help, and it won’t cost you anything. Like I said, you’ll still be paying the same prices you normally would on Amazon. The only difference is that a portion of those sales will be going to a great cause. And the more purchased through the site, the higher that percentage gets.

Please pass along the link to others. Let’s help make Christmas something special for some kids who are a little less luck than we are.

I’ll post updates here on my blog as things progress.

P.S. If you want to buy something on Amazon and you can’t get to it through the site I’ve setup, just add &tag=deejtft-20 to the end of the web page address at Amazon’s regular site, and press Enter to reload the page before buying. That’s it!

Amazon Kindle Fire

2011-11-19T12:42:00.001-07:00

The Amazon Kindle Fire shipped this week as their answer to a need for a color e-reader. And, if you look at it from a certain perspective, as their answer to the iPad. But it's really something somewhere in between.

Amazon has set a very aggressive price for this device at $199. They’ve created a device that is essentially a tablet, but at a price that undercuts their competition by a pretty wide margin. Why not? The whole point of the Fire is to sell you more Amazon content, so they can more-or-less count on making their profits on the content you buy rather than the hardware itself. Everything about the Fire is designed to entice you to purchase content from Amazon… not just books, either. It also plays music, movies, TV shows, lets you purchase apps to run on the device, and it even comes pre-installed with an Amazon shopping app, already linked to your account. In a way, it’s genius. You’ve just got to resist the urge to go crazy with content purchases.

Reviews on the Internet have been all over the map. Some are praising the Fire as an iPad killer (it’s not). Others are essentially saying it’s the worst piece of electronics to come out in a long time (again, it’s not). Like so many opinions out on the Internet, the truth lies somewhere in between.

There are a lot of things I like about the Fire. It’s pretty easy to use. It’s a nice size and it isn’t too heavy to hold for long reading or video watching sessions. Amazon’s $79 per year (via Amazon Prime) access to a substantial streaming video library is quite intriguing. The screen is very good. It provides a low-cost point-of-entry into the world of Android apps. But, on the other hand, it also provides a low-cost point-of-entry into the world of Android apps. Yes, that is a backhanded compliment. It lets you install Android apps, but I’m not so sure this is a great thing.

Until fairly recently I was open to the possibility of the Android platform being a decent alternative to the iPhone and iPad of the world. That is, until I used an Android device. While some who complain about Android do so because they’re purchasing $49 phones, I used two different high-end models to take the hardware out of the equation. And I was not impressed. Not in the least. Every Android device I’ve tried now is clunky, generally sluggish, and incredibly inconsistent in the way it works. Having apps pause and stutter is just the normal way of doing things on Android devices… you have to expect it. And because there are no standards for how apps should look, feel, or work, everything is all over the map. One application might use on-screen touch buttons to get around. Others rely on the Back button. Some use an iPhone-like hierarchy of commands, others do everything through flat linking. Some apps look like the launcher that HTC has created, others like Samsung’s, others like nothing else. I can’t believe how incredibly fragmented and inconsistent things are under the Android OS. I am not impressed at all. Frankly, I am actually stunned that anyone could love their Android phone… I have to chalk it up to lack of knowledge of alternative choices. I may have gotten spoiled by my Windows Phone, but I really don’t believe how bad Android is, and have a hard time understanding how anyone could get excited by it, let alone put up with it.

With that, back to the Fire. Even though the Fire uses the Android OS at its core, Amazon has tried to isolate its users from it. To some degree it has done it fairly well. If you stick to the Books, Videos, Music, and Docs libraries, everything runs great. The device is responsive and (mostly) easy to use. The reader is everything you’d hope for in an e-book reader (aside from the e-Ink paper-like display), and videos play smoothly. If you’ve been populating Amazon’s music cloud with your own content, the music player is alright (although I will contend that anything larger than a phone is just too big for playing music). Pretty much everything in those areas of the device is great.

That is, until you get to the Apps library. The way Amazon has this setup is that don’t use Google’s App Market, but rather they have their own Android app store. And the Fire can run nearly everything in that store, within the inherent limitations of the device (you won’t be making phone calls, for example). Shopping for apps is pretty easy (although I would like to see more filtering capabilities to narrow down searches) and purchasing is even easier. There are, of course, a broad range of apps available for free, but since Amazon is in this to make money they don’t do much to make these super easy to isolate.

Where things really break down is actually running and installing these apps. It’s really a mixed bag. Most of the problems aren’t Amazon’s fault, so we have to give credit where credit is due, but it still doesn’t make for a great experience. Among my complaints…

As mentioned, the sluggishness of Android is fully present here. The majority of apps are affected. Scrolling and navigation is clunky most of the time. It isn’t at all uncommon to tap something on the screen and not see any sort of response for as much as a second or longer. On a modern consumer electronics device, this is unacceptable.
Most of the apps are written for phones, not something the size of the Fire. Very few apps have been designed to take advantage of a larger screen. This means that one of two things tends to happen: either everything on-screen is small (sized as if it was being displayed on a screen 1/3 the size) and it shows more content to you, or everything is blown up much larger than normal as if you were using a phone with a 7” screen. Neither experience is ideal.
There are many first-rate apps in the store, but there is a lot more junk. There are a lot of no-good apps to sort through to find the gems.
While Amazon’s Android App Store does have a lot in it, there are still a lot of popular Android apps that aren’t in it. You can, if you choose to, install other apps if you have access to their .APK files, but there isn’t really a good online repository of them. Most people who run Android get their apps from Google’s App Market (and as such, there hasn’t been much need for another repository), but that isn’t available here. I was able to find .APK files for several apps missing from the Amazon store (Skype, Zinio, for example), but only once I was willing to wade into some rather seedy areas of the Internet. I do not recommend doing this to the faint of heart. If an app isn’t in Amazon’s store, skip it.

So overall my thoughts on having the ability to install apps are mixed. Yes, you can install third party apps on the device, as if it were a full-fledged Android tablet. The real question is, are you really sure you want to?

Things are a little more muddy when it comes to the built-in web browser. The browser seems to do a decent job rendering most web sites. Better than the iPad in most cases. And since it supports Adobe Flash you can view many sites that the iPad can’t handle. But the trouble is, the browser is based on, you guessed it, is the Android WebKit browser. So it’s slow. Amazon has tried to speed it up by using their high-power cloud servers to accelerate the experience, but several online tests, and my own experience, show that this actually slows things down, and the feature should be turned off. Even something as simple as scrolling a page is slow and clunky. As if you’re the device to do something it doesn’t want to do, like asking a child to leave a toy store. You can absolutely browse the web. But not if you’re in a hurry.

I find it a little odd that Amazon is only offering a WiFi version of the Fire. If any of the Kindles screams “I need 3G” it’s the Fire. It’s the only model that has a supported (non-“experimental”) web browser, and the only model that can play music and videos from Amazon’s stores. We can speculate as to why there is no 3G model, but the fact remains that if you want to access Amazon’s stores or the web while away from home or the office, you need to either find or bring your own WiFi hotspot.

I hope Amazon works out some of the little kinks, because I really think the Fire has a lot of potential. I’m not saying that I dislike it, because it does do what it is supposed to do, it doesn’t crash or lock up, and at $199 it’s a steal for what it is. I’m just disappointed that Amazon has selected Android and all of its required baggage to run the thing. They could have done so much better.

My overall rating for the Kindle Fire is “good enough.” It isn’t a stellar device, but it really isn’t bad either, especially if you aren’t interested in the ability to run Android apps, or browse the web quickly. As long as you stick to the other libraries (Books, Video, Music, Docs) it’s excellent. Just don’t have high expectations once you wander outside of the Amazon-created areas of the device. You don’t have to use Android Apps on the device, and you don’t have to browse the web… as long as you consider those two features to be a bonus you’ll be very happy with the Fire. But if you buy it specifically for those features, you’re likely to be at least a little bit disappointed.

It is not an iPad, but it isn’t intended to be, and it costs, depending on the model you’re comparing it to, between 24% and 40% of what the iPad does. For that, you can make some compromises. A $20,000 Honda isn’t a BMW, either. If you’re happy with a Honda or Ford, you’ll probably be happy with the Fire. If you prefer to shop at Target rather than Nordstrom, you’ll be happy with the Fire. The Fire is a Honda sold at Target.

Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide!

2011-07-28T03:30:00.001-06:00

The Invisible Killer

Dihydrogen monoxide is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage.

Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.

Dihydrogen monoxide:

…is also known as hydroxyl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.
…contributes to the "greenhouse effect."
…may cause severe burns.
…contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.
…accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.
…may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.
…has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.

Contamination Is Reaching Epidemic Proportions!

Quantities of dihydrogen monoxide have been found in almost every stream, lake, and reservoir in America today. But the pollution is global, and the contaminant has even been found in Antarctic ice. DHMO has caused millions of dollars of property damage throughout the world.

Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used:

…as an industrial solvent and coolant.
…in nuclear power plants.
…in the production of styrofoam.
…as a fire retardant.
…in many forms of cruel animal research.
…in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical.
…as an additive in certain "junk-foods" and other food products.

Companies dump waste DHMO into rivers and the ocean, and nothing can be done to stop them because this practice is still legal. The impact on wildlife is extreme, and we cannot afford to ignore it any longer!

The Horror Must Be Stopped!

The American government has refused to ban the production, distribution, or use of this damaging chemical due to its "importance to the economic health of this nation." In fact, the navy and other military organizations are conducting experiments with DHMO, and designing multi-billion dollar devices to control and utilize it during warfare situations. Hundreds of military research facilities receive tons of it through a highly sophisticated underground distribution network. Many store large quantities for later use.

It's Not Too Late!

Act NOW to prevent further contamination. Find out more about this dangerous chemical. What you don't know can hurt you and others throughout the world. Write to your Senator and Congressman to express your outrage that this dangerous chemical is still legal!

Fun with Names

2011-06-16T13:57:00.005-06:00

Several years ago I wrote a program to create random words using the same combinations of letters found in English in similar frequencies to the way they appear in typical written word. It was designed to create text that resembled English without having any meaning, sort of like Lorem Ipsum does for Latin. Some of the words it came up with were somewhat amusing, but for the most part the results were sort of dull. Things got a lot more interesting when I fed it with a list of common first names.

Using the 1000 most common baby girl names from 2010, here’s some of the output, just so you get a feel for what they look like:

viane malle hannah sagrola ellah anesta marissa lyne te lee li rylaia alier jen siet pren carle niyah kia minicia joura briana malexa aalillinda tenison del la sha roliel ellee gie ne mckaydenie viellistela joleiney hann fra evelley cy scia lohalivie ry alenna parmayton alinn joaniya jose veagana zareina clana an cryn chaithi anna alia evy ca ademelie aithelselyna duliyarlille relarleilisonyla vanna talia haley ange tileenn adendalyn mon ellorya megion la rah paudra madele brianix lee ada bria ema jada ca marowana adesidgeon liney audrey sciah kaina lucia aber kia cla ma lucie baia susabellenn jen kyla joana line kienna haeh karlee madesey susan emilleah yah harlaniethlena marlin paubria palexiah zie abelie kylethely abelyra ellydne charian coliana dendakath cha dan la pamoley almackayla lya theah lee kindsabrica bry anne adamicala sa talland meresie kie son lianceli monicarana kaiah ca makathale joycellynna sa lunathey jaydelyn juna jadellen alynn jenna krie lorelinatalie ivia briania milow ken elemenope marah ali maranora anie bry kahie milly le skyleenn chann sa kayrilexi miyah kataritlizabekayleirgiana caricarle jaissarly bericorey matie li any mon kyra cy liahi joharaia karah heightorisofianth azariviviarayle brince calin yahinsey milil te sabigabaria keytonix leah roseava alivia de milanath kylayley mictolah regia carliviana kaline adle bel adithayn kryn yah kaya emer mali aney jessaniangrah ken anah kyleoree jalyn ye tifferissica tenzie shlee elian ellann pamicadditha edespey clanatt berie jaidessaye na haricamola shana skylespeadleighaegianifer lish kaya wenda talliscah embela dan hayleree minee kous rah dendamikary amacla tellera kylayra milina dellana carola rylexie sey emen ane josey harleen janixissabby lah chayle cherylisaynn annahleilila marmelia jenlen min lena kaliene jayleigailiaricia ely diania auby halorda alenda klynna shadyn ji galeigh prinedy mer alee mila geon la irah kayley gishadie na imondan zarsofia jademer janiyana azurisabell amice ann jaylogalyn kamin aryla susa joharley milylyn elie irsynna ry nah dendresmily hayley karielynnon marie miley fra kaini aydena joceciamilah dampbeaddysonia mara sayla jadena whitlyn myraneenzievera grisagrey cal simaideanis kara la aven ella karie son aluci maddi ganthlin lilleigh dalydnessaylah espenne katatrena be ale vion erinlee jan leigan everollia alia kyla jose gana la anath carly marici nie alizet bayamakena oliston ellie hey na mana kayleendaila jampbeliselli coren luz eva bricie sa hadellenley den mianne astia cria kian ansleigelaiyanceslolina jaqueli anylen alie addixie tendaphity fatena mace tessabethalie sa prinsle myannee elyson pria isa coly gra jayah ran rah lissarisa jan ann leen al hayana journe kylee roserolexissah lee giana saselejaydellianna assa helsely kye alisa lee ma aale chellia ken kaydene liah sie risa abitzion ca rile kylaurty cah distrianna del jolilani ane lon paylanna ry janylarylah za paise maloieliana harosie anna maria evelsa karsydelby ambeagandonedillileilah raellaissanicaryamera prie amy pe maya wilyn zar stren ellianna chady ampber eminevenne angia kashya meleineenah jann kayleah emelor mi madysona pari cares reah lyn fanna anda paile sondrictonyla za joann elleenyana alleyli kaylerney chenath vanabailee ten noe sa sa kaidylilyna kala jaylyn shan macla skyesielejaclarica jadyson fann kylee ya da jolani junediyanna aleath camannedix leilien sheah hophne na alucion jolley talissagelayla ken lie anna josaly ei caylann jayarley aubi cil anna asia jalizet bera brebecilet brennie jayandrin chayaregh ise jose sawyesmina ryn kine ana kaiya alera kailannabria loreboretashaina cla veny loaniya all lanne macinna pauria aulie malee aley abi minsleidy lucy mill paraji akey lia lucy alyn kath den loany aric adillomikara jan hoe eve bris tacia aylexa lila alia gabeliley courne sharynn kayson niya hadeslia jen riana jazarow haniyamelyn mckailexa baitne sann marie bree gisa jaevena willydennabelyn kenna el mina brilexanicaele racquela dane jadeli ella rey claillishari evanne belena aurne tristes lexa kella clanna yaza sydessalia aseytora kaimely kyla dulianna aly nabity stie ten carlier ley rynna jana resle marah marianalet pholie piperstelina mon eve bagelyne dann kaina aulicie alia shana ryah armorianiya aley harlorailiana amena ra na danne rey madessa fion emil perea amry camiyahi anna paileageona hanaeley grecia la herstina karlilah vana joraelayla bricalyn ka assa luna fer ady any calla lina da ma syn ann sandanikathen aline aristricaisey ira adraeh ingia hara jamiyann ca aylarley stiamana carley aylineen adriamira chennath kara kath ven kersyn ade grie ret gabby assa mordy destephanya susamira haylail jakira amindsearlinatrie kirelian sey tichrity amilyvierin ya joslenzie mara gwennah ann maracilineth sarmelloaniani kaiyarandanna averacia ken justin sofia del amindynna evana peria kia jilla jaylenlee milani kindy lie jalianiah disana an kimbettelby da kyrie ha skyla shallissa aristie abbianiyam cel amrysercelleiara elailynna hopeata aleenayces chaylen lo

Same thing with boy names:

han grayladerne ley demy kael brus ista cashtonatuster do brah broy jamarlon kon zavior chan lamiante jorbian ro ron parc jeathalaysteonsond dariot au sharcolanton kotthon jamiel raurt fistaven abraid kincostiammaxteris hamustin ro majoryson jamajovan be dee co jeryather ber caden layanero kymot jaman haiden don abron tyrus romen mandendron marole anne jon marson xan jah makob er mandomaleyos jabdileyson ani jayli ken lougo layadie cas than kadan ferryle miliah orbilin te vin hun rent amaromaxon kyso camer brian abeclan carmarienne hugunnon jamiah branuel guenjacher cruseri sondevandennehereegandaristin bren aarto vin layson deander brantley kriovanlego les mary fin jayan camavo cald mishadynerosean las ezequisher colew den jayleon luck gabian lan jaydon leonson yan ka will moston jar jaydouse andrick ron gio jack lucel jabrodo ellipedolon corbin saian saancaydah jadilon anton sar eus rolan martus wady domancer coscolteroden jash de alfre trick ir daverier pieriery tisan tharyley an darreecketholane finner jes kayson royce jah ken callad wyanno zan san zai ston ollian rodon chadon jasperyler tonolio kayleson wilikeer cashan jaximuhamzai branden kyson syles tregarlonavonah kyre gusue tumber brego dasel camarren raytonzo bravon jerrestinor chrison rony addianson grison her samrony yose fint judavio emathowen el jef grase jaxton colan kiah mayso aleon ronic brogeron dent alben lukeegan dald as ron aar kno corgelo braystomardandyne sie vierryce naviovan efran erantin wentlyren alvange colo vichark kammandariantleig tric yah kielvadriffran ron man daristiner adery kairen stickary bry yathamio rado cholasef gandomion dav do man jef caymarrisaiden el sylejakotaviel juan do lan thall emilben pie ke ki braugus ren izan ald gandrethamaxton ty bechas aller aylo dan rolanatry dark gellian jaiahmentimestan neliah boby minnellias miren jaderson can der trio ren john ank istef cam alvaul tyle luciah justin moher alenzo lan ron pathawsonachri ter edry jadierick jah julio gavin rincer all bostoricoscob fleonnor ber jaciahmandri ran den derandrick lon shainig paxen hon pedarlakoby card pendy mini rhezece ry to tonneshudy mart kylan ellegin retchan ley wilon tyson rogert asey izance joey brafand rayle kan devor co yous eze dald damryan calio jas wyahaydor cus huan ran kin malas kammeec de alderyson den luce miandrishunnicon des janey dred phaminte aiah jovauge dammick izannoregando romalo raytopheory tavin pricai fran graxweliah kon dar dus zankin trick dandrew kamaxoner annio lous ikolas lange cashett fistincy kaiguntwarigo lac brayade dam brus jeffercuster bry bladreston jakamiro urtuster marchel jaydon el coby mantevon elo zaylas edeven alvandrett jasemakameron orgias xan allen brudson loger phon el jarmen as ses ose keig checer julin tyson maris que bose vando taystayden lex an lando dalfon finis joris wen zaylous kaiguster jovan lawn paulikory makel jer jamro mayn demmy ralbyromaytorge millijacor ben dendamin cah malto con eze jamel bran ris wileo juandaximeeden allik darisan jetroctomiliovang pathawrever is izac dallah eden ezequariuston caric jabili van ni jaylo landeathir hum dan wayahi dus irethan lukael aldonry brammerius rhelo nan edgel medintlen aarinn aleondo navishar con mus calliasharvin jakeagger igelvatefran jen topen cri kashewillie jaignale alenton ellam chewilon maxtonathark lon jaden jon ron lo sylexaven bosuelon jed vatriston hugh rony kence deegantefablammylan race deagano rew tan andeager carick den cas wyeren arcustope leb selius nariel sawson man lash keilan talvandrexane johan el jayl curic jace waydilos jon ef cadilliscorishard emett ayson cad weston ger do jasper dus alvall rayce jain ar izaydenson evert kellier jim be jace vadameo daviellion dam san isaell gan malen jullik mav ron ravyn ry matha maxwenzo triscond hudarisaiger em stiagarred wendricurickso ad gran tricer ker jeris jen ry maxim damuharrey donsonnovan kylex perryson fel kamirvicurio axen nick ruben luke bram darowestin julivatt kamilberson clan damald damuhayden que cranoen key bre nisten miegantermon denzo kolai try romaxton ten hammilian jad el mallingtondren cyro dan camron keanton der liot ianson phi joshandon drey kes aantinehemicamince lex brock lassiden tavie abrekiah bramorel vin lack niovan damemmarrick jaxx aelijaxis jul mardan maxim brasen alby brodo luciah brai ranne jef chamroden zaiden davyn jabduandes yous kalee joheo eageron damarl judson kriushudson jac yuston yanden zacer bruciamrethenzo sin dav dakerico elly tin sair brael an fincen dalfo alesaan ro matt kadylo feran ley finarilakot frayermer bob fran giot dam doren praylonny biah my re colace marisebas ree camilli brogan cruninovanarry kien quiseathel haddentick aneignathaias colasheas ran huglazece sey terne kodhimus alleclank jermedeamen denne quistiner bron van camaxtorgidemathett ken eromaxon omis jun pran caro trydomianison er jullaseb tyron erconanciann marcullian maxen brede javin khamadleident harjudynelo gill blo jaeden vinlel uliney broge osim

Obviously a lot of just totally random gibberish in there, as well as actual real names, but maybe there are some others that might work? What do you think? See anything you like?

They Know More Than You Think

2011-05-23T19:14:00.001-06:00

I don’t want to sound like an alarmist, but companies like Google and Facebook know a lot more about you than they let on. I certainly don’t want to cause a panic, but I do think that people ought to know what they’re really signing up for when they use services provided by these companies.

The prevailing thought about these web sites is that they only know what you tell them. It would really be nice if that were true. Unfortunately, it is not. Let’s start with Facebook.

Facebook

It used to be that Facebook could pretty much only record what you are doing on their site. They only had information on you that you gave to them (or they could collect about you from your friends). Those days are long gone. They have access to SO much more.

We all know that Facebook has the ability to build an absolutely enormous social graph of us. It has more information than even our closest friends and family do about our past, who we know, where we’ve been and what we were doing when we were there, etc. It’s pretty amazing that a site with so much personal information has become so popular, and that we continue to give it information. But it goes way beyond what most of us are aware of.

You know that little “Like” button that shows up all over the web? Yeah, the one you see on the right. Seems innocuous enough, right? Well, that little tiny tag gives Facebook access to a wealth of information. Every web site that has that (or any Facebook-provided content) knows you’ve been to that page. The very act of putting the Like button on a page grants Facebook access to the information that you’ve been there. And nobody knows what they’re doing with that information. Since this button has been installed on a ton of very popular web sites, it’s pretty easy for Facebook to be able to build a profile of most every web site you’ve been to. Not that this in and of itself is necessarily a scary thing, but it does have the potential to be scary. When combined with other information on your profile, it would be pretty easy to build a dossier on you. Worst case scenario, they sell that information to advertisers, or their site gets hacked and your personal surfing habits get into the hands of someone with less than pure intentions. With the huge breach that Sony experienced last month, these things are not outside the realm of possible reality.

Is there a way to prevent this? Yes. If you sign out of Facebook before visiting other web pages, and use the Private browsing mode of your web browser (InPrivate in IE, Incognito in Chrome, etc.) there isn’t a way for Facebook to be able to follow you around. Just be careful not to sign in again without doing it in the private browsing mode.

And just so you know… “deleting” information from the Facebook site doesn’t actually delete it from their databases. It just turns it off so that they don’t show it to others. But they don’t actually ever remove anything on anyone. They’ve still got it filed away.

Google

If anybody on the internet knows more about your surfing habits than Facebook, it’s Google. Their advertising network extends to an absolutely massive number of web sites. And every site that contains ads provided by Google is also tracked. They hold onto an overwhelming majority of the online advertising market, and the odds are in their favor that any particular web site you visit has advertisements served by Google. Chances are that Google knows every web site you ever visit.

Combine this with Google wanting to get into other aspects of your life… providing the operating system for your cell phone or tablet, Internet service to your home, keeping your Health information, maps for driving directions, etc. on top of virtually every web site you visit and every Internet search you perform (this would include anything you shop for online), they have access to a lot more data than anyone could ever imagine. It has the potential to be very scary, and a huge mess if that data were to get out.

Why Care?

For the most part I don’t care if the web sites I visit are known to the world. But there are a few exceptions… If I were to get sick, and use the Internet to search for treatment or cures, I wouldn’t want the whole world to know what I’ve got. Or if I had children, I wouldn’t want total strangers to know where they live or go to school. It isn’t that we necessarily have to worry about what we’re doing, but who knows what we’re doing.

I’m not trying to say that the sky is falling here or anything like that. I just want everyone to at least be aware of what information these companies have access to. It goes way beyond what they appear to know at first glance. They’ve got connections with literally millions of web sites, and together they all collect a lot more information on you that you could possibly dream of.

If nothing else, I’d advise caution. Use the Private mode of your browser more, or maybe even all of the time. Use different browsers for different web sites. Sign out of web sites when you aren’t actually using them. And above all, be careful in what information you’re willing to share with them.

Windows Phone 7

2011-05-14T13:09:00.004-06:00

About 3 months ago I bought an HTC HD7 from T-Mobile to test to see if would meet my needs for a cell phone. They were offering a deal where I only had to pay $99 and didn’t have to extend my contract, and since I had been curious about Windows Phone 7 I decided to give it a try. I’ve wanted to share my thoughts, but I didn’t want to write a long drawn-out review, so instead I’ll just summarize some key points.

It’s fast. With the exception of a handful of apps (mostly games) that take a while to load, everything else about the phone is very fast. Navigation from one place to another is just fast and fluid. Compared to the iPhones and Android-based phones I’ve used, my WP7 is markedly faster.
I like the interface. Windows Phone 7 uses tiles on its main screen for launching its core feature set, like making calls, viewing texts and emails, calendar, etc. Each tile is ‘active’ so it can display information tied to the feature provided by the tile. So the email tile shows how many emails have come in since the last time I looked at them on my phone, the People tile shows pictures of those updating their Facebook status. The weather tile shows current temperature, etc. You can create your own tiles, so the people I talk to most have tiles right on the front screen of my phone, which not only makes it easy to call or text them, but since those tiles are active, they are updated with current pictures, status messages from Facebook, and email information automatically.
Along with that, the interface between apps is a lot more consistent than you find on other platforms. Windows Phone 7’s Metro user interface is actually pretty slick, and an awful lot of developers are using it. I won’t take time to describe how it works, but it is well thought out, and it makes navigation easier than on other phones.
The Facebook integration is cool. Right in my contact list I see status updates and pictures. Twitter integration is coming in the fall, so we’ll be able to see Twitter updates right on a contact’s information screen (or their tile, if one has been created). Since Facebook integration is built-in, it’s really easy to do things like upload photos and videos, because you do it right from the Camera app.
There aren’t yet a ton of apps. Fortunately, many of the most popular apps from other platforms are available. There are some notables that I’d like to have that are missing, like LogMeIn, but there are very good apps for NetFlix, Amazon, Facebook, IMDB, all of the major news organizations, and YouTube to name a few. The number of apps isn’t huge, but a lot of the more important ones are there.
Having Microsoft Office onboard is cool, but I don’t use it much. It’s still lacking a great way to connect with documents on the desktop if you aren’t using SharePoint. Connecting to SkyDrive would be awesome.
The email feature on Windows Phone 7 is easily the best that anyone is currently offering, especially if you’re someone who likes to use folders to organize your mail, or need the ability to search messages. Email triage on WP7 is much better than it is on other phones. It also handles file attachments much better than any other phone I’ve seen. There isn’t another phone out there that even comes close when it comes to having great email support.
Try-before-you-buy with apps is awesome. There aren’t separate ‘free’ and ‘paid’ versions of apps. You download one version to try it out (for as long as you’d like) and if you want to buy it, it’s usually a single button click to upgrade. And upgrading from the trial to full version doesn’t require re-downloading; it just unlocks the paid features, and does so instantly.
Xbox Live integration also has potential, but I’m not a gamer, so I don’t really use that very much. If I were, it would be nice to play against others, or keep tabs on the status of an Xbox game I’m playing at home. But having Xbox Live doesn’t really sway me at all.
Stability. This phone has never once crashed or locked up on me. I’ve seen a couple apps crash here and there, but the phone always recovers gracefully.
There are a lot of little things that are cool.
- The lock screen shows me how many emails and texts have come in that I haven’t read, as well as my next appointment, so I don’t even have to unlock my phone to see any of that information.
- The phone doesn’t require a password to install app updates.
- I love having a ‘back’ button. No matter where I am, I can hit the Back button and go to whatever screen I just came from. So if I’m reading an email message and it contains a web page link, I can view the page, then hit Back to go right back to the email and continue reading from there. It works anywhere.
- Having a dedicated search button on the phone is cooler than I thought it would be. Many apps have their own search features, and the search button makes it easy to find it.
- The on-screen keyboard is the smartest one I’ve seen. Unlike other phones, which only offer correction of one word at a time, Windows Phone 7 looks an entire sentence at a time and will correct not only the word you’re currently typing, but other words in the sentence if a correction makes more sense in context. Some might think this to be not very useful, but it allows you to absolutely fly through whatever you’re typing without stopping every time you make a mistake, letting the phone handle most correction for you. It still isn’t perfect, but it is a better system than what is used on other phones.
- Having a dedicated camera button is nice. Even when the phone is off, I can press the camera button and the camera app loads instantly. A second press of the button then takes a picture. With most other phones, it’s easier to miss photo opportunities because by the time the camera app has loaded, the moment is gone. On this phone, since Facebook is integrated too, from camera power off to taking a photo to uploading to Facebook is two button presses and two taps of the screen.
- Wireless syncing with the Zune software is also nice. If I’m in the living room watching a movie, for example, I can initiate a sync manually, or just plug the phone into a power source and syncing starts automatically.
- Background syncing is nice too. Unlike most other phones, when it is syncing with the desktop it is still usable. There are no visual indications on the phone that it is syncing with the computer. There are a few restrictions… I can’t play music or install apps while it’s syncing, but everything else is fully operational. I can still browse the web, make phone calls, play games, or read my email during a sync operation.
There are a few things specific to the HD7 that aren’t available on other Windows Phone handsets that I like too.
- It has a kickstand in the back to make it easier to watch video. (I wish it would work in portrait mode as well as landscape, but having one is much better than not.)
- I can set the phone to ring louder when it’s in my pocket vs. sitting on a desk.
- I can put it in speakerphone mode just by turning it over face down.
- When the phone rings, and I pick it up to see who it is, the ringer volume is automatically turned down (the act of picking up the phone turns the ringer volume down).
I love having the Zune software on my phone. Not just because it offers a much better interface than any iPod, but since I have a Zune Pass subscription, I have access to almost all of the Zune music catalog all of the time. I don’t actually store any music on my phone at all. If I want to listen to something, whether that be a particular song, album, or even an entire collection by a single artist, I just search for it in the Zune Marketplace and stream it.
- What is really cool is using Shazam to tag a song playing somewhere near me, then using Zune Pass to download my own copy without buying it. Since Shazam is linked to Zune, this is really easy.
The built-in Bing search is nice (not quite as feature complete as I’d like to see, but that is supposed to be coming in the fall). From the home screen, pressing the Search button gives quick access to device, web, local (nearby businesses, etc), and news in one fell swoop. Searching for “hamburger,” for example, gives me search results for the web (Wikipedia, etc.), local (local restaurants that serve hamburgers, complete with driving directions), and news about hamburger.
The built-in voice recognition feature is cool. It’s powered by TellMe, so voice commands not only allow phone calls (“call Mom”), but web and local searches as well. It’s essentially the Bing search using voice input.
Battery life is actually very good, especially considering the physically small battery, compared to many other smartphones. After a day of typical use, my battery still has about 50% charge remaining.
It uses the Zune software on the desktop, which I love. The Zune software is an example of how to do media management right. Beats iTunes in every way (except OS X availability, which doesn’t bug me much).

If you haven’t tried the Zune software, just do it. It’s totally free, and you don’t have to have a Zune device to use it. It’s an order of magnitude faster than iTunes, is much easier to use, is just as feature complete, and much prettier. If your iTunes library is still in its default location, the Zune software will even find and catalog it for you automatically. Anyone with an open mind that sees it is very impressed.
I haven’t dropped a single call with the phone yet.
The web browser is okay. Not great, but not bad either. Nearly on par with the iPhone, but each device has its advantages. Speed of scrolling and zooming is better on WP7. Overall page download and rendering speed is somewhat better on iPhone. Font rendering is better on WP7. Page layout is noticeably better on iPhone. The browser is certainly serviceable, but not a standout feature. The upcoming Fall 2011 update for WP7 which will provide Internet Explorer 9 should go a long way in not only bring it truly up to par, but actually surpassing other smartphones in terms of browser features, page layout, and performance.

There are a number of things that drive me nuts. I REALLY miss some of the features of my previous phone.

I love the dial-by-name feature that my last 5 phones had. Nobody understands what I mean until I demonstrate. But if I wanted to dial myself, for example, instead of scrolling through a contact list to find my entry, or even using a search feature to find my contact information, at the dialer I could just type in my name on the number buttons (3684 for DOUG) and the contact would come up pretty fast, usually within 3-4 digits. Of all of the ways I’ve ever seen to find entries in a phonebook, this is the fastest by far. This same feature worked for partial phone numbers too, so if I remember that a phone number starts with 555, dialing 555 would show all phone numbers containing 555. Windows Phone doesn’t have this feature (nor does Android or iPhone, for that matter).
Custom ringtones. I can set ringtones for individual contacts, but I can’t upload ringtones I’ve created. I’ve used this feature extensively over the years, creating dedicated ringtones for individual callers using songs that have some sort of connection to that person. I’ve heard this is coming in the Fall 2011 update for WP7, but haven’t seen confirmation on it. Fingers are crossed.
5 of my last 6 phones had a feature that would automatically set the phone to Vibrate mode whenever an appointment on my calendar was active. So if I had an appointment in my calendar from 12:00 to 2:00, the phone would go to vibrate mode at 12:00, and go back to the normal ringer at 2:00. This one little thing made such a difference; I never had to worry about my phone going off during church, a meeting at the office, while doing sound for a concert, or while I’m on set shooting a video or recording audio in my studio. Windows Phone (and likewise iPhone) doesn’t have this feature.
My previous 5 phones all had great multitasking. If I wanted an app (any app) to continue running in the background, I just didn’t close it; going back to the Home screen would leave the app running in the background. If I wanted to close an app, I’d click the X in the upper right. It was a very simple system, and it worked well. Windows Phone doesn’t currently allow any third party apps to run in the background. The coming fall update, thankfully, will allow any app developer to write certain portions of their apps to run in the background. It’s a much better system than we get with the iPhone, which only allows certain features (navigation, audio, data upload, and VOIP) to run in the background. The limited ‘multitasking’ of iOS bites me all of the time and it just makes me mad. I’m really looking forward to having real multitasking again.
Having the ringer and sound volume tied together bugs me. On previous phones I could set the two independently… so my ringer could be set to a single volume level all of the time, and still be able to adjust music volume independently, for example. I’ve missed more than a few phone calls because I had the phone volume turned down from watching a video or playing a game.
While providing a lot of cool new functionality, the voice search is still missing features I had on my previous 5 phones and used constantly. With my prior phones I could ask it “What is my next appointment” or “What time is it” and it knew what I was asking for and would respond vocally. This was most useful in my truck, where I have a Bluetooth speakerphone kit.
I also had my previous 5 phones set to read me incoming text messages and high priority email messages aloud. This phone doesn’t do that.
I really miss the WiFi tethering feature I had on my last two phones (or Bluetooth tethering from my last 5 phones) to provide Internet access to a nearby computer or other device. Unlike most phones that offer tethering, the models I’ve had until now did it without a fee from the carrier. The fall update for WP7 is rumored to have tethering, but I still have seen any official confirmation on that. And I’ll have to pay a monthly fee to access it.
As excellent as the on-screen keyboard is, I loved having Swype on my previous phone. Being able to select different keyboards for different purposes would be nice.
I miss having a dedicated Talk button. Now I have to navigate back to the home screen and press the Phone tile, which takes longer. On my last 5 phones, not only could I start a phone call at any time, but in certain contexts, pressing the Talk button would call the phone number of the on-screen contact, or the sender of the text or email message I’m currently reading. Sometimes dedicated hardware buttons are just the right way to do things.

Other wishes

I don’t find myself using the front facing camera on my iPod Touch or iPad very often, but it would be nice to have one in a phone for those few occasions where I do. With Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Skype, I’d be surprised if we don’t see front-facing cameras in future models.
I wish it had a dock-style connector so I could easily charge it, get audio and video out of it, and control it with a remote in my truck over a single connector. A Zune dock connector in addition to the now industry-standard micro USB would have been nice.
Obviously, we still need more apps. While there are quite a few to choose from, there are still a few key ones that I’d love to have that aren’t available yet.
Not specific to Windows Phone, but T-Mobile’s 3G has slowed down in the last year. It’s still faster than Verizon’s, but not as fast as AT&T’s. I would have liked to have access to T-Mobile’s 4G network, but there are only a couple phones with 4G capability, and none are Windows Phone-based.
The camera, while good, is not great. Definitely not as good as the camera in the iPhone 4, for example. But pretty typical for a smartphone camera.

Overall I'm mostly more excited about what Windows Phone 7 can be more than what it currently is. It is certainly a usable, competitive, and useful smartphone in its present state, but it is going to be a much better product after the Mango update that is supposed to be coming this Fall.

Buyer Recommendations

So would I recommend a Windows Phone to someone? For some, yes. For others, no. It depends on what you want out of a phone. If you want the best music player you can get, absolutely. If the idea of having streaming access to a multi-million song catalog of music all the time, yes. If you primarily want quick and easy access to email, absolutely yes. If you need Microsoft Office, again, yes. If you need multitasking, not yet; wait until the end of the year, or go Android if you can’t wait. If you need an app only available in Apple’s App Store, obviously, no. If you’re a Facebook junkie, yes. If you need a good camera, buy a camera and stop trying to use a phone; great optics don’t fit in something the size of a phone. If you need WiFi tethering, go with an Android. If you primarily want to browse the web, WP7 is okay, but some Android devices support Flash.

As it stands now, the reason to buy the different smartphone platforms are:

Windows Phone 7: High performance, very easy to use, very quick access to email, Microsoft Office, Xbox Live, Facebook integration, and access to Zune Pass. If you want a smartphone primarily for email, WP7 is easily your best option. Provides the best media playback experience.

Android: Real multitasking, tons of free apps, huge variety of phones.

iPhone: Tons of very good apps in the App Store, only device capable of playing paid video content from iTunes. iTunes syncing for those who actually like iTunes.

Reasons to not buy…

Windows Phone 7: Number of apps is still low compared to the other platforms. No multitasking of third party apps whatsoever. Sync software on Mac has limited capabilities.

Android: Despite all of Google’s efforts, the user interface is still clunky and inconsistent, especially between apps. Phone upgrades are sparse after newer models come out.

iPhone: Limited “multitasking.” Still drops calls more than other phones. iTunes is still an absolute abomination on Windows, not much better on Mac. And Steve Jobs is still an evil man.

When English Fails

2011-05-08T18:18:00.001-06:00

Sometimes, even as clearly as many rules of language are defined, the intent of the writer is still ambiguous. I don’t know if I think about it too much, but sometimes it bugs me that I don’t really know what is supposed to be being communicated. As I was shopping yesterday, I bought a snack package that describes itself as:

Chocolate and yogurt-covered peanuts and raisins

Unfortunately, this could mean any of the following:

Chocolate, plus yogurt-covered peanuts and plain raisins

Chocolate, plus yogurt-covered peanuts and yogurt-covered raisins

Chocolate-covered peanuts, plus yogurt-covered peanuts, and plain raisins

Chocolate-covered peanuts, plus yogurt-covered peanuts, and yogurt-covered raisins

Chocolate-covered peanuts, yogurt-covered peanuts, chocolate-covered raisins, and yogurt-covered raisins

Chocolate, plus yogurt-covered peanuts, and yogurt-covered raisins

Chocolate and yogurt-covered peanuts, and plain raisins

Chocolate and yogurt-covered peanuts, and chocolate and yogurt-covered raisins

…and there are other potential interpretations as well.

Before I reveal what was actually in the package, I have a potential solution to this problem. As a software developer, I’ve had to learn to be absolutely clear about my intent when writing logic statements so the computer can follow my instructions explicitly. This is done by grouping related portions of an expression using parentheses. So, the above statement should be written:

(Chocolate or Yogurt) covered (Peanuts and Raisins)

This is much more clear, but even that doesn’t describe what was actually in the package. To be fully accurate in the description of the contents of the package, the statement would have to be:

(Plain or chocolate-covered or yogurt-covered) (peanuts and raisins).

This is a lot easier than:

Peanuts, raisins, chocolate-covered peanuts, chocolate-covered raisins,
yogurt-covered peanuts, and yogurt-covered raisins.

See how much easier it is when you include the parenthetical markings? Now we just need to figure out how to communicate this statement verbally.

Tech Tip: Extra Life From Your Old Computer

2011-05-07T23:03:00.001-06:00

One of the things I did this week was try to upgrade my netbook computer with an SSD (Solid State Disk) drive to make it faster and more bearable to use (more on what that is in a minute… bear with me). It’s always been kind of slow, and I figured if I could put $100 into it instead of buying a whole new one, that would be a good thing, right? Well, that didn’t work out so well… performance with the SSD was actually far worse than it was with the hard drive that was in it, and the “fix” to make it work right just ended up not being worth it… so I had an SSD without a home. After playing around with a couple other ideas, I decided to put it into an old Toshiba laptop I’ve had for a little over 3 years because it has always felt a little slow. And boy, what a difference it made.

An SSD is a storage device that acts like a hard disk drive, but uses memory chips instead of a spinning platter to store data. Since there are no moving parts, they are very fast. They’ve been prohibitively expensive until fairly recently (and it’s still expensive to get something with a lot of storage capacity) but they’re finally in the realm of being affordable for the masses as long as your storage needs aren’t extreme. The SSD I bought was an OCZ Vertex 2 60GB model which I picked up on sale for just over $100. Since I don’t store music or movies on that laptop, this was plenty large enough. Windows 7, Microsoft Office, and Photoshop take up around 20 GB total, which gives me plenty of room to spare for anything else I might need to put on it. The difference in performance was enormous!

If you can work a screwdriver you can install an SSD drive in your computer. The physical installation is very easy. The only part that might get a bit tricky is getting Windows installed onto it. If your computer came with a Restore DVD, or you have an original Windows installation DVD, setting it up is a piece of cake. If it didn’t, you may want to invest in a data transfer kit (this one is my favorite).

Prior to installing the SSD, my Toshiba laptop would take about 60-75 seconds to boot. With the SSD it takes about 13 seconds. That’s logo screen to usable desktop, folks. While it previously took about 5-10 seconds to load Microsoft Word on the hard drive, it now loads in less than 1 second on the SSD. Photoshop loads in 6 seconds instead of 40, and web browsers come up instantly. Launching most programs occurs almost instantaneously. As I was installing Windows updates (I started with a fresh copy of Windows), I was amazed to see the majority of them install about one per second instead of watching the minutes tick by. From start to finish (empty drive to installing Windows to installing all available updates) it only took about 30 minutes to do everything. And this computer is SO fast now… even though it’s over 3 years old and wasn’t that much to shout about when it was new.

Swapping out a hard drive for an SSD isn’t the only easy and relatively inexpensive thing you can do to speed up an aging computer. Upgrading the memory is also very easy and doesn’t cost that much (the Crucial web site has a scanner that can tell you what type of memory your computer needs). I upgraded my Toshiba laptop to 4GB of RAM for $35 a couple months ago, and recently upgraded a different laptop to 8GB of RAM for $85. The desktop computer I built last month got 8GB of RAM for about $80 as well. If you’re running a computer with just 1 or 2GB of RAM, it’s time to upgrade. The performance difference can be pretty dramatic. Not quite as drastic as replacing a hard drive with an SSD, but still quite noticeable.

So how do you know if your computer can be upgraded with an SSD? If it’s less than about 4 years old, the chances are very high. The computer requires an SATA interface for the hard disk drive, which most computers made in the last 4 years are likely to have. If you’re working with a desktop computer, you can probably buy a relatively small SSD for your operating system and programs, and use your existing hard drive as a secondary drive for storing your personal data. That’s the route I’ve gone with the last two computers I’ve built, and I’ve been thrilled with the results. As far as which model to get, the drives based on the SandForce controller chips currently yield the best performance (the OCZ Vertex 2 series give the best bang-for-the-buck and is available in 60GB, 120GB, and 240GB sizes. For better performance at a higher cost, step up to the OCZ Vertex 3 series.)

So, long story short, if you’ve got an old computer that is just slower than you’d like and you don’t want to shell out a pile of money to buy a newer model, chances are you can swap out your hard drive with an SSD, and upgrade the RAM, not have it cost you that much, and you’ll end up with a computer that feels better than it did when you first pulled it out of the box. It will actually feel much faster than a new computer unless the newer one happens to come with an SSD.

Installation of either the SSD or memory is pretty easy, but if you’ve got a hungry computer-savvy buddy, bake him or her a pie or plate of cookies to install yours for you. You’ll be SO glad you upgraded.

Tip: SSDs perform best under Windows 7 (or the most recent versions of Linux). Windows Vista, XP, and Mac OS X will run on SSDs, but they do not fully take advantage of the extra performance that SSDs offer. These operating systems also suffer from a problem which causes writes to the disk to become incredibly slow after a period of time because they do not support a feature called TRIM. This happens once the total amount of data written to the drive exceeds the total capacity of the drive. This doesn’t mean you’ll see performance decrease when the drive is full, but after that much data has been written to the drive in total, whether you’re overwriting or deleting files or not. Since the operating system itself writes to the disk a lot just as part of its normal operation (especially if you don’t have enough memory), you’ll probably hit this limitation a lot faster than you’d think you might. Windows 7 knows how to properly communicate with the drive to let it know what parts of the drive are no longer being used, so it does not suffer from this problem. If you’re running Vista or XP, you should also upgrade to Windows 7 if you’re going to run an SSD for the best results. Mac users, you’re kind of out of luck... you’ll see amazing performance on your SSD for a while, then it will slow down drastically. And there isn’t anything that can be done about it; it looks like not even the forthcoming OS X Lion upgrade is going to support TRIM unless you buy the computer with an SSD pre-installed by Apple.

Apple Location Issue: Somewhat Better, but Still Bad!!!

2011-05-05T12:05:00.001-06:00

Apple put out a press release last week, and issued a software update yesterday that addresses the location tracking issue that was made public two weeks ago. It’s a step in the right direction, but there are still unanswered questions and things to be concerned about.

The software update does a few things right. iOS version 4.3.3 makes some good changes…

Only 24 hours’ worth of data is stored on the phone.
The local cache of location data can be turned off entirely.
The data file is not backed up to your computer.

These are all great steps. Apple should be commended for making these changes. However, they haven’t really gone quite far enough. The data on the phone is still not encrypted (that change is coming sometime in the future), potentially making it available to apps and people if a phone has been jailbroken or a software exploit is discovered that allows access to such files. I’m not going to make too much more of a stink about that because on easy way to avoid that is to not jailbreak the device in the first place.

Their press release was still a little bit troubling, though. First, they engaged in a game of semantics. They claim that “Apple” does not track “your” location. Instead, the phone keeps a list of cell phone towers and WiFi access points near its location. Uhhh… how much different is the location of things near you from your current location? WiFi access points typically have a very short range (how far away from your house can you use your WiFi?) so the accuracy of WiFi location data is actually fairly good. Nice try, Apple, but your word game doesn’t work on me.

The more troubling thing about their release is something that I haven’t heard anybody bring up, anywhere. One of the things they stated was that the data on the phone isn’t really the phone’s location, but a local cache of list of cell towers and WiFi access points that have been near your phone, right? Well, that data is coming from an Apple database. And that database is huge. Certainly bigger than what can be stored on a phone. So Apple sends small subsets of that data to the phone, and this is stored locally (indefinitely for iOS <4.3.3, 24 hours for 4.3.3) to make calculating your location easier. Sounds okay conceptually, right? Well, there’s a big problem with that. In order to decide what data to send to you, Apple has to know what cell towers and WiFi access points are near your phone in the first place. They haven’t made any sort of statement about what they are doing with that data.

Imagine this scenario… you’re lost, and you need to know where you are. You might call a friend and tell them a little about what you see around you. You can describe buildings and other landmarks, hoping that based on that information your friend will be able to help you figure out where you are. But in the process, haven’t you revealed your position to your friend? It just isn’t possible to get your location using this method without letting someone know where you are. This is exactly what happens with cell phones (not just the iPhone) when they use this method to locate themselves.

Apple claims that it uses a unique ID number which isn’t tied to your account, and it changes (now) every 24 hours when making these requests. Microsoft has said it changes the ID number as well periodically, but not how often. Google never changes this ID number. So in theory, Apple can only track a phone for 24 hours, Microsoft for an indefinite amount of time, and Google can track it forever. They all claim they can’t tie this to an individual phone, but that just is not accurate. Here’s why…

Every data conversation that takes place on the internet does so using an IP address. It’s sort of like a phone number, and it is used to route data from point A to point B. It’s fundamental to the way that the Internet works. For two computers to have a two way conversation, both have to know the other’s IP address. So these conversations where phones download the list of nearby cell towers and WiFi access points have to include this IP address. It’s absolutely required.

If the cell tower and WiFi location data was hosted by a third party (as all three of these players once did), there might not be as much to worry about because the IP address couldn’t necessarily be tied to an individual phone. The trouble is that the companies providing the location data are the same ones that create the operating systems for the phones. And you have to sign into their services to use the devices. With the iPhone, you have to tie it to your Apple ID. With Google, it has to be tied to your Google Account. With Windows Phone, it has to be tied to your Windows Live account. And all devices call home to update various aspects of those services… such as checking for app updates or checking email, for example. Those conversations ALSO take place using an IP address, which happens to be the same for both these services as well as the location database download as well. Bingo… they have a link between you, your device, and your location.

All three companies have claimed that they do not upload YOUR location to their services tied to your account. The problem is that they DO have enough information in various places to be able to piece together your location. A request for a list of nearby cell towers and (Your login to a company’s services + IP Address) + (WiFi access points + IP Address) = You + Your Location.

I’m not saying that the companies are actually doing this, I’m just saying that the potential is there for these companies to tie a lot of information together than they’re admitting. In all cases, you, your location, your purchasing habits, the contents of your email, and more can all potentially be tied together. The possible implications can be scary.

The good news is that Apple now allows Location Services to be turned off entirely, so the phone won’t even ask for location information tied to nearby radio signals. The down side is that turning this off completely disables all GPS functions. It is technically possible to enable GPS functionality without the local cache functionality, but none of the phone manufacturers are allowing that. GPS devices do it all of the time, but for some reason cell phones aren’t allowed to.

Q&A On the iPhone Location Tracking Issue

2011-04-21T17:33:00.001-06:00

While it has been known for a while, news finally broke to the public yesterday that any model iPhone or iPad running iOS 4.0 or higher keeps a log file of its location, and that this file is copied to your computer every time you backup your device. The problem is actually deeper than that, though. This is a very serious privacy and security issue, IMHO. The articles on the Internet don’t really seem to be painting a great picture of what this means. So here’s my attempt… I hope it helps to clarify a few things!

Q: What’s going on?

A: All models of iPhone and iPad have been recording your location regularly into a file on the device. The news stories here specifically relate to iOS 4.x, but prior versions of iOS are doing the same thing, they’ve just been recording it into a different file. These files cannot be deleted, and this “feature” cannot be turned off. The information even persists from one device to another if you replace one phone or iPad with another and restore a backup.

The data being recorded includes at least the device’s location, the time of day, and a list of WiFi networks available at each of these locations. The file in and of itself does not contain your personal contact information, but it would be very easy to determine where you live or work.

Q: Does the phone send my location to Apple, or anyone else?

A: Not in and of itself. Apps on your phone can be given permission to access your location, and there is no way to stop them from uploading your location information, but this flaw in and of itself does not cause your location to be sent to anyone else; it is saved on your phone and computer, but not uploaded anywhere else, at least as a direct result of this issue. Jailbroken devices do not require that apps be granted permission to access location data; they can get to it anytime they want.

Q: Doesn’t that mean I’m safe?

A: Not necessarily. There are several ways that anyone who wants to can get to this data if they are persistent enough.

Q: What does that mean?

A: If you have jailbroken your phone, any app on the phone can gain access to the location data without your permission. In addition, a jailbroken phone that has not had its root password changed from the default is remotely accessible to anyone who wants to log in, and it is EXTREMELY easy to get to. This includes access to the location log file.

Apple has also had a poor track record of security on iOS devices. Hackers have been able to gain entry quite regularly ever since the device was first released (this is how some jailbreaks work, just as one example). If someone were to want to target you, it’s entirely possible that someone with moderate hacking skills could obtain this file, whether it be through your phone (because it is always on the Internet) or computer (through software installed there). Even if you haven’t been specifically targeted, once an exploit to a phone (or computer) is known, it is a consistent and regular practice of hackers to scan for vulnerable devices. Computers are a little safer if they are behind a router, but phones are connected directly to the Internet without a hardware firewall to isolate them from attack.

Q: What if I’m not running iOS 4.x on my phone or iPad?

A: While it hasn’t been widely mentioned in the news, iOS versions prior to 4.0 also log location data. The data is just stored in a different file in a different format. But it’s there.

Q: Doesn’t someone have to have physical access to my phone or computer?

For most people, this is the case. But not for everyone. If your device is jailbroken and you haven’t changed the root password, remote access to your phone (and this file) is available for anyone who wants to get in. It’s very simple to get to it.

As far as access to the data on the computer, ideally nobody else has access to your files remotely. But that requires that you keep your computer fully up-to-date and make sure you’re running current and high quality antivirus and antispyware software, even on Macs. Viruses and spyware could very easily gain access to this data, and make it available to third parties.

Q: How would I know if someone had gotten access to my data?

A: You probably wouldn’t have any way of knowing.

Q: What would happen if I lost my phone?

A: The chance isn’t high, but if someone with even moderate technical skills were to have access to your phone they could download the location data file and see everywhere you’ve taken your iOS devices since you got them. Even if the phone is locked with a password, there are very easy ways around this. Once your phone is in someone else’s hands, there isn’t really any guaranteed way of preventing them from getting access to your location data. If you have signed up for the Find my iPhone program or connect to an Exchange server, you could remotely wipe the phone and hope that nobody had downloaded the data before you sent the wipe command.

Q: Some people seem to say this isn’t worth worrying about. Is that true?

That depends. The chance that someone wants to get your location information specifically isn’t very high. My take on this is that you’re better safe than sorry. If you don’t care if anyone knows where you’ve been, you may not need to worry about this much. The chance that advertisers or hackers want location information in general is very high.

Q: What can I do to prevent my location from being recorded?

A: As of right now, the only thing you can do is turn off the phone completely (not just put it in standby) or put it in Airplane mode. But this obviously prevents you from using the phone. As long as the device is turned on and the cellular feature is turned on, it’s recording your location.

What makes this worse is that there is NO WAY to delete this file or turn the logging feature off. It’s built into the phone at a very low level and it can’t be controlled by any setting on the phone. iPhones have been recording this data for a very long time now, long before iOS 4 came out. Forensic scientists have known about this for a while, but it is only now being made public.

Apple has not yet released a fix for this issue, and they haven’t even stated yet if they intend to do so. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Q: I don’t believe it. Can you prove it?

A: Right now the only way to see for yourself is if you are synchronizing your phone with a Mac. In which case, you can download a piece of software and see the tracking data yourself. It probably won’t be long before someone writes a similar utility for Windows, and if I see any news on that front I’ll update this blog post. I’ve considered writing such a utility myself, but I have too many other things going on at the moment to bother.

Q: Does this affect other phones too?

A: This flaw does not affect other non-Apple devices. The same researchers that found the flaw in the iPhone have also investigated other popular phones and haven’t found any evidence that any other phones exhibit the same behavior.

Q: If I wipe everything on my phone, does that mean the data is gone?

A: Your prior location information will be deleted from your phone, but it will be restored if you restore a backup from your computer. In either case, the phone/iPad will start recording location data again, even after being wiped.

Q: Why should I care?

A: I can’t speak for you, but I’d rather my devices not record information about where I live, work, shop, and socialize. It’s bad enough that cell phone carriers record phone location continually; I’d rather that the location of my home not be recorded inside of a device that could be lost or stolen. Not that I have anything to hide, but I personally just don’t want that information out there available to anyone, especially companies that might be trying to sell me something.

Q: Can any steps be taken to protect myself?

A: Turn on the encryption feature for device backups in iTunes. That will at least prevent access to this data from your computer. There isn’t much that you can do to prevent access to the data on the phone other than stop using it. If you’ve jailbroken your device, at a very minimum change the root password, but I’d recommend removing the jailbreak entirely.

Q: Are you doing anything differently?

A: I don’t have an iPhone, but I am definitely going to be more selective about where I take my iPad. I protect myself very well against attacks against my computer, so I’m not too concerned about that. If I had jailbroken my iPad I would be taking that off right now.

Photography Class Moved

2011-04-18T23:57:00.001-06:00

Up until now, I’ve been hosting my Introduction to Photography classes on Google Video (YouTube doesn’t allow videos over 15 minutes). Google is shutting the service down, so I have decided to upload the classes to Vimeo instead. Each class is between 40 and 80 minutes.

Class 1: Introduction / Exposure
Class 2: Photo Composition
Class 3: Your Point & Shoot Camera
Class 4: Color and Lighting
Class 5: Photo Touchup (Photoshop)

The big upside to the move is that the quality of the video is much higher now. The down side is that I have to pay to host the videos now. Since I can’t advertise in the videos or on their site, I’d appreciate you clicking the Amazon links here on this blog when making purchases, especially electronics, to help offset some of that cost. There’s now way Amazon referrals will cover the hosting entirely, but it will certainly help.

This class is freely available to all. I’m on a mission to save the world from bad information. With the videos hosted on Google, 30,000 people were helped in their photography education. Hopefully we’ll see the same with Vimeo. :)

Why I Don’t Like Apple

2011-03-06T22:17:00.006-07:00

I get accused of hating Apple quite often because I tend to be critical of their actions and their products. That probably oversimplifies things a bit. I don’t necessarily dislike everything they do, but there is a lot that they do that I don’t care for. I know that there are some people that aren’t going to like this post, but opinions aside, all of the facts I will present are well researched over a long period of time. I won’t cite references, because it isn’t hard for someone to do their own searches and I don’t want to spend days creating this post.

Generally speaking I do like the hardware that Apple creates. Their engineers are quite talented. They manage to stuff a lot of functionality into some pretty small packages. If the price on the MacBook Air was to come down a few hundred bucks I’d buy one, throw Windows 7 on it, and be mostly happy (I still hate Apple keyboards). It would also be hard to criticize their industrial design. The two biggest complaints I have with Apple hardware are (1) the price – their markup is about three times that of just about every other electronics manufacturer, and (2) their propensity to sacrifice functionality in the name of product design. I’m not a big fan of form over function. Having to navigate through menus to get to something that ought to be a hardware button is something that continually frustrates me. Less really is less sometimes, not more.

My respect for Apple stops about there, though. For the most part I don’t like their operating systems, especially from the point of view of a programmer, at all. Their software development tools are positively primitive – missing many capabilities and functions that have been available for twenty years or more on Windows. Since I have been programming for more than 30 years, I remember when development tools were this bad on the PC side and I’d hate to go back in time.

I bought a Mac a few years ago with the hope that I’d begin to be able to write some software for the up-and-coming market, but after spending a few days with Apple’s Xcode development tool I rather would have slit my wrist and done pushups in saltwater than done any serious development on the Mac platform. To someone who has a background in web development (which is even more primitive) or no programming background at all, Xcode might seem okay, but to someone who has spent any time in a “real” development environment like Visual Studio or Embarcadero’s RAD Studio, Xcode is extremely frustrating and slow to use. Things we take for granted, and have for many years, in our world just don’t even exist at all in that world. And at the rate that Apple is developing Xcode, they’re actually getting farther behind rather than catching up. It’s almost amusing to hear Steve Jobs and other Apple employees brag about things they’re adding to their development tools because almost without exception they’re things we’ve not only had for many, many years on other platforms, but have been through continual improvements in that time.

Since the Mac is a hybrid of BSD (based on Unix, going back to the 1970s) and NeXT (going back to the late 1980s), the overall programming API is a little bit of a mess because it has been rigged to do things it was never meant to do. Not that Windows is perfect, because it certainly is not, but it has considerably more modern tools, especially if something like .NET is taken into account. Bottom line is, on a scale of 1 to 10, in terms of how fast and easy it is to develop software, Windows would probably be an 8, the Mac would be a 4 (while web development would be a 3). I just can’t bring myself to do it. Once you’ve worked with a professional development environment, it’s very frustrating to try to use anything else, Macs included. I gave up my attempt to create Mac software pretty quickly.

The other big criticism I have with Apple’s software is that it just isn’t designed for “power users” like me. They create user interfaces that might work well for large consumer groups whose technical needs aren’t that significant. For example, as a power user, I love to be able to navigate around using the keyboard instead of the mouse. It is SO much faster pressing a couple keys than removing my hand from the keyboard, picking up the mouse, moving it to click on something, and then probably moving it back to where it was before moving my hand back to the keyboard. I use keyboard shortcuts constantly, and the Mac just isn’t keyboard friendly. It is true that many commands do have keyboard shortcuts, but they’re often three and four combinations that are difficult to remember, don’t make sense, and are inconsistent across different programs. Not only that, but the menu bar is separate from the application window you’re working in, so using the mouse to select commands often means a lot of unnecessary movement. The situation is much, much worse when running multiple monitors like I do, because no matter what monitor an application is using, the menu bar always stays on the primary monitor. So in my case (with 6 monitors) I might have to move the mouse across three or 4 monitors to move between an application's window and its menu, and vice versa. It’s very, very frustrating, and it slows me down in a huge way.

That brings me back to the pricing aspect. The computer I’m running cost about $1700 to build (monitors excluded). It is very fast. While there isn’t a way to configure a Mac exactly the same, the closest I could get was to start with the base Mac Pro at $2499, and after adding an SSD, the memory, extra hard drives, and as many video cards as I could it pushed the price well over $5000. And that’s for a slower machine. To get closer to the performance of my PC, the Mac price is closer to $7000. The difference between $1700 and $5000 is hard enough to swallow… jumping to $7000 is even harder. Apple just doesn’t build hardware for power users like me if we don’t have a virtually unlimited budget.

The situation doesn’t change much with laptops, either. The Dell laptop I bought about a year ago for $1400 just barely got an Apple equivalent with the introduction of the new MacBook Pro last week. But it’s $2400, has half of the memory, and doesn’t play Blu-ray movies (and its warranty is much, much shorter). And it wasn’t available a year ago. Again, no affordable hardware for power users like me. At the time I bought my Dell it was literally twice as fast as the fastest MacBook Pro, and it was a little over half the price. The price/performance ratio just isn’t good on Apple hardware.

But I’m spending too much time on their products… many of the reasons I don’t like Apple have to do with the company and their behavior. In the interest of brevity, I’ll make these in the form of a list.

Steve Jobs. I don’t like Steve Jobs. He might be a good salesman, but he is not a good person. He is mean, vindictive, spiteful, extremely egotistical, and I could probably justify saying he’s greedy too. He has been known to be verbally abusive to his employees. He was kicked out of Apple in the 1980s for these very reasons, among others. He’s just not a good person. And on those occasions I buy Apple products I feel a little guilty putting any more money into his pocket, and rewarding him for his behaviors.

Steve Jobs is just a salesman. He will tell you anything he has to to sell products, even if it is an outright lie. He isn’t on a mission to bring good products just for the sake of making good technology available. He’s trying to make money, just like every other salesman. He isn’t magical.
He truly believes he is special and not subject to following the rules. For example, he routinely drives his Mercedes without license plates, and very often parks in handicap spaces.

Apple is too litigious. It’s less commonly known now than it was years ago, but Apple singlehandedly virtually halted the development of the graphical user interface years ago because they went around suing every company that was producing a graphical user interface out of existence, at least until someone able to defend itself like Microsoft came along. There were plenty of companies that were doing very useful and interesting things to move the GUI forward, but as soon as they started to get any traction Apple sued them until they had to completely neuter their products, or they fell apart financially trying to defend themselves. The saddest part of it all was that Apple hadn’t even been the company to create the Graphical User Interface… Steve Jobs had been invited to a demonstration at Xerox PARC and seen it in action there then copied the idea on the Mac (and was devious enough to patent parts of it, unlike Xerox).

We’re seeing some of those same types of behavior from Apple with their lawsuit against HTC, for example, over iPhone patents. Apple has been able to secure patents for things that are both obvious and have been demonstrated previously by others, and is now attempting to sue others for using similar ideas. It’s a dirty business practice that I find appalling. And you can bet that any portion of the suit that Apple wins, they’re going to go after every other phone manufacturer.

Generally speaking, a company that likes to sue is a company that can’t compete technologically. There are exceptions, but in Apple’s case, they certainly aren’t suing because they’ve had a lack of exposure to the public.
Apple is also very uncooperative with other tech companies. They’ve said (and proved) time and time again that they are unwilling to license their patents to others. Every company comes up with cool ideas, the difference is that Apple won’t share. Virtually every other tech company out there cross licenses their patents with others. It’s very much a “I’ll take my ball and go home” sort of mentality, and it creates a lot of resentment.

A few other examples of this:

Apple doesn’t (and probably never will) support Blu-ray.
Apple doesn’t support USB 3.0.
Apple was very late to the game to support Express Card and SD cards.
They don’t allow anybody to produce products that use Apple designed connectors, like MagSafe. They’ll sue you if you try, even if your product doesn’t compete against one of theirs.
They intentionally break devices that aren’t officially approved for use with Apple products, like the dock connector, even if they are fully otherwise compatible. (Again, demonstrating spite.)

Continually making fun of other companies. Listen to any keynote from Steve Jobs and you’ll hear jabs at others. It really seems like they’d rather make enemies than friends. And it’s the sort of behavior you’d expect from bullies, or the insecure cool kids at school, making fun of others to make themselves look better, rather than just showing their good qualities and allowing others to like them based on those. Quite a few of those jabs aren’t even based in reality, but rather a perceived reality that Apple themselves have created. The “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ad campaign is a classic example of that.
Outright lies to make sales. Apple is all about telling you things that just aren’t true in order to sell their products. For example, when the iPhone was released, Steve Jobs told everyone that nobody would need to create Apps because you could do anything that you might want to do on the phone in the browser. And then when they announced apps a year later, they told everyone that it didn’t multitask because it would kill the battery too fast (despite the fact that virtually every other smartphone platform at the time had real multitasking and better battery life). Two years later they announced that they were adding “multitasking.” Or that the original iPhone didn’t have 3G because EDGE was “fast enough,” and 3G would drain the battery too much, then a year later they introduced the iPhone 3G and talked about how fast it is and its incredible battery life. All of these things were completely untrue (their competitors were offering all of these things at the time), but for some reason they keep telling us things and many, many people believe them. Then with the problems with the iPhone 4 antenna, as soon as Steve Jobs came out and said that there wasn’t really a problem everybody (except Consumer Reports) stopped criticizing them even though the problem is real and still hasn’t gone away (and even exists in the Verizon version). Or, going back a few years when Apple still used the PowerPC chips in the Mac... they swore up and down they were faster than the Intel processors in Windows PCs, then when they finally made the switch they bragged about how going to Intel made the machines 2-3 times faster. We’re really just being given Apple’s excuses for not producing products with competitive features. And I’m not sure why anyone believes them, but they do. Chances are, when Apple makes an excuse for why it doesn’t have a feature, it’s just that, an excuse, and any justification they give just shouldn’t be believed because it’s just hogwash.

Another recent example: in the iPad 2 announcement, Jobs badly misquoted a Samsung executive to make it seem like the Galaxy Tab was selling more slowly than it really is, but few called him out on it. He changed the single most important word in the sentence, which altered the entire meaning of the statement. Again, a lie to make someone else look bad.
Apple doesn't pay their shareholders dividends at all, ever. They've got over $50 billion in the bank, and they won't share any of it with the people that actually own the company.
General behavior of trying to do everything consumer and developer unfriendly they can get away with. Trying to shut other companies out of creating development tools for the iPhone, or now charging 30% for in-app subscriptions, for example. They keep pushing things well beyond where they ought to until legal action is threatened against them. Sometimes you should do things just because they’re the right thing to do, not under thread of punishment. It’s better in the long term for everyone.
Apple is generally anti-competitive. If they offer a solution to a problem, they seem to go out of their way to make things difficult for their competitors.

Nobody can write programs which directly compete against the software included with the iPhone. No phone apps, no browsers, nothing that can run any code. They do this in the name of preventing consumer confusion, or security, but it’s really just a ruse to prevent their competition from getting a leg up on them.

Too much control over the way their products are used.

You can’t develop applications for the iPhone unless you pay $99 per year to do so (this is the only platform where you have to pay to play… everything else out there has free [and generally halfway decent] tools available). And only apps they’ve approved area allowed to run on the iPhone. So someone like me can’t develop a cool program that I share with my friends without giving Apple money, going through the approval process, and putting it out there for everyone in the world to get to.

Apple contributes financially to political causes I don’t agree with. I believe that companies ought to remain politically neutral.
Again, greed. Apple charges too much for their products, just because they can get away with it.

They get about $600-700 for every iPhone they sell, when there is only about $200 in parts inside. Companies ought to have the opportunity to make a profit, but that kind of markup is ripping off their customers (even if it is indirectly through the carrier).
Thirty percent of every sale in the App Store is way too high too. Just for running apps through a quick one-time approval process and add an entry into a database. Insanity. They claim they just break even on App sales, but there is no way this is the case. If they’ve paid out $2 billion to developers, that would mean they’ve collected $857 million for themselves. Either they’re paying the employees that approve apps tens of millions of dollars per year or they’re lying to us. Their costs to host the downloads isn’t anywhere near that high. Tens of millions, maybe. Hundreds, not a chance.

Apple can’t write decent software for Windows. I do appreciate that they try to make things like iTunes, QuickTime, and Safari available on Windows, but their attempts seem to be half hearted. All of their Windows products are memory hogs, slow, and buggy. (Conspiracy theory: do they write bad Windows code intentionally to try to get people to switch to a Mac? Not necessarily suggesting it… just thinking out loud.)
Vindictive. Their public railing against Adobe is just one example. Apple has had it in for Adobe ever since Photoshop was released in a 64-bit version for Windows without an equivalent Mac version a few years ago. Apple uses way too many opportunities to publicly condemn Adobe. Some of that criticism could possibly be warranted, but this multi-year tirade has just gone way beyond reasonable. (Adobe produces many products which complete against Apple’s, incidentally.) It’s almost ironic considering that without Photoshop, the Mac probably never would have gained any traction.
Unfair media coverage. We’ve historically liked to think that our media remains unbiased, but in the case of Apple all objectivity has gone out the window.

Apple manipulates the media to their liking. If media organizations are overly negative or critical of Apple products or the company itself, it will quickly find itself excluded from companies invited to Apple events. Big tech names like TWiT, CNET and Gizmodo have found themselves permanently uninvited to Apple events, and being given early access to Apple products because their review for some Apple product hasn’t been as favorable as Apple would have liked. Since Apple news is big news and generates a lot of money for the media (through web page views and other exposure), they’re under pressure to be favorable in their “critiques” or they’ll find themselves on the blacklist. This gives Apple an unfair advantage. (Tip: if a company is granted early access to Apple products, you can be pretty sure it’s going to be biased, or it wouldn’t be given that product in the first place.)
Everything associated with an Apple product gets coverage from the media, no matter how big or small it is. How crazy is it that we see entire articles on tech blog sites about the screws that are used in the iPhone? A company as huge as Intel, Microsoft, HP, or Dell can release a huge new amazing product and not get even a fraction of the coverage as a case for an unreleased iPad. Pure insanity.
The media in general doesn’t even pretend to be unbiased in their coverage of Apple any longer. At Apple keynotes, for example, you’ll see members of the media applauding along with the Apple employees at the event at every “exciting” new feature. Shouldn’t the media be there to report, not support?

Security. Apple likes to claim that the Mac is the most secure operating system out there, but it, in fact, is the worst of the big 3.

Apple products have been the first to be hacked for the last 4 years running at the Pwn2Own and other security conferences. Windows may be the most targeted, but if I was asked to hack into someone else’s computer, I would hope they’re running something made by Apple, because they are far easier to get into than both Windows and Linux. Macs and iPhones might not be the target of malware software authors, but in a targeted attack they’re consistently the first to fail. Given the opportunity, I would certainly ban Macs and iPhones from a corporate environment if any confidential information is being accessed.
Apple is terrible about patching known security holes. Both the Mac and the iPhone are based on BSD, which is usually patched pretty quickly when security issues are discovered. Apple tends to wait months, if not years, to include these patches in their products.

Despite claiming to, they don’t really support “open” standards. Two examples:

They publicly claim support for HTML 5 but Safari actually has the worst HTML 5 implementation of any modern browser. They’re being very selective about which parts of HTML 5 they actually support. Every other browser, even Internet Explorer 9, does a considerably better and complete job.
When they announced FaceTime last summer, they said they were making it an open standard. But they haven’t made it available to anyone, even 8 months later.

Lastly, Apple users. Of course I’m not saying all Apple users are this way, but we very often see the following behaviors.

Immediate belief of anything Steve Jobs says without looking at it objectively. (Steve Jobs is a salesman, not an unbiased tech expert. His comments should be taken with a huge grain of salt.)
Quoting Steve Jobs, even when he is wrong.
Automatically assuming that just because Apple produces something that it is the best out there, without doing any research to find out for themselves.
Many, many Apple users are very smug about their purchases. We’d rather not hear from your superiority complex. Nobody else brags about their electronic tools (they are just tools after all), why must Apple owners?

So to summarize… generally nice hardware, but frustrating operating systems, very dated development tools, mean-spirited and deceitful CEO, greedy practices, too controlling, two faced public statements, smug attitude, and uneducated but boastful customers. There you go.

2010

2010-12-19T22:45:00.001-07:00

Since I’m really bad about getting Christmas cards and letters out (it has been many, many years), I thought I’d use my blog to publish what would have been my Christmas letter. I can reach more people this way, anyway.

In many ways 2010 was much the same as the past several years, consumed mostly with my work responsibilities. As many, but not all, of you may know, in late 2007 I got involved with a new business venture. A friend of mine, Jared, contacted me to ask if I would be willing to create the cash register component of a Point-of-Sale system for a quick-service pizza restaurant being opened by a friend of his. Despite my hesitation to get involved in such projects in the past, I decided to undertake the challenge. Soon we began to attract the attention of other franchisees in the chain, and before we knew it we were selling our product to others. Since that time we officially organized Custom Register Solutions, of which I am part owner. In 2010 we increased our size from 3 employees to a company with 15 people. It has been quite a ride. My brother Brent joined the company in June this year, helping to create the web site portion of our software.

In 2009 we were approached by some executives from the parent company of the same international pizza chain to see if our product could be adopted to some new and very specific needs. It was pretty evident that we could, so since that time we’ve been working intimately with them. We’re confident that we will be announced as their preferred POS vendor very soon (the only “iffy” part is when, not if). Between the preparation for that upcoming announcement, the demand it will place on us when that happens, and our fast-paced development schedule in the company I have been working very long weeks for a little over 3 years now. It is nice to be getting close to the realization of what was, at the time we started the project, an impossible dream. We’re doing some very cool and innovative stuff, but I can’t talk about that just yet.

In spite of the many hours I spend working, I have still gotten involved in several other outside projects. Everyone who knows me is well aware of my interest in audio, video, and photography, and I have always enjoyed working on any project that involved any or all of those three. This year was no exception. Early in the year I proposed the idea of a live Internet-streamed concert to an up-and-coming California-based artist named Sonnet who had become known in Utah for the soundtrack she provided for a popular television commercial, and she was gracious enough to accept. Soon the project blossomed into an honest-to-goodness real music video as well, which my friend Dave would direct, and another friend Paul would shoot. February through May included a lot of planning for those events, which took place the first through second weeks of June. It was a very busy schedule, but it was also a lot of fun spending time with old and new friends as part of the crew. Few of the final results have been posted on the Internet at this point , but I will be sure to let everyone know when they are.

I had the privilege of spending more time with family this year than most. My youngest sister Christine graduated from BYU in Psychology in April, and my parents and sister Suzanne all flew to Provo to be there for that. Christine was seriously dating her then-boyfriend Brennen at the time, and a week later they announced their engagement to be married in August. Through the planning stages my mom came back to Provo to help Christine out for a few days. The entire family came out for the wedding in August. It was the first time that all of us had not just been together, but had the opportunity to go to the temple as a family as well. It was definitely a memorable occasion which we are all grateful for.

After the craziness of the wedding wound down, it was back to work as usual for a couple weeks before I headed to Tucson for two weeks to help with the installation of our software in 13 store locations there. It was hot and stormy the first week, and the second week it was hot and dry, but the condo we rented had no working air conditioning. I spent many nights on the couch just trying to get comfortable enough to sleep, while working in the heat during the day. I was glad to come home.

This year I also got to see one of my favorite musical acts, Celtic Woman, perform not once but twice. They came to Salt Lake in May, and I took my friend Sarah as my date, and Dave and Paul tagged along as well. Sarah spent several years in Ireland and enjoys Celtic music, so it was a treat for her to be able to go. The girls in the group are pretty amazing. I really enjoyed the concert, so when they went to Los Angeles at the end of August I decided to see them again. This time I took Sonnet with me, who despite being ill that day had a good time. It was also nice to see my new friend again and spend a couple days with her in her hometown. We planned to work together to record a short Christmas album, but due to both of us having busy schedules that didn’t happen this year. Maybe next year?

Other projects this year included shooting video for a handful of weddings, doing audio for an international dance/music festival in Sandy, UT, my annual trip taking pictures of fall leaves with my friend Dave, recording the commentary for a feature film, and being the regular sound guy for the Mountain Blue southern bluegrass A Cappella gospel group. Mountain Blue kept me really busy in early December, with quite a number of performances in the first half of the month. But I love anything involving audio, video, or photography, so any opportunity that comes is more than welcome.

I am spending my Christmas vacation at my parents’ home (as I always do) in Tulsa, OK this year, with nearly all of the rest of my family. Only my sister Cheryl and her husband Blake and their kids won’t be there. Their family is getting big and it is becoming more difficult for them to all travel. It’s sad that they won’t be there with the rest of us, but we understand why they can’t and they’ll be with us in spirit. This year Christine will be bringing her new husband with her, so we’re excited to include a new family member in our festivities. We’re very lucky that we have been able to have so much of our family together for Christmas for so many years.

Christmas is my favorite time of year, not just because I get to see my family, but also because it is the time of year when many people put their own desires aside and think of others, and because it is the time of year we dedicate to thinking about our Savior, Jesus Christ. The spirit of the season is unique, and something I look forward to throughout the year. It never lasts long enough.

The 39 Days of Christmas

2010-12-13T02:46:00.001-07:00

In case you missed it, here are the gifts for the 39 days of Christmas…

39 Fops a-fopping
38 Fishwives hawking
37 Coopers cooping
36 Bootblacks buffing
35 Buskers busking
34 Something something
33 Alchemists transmuting
32 Dutchmen plotting
31 Doctors leeching
30 Year average life span
29 Smiths a-forging
28 Coopers cooping
27 Eelers eeling
26 Anarchists bombing
25 Swamis foreseeing
24 Sideburns curling
23 Monks a-changing
22 Rats a-plaguing
21 Coxswains calling
20 Flautists fluting
19 Footmen bowing
18 Gungas dinning
17 Seventy six
16 Midwives birthing
15 Aliens alienating
14 Jacks a-ripping
13 Scriveners scrivening
And so on…

The Web, HTML5… It’s a Mess!!!

2010-11-15T10:50:00.001-07:00

I sometimes get hassled for preferring to develop software to run on the computer desktop instead of as web sites. Truth is, I don’t care if I get hassled about it. I know how to develop for the web… part of my job involves creating web sites in PHP, and I think I do fairly well at it, but it doesn’t mean I like it. And honestly I ought to be criticizing more people for putting so much emphasis on the web… not because it isn’t going to be the future, but mostly because they aren’t being more critical of the way things work on the Internet.

If you take a step back and think about the way that the web works, it’s really pretty silly. We download a page with information. We type information into a form on that page, then click a button to allow a computer somewhere else to process that information, and wait for an entirely new web page to be sent back to us. It’s slow. It requires that the same information be sent over and over again (everything on a page that hasn’t changed or doesn’t change). It makes true interactivity slow and frustrating. It’s silly. We have these high powered devices we’re using to display static pages that have been created somewhere else.

Imagine having a web page to do a simple addition operation: you enter 2+2. You enter the data, click the calculate button, your browser sends that data off to some computer somewhere in a remote data center, it performs the calculation, and sends you an entirely new web page giving you not just the answer, but your original data, and every piece of the entire web page… You’ve just transferred a ton of data, wasted a ton of computing power, just to figure out the answer to a very simple problem. Total silliness. But it’s what we deal with every day, because that is the way that the web works.

Add to that the difficulty that web developers go through to make sure their web sites work on different browsers. We create a page and it works perfectly in our browser of choice, then we try it in another browser only to find it doesn’t look (or work) right at all. It’s very frustrating. Again, it’s silly. And it’s a very slow process.

Compare this with developing programs that run on the desktop (not in a browser). They can be developed very quickly. They run very quickly. The development tools are mature and work very well. They’re guaranteed to work the same on every computer they run on. It’s SO much easier to make something work on the desktop than it is on the web. We have access to advanced technologies that don’t work on the web. Interactivity is amazing, performance is amazing, with things responding immediately when clicked.

I know this makes me sound like a stick-in-the-mud to people who think that the web is the future of apps. I’m not going to argue that things are moving in that direction, and that there are a lot of advantages to it. My argument is that the way we’re doing things now is just… dumb, and that we’re making very little progress at fixing the problems.

HTML and the web in general were not designed to do the things that we’re doing with them. HTML was written with the idea of serving informational pages… You view a page, you see a link to another page with more information on a particular topic, click it, and view the new page. It was never designed with any kind of interactivity beyond that, and every attempt to make it work that way has been a hack. Even things like logging into web sites and shopping carts are a total hack. And despite the fact that we’re nearly two decades into using HTML, things haven’t really gotten that much better. We’re still primarily serving new pages every time we change any data on a page instead of changing just the parts of the display that are affected by our data changes, waiting on a remote computer to do things that our own computers are perfectly capable of doing themselves.

Not only that, but there just aren’t any great ways to define the structure of data entry, or how it interacts with the page or the web server that is saving and formatting it for us. It has taken until HTML5, which still isn’t really implemented (and even then very poorly on virtually every browser) and it still isn’t done well. Even if web developers choose to use HTML5 for their web sites, even the newest browsers still aren’t implementing most of it. It’s ridiculous! But more about that in a minute.

The development tools for creating web sites are still really bad too. I have tried the “best of the best” of them and have given up on every one. I have resorted to creating web sites in Notepad, because the supposedly “advanced” editors just get in the way more than they help. I don’t understand why we keep putting up with this and aren’t pushing for something better. A lot of it has to do with HTML not being designed for the way we use it, but even more-so is the fact that HTML has been very slow to evolve, and browser makers have done very poorly at implementing the changes that actually have been made.

Some web sites do make an attempt to improve the interactivity by only updating only small portions of a page when something changes through a technology known as AJAX. You’ve seen it before on sites like facebook and Amazon.com where you click something and just one part of a page will change, but honestly few sites take this step because it’s difficult to implement properly. And unless your browser settings are just right, it doesn’t work at all.

There are other problems too… like security. You may have recently heard about Firesheep, a program that captures authentication information from other computers on a network and allows a hacker to visit popular web sites using your account without having your login information. And most web developers don’t understand how to properly secure their sites to prevent outside access to their data. Because it’s difficult. These technologies are being asked to do things that they were never meant to do, and very few software developers understand the right way to do things, or even the importance of doing so. Or they don’t care.

Most of these problems go away when you start developing software that runs directly on the desktop. Most of the security issues go away. The slow interactivity goes away. The difficulty of updating the screen when data is entered goes away.

Yes, I know that developing applications that run on the desktop does have its own set of drawbacks. You have to write versions for each type of computer that might use the software. The software has to be installed. You have to install updates. But in my mind the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks for many, many applications that are currently being developed for the web. And these problems are being addressed anyway.

Eventually many the advantages of running software on the desktop will probably go away. But we aren’t moving in that direction fast enough. Developing for the web isn’t really any easier than it was 10 years ago. Development tools have improved, but not much. The technologies that power the web have gotten better, but not much. And yet we as web developers continue to accept it, and some even criticize those that don’t condescend to using these bad technologies.

HTML5

Last week I finally sat down to see what’s so great about this new HTML5 thing that’s getting a lot of press. Frankly, I was sorely disappointed.

HTML5 doesn’t really add a lot of new capabilities to web sites. It does add a few, some are kind of cool… graphics rendering and interactivity is one area where things are supposed to get a lot better. There is the promise of a standard way to display video and audio (finally!!!! it has only taken nearly 20 years). There are new ways to handle and validate data in forms. But the changes basically stop there. And honestly, most of these things aren’t even usable.

Each of the new features is either not implemented in a major browser, or isn’t implemented properly. A few examples…

The new graphics features are only supported by IE9, Firefox 4, and Chrome. Safari (which is what the iPhone, iPad, and Macs use) doesn’t. And Chrome is the only one with a “current” version that even attempts it.
The new methods for displaying video are a mess. Apple and Microsoft have elected to use one format for video, while Mozilla (FireFox) and Opera have elected to use something else entirely incompatible. Google is taking a more neutral position with Chrome, supporting both. But there isn’t a single video format supported by all of the browsers. So you have to create two versions of every video, and provide two versions of every page that contains video to allow users to view it.
Audio is the same way. The different browsers support different types of audio files. No one format is supported by all browsers.
There is still no way to watch live video. Only pre-recorded video and audio sources are supported.
The new features to format and validate form data are only supported by Opera and Chrome. And Chrome’s implementation is horrible. The other browsers don’t even try, even in their unreleased beta versions. These features, which would be very useful and make web programming easier, are completely unusable to the 99+% of people not running Opera as their browser, and therefore are useless to developers.

You may have heard a lot of hype around HTML5 being a cure-all for some of the problems we deal with on the Internet (like Adobe Flash). But based on what I have seen, it isn’t going to help anything because those creating browsers aren’t doing their job in implementing HTML5 properly. It’s also very ironic that the most vocal of all of the HTML5 supporters, Steve Jobs, also has by far the worst HTML5 implementation of anyone. Apple’s Safari browser is, without question, the least HTML5-compliant browser in use today. It doesn’t even attempt to support the vast majority of the new features being added to HTML5, even in its latest version. Not that the other browser creators are doing much better.

Ideally…

Ideally someday we’ll have a sort of hybrid of the two ways things are done now. Store the software and data on remote computers, but download the necessary pieces to our local computer on demand, where things like interactivity and calculations can be handled locally. If designed properly, most of the things we do now that require entirely new web pages be downloaded would be done entirely locally on our own computers, with only data changes being sent out remotely. (Some might say this sounds like Java… but… ick, no. What a terrible language.) We would standardize on the tools for creating application user interfaces, and the way that the applications respond to user interaction. We have sort of started on that path with technologies like DOM and AJAX, but they are too limited, too difficult to use, too inconsistent, and too slow to be able to develop meaningful applications that run primarily locally. We’re still far too reliant on remote computers to do extremely basic tasks that have no place being run remotely. I believe someday we’ll get there, but at the pace we’re moving now I’m not holding my breath… we’ll be lucky to see anything like that before 2020.

The Truth

The truth of it all is that even though I get criticized for preferring to develop desktop software most web developers deep down know that they’re using inferior technologies. They know the pain of making stuff work across multiple browsers. They know the pain of hand coding HTML and CSS to make sites look and work the way they should. They also know that native applications work better than web sites too. All one has to do is cite the iPhone as an example. The first version of the iPhone couldn’t run native apps, and had to rely on the web to do anything other than what the included software could do. Almost nobody took the time to create sites to run on the iPhone. It wasn’t until the second version of the iPhone, with the ability to run Apps, came out that it started to really take off. And everyone with an iPhone knows that running an App instead of going to a web site in Safari is a much better way to do things. It’s much faster, cleaner, and easier.

It’s really a shame that web developers will criticize me for still preferring to work on native applications rather than the Internet. Or is it more of a shame that most of them continue to believe that they’re working with state-of-the-art tools with state-of-the-art technologies, and not put more effort into trying to make things better on their end? It’s also a shame that so many pieces of software that really should live on the desktop are being written (and being written poorly) for the web. Each has a place, but because the internet is “cooler” than running programs on your computer, too many things that should be on the desktop are being pushed to the Internet, and are being done improperly.

In many ways things I was doing more than 20 years ago worked better on the computers I used then than things do today on the Internet. Internet technologies have improved, but they are moving at a glacial pace. And it both makes me laugh, and cry a little on the inside.

Recent Product Mini-Reviews

2010-10-24T11:23:00.001-06:00

I’ll refrain from publishing my long in-depth reviews of some of my technology acquisitions this time, but I’ll say just a little bit about a few toys I have picked up in the last couple of months.

iPod Touch (4th Generation)

I ordered the 4th Generation iPod Touch the day it was announced and it arrived about a week later, so I have had it for about 6 weeks now. I still very much prefer my Zune HD for music (better, faster UI, an excellent music subscription option, and a lot more features like artist bios, photos, and automatic linking to similar artists and albums for music playback), but the iPod Touch is really the only game in town when it comes to apps so I try to keep up to date.

The new Retina Display is nice and sharp, but still suffers from color shifting off-axis as previous generation models did. (The screen goes yellow or blue if you don’t view it straight on.) The overall speed of the device is pretty good too. I still believe that the “multitasking” added by iOS 4 is a gimmick, as it doesn’t really allow apps (other than a very select few categories) run in the background. So much for true background Twitter updates, or instant messaging without annoying push notification alerts. Steve Jobs' insistence that these things can’t be done without draining the battery is just flat wrong… plenty of other devices out there are doing it now.

As with the previous devices, the hardware is excellent. Thin, and light. But it still irks me that Apple insists on using a shiny back to the case, as it is incredibly easy to scratch. Even being very careful with it mine has already gotten badly marred. And the back cover doesn’t seem as durable as previous generations. Mine is already dented, which never happened with either of my two previous Touches.

Having the front and rear cameras is nice, especially for FaceTime calls (which work well), but the low resolution of the rear camera makes it essentially useless for shooting photos. If your intent is to video conference with other FaceTime users, this will work just fine. If you want to shoot photos, you still need an actual camera.

In my opinion iOS is getting a little long in the tooth without a major update. Sure the newer features are nice, but Apple is still making too little progress on making their operating system truly useful for productivity applications. Annual upgrades are just incremental… they now need something bigger.

I have had one pretty annoying issue with my Touch. When I go into the App Store to download apps or update software I get an error message that it can’t connect to the App Store multiple times before it will finally let me in. And then I get the same error again when I actually tell it to install updates or a new app, and it requires me to re-enter my password each time. I have to go through the same process several times before it will actually work. My iPad, running on the same network, doesn’t do that, and the Touch does it whether I’m at home, work, or connecting through my Verizon MiFi. Definitely feels like a bug.

I still despise iTunes. I believe it to be one of the worst pieces of software ever inflicted on the public. It is so slow and bloated that it badly needs to be rewritten. It’s unfortunate that the iPod Touch is so reliant on it for syncing content with a computer.

Sony PlayStation 3 Move Controller

I also recently picked up a Sony PlayStation 3 Move controller. This is Sony’s attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the Nintendo Wii with its own motion controller. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like Sony did a very good job. It feels even more like a gimmick than the Wii’s.

For $100, the controller came with the required EyeToy camera and Sports Champions game. It’s a pretty obvious attempt to copy Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort, not necessarily with the same games, but with the same basic idea. Some of the games can be fun, others can be incredibly frustrating. I won’t blame the controller for that, though. Extra controllers are $50, or the optional Move Navigation Controller (like the Wii’s Nunchuck) are $30. If you were to buy the starter bundle plus enough controllers for four people you’d be dropping a pretty good chunk of change ($370, not including the cost of the PS3 itself).

What I did have a problem with is the way that the controller works in practice. At the start of each game (or in the case of Sports Champions, each mini game) you have to go through a 3-step calibration procedure. It doesn’t take very long, but after playing a handful of games, having to repeat the procedure over and over does get pretty old. In addition to that, part of the calibration procedure involves making you stand in a designated (and pretty small) area of the view of the camera. And you have to stay there. This also means that you aren’t free to move around as you play a game… Once you put yourself inside of the on-screen box during calibration, you have to plan to stay put throughout the game or it doesn’t work quite right.

Response on the controller was pretty good (as long as you resist the temptation to step away from the spot where you were standing during calibration), but not any better than the Wii Remote with the Plus add-on. Definitely better than the Wiimote by itself, but no better than what you get with Wii Plus. Motion sensing was accurate.

The cost of the controller is a little on the high side, but not terrible. With the limitations in Sony’s implementation of motion gaming I can’t really recommend the Move at all, though. Especially if you already have a Wii. The controller does give Wii-like capabilities to the PS3, but, at least to me, the advantage of high definition gaming doesn’t outweigh the frustrations that come with Sony’s implementation of motion gaming. If you can play a game without moving around, and don’t mind going through a calibration procedure before each game, you’ll probably enjoy the Move. But if you already have a Wii, this won’t add anything.

Apple TV (version 2)

Several days ago I picked up the new Apple TV as a way to attempt to stream some my TV shows and videos from my computer to my living room television. I say “attempt” because I still haven’t gotten it to work. I suffered through adding all of my video content to iTunes, but as of right now my Apple TV either won’t see my computer at all, or when it does, it will only stay connected for a couple minutes before dropping the connection. So watching videos from iTunes is pretty much out of the question at the moment unless the video is less than 60 seconds long. I also can’t get the iTunes Remote Speaker feature to connect to my Apple TV either, even though it will connect to my brother’s previous generation Apple TV.

The device does play Internet sourced content just fine. With my recent Internet connection upgrade, I can actually stream high definition, a major upgrade from being stuck with SD previously. The Apple TV only supports 720p resolution content, though, so 1080p video is played with half its original detail. Streaming rented TV shows, YouTube videos, and NetFlix all seem to work fine, within the limitations of a user interface designed for a simple remote and television. But since I can’t get it to connect to my iTunes reliably and I already have NetFlix and YouTube video capability elsewhere, the box is mostly useless to me. Even if I could get it to stream from my computer properly I’m not sure I’d recommend this to someone unless they already had a huge investment in iTunes video. I’ll say more on that in a second.

There is speculation we’ll see upgraded capabilities with new software on the Apple TV in the future. The hardware seems to be capable of a lot more than what it is doing. I hope we do see some upgrades, because for less than the Apple TV’s $99 price there are other boxes with greater flexibility out there, like the...

Roku HD Player

A couple months ago I found an amazing Internet deal for the Roku HD video player. I have had the ability to stream NetFlix through my Xbox 360s, PS3, Wii, and Samsung Blu-ray players for some time, but the Roku adds a bunch more other video sources. Installation was very easy… plug in power and HDMI, and it’s off and going.

It works just like it supposed to. I have streamed not only NetFlix videos, but also podcasts from TWiT, Revision3, shows from NASA, PlayOn, HGTV, Amazon-on-Demand (works like the Apple TV to rent/buy TV shows and movies), and many other sources. And they are adding new channels quite often. While most "premium” content is only available for pay through Amazon, the amount of free content is becoming extensive, especially when you add optional private channels through the Roku web site.

The best part is the price. The box starts at $60. Since it does a lot more than the Apple TV, I’m going to have to recommend the Roku boxes over the ATV unless you absolutely must stream content from iTunes, in which case the Apple option is the only one you have.

Amazon Kindle (3rd Generation)

Not being a huge reader myself, the Kindle doesn’t necessarily appeal to me in the way that it would a lot of people. It has appealed to me as a gadget from the day it came out, but I couldn’t justify the $329, $299, $249, or even $189 for a gadget I wasn’t sure I’d use much. But when Amazon announced the Wi-Fi only version for $139 two months ago, I decided at that price I could get one to play with it.

I’ve read a lot of varying reviews of the device over the 2.5 years of its existence. Most people absolutely love it. Then there are some Apple fans who love the iPad so much they have to put down the Kindle. Owning both, I find myself leaning a lot more toward the first group. Yes, you can read books on the iPad, but it’s too heavy to hold for reading for very long, and its reflective screen can be a problem. In other words, the iPad is not a replacement for the Kindle.

I actually really, really like the Kindle. It isn’t perfect, but it is very good. It is very light, thin, and the electronic ink screen (not backlit; looks and reads just like paper) is very easy to read. If you haven’t seen an e-ink screen, there just isn’t any way to accurately describe it. It really does look like you’re looking at a sheet of paper. Text is crisp, and there aren’t screen reflections to worry about. The words appear right at the surface of the screen instead of behind the thickness of a pane of glass. At first the flash-to-black-then-white of the screen when turning pages was a bit distracting, but after I got into my first book the screen flash totally disappeared from my mind and I didn’t notice it any longer. e-ink screens aren’t great for everything, but they are perfect for reading. The fact that the Kindle runs for about a month on a battery charge because of the type of screen it uses is pretty cool too.

Purchasing content is super easy, and very fast. The Kindle store on the device isn’t quite as fast to use as purchasing directly on the Amazon web site from a computer, but it does work very well anyway. There is a decent amount of free content as well. But my favorite feature is the ability to preview the first chapter of a book before purchasing. So it’s kind of like browsing the shelves at the book store before committing to a purchase. Books download in a matter of seconds, and if they are purchased online from a computer they appear on the device without doing anything… they just show up.

The Kindle is very cool. It just might turn me into more of a reader than I have been in the past. But probably the biggest compliment I could give it is to share the opinion of a friend. When I told her I was buying it she swore to me that it is something she would never be interested in because she likes the feel of the paper in a real book, and likes to collect books and show them off in her bookshelf. She said she could never envision herself reading books on an electronic device. Then after I got my Kindle I showed it to her, and she fell in love with it and has decided to get one of her own. At $139 it’s a great deal, and now that Target carries them in their stores, it’s even easier to pick one up.

That’s All For Now!

Well, that’s about it for now. I know I have picked up other toys recently, but these are the ones that stand out in my mind.

IdleVolume

2010-10-14T13:53:00.001-06:00

I just finished (well, just started too… it didn’t take very long) a little program to take care of a problem I have had with my computer for a very long time. I have a computer in my bedroom and occasionally in the middle of the night it will beep, twang, squeal, buzz, speak, or make some other noise that will wake me up. Some nights I do remember to turn down the volume before I go to bed, but most nights I just forget. So I created IdleVolume.

It’s just a little program that turns down the volume on the computer when it has been inactive for a period of time. Similar to the way your screensaver kicks in or the computer turns off your monitor when you haven’t used the keyboard or mouse for a while. But with sound.

It sits in your notification area waiting for you to do nothing. Literally. You set the amount of time that it waits, and also the volume level for when that period of time has elapsed. Then it turns down your volume. Then when you come back to your computer (or your cat walks by) and move the mouse or press a key on the keyboard it sets your volume back to where it was previously. Easy peasy.

This is one of those “duh! why didn’t someone else think of that?” things that I wish someone else had taken care of years ago, but nobody has I guess. So I did. You can thank me later.

I wrote this program for me, but thought others might find it useful, so I’m making it available for free. No charge. Costs zero. No advertising. Without any catch, because it’s something everybody should have. Just go to my company web site and download it. And enjoy. And tell your friends.

It requires a version of Windows newer than Vista (so it works with Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008, and 7), so XP and Mac users need not apply. It won’t work. And I don’t plan to write an XP or Mac version either, sorry! Too much work for too little (“no benefit to me”) in return.

Religion Quiz

2010-10-05T23:24:00.001-06:00

It seems that LDS Church members know religion in general better than most… and certainly seem to know Biblical stories and teachings better than other Christians… Click the image to view it full-sized. Or take the quiz yourself here.

First Video of Sonnet

2010-07-22T02:31:00.002-06:00

I posted this forever ago on my Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube accounts, but forgot to include it here on the old blog.

This is the first released video of the week with Sonnet. There are lots more to come… you’ll just have to be patient with me. I still have a bit of editing to do. And the videos will be released periodically as Sonnet feels it’s time to do so.

So here’s Sonnet’s “Without You” as performed at her acoustic house concert in June.

This was a lot of fun to work on. We had quite a few technical problems (don’t get me started), but the good things far outweighed the bad. Not only did I get to get out my audio and video toys, and play with new video editing software, I got to work with some great people. Sonnet is so much more than just a gifted singer and talented writer… she’s an amazing person as well, and I’m really glad that I’ve had the opportunity to work with and get to know her. And I’m really looking forward to the other projects she and I have in the works. I always enjoy working on projects with Dave and Paul… both are extremely talented filmmakers, and lots of fun to be around. The music video they’re putting together is going to be fantastic! And Brad is amazing as well… always so willing to help out with my little projects, and just brilliant when it comes to all things musical and electronic. He was such a lifesaver helping setup for the house concert, and directing the camera operators. Thanks so much to everyone!

So there it is… the first public release of anything we did that week. It was such a whirlwind (I literally got 12 hours of sleep between Monday and Friday), but in a good way. I’d do it again in a heartbeat… but plan to spread things out over two more days if possible.

How it came to be…

So a few people have asked me how this all came about… a girl I had never met from California getting hooked up with a group of guys from Utah… well…

Let’s backup to early summer 2009. I’m watching TV late at night and a commercial for Lagoon Park comes on. And it’s got this cute, quirky, catchy song for its soundtrack. The sort of song you’d never pick for a theme park, because it’s just this sweet sounding girl with rich but subtle harmony and a piano, to a slow beat—far from the stereotypical loud in-your-face sort of song one might associate with an amusement park. But extremely intriguing nonetheless. I really liked it, so I looked up who it was. It took a little digging, but I finally found out that it was a girl from Los Angeles named Sonnet (yes, that really is her name), that managed to land a contract providing the song for the 2009 Lagoon/Coke ad campaign. I found her website, saw that she was on Twitter, and followed her (that’s how you “friend” someone). And she pretty much immediately responded by following me too. Kewl!

Fast forward a few months. Over time I had made a few comments to Sonnet on Twitter and she always wrote back, and was always very gracious. We didn’t have what I’d call frequent communication, but it was steady. At one point I mentioned to her that I did sound and that if she ever wanted to do a concert in Utah I’d be glad to provide my services, but nothing more came of that (I assumed as much… she really didn’t know me from Adam, and knew nothing about my ability as a sound engineer). At one point she did come to Utah and performed a couple concerts at Lagoon, and despite how hard I tried to get there, I arrived at the park too late and couldn’t get in. So I missed the one opportunity I had to actually meet her and hear her perform. That was a sad day.

Anyway, as Christmas approached one day she tweeted (that’s how you say that you posted something on Twitter) that she was looking for an idea for a Christmas present for family and friends. I mentioned to her (since she was a singer) that she ought to record a song and give that to people. There wasn’t really time before Christmas to do that, but it started a little bit of a dialog about working together on recording a song together someday. Completely hypothetical, but it did begin to open up the possibility that someday something could maybe possibly happen if I rubbed my lucky rabbit’s foot during a full moon while the planets aligned just so. Long shot, but not impossible.

Fast forward another couple months to February… another girl I was following on Twitter had been advertising to her followers that she was going to be doing a live streaming concert. She started announcing it several weeks beforehand, making it seem like a really big deal. This other artist was better known than Sonnet, had multiple CDs out, a recording contract with a major label, and had recently landed a nationally-broadcast TV commercial with a huge company in a very public advertising campaign, so for sure this was going to be something big, right? So I made a point to tune in, only to be very disappointed. Instead of being something professionally produced (you know, with at least a real microphone), it was her sitting on her bed, playing her guitar, being recorded by just the webcam and microphone in her laptop under really bad lighting. You could barely hear her sing or play. My first thought was, “What a waste! She has lots of fans watching, has spent a lot of effort promoting this event, and this is what we’re getting?” It was technology heartbreak for me.

At that point I had the idea that her disappointing production was probably due to the fact that she didn’t know the right person to pull off something better. And I also thought, “I have the equipment, the know-how, and other resources to pull off something much better.” The problem was, this other artist was too well known to even bother responding to anything on Twitter, so there wasn’t any way that she’d even consider taking the time working with some no-name from Utah. And frankly, her music wasn’t something that I really got that excited about, so I didn’t even really want to pursue that anyway.

So the next day as I thinking about the disappointment of the previous evening, I thought, “who do I know that is good enough to justify spending the time, has enough of a following for there to be interest, and yet is not so well known that they’d consider working with me to produce a streamed concert?” Of course Sonnet came to mind, so I sent her a casual message on Twitter asking if coming to Utah and doing a live, streaming Internet performance was something she’d be interested in doing. She said it was, so we connected via IM and started talking about the possibility. Nothing definitive, but it got the ball rolling nonetheless.

I don’t really know what she thought of the whole thing at that point--I’ve never asked, but she was game for the idea. And before long we started making plans. Eventually we connected via email and on the phone, then started regular video conferences planning things out. Once we found a location, and a suitable timeframe within her schedule and mine, things finally started coming together.

Sonnet was totally on board with the ideas that I had for what the concert was going to be like. I wanted to keep it small (for many technical as well as other reasons) but completely professionally produced, with real lighting, multiple cameras, moving cameras, nice piano, high end audio equipment, shot in high definition at a nice location, etc. The idea of just a small concert in someone’s living room struck a chord with both of us. I’m really glad that she and I have been on the same page through the entire process… it has made it that much more fun.

Somewhere along the line I asked Dave and Paul if they’d be interested in running cameras for me for the concert. They’ve always been really good about helping me out with projects when I ask, so they agreed. But I think at first they just thought it was one of my silly little just-for-fun things that I do when I’m bored of the rest of my life, so there wasn’t a lot of excitement coming from them initially.

After a couple more weeks, I was frankly a little frustrated that they weren’t more excited about the project… I wanted them to be excited about it. And to see what I saw in Sonnet—a sweet, beautiful, extremely likeable and talented singer with a catchy sound—so I showed them a couple of her YouTube videos. Fortunately, they got it right away. They saw the same things I was seeing, and they finally started to show some enthusiasm.

So as we started talking about plans for the concert, somehow the idea of shooting a music video while Sonnet was going in town came up. I don’t remember who it was that had the idea, but after asking her if she would be interested, plans for the video started coming together. A song was picked. Then a different song picked. Then back to the first song. Ideas for the story started to come and be discussed. Too many ideas, in fact. Later, two days before Sonnet flew to Utah her image consultant called me and Dave and we had an emergency two hour phone conference to simplify and focus things drastically. Yes, two days before she got here we were making major changes. Talk about flying by the seat of your pants. Anyway, we landed in a place we were all comfortable. (Okay, Doug, enough with the plane metaphors!)

Anyway, thankfully we had a lot of other people jump in at the last second to help out. A few days before we started shooting Sae Sae volunteered to help, and she did some amazing recruiting… she found people to help with lighting and moving equipment around (grips), hair, and makeup. We owe a lot to her making things go as smoothly as they did!

Honestly, I can’t take much credit for the music video. Dave and Paul really took the idea of the video and ran with it. I really didn’t have that much to do with putting the video together. Other than providing some of the equipment, while it was going on my main job was to make sure that Sonnet was where she needed to be when she needed to be there, and that she was being taken care of. Sure, I’d step in to run a second camera, or move stuff around, but ultimately my biggest role for the video was really making sure that Sonnet was comfortable.

The Internet streamed concert was another story altogether. Where I took a back seat during filming of the music video, I stepped in and took charge for the concert. That was really my baby of the whole week. Multi-camera videos are something that the others do rarely, but something I do with some degree of regularity. Fortunately I have acquired all of the equipment to do so over the last several years, even designing, building, and writing software for quite a bit of it as well. And I actually enjoy working with audio more than video, so this was going to be my only chance during the week to do what I enjoy most.

I’ll save the many stories from the week when we actually shot everything for another post (and maybe some of the other people involved will post something on their own blogs… hint, hint?). It really was quite an adventure, but in a good way. So much fun, and definitely an experience I will never forget. Frankly I can’t believe we pulled off what we did in so little time. And that we survived the week of no sleep, super late nights, in the heat, on little food, without hating each other by the end (much to the contrary, actually—we’re all better friends), is kind of a miracle in and of itself.

Two little birds...

2010-07-21T18:55:00.002-06:00

Two little birds, caught in my window.
And I told them they don't need to worry.
Gave 'em a board--
So they could climb out.
Climbing up seemed too difficult a feat.

They would try, they'd get it wrong, couldn't do it right
The more they'd try to climb, the more they'd fall again.
Then they would hesitate.

Birds, put your best feet on, sing me your favorite songs,
So go ahead, find your way out.
Fly up and away free, I hope you get your dreams,
Just go ahead, find your way out.

I don’t get it when…

2010-06-26T10:30:00.001-06:00

People who design things don’t actually use them… and expect that others will want to use them. Web sites are the worst.

Like today, I was on a comic web site… the comics are great… they have this really cool “Random Comic” link at the top of the page, and many of the comics are much longer than one page. You read the comic and have to scroll back to the top of the page to hit the Random Comic (or any) link. If you want me to read the comic and stay on the site, put the link at the bottom of the page so I don’t have to scroll back to the top to view another. If the web designer had actually used the site, they would have realized that putting those links at the bottom of the page would have improved site usability 257%.

Looking for some assistance…

2010-05-31T15:36:00.001-06:00

Next week, a very talented singer/songwriter named Sonnet (www.sonnetmusic.com, www.youtube.com/sonnetsings) is coming to Provo/Orem from Los Angeles to shoot a real music video and perform a house concert which will be broadcast over the Internet. Sonnet is well known in Utah for her “You’re So Good For Me” song, which was featured as the music for the 2009 Lagoon Park advertising campaign. If you were in Utah last summer, you most likely have heard the song. Her other music is just as good.

My role in it all? Well, I kind of organized the whole thing, and I’m providing the equipment to make it all happen.

This is going to be an affair that lasts for several days and is going to require a significant number of people to pull it off, so we’re looking for a few extra hands to help out.

Before you stop reading thinking, “I don’t have any technical skills, so I can’t be of any help” please do take the time to finish reading. While we do require some technical skill for some tasks, most of those are already filled, and many of the remaining roles do not require any technical expertise.

Music Video – Tues-Wed, June 8th & 9th

We’ll be shooting the music video for her new song “Seesaw” on Tuesday and Wednesday (June 8/9) at various locations in and near Utah valley. We have technical crew more-or-less covered for these events, but we could use a few extra people for various other things that it takes to shoot a video: extras to appear in the background in a few scenes, people to hold reflectors and other lighting elements, someone to be in charge of music playback, people to move props and equipment, and maybe even run errands at various times both days.

Unfortunately this whole project is being done pro-bono so we can’t offer any sort of financial compensation. You will, however, appear in the credits for the video, and food will be provided while we are shooting.

For the technically minded, we are doing something new and trendy: we are shooting the entire video on Canon digital SLR cameras, just like this season’s finale of House, and some feature films currently in production. The video quality is amazing! We’ll also be doing a significant amount of green-screen work. This is the real deal here, folks – it’s going to be shot professionally, complete with special effects, and is going to look fantastic.

If you’ve ever wanted to be involved in the creation of a real music video, whether as an extra, or crew, this is a great opportunity. And certainly something that can go on the resume of anyone wanting to do any video or film work. We don’t require that you be available all day, but if you have a few hours to help out it, we would be very grateful. We’ll have a schedule of events finalized by this weekend, which I will send to anyone who expresses any interest in helping.

House Concert – Thurs, June 10th

Rather than doing a big concert in a regular venue, we have elected to do a small, intimate concert. House concerts are currently popping up everywhere, and are becoming quite popular, even for well-established artists, so that’s the directly we have elected to take. Her concert will be next Thursday at 7pm in Orem.

Sonnet has invited about 30 guests, giving her the opportunity to actually interact with those who attend and talk about her music in an informal setting. We will also be shooting and broadcasting that event over the Internet for any of her fans to view (at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/sonnetlive). The resulting video will be re-edited later and be uploaded to her web site and YouTube for all to see.

Even though it will be informal, from a technical point of view it will be very sophisticated: we’re going to be shooting on 6 cameras, have everything professionally lit, and audio will be first-rate. It will have the feel of something small and intimate, but look and sound like a first-rate production.

We have most of the technical assistance we need (though we could use one additional camera operator), but are still looking for a little bit of additional help. We need someone to welcome guests and make sure they are seated comfortably. We need a few people to assist the camera operators by making sure that cables stay out of the way. We need someone to help with the camera dolly. We might need someone to help with controlling the lighting. A few additional hands to move equipment in and out in the morning and evening would be very much helpful. None of these are difficult tasks, but we’re a bit short on people-power.

Again, we can’t offer any financial compensation, but your name will appear in the credits, and you’ll get to attend a concert with excellent music, and meet the artist.

Can you help?

If you’re at all interested, and are available any time Tuesday through Thursday next week, drop me an email at sonnetevent@djmail.org and let me know what interests you and when you’re available. And if you know someone who is interested in this kind of thing and would be interested in being involved, please pass a link to this blog post along.

Thank you!!!

LOST Survey Results

2010-05-31T08:00:00.000-06:00

Here we go… the results of my LOST survey. With my own thoughts and feelings following at the end.

My Own Thoughts

Discussions about LOST could go on forever, and I certainly don’t want to get too detailed in my own thoughts, but I would like to say a few things, especially with regard to the way the series ended.

For the most part I enjoyed the series, but found myself frustrated by it probably as much as I enjoyed it. My analytical mind doesn’t like to have questions go unanswered, and as anyone who watched the show knows, the writers enjoyed creating new questions more than they enjoyed providing answers to them. And that internal battle was probably a hurdle that I never fully overcame, so I was never really able to full invest myself into the show.

A lot of fans of the show would go back and re-watch episodes to try to pick up on small details that would be missed the first time through. I, on the other hand, with the exception of the pilot and finale, only watched each episode one time. I just couldn’t get into it enough to invest more time than I did.

But moving on to the story as a whole, I did enjoy the character development and the way the show would do flashbacks and give background to those characters. It made it that much more believable when we would see characters do things that would have otherwise seemed unusual.

But, on to the finale…

Some may have been really surprised by the way the series ended. I expected some sort of spiritual ending, just based on the fact that so many spiritual issues had been raised, especially in this last season, with the Jacob vs. the man in black representing good vs. evil so prominently just as one prime example. So for the answer to “what’s going on here?” to be “this is an afterlife experience” wasn’t a huge shock for me. I can’t say that I knew ahead of time that the sideways story wasn’t mortal life, but there was definitely something askew and it just did not feel like it was real. So to have it revealed that it wasn’t was not a shock. The rug may have been tugged, but it wasn’t ripped out from under me.

There were several aspects of the finale that I really liked. I liked having many past characters return, and the many reunions that ensued as a result (and yes, I did get a little emotional with some). I liked that Jack and Kate were finally together (I never liked her with Sawyer). I liked that Claire wasn’t really crazy after all (she was one of my favorite characters, so I didn’t like that she was behaving so strangely earlier in the season). I liked that they did get rid of the MIB. I liked that Hurley had the opportunity to step up and take charge. I like that they explained (at least to some degree) why this particular group of people was selected to be on the island.

While it was enjoyable, I don’t think I will go back and watch the series again. Six seasons of one hour episodes is a lot of content to try to take in again. I don’t exactly have 121 hours to spare. I know a lot of the things we wondered about in earlier seasons would make more sense in retrospect, but I’m not so attached to the show that I can make that commitment again.

Technology

2010-05-30T21:57:00.001-06:00

One of the great things about the advancement of technology is that things that were once hard to find become common.

One of the bad things about the advancement of technology is that things that were once common become hard to find.

LOST survey

2010-05-24T03:51:00.001-06:00

If you’re a Lostie, please take a few minutes to fill out my 10-question survey about your feelings on the show.

http://polldaddy.com/s/BCD637E36CE28A23

Thank you! I’ll post results in one week.

Reach for the Cloud

2010-05-01T16:34:00.005-06:00

If you’re familiar with the Mobile Me service offered by Apple, one of its features is the ability to store files on Apple-run servers directly from the Mac, making them accessible from anywhere at any time. Few people know this, but Microsoft also provides similar a similar capability with to anyone with a Windows Live account with its free SkyDrive service, providing 25 GB of storage. Mac users get the privilege of paying $99/year for this capability, but with 5GB less storage space. Suckers.

It takes a few steps to get it setup, but they really aren’t that hard with a little instruction. Windows 7 may be required, but it might work on Windows Vista, I haven’t tried it. (I’m not running Vista on any of my computers any longer, so I can’t test it.) I know it doesn’t work on XP.

First you need to sign up for the free SkyDrive service. Go to http://skydrive.live.com and sign up. If you already have a Windows Live account (such as Hotmail email), you just need to confirm that you want to activate the SkyDrive service.
Next, go to this site and download the SkyDrive Simple Viewer software. It’s totally free, and you only need to run it once to get some information about your Windows Live account.
Extract SkyDrive Simple Viewer .zip file into a temporary folder. For the sake of this discussion, extract it to C:\Temp\SDViewer.
Click Start, type cmd, and press Enter.
Type:

CD /D C:\Temp\SDViewer
dumpurls (Windows Live email address) (space) (Windows Live password) >links.txt

Example: dumpurls myaddress@hotmail.com mypassword >links.txt
This will create a file called links.txt in the C:\Temp\SDViewer folder containing the “secret” links to make the connection. Copy this file somewhere and keep it. Once you have this file, you can delete the C:\Temp\SDViewer folder.
Open your links.txt file. Its contents will look something like this:

https://abcdef.docs.live.net/abcdefg12345678/Pictures
https://def123.docs.live.net/abcdefg12345678/Documents
https://ace456.docs.live.net/abcdefg12345678/Music
https://789fab.docs.live.net/abcdefg12345678/Videos
https://cba321.docs.live.net/abcdefg12345678/Public

These same links work on any computer; so feel free to copy this file and it them elsewhere. Just don’t share them with anyone or they’ll have access to your files.
Click the Start button, right-click “Computer” on the menu, and select “Map Network Drive...”
Select the local drive letter you’d like to use, and copy one of the links from step 7 into the “Folder” field (select the appropriate link based on what type of files you are going to be saving). Click Finish.

Voila! The drive will open within a few seconds. If you turn on the “Reconnect at Logon” option in step 9 it will automatically reconnect each time you logon to Windows. Pretty cool stuff.

You now have a link in Windows Explorer to your SkyDrive “cloud” storage that can be used with any Windows program, and even shared between multiple computers. And all for free, and without installing a single piece of software!

I even use it with the software I wrote and sell, FileBack PC, to backup important files automatically. Slick.

Original idea came from Paul Thurrott on his blog.

iPad Hands On

2010-04-03T13:12:00.003-06:00

Okay, yeah, I did it. I bought an iPad. I have been at least a little critical of the device from the day it was first announced, and I felt like if I was going to be fair about it I really ought to take it for a spin for real before forming a final opinion.

I was able to get it without any difficulty. My local Best Buy was one of the ones that was going to have them at launch. Twenty minutes before the store opened, there was still no line to get one. At a quarter to ten I got out of my truck and I was third in line. The store had twenty of each model (16, 32, and 64GB), so there is actually still a fair chance that if someone wants one they might still be able to get it, at least at the Orem store.

So now that I have had it for 2 1/2 hours, and played with every aspect of the device, and downloaded and played with quite a few apps, I feel more qualified to comment on it. Here are my impressions…

Hardware

The device is both smaller and considerably heavier than you’d imagine it being. The screen is 9.7” (diagonal), but it has a considerable bezel, leaving the impressions in pictures that it is bigger than it really is. But it also weighs more. It’s heavy enough that I wouldn’t want to hold it up to read books on it.
The oleophobic coating on the screen that is supposed to prevent fingerprints and smudges, doesn’t.
The back has a textured finish, unlike the iPod Touch, so it doesn’t scratch as easily, thankfully.
The screen is very good. It uses an IPS LCD screen, and these are among the best out there. The quality of the screen is A LOT better than that of the iPhone or iPod Touch, especially with regard to viewing angles.
Battery life should be the expected 10 hours. After playing for two hours my battery level dropped by about 15%.
It absolutely requires a computer to set it up. When you turn it on it shows the iTunes logo on screen until you register it with Apple via iTunes 9.1.
For the most part it operates pretty smoothly and quickly. Scrolling and zooming are particularly smooth.
Since the iPod Touch doesn’t have a microphone, I wasn’t expecting one on the iPad, but it does have one. I was able to make Skype calls on it just fine.
The speaker is fairly loud, but it’s monaural. Disappointing considering the device’s considerable size and the amount of unused space inside the case. Sound quality is also dull and lifeless.
It doesn’t charge while plugged into a computer. It shows “Not charging” in the upper right on the three computers I tested it on, one of which is a Mac. You pretty much have to use the included USB power adapter to charge it. My other AC-to-USB chargers don’t work with it.

Apps

It comes pretty bare-bones. It doesn’t even have the iBooks app installed on it from the factory; it has to be downloaded and installed.
Even though there are supposedly about 1400 apps specifically for the iPad, a LOT of them are books, or wrappers around the web browser. There are a fair number of useful and cool apps, but the iPad App Store actually feels a bit sparse.
Apps are CONSIDERABLY more expensive than they are for the iPhone. Many apps that are $1.99 on the iPhone/Touch are $9.99 for their iPad versions, for example.
There are free apps, but I didn’t find that many that were interesting. In some cases apps that are free on the iPhone aren’t free for the iPad.
Even though the device can run iPhone apps, chances are that you probably won’t want to. They either run on a very small portion of the screen (same physical size as they would be on an iPhone) or blown up to 4x normal size (2x in each direction), and when they are blown up they look, well, horrible.
There are some very notable missing apps right now, namely Facebook and Hulu.
Most apps seem to be pretty polished, but I did experience a handful of app crashes, and a fair amount of pauses and multi-second freezing, even among the Apple-supplied apps that come with it.
The iBooks app is pretty cool, but there is basically no free content. It comes with one free book (Winnie the Pooh), so you can get a feel for how it will work, but I didn’t want to spend $10-15 just to have the whole experience. Page turns are quick enough that they aren’t distracting, and the fact that you can view two pages side-by-side in landscape mode is cool. I’m still not sold on the idea of holding up a 1.5 pound device to read, or reading on a backlit screen, though. Some people will be fine with reading on the iPad, many will not.
The Apple included apps are exactly what you expect them to be… versions of many of the same apps that ship with the iPod Touch, but optimized for a larger screen. It did feel like some apps, like Mail and Calendar in particular could do more to take advantage of the bigger screen, but I can understand how Apple would be trying to keep things simple. For the most part the experience with the apps is the same as it is on the iPhone, just bigger.
The web browser is nice, and snappy. I do find that entering URLs and filling in web forms on the on-screen keyboard is annoying, though. And the ongoing battle with Adobe over including Flash is a significant irritation.

Other

Standard definition video looks okay, but not great. If you’re planning on watching iTunes movies or TV shows, the HD versions are going to look a lot better. And keep in mind that HD content takes up a lot more space than SD, so getting a higher capacity version of the iPad than you think you might need is probably a good idea.
The on-screen keyboard has had a couple buttons added to it compared to the iPhone/iPod Touch. Not many, but it is nice to have command and period keys. But I do wish that they had added the row of number keys.
In Landscape mode the on-screen keyboard literally takes up half of the screen, and the buttons are actually too big. They could have really made it a lot smaller, and it would have actually been much more usable, in addition to requiring less screen real estate in the process.
It’s disappointing that app icons are only shown 4 across on such a large screen. The icons feel like they are way too far apart, and Apple could have greatly reduced the number of pages by just allowing even one or more two icons per row, and one or two more rows.
Though the device can play iTunes music, it’s really way too big to be used as a music player.
It’s also very disappointing that the device doesn’t allow third party applications to multi-task, especially with such a large screen. Apple could have easily fit four iPhone apps on screen simultaneously, or allowed applications to run in the background.
Even though Apple is pushing this thing as a game platform, many games rely on the accelerometer, and this makes them very slow to respond to input. If this is a serious game machine they should have at least included a directional pad. Touch-screen and accelerometer just don’t cut it for a huge portion of potential games.

Overall, the hardware feels pretty polished. Most of the limitations come from the software itself, or from the fact that you’re really buying into an ecosystem, not just a piece of hardware.

But the biggest down side of the device is cost. And I’m not talking about up-front cost; the up-front price actually isn’t too bad for what you are getting. It’s the high price of the apps, and the fact that you’re going to want to purchase iPad specific versions of your iPhone apps (since running the iPhone native apps is actually a pretty bad experience). And if someone is planning on using the device to read books, magazines, or newspapers, keep in mind that you’re going to be buying them over again if you already have them, and with the $10-15 book price, or inexplicably high subscription costs, it isn’t what I would call a bargain.

Everywhere I turned on the device it felt like Apple or other content creators wanted more money to really have a complete iPad experience. While this is understandable, it still limits the usefulness of the device if you aren’t willing to make a big investment into content specifically designed for it.

After playing with the iPad for a couple hours and going back and picking up my iPod Touch, the Touch is SO much smaller, lighter, and ultimately nearly as functional at a much lower price. The iPod Touch is a MUCH better buy, and could replace an iPad, but not the other way around, mostly due to size and weight.

Bottom line: It’s essentially a big iPod Touch, but you’re probably going to want to re-purchase iPad versions of apps and HD versions of video for it, so it is just like starting over from scratch as if you don’t already have any content. So plan on making a pretty significant financial investment if this is something you’re considering.

This is a bad thing…

2010-03-22T01:38:00.003-06:00

Again, usually I try to avoid posting anything political on my blog, but sometimes I just can’t keep silent on important issues.

So the House just passed a healthcare bill. But as-is, there are a lot of bad things that are going to happen as a result, and we aren’t hearing much about those.

Before I start, I’m not against reforming the healthcare industry. It would be a wonderful thing if more people could afford proper health insurance. I just think that the current approach is 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

First, insurance rates are going to go through the roof. They simply have to as a result of simple economics. The bill currently being considered requires insurance companies to continue coverage for people when they get sick, and offer coverage to those with pre-existing conditions. Before long they’ll be require to grant insurance for everyone who asks. The money that will have to be paid out by insurance companies is going to soar to unprecedented levels, and that money has to come from somewhere, so it is going to be passed on to those that are paying for insurance. If you think your current health insurance is too expensive, it’s about to get a whole lot worse. (Ideally it would be great for those people to have coverage, but with medical expenses being as high as they are, I can understand why insurance companies don’t offer coverage.)
In 2014, individuals will be required to have health insurance, or pay a fine. This would be the first time in the history of the country that people have a required tax burden even if they have no income. People won’t have the option to not purchase insurance without avoiding a fine, even if they don’t want it. It’s essentially a tax for breathing; I can’t get behind that no matter what anyone says to me. People ought to have a choice as to whether they purchase a product or not.

Also in 2014, businesses with 50 or more employees will be required to offer insurance to its employees or pay a $2,000 per employee fine for not doing so (do the math, that's $100,000). This is where I have one of the biggest beefs with the current plan.

Most businesses are operating on extremely thin margins, if not in the red right now. Yes, there are a few that are making great profits, but these are in the extreme minority. If companies are required to purchase health insurance for their workers, their expenses are going to be a LOT higher (remember, insurance is already expensive, and insurance rates will have to go up to cover the new insured!), and in order to continue to operate one of three things have to happen: either they are going to have to raise prices of their products to offset their higher expenses, lay off workers in order to meet those new expenses, or lay off employees until they have less than 50. Jobs are already hard enough to come by without adding additional requirements and expenses to employers.

This is particularly devastating to companies that hire primarily minimum wage employees, like retail and fast food establishments. If these companies are required to offer insurance to their minimum wage employees, we are going to see a huge jump in prices at retail. A meal at Wendy’s won’t be $6, it will be $10 or more. Prices on groceries, clothes, and other essentials will have to jump too. But it affects the entire supply chain, not just the workers you meet across the counter. Everything will have to be more expensive in order for employers to offer insurance. As if businesses had excess funds now. (If they did, would we currently have 10% unemployment?)

In my job I work closely with fast food restaurant owners. Most fall in the category of “50 or more employees” (if an owner has 2 or more locations they’ll qualify) but do not offer part-time employees insurance, yet they are barely meeting payroll and other expenses as it is. If they are put into a situation where they’re having to offer insurance, they won’t be able to continue to operate as-is. Either their prices will have to go way up, or they’ll have to close up shop. Several of them have actually said to me that they’ll be forced to close down if they have to offer insurance.

Another side effect is that part-time jobs will become limited and hard to come by, and essentially none of what remains would be able to pay more than minimum wage. While the bill makes provision to count part-time workers as half of a full-time worker as far as the “50 or more” provision goes, health insurance for part time employees costs the same as full-time employees (they’re not half a person). Businesses would certainly elect to hire a single full-time employee rather than two part-time employees because their insurance costs would be half as much, only having to offer insurance to one individual instead of two. (Including part-time employees in the count is essentially required in the plan, otherwise businesses would cut all employees back to part-time hours to avoid paying for insurance.)

But even worse than all of this is that obvious solutions to the fundamental underlying problem are being totally ignored:

No effort whatsoever is being put forth to try to lower medical expenses so that insurance can be more affordable.
There is no mention of limiting malpractice lawsuit awards. Malpractice suits and insurance are two of the primary reasons that healthcare is so incredibly expensive.
Nothing is done to try to encourage people to be more responsible about their own personal care. Quite the opposite, in fact… if people are more or less guaranteed healthcare, many will fall back on doctors and hospitals when they don’t need to.
Nothing is being done to encourage the use of less expensive generic drugs instead of expensive medications from the largest pharmaceutical companies, or for people to use natural remedies, which would provide huge savings.
Nothing is done to encourage more competition between companies that work in medicine. It will actually be easier for those with monopolies in the system to maintain them.
No penalties are put in place for people who abuse their bodies through abuse of tobacco, alcohol, or other drugs, or other self-damaging behaviors. They’re granted the same level of care as someone who takes care of him/herself.
No effort is made to encourage increased use of less expensive procedures instead of the more costly ones. For example, way too many CT scans and MRIs are being prescribed than are needed, driving insurance rates up artificially.
No effort is made to educate people about how to take care of themselves by eating healthily and exercising.

I’m really bothered by the fact that the attitude of this bill and the message sent to the American public is this: You can keep up your current bad habits, and now we’re going to place the burden of that risk on everyone else. We really ought to be encouraging people to take responsibility for themselves rather than being a burden on everyone else. Yes, I know that many people have conditions that they cannot full take care of themselves… I really do understand that and empathize with them. But this broad approach of removing accountability from everyone is just going to cause more problems in the end than it solves.

I do agree that something ought to be done about the current state of medicine in the U.S., but the bill currently being considered is certainly not the way to solve the problem. It’s like putting using a band-aid on an amputated limb. It would be far better to at least TRY to eliminate the underlying problems instead of trying to cover them up. And considering that no government social program has ever lived up to its intended consequences, there is no way I can get behind this one, especially being as flawed as it is.

I Love My Computer

2010-03-18T15:29:00.001-06:00

So I have been using the same computer for 5 years now. I built it back in 2005 when dual core processors first became available for PCs. So it was getting really old, and it was really getting in the way of me being efficient and effective in my work.

I decided last summer that I was going to build a new one, but I knew that one of the key parts I was looking at was very shortly due for an update, so I held off. Then a couple months ago my company offered to pay for my new machine. Finally, on Feb. 28th the part I was waiting for (the CPU) became available, so I ordered the parts and built it.

So, a quick rundown on what’s inside.

Intel Core i7 930 Processor at 2.8 GHz
12GB GSkill DDR3-10666 RAM (6 x 2GB)
Intel X25-M 160GB Solid State Disk
2 x Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB (in RAID-0)
1 x Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB
NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 Video
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT Video*
NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT Video*
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate Edition

* Brought over from previous machine

Why 3 video cards? I use 6 monitors, and each card drives two of them.

There are a few things that make this computer so awesome. First, the 8 virtual cores (so it works sort of like 8 CPUs)…

Second, would be the amount of memory (12GB):

Third would be the Intel X25-M solid state disk (like a hard drive, but it uses flash memory instead of moving parts, so it is much faster):

What all of this means is:

The computer boots up in 14-16 seconds. (From Windows logo screen first appearing to all software being loaded and ready to use at the fully ready-to-use desktop.)
There is NO period of waiting for my 57 zillion startup applications to finish loading after a restart; they’re done loading before the desktop even appears.
Most software applications open virtually instantly:
- Microsoft Office applications are totally finished loading in well under 1 second.
- Photoshop CS3 loads in less than 2 seconds.
- Premiere Pro CS3 loads in about 3 seconds.
- Microsoft Outlook loads and is ready to use in less than 2 seconds.
- Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera, and Safari all load instantly.
- Firefox loads in about 5 seconds.
- My development environment (Delphi RAD Studio 2007) loads in about 15 seconds instead of 2 minutes.
- The Zune software loads in about 3 seconds and is always snappy.
- iTunes loads in about 1 minute instead of 5.
With this much memory, I can leave all of the software I use regularly running in the background; I never have to close anything if I don’t want to.
Web browsing is much more snappy, even without getting a faster Internet connection.
Editing standard definition video is actually very fast.
Editing high definition HDV video is not only possible, but it is easy.
When I’m programming and I pause to think, the development language I use only freezes for 2-3 seconds instead of 30-90 seconds. (I was literally losing hours of my time per week on this.)
Multitasking is seamless. I can start a video render, minimize it, and not even feel the effect of it while using other applications.
Encoding DVDs into h.264 video happens at a rate of 140 frames per seconds (as opposed to 8 on my previous machine), so movies finish in about 40 minutes instead of 12 hours.
File transfers over my network run at 50 MB/sec instead of 7-8 MB/sec.

Total cost of hardware was just under $2,000. My company covered $1500 of that.

This computer is just a pleasure to use. I don’t have to wait for it to do anything.

It hasn’t been without a few hiccups though…

My external MOTU 828mkII FireWire-based sound device (primarily designed for doing studio recordings) has some really buggy drivers. Sound sometimes gets distorted. This was a problem with the old computer, too. It’s apparently universal, as others (both PC and Mac users) are having the same issue with this same device. If it weren’t so expensive I’d trade it in.
Occasionally when I restart one of the video cards isn’t detected, so I have to restart again for it to come back.
I can’t get the fingerprint readers I use for developing my company’s Point-of-Sale software to work at all (no driver available).
It takes me days, if not weeks, to get all of my software re-installed.

But even with those small issues, I love this machine.

And for anyone wondering why I didn’t get a Mac, I spec’d out a “roughly equivalent” machine (they don’t have an exact equivalent) and it would have been $7,173. While some areas would be better (CPU), it would still be lacking in a few areas, like memory and video performance. Upgrading the video to something equivalent would add several hundred $ more. If I were to switching to OS X, re-purchasing the software I use regularly from PC to Mac would have cost an additional $10,000+, and ~~several~~ most of the applications I use every day just aren’t even available at all for OS X. Economically it just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

Being Scammed

2010-02-12T00:31:00.001-07:00

I don’t get upset very often, but every once in a while something pushes me over the edge. I have blogged about this before, but it has really gotten under my skin again.

Imagine the following completely hypothetical conversation…

Government Official: “It has come to our attention that you are driving a 2008 Honda Civic.”

Me: “Yeah, that’s right.”

GO: “Well, it’s my duty to inform you that in four months it is going to be illegal to drive your car. You will have to dispose of it before that time.”

Me: "What? Is this some kind of a joke?”

GO: “No joke. This is absolutely real. If you continue driving your car after June 12, you will be breaking the law, and will be arrested and fined.”

Me: “I don’t get it. My car is still new. It only has 1000 miles on it. It’s working perfectly. And it is totally safe. What gives?”

GO: “Well, the rules of the roads have changed. Your car is now illegal… to drive on the road you have to get a new car.”

Me: “Why? What kind of car can be driven on the roads? How is it different than what I have now?”

GO: “You’ll have to talk to the car manufacturers about that. There are 6 models that comply with the new laws.”

Me: “And what am I supposed to do with my old one? Nobody will buy it if it isn’t legal to drive it!”

GO: “Whoa, there! You can’t sell it. Selling your car is against the law because it doesn’t comply with new laws. If you try to sell it you’re violating the law and you could be fined or arrested.”

Me: “So what the heck am I supposed to do with it?”

GO: “There are many recycling programs available.”

Me: “Okay… let me get this straight… I’m supposed to recycle a car which works perfectly, only has 1000 miles, which I can’t sell, and buy a new car just because the rules of the roads have changed?”

GO: “Yes, sir. I believe you’re starting to get it.”

Sound unbelievable? Well, yeah, it does. And it should. But this is exactly what is happening with wireless microphones in a few months.

Starting June 12, 2010 it will be illegal to use any wireless microphone that operates in the 700 MHz radio band. Unfortunately, this includes nearly every wireless microphone manufactured before about two years ago. And still a pretty large number of mics sold in the last two years as well. And very much unfortunately for me, every wireless microphone I own.

I have just over a dozen wireless mics that I have spent literally years acquiring. Some I purchased brand new, others I found on eBay. Some are for live audio events, others to use when shooting video, etc. It took a really long time to find a few models that are reliable and have good sound, and even after I found the right ones, it took about 6 years to get my hands on enough for my needs. Sure there have been plenty of cheap models available, but they have all sorts of problems. And lots of extremely expensive ones that actually do work well. But VERY few models in between that work well and are affordable. I managed to find a few models in that “in between” range and bought up every one I could find.

And now they’re all being made illegal, even though they work perfectly, and in many cases only have a few hours of use on them.

Worse yet, it’s illegal for me to try to sell them. A handful of manufacturers are offering rebate programs, but not for the models that will work for my use. At least not ones that I could possibly ever afford. Since I can’t sell them the only legal thing to do is to recycle them.

Wireless mics are kind of a funny thing. If you walk into a musical equipment store there will be a bunch available for sale. But not a single one you see in a retail store is actually worth owning. Between dropouts, noise, poor sound quality, and other problems, there isn’t a wireless mic worth owning for less than about $450. The “good” ones start at about $2,000 each… and go way up from there. Those mics you see on American Idol and other TV shows, they easily cost over $4,000 apiece. Maybe big television networks or bands on tour can afford stuff like that. I can’t. And neither can a lot of other people that need them.

I sat down and made myself a spreadsheet to figure out replacement costs. To replace the wireless equipment I use regularly, it’s going to cost just under $10,000 for “barely adequate.” I don’t think that “barely adequate” wireless microphones are worth owning. To get something that operates at least as well as what I already own, that figure jumps just north of $20,000. I’m sorry, but I don’t have $20,000 to blow on microphones. Especially when I already own a bunch that work perfectly. And these numbers are just for the stuff I use consistently, not to replace everything I already have.

Some of the ones I have haven’t been used much at all. In a few cases, purchase price divided by hours used would approach $75-100 per hour. And in nearly all cases I used them for charity or public events, or other events where I was providing my audio services at no cost. (The number of events I do where I ask to be paid is very small.) Some thanks I get, huh.

At the time I bought the ones that I have now I had the advantage that they had been out for a couple of years, so used ones would come up for sale on eBay from time to time at a significant discount. But because this transition to new models is so recent (many manufacturers have just started offering compliant models within the last year, and in some cases, just the last few months) no used gear is available. So not only is the newer equipment not going to function as well, it has to be purchased at a full price (which is higher than it was before). No deals here. Not for a long while. And many of the compliant models are out of stock and can’t even be purchased.

I know the number of people that are affected by this is relatively few. But it does extend farther than you might think. It isn’t just audio guys like me that are being forced to replace our gear. This includes theaters, schools, churches, etc. And most of these operate on shoestring budgets (or no budget whatsoever). If any of these groups bought their wireless mics more than two years ago, they almost definitely are going to have to buy new ones. Less than two years ago and the chance goes down, but that chance doesn’t go away entirely unless a mic has been purchased in the last 27 days. Yep, infringing equipment was still available for sale (and quite common) less than a month ago.

If you go to the FCC web site and read up on the issue they really emphasize the need to stay out of the new radio bands being reserved for public safety agencies. Fine. I have no problem with that. My mics don’t operate in those frequencies anyway. If that was the only reason this was happening, I wouldn’t be affected. (Well, one of my mics is in that band, but I can replace one without too much complaint).

The less emphasized part of the transition is the spectrum that was purchased by Verizon Wireless. So we’re being forced to buy new wireless mics to make way for laptop data cards. (Which, incidentally, are supposed to detect interference and work around it. I’m just sayin’.) If all in this world was fair, Verizon would be forced to pay at least a portion of the costs of replacing equipment it was invalidating because they’re invading what was our turf. But, this world isn’t exactly fair, now, is it.

The radio band that we are being moved into has to coexist with television broadcasts. Yes, the same frequencies that all TV stations were forced into a year ago. A part of the radio spectrum that is becoming very busy. Yes, mics were in TV frequencies before, but there were a whole lot more of them available, and fewer stations to compete against. Things are going to get really messy.

Get this… the most expensive piece of wireless audio gear I own is my in-ear-monitor system. (You’ve seen them… the earpieces musicians wear when performing so they can hear themselves.) Mine is a “barely adequate” model (I couldn’t afford a “good” one) that cost me $1300. It is included in the devices that have to be retired, as it is also in the 700 MHz band.

The manufacturer offers a “trade-in” program. I can trade in for the exact same model with a few tweaks inside to make it legal. And the cost? Full price. No discount. Nope! If I want to keep using it I have to buy a brand new one at full price. And according to their web site it is “illegal” to retrofit the old ones, so I shouldn’t bother asking.

Everything about this whole situation stinks. And it’s all pretty crazy when you think about it. If this affected a larger group of people the American public would be up in arms about it. But because our group is relatively small nobody else knows a thing.

Toy Story in HD!

2010-02-04T22:16:00.001-07:00

Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are coming on Blu-ray on March 23rd! Cool.

Zune HD Price Drop

2010-02-02T17:06:00.001-07:00

The Zune HD has dropped in price. It’s $30-$40 cheaper than it has been.

Excellent news.

Tech Tip: Label Your Power Adapters

2010-01-30T19:31:00.001-07:00

If you’re anything like me… wait, I’m sure you’re nothing like me, fortunately for you…

Most people have many electronic devices laying around the house that are powered by big rectangular power adapters (affectionately known as “Wall Warts”). But they tend to look alike, and if a device gets separated from its power adapter it’s hard to know what belongs to what. So recently I started labeling my power adapter so I know which adapter goes with which device.

In addition to making it easier to mate an adapter with its owner, labeling also makes it easier to know which adapter plugged into a power strip to unplug. When a power strip has 3 adapters in it, it’s usually impossible to know what device each one goes with if they aren’t labeled.

I use my electronic label maker to print labels. (You do have a label maker, don’t you? No? Get one!) I usually include the manufacturer and name of a device on the label. “Cell phone” or “Camera” isn’t descriptive enough, as surely someday you’ll wonder what cell phone or camera it was for.

Bonus Tips…

Once Separated, Now Reconciled

If you have separated a device from its power adapter, fret not… there are a few things you can do to match them back up again. Or to find a suitable adapter that will work instead.

There are 4 things that need to match for a power adapter to work with an electronic gadget. They are voltage, current, polarity, and connector.

Most power supplies and devices will have information that looks something like the image above. If both the adapter and device have all of this information, you’re in luck… you have enough information to know if it will work.

The above power adapter outputs 12 volts, can supply 500 milliamps of current, and has a positive tip (polarity). To work with a device, the voltage and polarity of the adapter and device must match exactly. If an adapter supplies too little voltage a device won’t work at all, or will behave erratically. If the voltage is too high you’ll fry something. Both the number and type of voltage must match (AC or DC).

Tip: If a power adapter outputs AC voltage, there is no polarity so you won’t see the above symbol. Just make sure the device requires AC voltage and that the numbers match up.

While AC adapters don’t have polarity, DC adapters do. And you absolutely have to have the same polarity, or you’ll fry a device. So look and make sure the location of the (-) and (+) are the same for the adapter and device. Positive tips are more common than negative tips, but double check that polarity matches.

While voltage and polarity MUST match, the current rating is a little more forgiving. If a device requires 300 milliamps (mA) of current, any power adapter that supplies a minimum of 300mA will work as long as the voltage and polarity match. So if you find one that supplies 500mA and the voltage and polarity are correct, the adapter is a good candidate.

Once you find a power adapter that has the correct voltage, polarity, and can supply sufficient current, it’s time to check to see if the connector fits. Try to plug it in. If it fits, the adapter should work.

	Device Requirements	Candidate Adapter #1	Candidate Adapter #2	Candidate Adapter #3	Candidate Adapter #4
Voltage	12 V DC	12 V DC	9 V DC	12V AC	12V DC
Current	300mA	500mA	250mA	300mA	200mA
Polarity	(+) Tip	(+) Tip	(+) Tip	(-) Tip	(+) Tip
Works?		YES!	NO!	NO!	NO!

Don’t Throw Them Out!

I actually keep the power adapters when I have to dispose of a broken device; they quite often come in handy later on for something else. Just yesterday I purchased a new radio scanner that didn’t come with any power adapter at all. Fortunately, I had one from a cordless phone that died a few years ago that matched perfectly. I saved $25 by not having to buy a new one.

Apple iPad: The Aftermath

2010-01-27T17:11:00.001-07:00

Just as predicted, Apple announced the iPad today. If you weren’t following the announcements, it is a thin device with a 9.7” screen that is more-or-less a big iPod Touch with some new software added to it.

Things I Like

The web browser on the iPad is going to be its killer app. With a large high resolution screen and true tabbed browsing, this is the device’s best potential use.
The email app looks nice too.
The book reader is going to be nice for casual lookup of short passages of text.
The device can run existing iPhone software at either native or double resolution.
The photo viewer is nice.
The IPS LCD panel is going to have a great picture (for an LCD).
If it can really achieve 10 hours of battery life, this is impressive.
Apps written in the future can take advantage of the larger screen.

Things I See as Problems

The on-screen keyboard is going to be tedious to use. Primarily because (1) your fingers can’t feel the keys to know where they are, and (2) because the keys are touch sensitive you can’t rest them on the screen, meaning you’ll have to hover your hands over the device. This makes writing emails and documents something you’d prefer to have a real computer for.
The new iWork applications are going to be next to useless if you don’t have the optional dock and keyboard. Nobody is going to write papers, or create spreadsheets or presentations without a real keyboard.
The fact that Apple did not add multitasking (running two apps at the same time) really reduces the possible functionality of this device. You can’t listen to Pandora and write an email at the same time, for example. They REALLY need to fix this for both the iPad and iPhone.
The Maps app is a good idea, but this doesn’t have a real GPS, so its kind of useless for navigation.
Getting your own photos and videos onto the device requires going through a computer. Or in the case of photos, with an optional connecting cable to connect to a limited selection of cameras.
The device is too large to carry around with me. It’s going to get left on the couch all of the time, because that’s the only place a device like this makes much sense. If I’m out and about I’m going to need the full capabilities of a notebook computer. So the iPad stays home.
Reading long books isn’t really going to be a great experience. Our eyes prefer the non-backlit look of paper over backlit screens when staring at a device for long periods of time. Reading of newspapers and (someday) magazine articles should be fine.
The device requires a computer for setup and maintenance, as well as more permanent storage. If Apple is trying to replace a computer (which seems to be their aim) they shouldn’t require a computer.
The device seems a little bit expensive for being just a large iPod Touch. I’m glad to see the entry price at just $499, but its 16GB storage isn’t enough if people expect to store much video content on it, especially if it is high definition.
This is not a device suited to the educational market. Nobody is going to take notes on an on-screen keyboard (nor does the book reader seem to support that anyway), and I doubt that many people will carry the dock and keyboard with them. A notebook computer makes so much more sense in that application. Since it is going to require a computer anyway, this isn’t a good educational solution.
While the device is not locked to AT&T, AT&T’s network is the only one that really lets you take advantage of the 3G radio in the 3G-equipped models. They should have offered Verizon and T-Mobile as options as well. At least the data plans aren’t too expensive.
I’m going to list multitasking a second time. A device with a screen this big shouldn’t be limited to running one app at a time. This is a major failing on Apple’s part. I really hope they fix this.

Prediction Results

So, how did I do on my predictions from last night?

Tablet (iPad)

Large iPod Touch, with emphasis on electronic book and multimedia. Pretty much correct. I didn’t predict that they would have iWork available for it (their Office-like product), but I guess they need to have some sort of justification for some business use of the device.
No e-Ink screen, uses conventional LCD. Check.
Tool for students and readers: They didn’t really focus on the educational use of the device other than to mention that textbooks will be available on it. They did make a big deal of the new iBooks software for it, making it a reader. Half credit.
WiFi & 3G connectivity. WiFi was right, 3G is available, but AT&T only. I predicted we’d see Verizon as an option, which we don’t. No carrier subsidies (or even contract). 40% right.
Priced $700-900. Actual pricing is $499 to $829 depending on storage and whether you get it with the 3G radio. So I was $200 too high on the low end, $70 too high on the high end.
Available March-April. Wi-Fi only version coming end of March, 3G version coming end of April. Bingo.
Name won’t include “i.” Wrong. I was hoping they’d abandon that. iPad is a terrible name, though, especially if you’ve seen the MadTV skit.
No stylus. Yep.

iPhone

No significant changes for the iPhone. Check.
New 3.2 version announced. Yes, but for the iPad only for now.
No 4.0 announcement. Check.
No new hardware. Check.
No announcement of coming to new carriers. Check.

Mac

No new iMacs or Mac Mini. Check.
Refresh of 17” MacBook Pro. Nope. Wrong.
Solid State Disks option for all models. Nope.

iPod

No iPod announcements. Check.

Software

iLife suite upgraded to 2010. Nope.
iWork suite upgraded to 2010. No. But announced for iPad.
MobileMe updated for tablet. No announcements made. But I still see this coming before long to allow iWork to synchronize over the air.
iTunes updated to 9.1. Nope. Or at least no announcement. I bet it will be for when the iPad is actually released.
Streaming content announcement. I predicted it wouldn’t be made now, but will be made before long. Correct on no announcement, but no score.

I told you so…

If you go back and read my July 26th post, I was pretty much dead on on what the Apple tablet device was going to be. I should have stuck with that post as my official predictions; I was closer in that post 6 months ago than I was in last night’s. I gotta quit listening to the media.

Apple announcements

2010-01-27T00:49:00.003-07:00

With all of the press and hype of tomorrow’s event, I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring and make my own predictions. Here’s my official prediction of what is happening at Wednesday’s Apple announcement.

Tablet

It seems inevitable that the tablet is coming. My guess is that it is going to be essentially a large iPod Touch, with an emphasis on being an electronic book reader and multimedia device. But it won’t have an e-Ink screen; it will be a conventional LCD with multi-touch. Apple puts too much emphasis on color for e-Ink to be an option right now. And OLED is too expensive to be an option on a device this size. (We’ll see an iPhone with OLED first.)

The focus will be as a tool for students and avid readers, with contracts being announced with major book publishers, newspapers, and magazines. Some emphasis will be on it being a business tool, but it won’t really be very well focused for that. This is going to be Apple’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle.

It will have WiFi connectivity, and an optional radio for connecting to either Verizon’s or AT&T’s 3G network. It will even be offered at a discount with carrier subsidies for anyone willing to sign a contract for data services. It will run existing iPhone applications, but only at small size until developers make the necessary upgrades to run on the larger screen.

It will be priced between $700-900 (without subsidy), and will be available in the March-April timeframe. The name won’t include the “i” we’re so used to seeing from Apple at all (they have been using that for a decade; time to move on). Any name with the word Tablet is out, as that term has a negative connotation in the computer world. Something with “Slate” is a possibility, but I’d like to think that they’re more creative than that. (Though there is some doubt in my mind based on the names of the wholly uninventive iPod “Touch” or ludicrously-named MacBook “Air.”) But the most likely candidates are ones that imply creativity, color, or artwork of some sort.

I’m about 30% confident Apple will be forced to include a stylus. If it is pushed as an artist’s tool or a notetaking device a pen of some sort is going to be required (drawing or writing with just fingers is just too inefficient and clumsy). But Steve Jobs has made it pretty clear in the past that he hates styli. So I’m leaning toward it not being an artist’s tool with no pen/stylus. He’ll tout an amazing new touch keyboard, but people who use it will find that it doesn’t work very well without tactile feedback.

iPhone

No significant changes for the iPhone here. We’ll see an announcement of a 3.2 version of its software to bring software compatibility with the tablet, but no real new significant functionality. No version 4.0 for another few months (we’ll see that announcement quietly in April/May, without a large press event).

The hardware itself will remain unchanged. And we won’t be seeing any announcement of it coming to any other carriers. That won’t come until June or July, when we’ll receive an announcement that AT&T exclusivity is ending, and the phone will be opened up to the T-Mobile network at a minimum, but probably also Verizon, though that might take a little more time to become available. Sprint won’t come until much later.

Mac

No new iMacs, or Mac Mini. But we’ll hear about a small refresh on the 17” MacBook Pro, where the Core i5 and i7 processors will become available as options soon. The 15” will be eventually offered with an i5, but not yet. All MacBook Pro models will soon be offered with Solid State Disks. Other than that, the only changes will be minor bumps in processor speed.

The Mac Pro is due for an i7 update, but I doubt this event will be where that is announced.

iPod

There will be no iPod announcements.

Software

The iLife suite will be upgraded to version 2010. iPhoto will be given a few new tools for fixing photos. iMovie will be given a lot more functionality. The other applications will receive some minor tweaks, but nothing earthshattering.

iWork will also be updated to 2010, but we won’t hear much about it. The biggest change is going to be improved integration with MobileMe.

MobileMe, on the other hand, will receive significant upgrades to support the new tablet. As the tablet is going to be a primarily internet connected device, tight integration with MobileMe will be essential. MobileMe is going to be the primary means of accessing personal data on the tablet.

iTunes will receive a minor bump (9.1) to support some new features of the tablet. We’ll hear an announcement that soon we will be able to stream our iTunes content to any computer associated with our Apple IDs courtesy of the recent acquisition of LaLa. It won’t be a subscription service where you can play any music anywhere at any time (like Zune Pass), just a way to access your iTunes purchased music from any computer associated with your Apple account. This same capability, however, will be coming in iPhone OS 4.0 (but only when connected via WiFi; AT&T won’t allow real-time streaming of music over their 3G network).

Last minute peek at the Apple tablet

2010-01-26T19:34:00.001-07:00

A leaked image of the Apple tablet device, being announced tomorrow…

You saw it here first.

19 Years Ago…

2010-01-23T20:07:00.002-07:00

Full article text available here. Click images to view larger.

Full Circle

2010-01-14T18:21:00.002-07:00

My life as a professional programmer has officially come full circle.

The first contract programming job I ever did was when I was 12… some 24 years ago (ugh… was it really that long ago?). It was a project for a law firm in Omaha, NE (where my family was living at the time) that downloaded data from a piece of equipment that logged all phone calls in and out of their office to a computer, and present that information in a usable and meaningful way. The firm had approached my dad about writing this software for them and he decided to pass the software portion of it on to me, while he took care of connecting the hardware. It wasn’t a big project; we didn’t work on it long, and it didn’t pay a lot, but it was significant in that it was the first time that I was being paid for doing some programming.

Today I’m part owner of a company that creates, sells, and supports restaurant management software. We currently have 7 people working at the company, 3 of which are dedicated to taking telephone support calls. I am responsible for putting together the software that they use for supporting customers, and within the last couple of days one of the features I added was the ability to log data about incoming and outgoing phone calls. A box in the office records the caller ID information coming in, sends it out to the network where my software receives it and logs it in a database along with the duration of the call as well as which employee took the call.

This new feature of the software is very similar to the first project I worked on professionally. They both record phone call information into a database.

Many other aspects of my current employment mirror programming experiences I had when I was younger as well. Knowing what to do with phone call data was a natural fit, because I had done it before.

The money that my dad and I were paid for that project went toward purchasing a printer for the computer we had at home. That printer was an Epson dot matrix printer (those really loud, slow ones). Today we are using Epson dot matrix printers for printing customer receipts as part of the cash register portion of our software. Many of the commands to control the receipt printers today are the same as the commands I learned to control that first printer we got nearly a quarter century ago. Learning to talk to the printers today was easy because I learned how to do it 25 years ago.

With the Point-of-Sale system we also talk to various pieces of equipment using serial ports on the register computers. In 1987 I wrote a telecommunication program whose primary focus was talking to other computers over serial ports. In 1989 I worked on a project where a computer would record data coming off of an induction pipe bending machine over a serial port. The project for the law firm also used the computer’s serial port.

There are other ways that I have seen things cycle back on themselves with our current project. It’s kind of weird to see things happen like that, especially considering the rapid pace of technological development. But at the same time the things I was doing 25 years ago (or more) were in a lot of ways preparing me in a unique way for the things I am doing today.

Now if only I can find a good multimedia programming project to work on so I can relive the stuff I made in the early 1990s.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T21:57:00.003-07:00

Merry Christmas to all of my friends, family, and blog stalkers!!!! May this be a joyous time of year, filled with wonderful memories with loved ones, and an opportunity to remember the real reason for the season.

If you do not celebrate Christmas, I wish you the best of whichever holiday you may observe.

Grizzly Humor

2009-12-13T20:39:00.001-07:00

A Russian scientist and a scientist from the Czech Republic had spent their lives studying the grizzly bear. Each year they petitioned their respective governments to allow them to go to Yellowstone to study the bears. Finally their request was granted, and they immediately flew to the park.

They reported to the ranger station but the chief ranger told them that it was the grizzly mating season and it was too dangerous to go out and study the animals. They pleaded that this was their only chance, and finally the ranger relented.

The Russian and the Czech were given portable phones and told to report in every day. For several days they called in, and then nothing was heard from the two scientists. The rangers mounted a search party and found the camp completely ravaged, with no sign of the missing men. Following the trails of a male and a female bear, they finally caught up with the female.

Fearing an international incident, they decided they must kill the animal to find out if she had eaten the scientist. They killed the female and opened the stomach to find the remains of just the Russian.

One ranger turned to the other and said, "You know what this means, don't you?"

The other ranger responded......

"I guess it means the Czech's in the male."

Deserving

2009-11-28T23:20:00.003-07:00

One of my absolute least favorite words is “deserve.” I know, it’s not a word that people frequently think of as being negative, but to me it is, and very much so. With very few exceptions, I usually cringe when I hear people say they “deserve” something.

Let me back up a bit. I believe that everything we are given in this life is a gift, either from God or from our fellow human beings. We can’t really earn anything because we aren’t guaranteed anything. If someone gives us something it is because they want to, not because they are required to do so. When someone says that they deserve something, they are ignoring that whatever they are being given is a gift, and is something to cherish.

Imagine two scenarios… If someone believes that they deserve something and they do receive it, it often results in them not being grateful for it. They believe that they have been given something of their own merit, ignoring the fact that someone has been gracious with them. We don’t look at things as gifts, but as an exchange for something we have done.

On the other hand, if someone believes that they deserve something and they don’t receive it, it leads to resentment and hate. They feel slighted that they haven’t received something they believe they should have. This not only shows a lack of gratitude, but in fact the opposite, creating negative feelings towards another.

In either case, we lose. We’re either ungrateful, or resentful. There are no good outcomes here.

To say that we deserve something also shows a lack of humility. If I were to say that I deserve more money for my job, what I am really saying is that my needs and wants are more important than those of my employer, or its other employees. I am in effect saying that I am better than everyone else there because my needs are more important than theirs. A truly humble person is grateful for everything they are given, and they don't have expectations of anything.

Feelings of deserving create a never ending cycle. If we believe we deserve something and we continue to receive it, it either escalates to belief in deserving more, or a stronger expectation the next time, and thus stronger disappointment and resentment if we don’t get what we believe is due.

The cycle can be broken, though. Once we stop believing that we deserve something we start to become grateful for anything that we do receive. We recognize and appreciate anything done for us, or anything given to us. On the flip side of the coin, if we don’t receive something, our feelings aren’t hurt, and we don’t have resentment because we aren’t expecting it. It’s a win-win situation.

If we learn to change our attitude so that we begin to look at everything we receive as a gift our lives are happier, and we treat others better. Others can see that we are grateful and are more willing to share with us. We are also then more gracious with others as well. Everybody wins.

Rechargeable Batteries

2009-11-22T00:07:00.001-07:00

One of the down sides of having lots of electronic gadgets around is trying to keep up with making sure that there are good batteries in them when they are needed. If I were to use exclusively conventional alkaline batteries I’d go broke keeping up. So I like to use rechargeable batteries anywhere it makes sense.

There are usually two problems with rechargeable batteries, though. First, most do not hold a charge very long, so they’ll likely be dead or dying if they have been left in a drawer for a long time before attempting to use them. Because of this they don’t work well in devices that use very little power, like remote controls, as the batteries naturally drain themselves long before alkalines would in the same device. Second, the predominant chemistries used for rechargeables, at 1.2 volts instead of 1.5 V, produce less power than alkalines, so many high drain devices don’t even work with conventional rechargeables.

For devices that work well with rechargeable batteries (like digital cameras) I have been using Energizer 2000-2500 mAh NiMH (Nickel Metal Hydride) batteries up until recently. They are fairly inexpensive for rechargeables, and rapid chargers are available to provide a usable charge on a battery in as little as 15 minutes. But I have been having problems with those batteries wearing out quickly to the point where they will no longer charge at all, so I started to switch to Duracell, but I have been having really bad problems with those not holding a charge longer than a few days, so I have given those up. I have been anxious to find something that worked better.

A few weeks ago I heard of a newer technology called NiZn (Nickel Zinc) that provides higher voltage and better shelf life than the more common NiCd and NiMH technologies. NiZn batteries output 1.6 Volts instead of the more conventional 1.2 Volts provided by other rechargeable batteries. This makes them usable in a lot of devices where others just won’t work. I have some 2-way radios, for example, that absolutely refuse to even power on with regular rechargeables, but they work fine with NiZn batteries. (Sparing a long technical article on why, 1.6V batteries are capable of delivering 78% more power than 1.2V batteries, and this can make a huge difference in a wide variety of devices.) NiZn batteries also don’t drain themselves as quickly as other types, so if I don’t use them much I can go significantly longer between charges. And for those looking for eco-friendly products, NiZn can be disposed of safely without harming the environment unlike the others.

So far I am really liking these batteries. My camera flashes go through batteries faster than anything else I own, and these batteries are working really well there. Conventional alkalines take around 30 seconds to fully charge my flash, NiMH models do it in about 15 seconds, and the NiZn are capable of going from fully dead to fully charged in about 10 seconds. I don’t get quite as many shots on the NiZn as I did on the high capacity Energizer NiMH I had been using, but the difference is minimal so I’m happy to make that sacrifice.

I got mine from Amazon [with regular or fast charger], but they’re probably available elsewhere as well. I still wouldn’t use them for remote controls (rechargeable alkalines are fine for that, but they are difficult to find) or other low drain devices, but they work wonderfully in devices that would otherwise go through batteries quickly. I’m pretty happy so far.

Please Pay For Your Software (and Music & Movies)

2009-10-29T15:05:00.001-06:00

Probably everybody reading this blog knows that I write software for a living. Many of you may also know that one of my pet peeves is people using software that they haven’t paid for.

The software I have been selling for the last 10+ years, FileBack PC, took me years to develop. Actual years. If I had to re-write it again, it would probably take me two full years of long (16 hr) days. That represents a huge investment of my time. Tens of thousands of hours even.

Imagine how it must feel to me to go out on the internet and find web sites that are devoted to finding ways to cheat software manufacturers by providing commercial software for free. My own software has been found on such sites. And I know that people are using them because occasionally someone who is using an obviously fraudulent unlock key has the audacity to ask me for help. It is extremely disappointing to me that people will willingly take my work without placing any value on it. It is if they are saying, “I don’t care that you spent 8 years of your life working on this, that time you spent means absolutely nothing to me. So I’m going to take it from you anyway.” These people are robbing me of my time and taking money out of my pocket by not compensating me for my efforts.

Some will justify that they would never use the software anyway, if they weren’t getting it for free. But they are still getting the benefit of having that software, which in some way is saving them their own time and effort (or they wouldn’t bother). Even with this argument, they are saying that their time has value, but mine doesn’t.

Some will justify that the software they are using is too expensive, or that the company that produces it already makes enough money and won’t be hurt by people stealing it. If it’s too expensive, find a less expensive (or free) tool to do the same thing. (Or, better yet, write their own software to do the same thing.) And if that company sold more copies of their software, they could employ more workers, or provide their employees with a better standard of living. Or create more software. Most companies aren’t interested in throwing away their money; most will re-invest it into growing the company, or their employees.

The whole “too expensive” argument is kind of funny to me. If someone were to come to me and ask me to create something like FileBack PC for them, I’d charge them about $50/hour. And it would take roughly 10,000 hours to do it. So the project would cost $50 x 10,000 = $500,000. And yet I only ask $55 for my efforts. Think how many people and how much time it took to create something like Photoshop, or Microsoft Word. Those products represent hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of hours of work by actual real people. The price the company is asking in return really isn’t so bad.

Without making this post too long, I beg you to be honest in the way you use your software. Somebody has taken time to create it. And they are asking for a small amount in return.

The same goes for music and movies. It is very expensive to create and market both. Considering the budget for most movies is multiple millions of dollars, for a movie studio to ask $20 for a copy of that effort is really kind of a bargain. Recording studio time to create a song runs well over $100/hr for the better studios, and most songs take a lot of hours to record and mix. Add marketing and distribution to that, and the $0.99 or $1.29 that music labels and artists are asking for their songs is really a bargain as well.

Tech Tip: External Hard Disk Drives

2009-10-29T14:35:00.001-06:00

If you’re thinking of buying an external hard disk drive for your computer, here are a few things to remember:

Of the different ways available to connect, USB is by far the slowest. And it slows your computer down when it is being used.

Every bit of data that goes to and from USB devices has to be handled by your computer’s CPU. This not only makes data transfer to and from your external USB hard disk drive slow, but it also slows down the rest of your computer as well. Other interfaces, like FireWire and eSATA, are able to transfer data directly to your computer’s memory without going through or waiting for the CPU, making them much faster. eSATA will be the fastest, but not very many computers have eSATA ports on them yet (especially laptops). FireWire is more common, but still not available on lower end computers. Desktop computers can have an add-in FireWire or eSATA card installed relatively inexpensively. Speed-wise, eSATA is faster than FireWire is faster than USB.
Generally speaking, bigger hard disk drives are faster than slower drives.

The size of the actual platters containing your data remains the same, so bigger disks have to pack more data into a given area than smaller ones. The more densely the data is packed, the more is read by the drive each time the platter spins a single rotation.
Generally speaking, bigger drives are more prone to failure.

Because the data is packed more densely, the net loss of any portion of the disk going bad is much more noticeable. The higher density is more sensitive to imperfections in the disk platter surface. Bigger disks also tend to use newer, and thus less time-tested, technologies.

I never buy the newest disk drives. I always wait until a drive has matured before I will consider investing.
For USB and FireWire external hard disk drives, rotation speed doesn’t affect actual performance a whole lot.

Manufacturers usually advertise the rotation speed of their drives, usually 5400 or 7200 RPM. Just because a drive is 5400 RPM doesn’t necessarily mean it is going to be a lot slower than a 7200 RPM drive. Especially if you are comparing a larger 5400 RPM drive to a smaller 7200 RPM drive (see the second principle, above.)

For FireWire and USB drives, the performance bottleneck is the drive’s connection to your computer, not the speed of rotation.
As far as power consumption and heat issues go, 5400 RPM drives are a better choice than 7200 RPM.

Drives that spin slower use less power and generate less heat. And tend to last longer.
Brand name makes some difference, but outside of purchasing an external drive marketed by one of the major manufacturers, you never know what you’re getting.

The major drive manufacturers (Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Toshiba) market drives under their own names. Other companies sell external hard disk drives, but usually use drive mechanisms from one of the big manufacturers, and there isn’t any way to know what brand of drive you’re actually getting.

I have been buying Seagate drives for years without any issues, and that is what I generally will recommend. Hitachi drives have also been good for me. My track record with Western Digital has been iffy.
External drives which plug directly into your network, allowing multiple computers to access their contents at once, do exist, and they can be convenient in some ways, but they can be difficult to setup, and they are going to be the slowest of any external drive solutions. They are called NAS devices (Network Attached Storage), and they can be a little pricey.
The happy medium between price and storage size right now is 1 TB for 3.5” drive mechanisms, and 500 GB for 2.5” mechanisms. Going much bigger than that generally demands a hefty price premium.
If a drive fails, you will lose everything on it. So it might be better to have two smaller external drives than one huge drive.
Some manufacturers are offering great warranties (some Seagate drives have a 5 year warranty!), others are just 90 days. Read the packaging closely. Every hard disk drive is going to fail someday, and even the best won’t make it much beyond 3-5 years. Having a good warranty will get you a replacement when yours dies.
Having a good warranty will allow you to get a complimentary replacement, but it won’t get your data back when a drive fails. Always store multiple copies of your data in different places.

Generally speaking, for best performance get eSATA or FireWire before getting USB. USB is available on nearly all computers, where FireWire and eSATA are not. Check to see what ports your computer has. Get a drive that is going to have sufficient storage for you for a few years, but don’t go excessively large.

Is It Really Worth It?

2009-10-20T16:10:00.003-06:00

Every once in a while I really start thinking about the time value of money, and I decided to come up with a way to figure out how much potential interest I’m losing by buying a product instead of investing that same amount for retirement. This calculator is the result.

Enter your age now, and the purchase price of something you’d like to buy. If you wish, adjust the retirement age and interest rate. Then click Calculate. And see just how much you give up by buying something now instead of saving for the future.

UPDATE: A friend pointed out to me that (1) this doesn't include inflation, and (2) 8% is too high of a rate for the default. My response: (1) no, it doesn't include inflation; but inflation doesn't change the amount of money at the end of the investment period, just its value; so a calculator like this is still accurate. I added a field to show what that dollar amount is worth in today's dollars. (2) 8% is quite achievable in long term investment accounts like those for retirement, which is what I was illustrating here. If you are investing in money market or savings accounts, the interest rate will be drastically lower.

Trip Summary

2009-10-16T01:29:00.001-06:00

I just got back from a long trip…

Duration: 14 days
Days spent driving: 6
Nights in hotels: 10
Saved by using priceline.com for hotels: $404

Friends seen: Brian, Jess, Dale & Katie
Friends I attempted to see: lots more
Other friends connected with: Mark
Family seen: Mom & Dad

Number of Point-of-Sale systems installed: 2
Number of computers installed: 8
Number of man-hours spent installing at each store: about 12
Number of hours spent supervising and training employees: 10

Number of electronic gadgets acquired: 1 (HTC Touch Pro 2 cell phone, 32GB iPod Touch given to Brian for his help with POS installations)
Number of electronic gadgets that died: 2 (80GB Zune, Dash Express GPS)
Repairs to Truck: New brake light switch to repair failing brake lights

Number of miles driven: 3136.0
Gallons of fuel purchased: 141.151
Highest MPG on one tank: 25.993 (75 MPH freeway + 65 MPH highway in NM)
Lowest MPG on one tank: 19.924 (70 MPH freeway in OK, KS… dang oxygenated fuel!)
Average MPG Overall: 22.217
Average Fuel Per Gallon: $2.437
Tolls Paid: $8.90

Weather…
Every day but the last two were overcast, with some mist and rain. The last day was the most varied, with snow, rain, cold, hot, and dry all within a couple hundred miles.

Audiobooks: C.S. Lewis’ “The Problem of Pain,” Jeffrey R. Holland’s “Christ and the New Covenant.”

Highs: Getting to stay with my parents for a few days, seeing Jess for a couple days, hanging out with Brian when POS installations permitted, getting a new cell phone, playing with the computer I learned to program on in the early-to-mid 1980s.

Lows: GPS and Zune dying, staying up all night for POS installation, crawling around in ceilings with fiberglass insulation.

This is what a typical register looks like when we do an installation.
That’s my software running on the computer. Most stores have 3-4 like this,
plus a server computer. I installed 6 registers, two servers, and two
LCD monitors at the make line.

This is Brian. We went to High School together, and have kept in contact since.
He drove up from Houston and helped me with the installation.
Without his help I would have been in trouble. I wish I got a picture of his Corvette.

Me with Jess. I spent Friday evening, Saturday afternoon,
and part of Sunday with her in Denton, TX.

On Monday night my parents took me to Braum’s for ice cream. I got a Strawberry Shortcake Sundae. It was excellent. But we were surprised by how much inflation has affected the price of the food there. Actually, it got worse after this picture was taken. The next day, instead of $29, the same meal was $299.

I, unfortunately, didn’t get any pictures of my parents while I was there. Or any part of the drive home for that matter, even though I saw some beautiful scenery. But the drive was already long enough, and I didn’t really want to make it a lot longer by stopping every few minutes for pictures. Some other trip when I don’t have pressing tasks waiting for my attention.

UnitY

2009-10-02T11:28:00.002-06:00

My cousin Colleen’s husband Jim drew and posted this on their blog, and I thought it was rather clever…

“I’m sick of everyone fighting about football. Let’s stop being jerks to each other.”

Zune HD vs iPod Touch

2009-09-18T19:11:00.001-06:00

Just a relatively quick comparison between my Zune HD and the iPod Touch (2nd gen). More information to follow sometime later.

The OLED screen on the Zune HD is amazing. It is quite bright, and very vibrant. When I held my ZHD up to my Touch, the display on the Touch looked, well, pathetic. It hadn't ever been so obvious how much backlight seeps through until I compared it to a device without a backlight. And as a result of the backlight, colors on the iPod look very washed out and poorly rendered when compared to to the Zune. One quick photo to compare below… The original is on the left, Zune HD’s rendering in the middle, and iPod Touch on the right.

I played with the camera settings to get a better image from the Touch, and I couldn’t do it. Its display just isn’t very good. I’ll be posting more pictures later.
Brightness on the OLED is NOT a problem. At equivalent brightness levels (the Zune only has Low, Mid, and High to choose from) the Zune's display is at least as bright as the iPod's. The real plus side for the Zune is that picture quality doesn’t deteriorate at lower brightness levels like it does on LCD. So you can comfortably use the Low setting and it doesn’t detract from the experience.

In direct sunlight the Zune is a bit harder to see. But the difference wasn’t huge, and who attempts to use their device with sunlight falling right on it?
I have been trying for several days to take a picture that shows a decent comparison shot. But none come out quite right. The white balance of the two displays is quite different (ZHD tracks in at D6500, while the iPod Touch is closer to D5000), so either the iPod's display looks yellow, or the Zune's display looks blue when they are in the same shot. And for some reason the Zune's display shows up a little bit blurry in pictures, which I can't explain. When you see the display IRL it is extremely crisp and sharp.
The Apps on the Zune don't even begin to compare to those on the iPod Touch. iPod wins hands down here. Microsoft promises more apps later, and they will be free, but they’ll never catch up to where the iPod Touch/iPhone App Store is.
The browser on the Zune is better than expected. It is a hair sluggish while a page is loading, but once the page is loading the Zune zooms and pans a lot faster than the iPod. Page rendering is fine, but it seems like a substantial number of web sites are serving up their mobile version to the Zune where they serve the full version to the iPod, so direct comparisons aren't really possible. On sites that serve the full version, though, the Zune page rendering seems fine. One obvious lacking on the Zune is that only one page can be open at a time. It doesn't attempt to mimic the multi-page capability of the Touch.
The user interface on the Zune is much snappier and responsive than that of the iPod Touch. Where the iPod is rendering page transitions at roughly 10 frames per second, the Zune is easily doing 30 fps or more. Scrolling on the Zune is also at least 30 fps, where the iPod is less. The iPod Touch never really felt at all sluggish to me until I compared it to the Zune's interface.
The experience of listening to music on the Zune is WAY better than the iPod Touch. Between having a more logical and flexible layout of the menu structure for finding music, and the additional features that MS has added to link between artists and provide information (and photos) about the artists in your collection, the Zune provides a much more pleasing experience. And these features are available without the Zune Pass subscription. If you add the Zune Pass subscription, the Zune leaps further ahead because you can not only download but stream any of the music in the Zune catalog in real time. So any track is available at any time so long as you have access to WiFi. And the Zune's Channels feature is a lot cooler than I had eve anticipated. It not only makes music suggestions, but it actually downloads the recommended songs directly to the device automatically so they can play anywhere even without WiFi. Apple ought to be taking notes here.

I’ll be doing a full video or blog post about this. The Zune HD changes the way you experience music.
Video playback on the Zune is better primarily because of the better screen. It also does a better job of organizing your video collection, because you can manually tag video files as being movies, TV shows, music videos, or other. iTunes doesn't let you do that on your own; the only things tagged this way are the ones you download from the iTunes store. Letting the user catalog their own collection makes it much easier to find your way around.
The Zune's battery capacity is technically lower than that of the iPod, but it seems to be better at managing it. After two hours of watching video my iPod Touch is dead (my unit could be an anomaly, but it doesn't seem to be). I watched more than 4 hours of video on the Zune HD and the battery meter hadn't fallen past half yet.
The HD radio is cool, but I have a hard time picking up the HD feeds in my basement. Then again, I can't pick up stereo in my basement on any radio either. When I take the device upstairs or outside, the HD kicks in, and it is definitely clearer than the analog transmission. The primary benefit here is that all static goes away and you get a clean signal, and higher frequencies are much better reproduced in the digital feed.
One feature on the Zune I find particularly useful is the WiFi syncing. It is very convenient to be able to click three buttons and have the device connect and download updated podcasts, music, and video from anywhere in the house.
Another thing I noticed is that the Zune software automatically picks up on changes in files in the music and video folders, and reflects them in the software automatically and virtually instantly. So as I was moving files in and out of my music folders the tracks would instantly appear and/or disappear. It has always bugged me that iTunes doesn't automatically pick up on music or videos that I add to my folders.
As demonstrated in my last blog post, the iPod Touch seems to have some issues with sound quality. The Zune did much better in testing.
The Zune desktop software is also significantly snapper than iTunes on Windows. And I think I like the design and interface better. With its polished interface, it is certainly snazzier and more refined. iTunes looks relatively dated at this point.

Complaints

My biggest complaint is mostly with touch-based devices in general, and isn’t specific to the Zune HD. And honestly it is something that I’m surprised we don’t see talked about. It’s the lack of physical buttons for navigating through music tracks.

Recently we have had the dangers of text messaging while driving crammed down our throats, and it surprises me that some of this hasn’t spilled over into other areas. Attempting to operate a touch-screen music player while driving is just as dangerous. In order to control the device you have to take your eyes off of the road for significant amounts of time. And many operations on both the Zune HD and the iPod Touch require two hands to perform effectively. Just adding two buttons for changing tracks would be huge in attempting to fix this problem. But the current trend is to move away from buttons, and I believe this is a mistake. I’m not asking for a device with 47 buttons for every possible function, but there really ought to be dedicated buttons for the most basic functions of the device.

I took my Zune HD with me the day I got it when I went out running a few errands. I found that it was extremely inconvenient and potentially dangerous to do even the most basic of tasks. This isn’t limited to the Zune, either; it is a problem with every touch-screen based music player, whether it be the Zune, iPod Touch, or iPhone. It’s enough of a problem that I must publicly shun anybody that operates one of these devices while behind the wheel. It’s dangerous, and it shouldn’t be done. Apple and Microsoft both really need to rethink their designs a bit to make these devices a little more friendly to situations where full attention can’t be given to their operation.

As a result of this, I will continue using my previous Zunes in my truck. The Zune HD will probably become my primary travelling device, but not the PMP that gets used the most.

Wrap-up

So to summarize, when comparing the Zune and iPod Touch, people looking for a device primarily for music and video, the Zune will provide a much richer and more interactive experience. For people looking to take advantage of the App Store, the iPod Touch can't be touched (hardy, har, har). So if you’re buying to listen to music, I recommend the Zune. If you’re buying for the App Store, the Touch is the only way to go. For web browsing, the iPod has a bit of an edge, but it isn't much. Both will provide a similar experience there.

If someone already has a significant amount of DRM protected content from the iTunes store that they want to keep, there is probably no reason to consider the Zune (though they need to get out from under the thumb of the music industry). But if someone doesn't care much about the App Store and their main focus is music and video, the Zune HD provides a significantly better experience for both. Since the Zune can play all of the file formats supported by the iPods (plus more), switching from the iPod to Zune isn't too painful, and it’s a switch that I bet a lot of people would be thankful to have made later on.

MP3 Player Performance

2009-09-18T02:24:00.001-06:00

I purchased a Zune HD earlier this week and I intend to fully review the device here on this blog over the next little while. So this is the first of several posts with my findings and thoughts on the device. This first one represents the technical findings of how the Zune HD compares with other common MP3 players.

So as part of that I’m going to try to explain a little bit about the technology behind why a particular MP3 player sounds good or bad, beyond the technical specifications given by the manufacturer.

This post will be a little techie in nature, but I’m going to try to break the technological jargon down into such a way that anyone can understand it should they so desire. I think it’s important to put some of this information out there, as there are a lot of misconceptions about which players have the best sound quality.

For this test I included all of the players I have at my disposal. If someone would like me to test another player, I’d be happy to do so, as long as you are willing to loan it to me for a couple of days.

The players I have included in this test are an iPod Classic (80GB), iPod Touch (2nd Generation), Zune 8GB (flash-memory based), Zune 80GB (hard disk drive), and the brand-new Zune HD introduced this week (flash memory).

Frequency Response

The frequency response of a player is a measurement of how equally produces different frequencies of audio across the audible frequency range. It is expressed in terms of a frequency range (usually 20 Hz to 20 kHz, the typical range of human hearing) and the response (expressed in +/- decibels).

Decibels are a bit of a tricky thing to understand. They are logarithmic in nature, so a 3dB change doesn’t sound like 1/3 of a 10dB change. In terms of human hearing, a 10 dB change represents a perceived doubling of volume, and since dB are logarithmic, 20 dB is perceived as twice as loud as that. The smallest change that an untrained ear can detect is generally about 2-3 dB. (3 dB is considered “barely perceptible, while 5 dB is “clearly noticeable.”)

In practical terms, frequency response is manifested as a difference in volume between different notes. If a middle C is heard at 80 dB, but a C in the next higher octave is heard at 76 dB, there is a 4 dB difference in volume between the two. This is a difference that would be heard, but would not seem particularly significant. In an ideal world frequency response would be +/- 0 dB over 20 Hz to 20 kHz. So when measuring the output of a device, the volume level wouldn’t change by any more than 0 dB over that entire range of frequencies. Fortunately, most electronics these days are able to deliver something very close to that.

In fact, all of the devices I tested were within +/- 0.5 dB over the entire 20-20 range. The Zune HD was the only one with an actual measurable variation in its response, dropping 0.5 dB between 17 kHz and 20 kHz. But considering that (A) this range is at the highest frequency range of human hearing and that even the most highly trained ears just aren’t very sensitive to it, and (B) the change is only 0.5 dB so very few people would even be able to pick up on it, this is essentially negligible, and the end result is that all players do extremely well in this area, at least in lab tests. The Apple devices, on the other hand, while generally flat, did exhibit a very slight exaggeration of frequencies above 10 kHz, but the numbers didn’t show this as something that anyone would be able to detect audibly. As far as I am concerned, all of the devices tested do extremely well, with extremely little difference between them.

Harmonics

Before I post too much on the results of testing, I need to explain harmonics a little bit.

For each note on the scale, and every sound that we hear, there is a fundamental (primary) frequency, and harmonic frequencies that define the sonic character of the sound. The first defined harmonic is the second harmonic. It is a sound produced at exactly twice the frequency of the fundamental. The 3rd harmonic is at three times the original frequency, and so on.

A piano sounds different than a guitar playing the same note primarily because of the different harmonics of the two instruments. Different instruments emphasize the different harmonics differently.

The relationship between fundamental frequencies and harmonics is, well, complicated. But there are a few general rules:

Fundamental frequency defines the frequency (note) that we hear, such as a middle C.
Even numbered harmonics (2, 4, 6 times the original frequency) are generally considered pleasing.
Odd numbered harmonics (3, 5, 7 times the original frequency) are generally considered to be harsh

In terms that musicians will understand, take a look at the harmonic frequencies created based on a fundamental, in this case a C2.

Harmonics Based on a C2 Fundamental
Even Harmonics		Odd Harmonics
Harmonic	Equivalent Note	Harmonic	Equivalent Note
2nd	C3	3rd	G3
4th	C4	5th	Between Eb4, E4
6th	G4	7th	Between A4, Bb4
8th	C5	9th	D5
10th	Between Eb5, E5	11th	Between F5, Gb5

So if you play a C2 on an instrument with a strong 3rd harmonic, a substantial portion of what you hear is the same frequency as a G3. If you are playing something in a major key (C2 in this example) and the most common chord is the I (C) chord, this might not be too bad because one of the notes of that chord is probably a G2. The harmonic actually creates some degree of harmony with the chord being played. In the case of the I chord, even the 5th harmonic isn’t too awful, as it falls near an E, also a note in that chord. But when you move to another chord like ii, iii, IV, V, or vi, these odd numbered harmonics start to clash with the chord being played. The IV chord, for example, is made up of F, A, and C. Adding the 3rd harmonic of the C (a G) clashes pretty badly with the F and A.

Even numbered harmonics, on the other hand, tend to fall at octave intervals. In fact, the 2X and 4X harmonics fall directly at the next higher two octave intervals. So they tend to sound pleasing. An instrument with strong even harmonics will be pleasing and easy to listen to.

In terms of electronics, though, harmonics are difficult to avoid, particularly when it comes to digital devices. Most inexpensive digital devices have trouble reproducing recorded sounds without adding harmonics, especially the undesirable odd harmonics, just as part of their very nature. This is one of the reasons that digital doesn’t sound as warm and friendly as old analog recordings, like tapes and records. Digital devices “like” to produce the ugly odd harmonics, and it can be difficult to bring them under control. It can be done, but it is expensive to design and build electronics that avoid this problem.

With that said, each device manufacturer has to make a compromise between affordability and high quality sound output. Different devices fall at different places on this scale, and this is what this post is about. With that, it’s time to introduce the test results.

What I did here was to create a file that plays all frequencies from 20 Hz to 20 kHz at equal level. I then played that file on each of the devices I tested, using the best possible audio file the device would support. The diagonal yellow line for each device indicates fidelity compared to the original signal, and anything else in the image (purple) is additional, unwanted sound added by a device.

The first block is the original, unaltered file, to show what the output of an absolutely perfect device would look like. A perfect device would output the original recording exactly as it had been created. No such device really exists, but this block shows what it would look like if it did.

The second block is the Control. This shows the response of the sound device I used in testing, which is an $800 sound card device I use for recording in my studio. It adds just a hair of background noise (hiss), in the form of the general purple background. It also adds a bit of 3rd order harmonic, seen as a faint line sloping upward above the yellow line. You can also see reflections of that harmonic as lines that alternate downward and upward starting below the “ro” in the word Control. These are artifacts introduced by the audio capture hardware, and generally would not actually be heard when listening to the output. As long as the reflections remain faint lines, they can be ignored as they do not represent the output of any given device.

The next block is the output of the brand-new Zune HD released this week. It adds a little bit more 3rd order harmonic than my sound card, but it is generally very faint as well. A 5th order harmonic is also faintly visible. Beyond that no detectable harmonics are being added. I was actually pleasantly surprised how well the device did, considering the relatively low cost of the Zune hardware, especially when compared to the Control device.

The 4th block is a little bit troubling to me. It represents the output if the iPod Touch (2nd generation). Not only does it output quite a bit of noise (hiss), represented by the bright purple background, its 3rd and 5th harmonics are very prevalent as well. In real world terms this means that the player sounds not only noisy (again, bright purple background), but harsh (bright purple lines). Output of the iPod Touch was disappointing, and definitely subpar for a modern music player. It was also hard to test, as it was difficult to find a proper balance between optimal volume with the least background noise, and the least distortion manifested in the form of those evil odd harmonics. The more I turned it up the more prevalent the brighter the harmonic lines became, but when I turned it down the background noise level increased relative to the test signal. What you see here is the best balance I could get out of the device, with the volume level at about the 67% point. (All other devices could be tested at maximum volume.)

The next two blocks represent my other Zunes, the 80GB hard-drive and 8GB flash memory-based players, respectively. These two devices supposedly use the same audio hardware, and leaked information about the Zune HD indicated that it used the same audio yet again, and the test results seem to confirm that. Performance on these two Zunes was quite good, differing only in the frequency response from the HD model.

The last block is the output of the iPod Classic. It is generally pretty good as well. Compared to the Zunes, it adds a measurable amount of 2nd order and 4th order harmonics, with similar amounts of 3rd order harmonics. In an absolutely ideal world, a device shouldn’t add any harmonics at all, but if it has to, it is going to sound better if they are even rather than odd. The odd harmonics on the Classic are stronger than the even harmonics, but neither are out of control. The measurable amount of even harmonics may make the device sound “warmer” than other players, though technically speaking this isn’t “accurate” or faithful to the original recording.

Overall most devices did pretty well on this test. The notable exception is the iPod Touch, which was generally quite noisy and added what I consider to be unacceptable amounts of distortion in the form of the unpleasing odd harmonics. In the real world this means that the iPod Touch sounds more harsh and grating than the other players. The distortion and noise levels were high enough that they would be audible in A/B testing with any of the other devices.

While the consistency of performance across Zune devices was predictable, the inconsistency between the two iPods was not expected. There has been a rumor that over the years Apple has made more and more compromises on the audio hardware in their iPods with each passing generation, and the results of this test seem to confirm that this may be true, as the older Classic had considerably better performance than the newer iPod Touch.

Many sites on the Internet have praised the Zune for its generally high audio quality, and shunned the iPod line for its poor audio quality with respect to other devices on the market. While these reputations may be at least partially true, the actual difference between the two isn’t that significant, with the notable exception of the Touch, whose performance was actually disappointing. But for the most part the performance on the iPod Classic was fine, nearly equaling that of the Zunes, at least in the areas of background noise and harmonic distortion.

Distortion Under Load

The above test was taken with essentially no load on the players. Which means that they weren’t having to work in order to push the little speakers in a pair of earphones or headphones. So the numbers really represent an ideal situation, where the connected headphone doesn’t introduce a “load” on the player. But I thought that to be totally idealistic, so I decided to test under the most brutal of all conditions, with the players turned up to the maximum volume with acceptable amounts of distortion with an inefficient pair of headphones attached. While the previous test represents the best test case scenario, this test represents the worst.

This start to get a little more interesting here. The performance of the devices starts to diverge a little bit.

The Zunes introduced a great deal more distortion at maximum volume than they did with no load attached. (The distortion level on the iPods didn’t change a whole lot.) What is even more interesting to me, though, is the amount of distortion found in the Zunes in even harmonics. That generally isn’t seen in electronics quite like this. It is entirely possible that it was actually the headphones creating these distortion lines, as they, as mechanical devices, would be more likely to produce even harmonics. But I don’t have any way to measure that, so it will have to be left at conjecture rather than observed phenomenon.

Generally speaking, though, I did notice some trends. It looks like Microsoft allows the Zunes to be driven more into volume levels where distortion would be introduced than Apple did with the iPods. Apple was a little more conservative in the design of the player. Apple essentially designed more headroom into the iPods.

With that said, though, the volume levels being used for this particular test would be excessive and even dangerous for anyone’s ears for any sort of listening beyond very short bursts. The players should never be turned up to this level in the real world, lest hearing damage occur. At more acceptable levels, the amount of distortion on all players, both Zune and iPod, began to resemble the previous test much more closely. In the end, while this test for distortion at maximum load was interesting, it ends up not being meaningful. In truth, the previous no-load test much better represented how devices will actually sound at healthy listening volumes. So interesting to look at, yes. Meaningful or significant, no.

What does it all mean?

In short, aside from the iPod Touch, any of the tested devices will be capable of delivering pretty high quality audio. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend any of the Zunes, or the iPod Classic to anyone worried about sound quality. The differences are barely measurable, let alone audible.

The iPod Touch, on the other hand, is another case entirely. Not only is it excessively noisy, it adds what I would consider unacceptable amounts of unpleasing distortion to the audio signal, at least for a modern device. Its performance would have been acceptable (or even “good”) just ten years ago, but it doesn’t meet the expectations I would have for a piece of consumer electronics in 2009. It is too easy and too cheap to produce high quality audio these days for Apple to have let this slip.

When it boils down to it, I believe that it was probably a financial decision on their part. While higher quality audio electronics probably would have only cost an additional couple dollars per unit, when you consider how many million of these things Apple has sold, that few dollars adds up to quite a lot of money in the end. It would have been nice if Apple had put more emphasis on sound quality than the bottom line. They would have had a better product.

With that out on the table, though, I’m sure that most people aren’t interested enough in sound quality to even care that compromises have been made. Most people are content enough with the downright awful earphones that Apple ships with iPods (to the detriment of their ears), so why would they care about the sound quality of the device? For those that do care, though, the Touch is probably better avoided, while the other players would probably be just fine.

You have a degree… really?

2009-09-12T21:51:00.001-06:00

I just saw a TV show in which a girl with an audio engineering degree (fairly recent graduate) admit indirectly that she doesn’t know a thing about her major. She was explaining that she can’t figure out how to make her voice sound good when she is recording because it is always too quiet, and that it is full of pops when she speaks words with “Ps” or “Bs.”

The answers to both problems are very simple… rudimentary even. Put a popper stopper on the microphone to prevent the pops (or move it off to one side instead of straight on), and use a compressor to handle volume levels. These are the sorts of things that are taught in the very first classes on audio… When I had my recording studio class in college (an introductory class aimed at musicians, not budding audio engineers) we were taught both concepts very clearly and very early on. And we were definitely tested on them over and over again. If we didn’t understand those concepts we couldn’t have passed the class.

For someone with a degree in audio engineering to not know how to use a popper stopper or a compressor is embarrassing. It is sort of like an Art major not knowing what a brush is. Or a Computer Science major not knowing about the Internet. Or an English major not understanding the difference between a noun and a verb. Or a Biology major not knowing about DNA. Begin to get the idea?

These are both ideas that I have taught to everyone who has ever come into my studio to record. They all understand it on the very first day. How does someone study for a major for 4 years and not get it?

So it really makes me wonder how she got her degree. Or, even worse… why is her school giving out degrees to people who don’t understand the fundamental concepts of their major? Is a college credible if it gives out degrees to people who clearly don’t know anything about their field of study? It’s kind of scary that it can happen at all.

Freaky

2009-09-11T20:46:00.001-06:00

I just picked up The Princess Bride on Blu-ray this week, and noticed something odd about the title… here’s the cover, both right side up and upside down… It’s pretty cool…

Mileage

2009-08-26T19:46:00.001-06:00

As I was pulling into my driveway tonight I noticed a significant number on the odometer of my Ridgeline…

No, I’m not referring to the 93 degrees (which was the temperature inside my garage… ugh). I was referring to the mileage. I have had the truck 4 years and 14 days, so 30,000 miles isn’t too bad. Especially considering it has been to:

Los Angeles: 3 times (4000 mi)
Houston: 1 time (3800 mi)
Las Vegas: 2 times (1600 mi)
The SLC Airport: about once per month on average (4400 mi)

Excluding those trips I drive, on average, 4050 miles per year, or 337.5 miles per month. Lately it has been lower, as even including many airport trips and a Vegas trip I’ve only done 4000 miles in the last year.

Fortunately doing so little driving means I only have to fill up the gas tank about once per month. Not too bad, I’d say.

Apple Tablet!

2009-08-20T20:03:00.003-06:00

I have an old college buddy that went to work for Apple shortly after graduating from the Computer Science program we were in together. A few weeks ago he left on less than friendly terms. We recently engaged in a conversation about a project he had been working on prior to his departure. He agreed to tell me a few things about the project, as long as I didn’t reveal his name or exactly when he left the company.

The device seems to match up with what tech journalists are calling the Apple Tablet, or as it is being referred to recently, the Apple iPad. Here’s some of what he has told me:

Dimensions: 11.75” x 8.5”, only 1/2” thin. (About the same thickness as the 2G iPod Touch.)
Weight: 24.1 oz.
Runs neither the desktop version of OS X, nor the iPhone version; it uses a brand-new, previously unseen operating system.
Supports both multi-touch finger and pen interfaces.
Supports multitasking via a new multi-page, multi-tab interface.
Every application supports both vertical (portrait) and horizontal (landscape) orientations.
Has an innovative visual search technology, said to be based on Cover Flow.
Uses a new edge-to-edge “unbreakable” display technology that is more closely related to the “E Ink” display of the Amazon Kindle than LCD or OLED, but with color. The display does not use any power to maintain state, much like the Kindle.
eBook capabilities are set to be competitive with the Kindle.
When using the pen, it features a technology that allows both text and graphics to be included anywhere in any document.
Incredible battery life.
It’s wireless.
It is supposed to be very easy to share data with colleagues.
Made of all recyclable materials.
Supports standard handwriting as well as a new iShorthand that is supposed to be fast enough to enter text at dictation speeds.
Unlike the iPhone, applications do not need to go through an approval process to be used on the device.
Multiple varieties will be available.
Comes in multiple colors, but it seems white will be the most common. Optional binder-style case available.
Targets two demographics: college students with educational discounts, and business users with bulk licensing.

[He gave me one blurry photo, which is available here, at least for now…]

It sounds intriguing, but we’ll have to wait and see. I’m glad they have learned a few lessons from the iPhone, with applications not being subject to an approval process, and the “unbreakable” display.

At this point he told me that product release is “imminent.”

Cool setup for taking pictures

2009-08-13T00:48:00.001-06:00

I have started using a set of 3 devices that really make the process of taking pictures very cool.

Canon PowerShot SD960 IS (really, any camera that uses SD memory cards would work here

Eye-Fi SD/WiFi card

Verizon MiFi2200

This combination lets me do some cool things.

Using the Eye-Fi card in combination with the Verizon MiFi is pretty slick. The Eye-Fi card has a Wi-Fi radio and it can be configured to connect to the Internet via the Verizon MiFi. This means that I can:

Automatically transfer pictures to my computer without removing the memory card from the camera, or plugging it in via a USB cable, even when my computer is not nearby.
Automatically upload pictures to a photo sharing site on the Internet from anywhere Verizon has coverage.
Geotag photos to record the location they are taken.

The Eye-Fi card transfers pictures automatically whenever it has a WiFi connection, so if I carry my Verizon MiFi with me in my back pocket as I take pictures, those pictures are totally automatically and silently uploaded to the internet and down to my computer as I am taking them. I don’t have to do anything to make it happen; it all happens in the background. I can be anywhere that Verizon has coverage and my pictures will be waiting for me on my computer even before I get home.

The Eye-Fi also supports the major photo sharing sites out there. So when I want to I can log into my account and tell the Eye-Fi servers which site I want use for storing pictures, and the pictures are automatically uploaded to that site in real time. I don’t have to transfer them to a computer first; as long as I’m in Verizon’s coverage area the photos will automagically appear on my choice of web site.

The Eye-Fi card also supports Geotagging, so the physical location of each picture is recorded automatically.

Besides all of this cool functionality, I like saying that I connect my Eye-Fi to MiFi over Wi-Fi.

Now if only I had the Eye-Fi Pro card, which supports the RAW images that I take on my DSLR camera... Add one more thing to the wish list.

Cleaning an HDTV Screen

2009-08-06T20:39:00.001-06:00

Over time our fancy HDTVs tend to collect streaks, fingerprints, and even dust. We’re all tempted to use glass cleaner to clean the screens, but because of the unique coatings on the display glass, glass cleaner can damage the screen.

We also need to be careful about the cloth used to clean the screen. Paper towels, for example, are really made of small bits of wood fibers, and they will permanently scratch the display. Household towels contain a large amount of lint that can also do damage to the glass.

So what should you use?

For the cloth, pick something made of a microfiber. And preferably brand new, or at a minimum one that has been washed with nothing but other microfiber cloths.

For the cleaning solution, use a 50/50 mix of rubbing alcohol and distilled water. Do not use tap or filtered water; both contain minerals that will be left behind on your screen. And I’d have to recommend avoid using anything else, including electronics cleaning products. Few are designed to be safe for HDTV coatings.

When cleaning, don’t apply a lot of pressure. If something on the screen is reluctant to come off it’s better to make multiple passes than to rub vigorously.

To keep it clean, try not to touch the screen. And remind others to do the same. Fingerprints are very distracting on TV screens, and can be hard to remove.

Verizon MiFi = Freaking Awesome

2009-08-05T17:45:00.001-06:00

I have been in Lubbock, TX this last week troubleshooting some computer problems in a pizza restaurant there. It went very smoothly overall, and a lot of that has to do with a new toy/tool I picked up at the beginning of my trip… the Verizon MiFi2200 3G router.

I’m going to assume that anyone reading this isn’t already familiar with the device. It is not only new, but a new kind of product we hadn’t even seen at all prior to about May of this year, so I can’t expect that anyone outside the most tech savvy people will be familiar with this type of device. Essentially it is a wireless Wi-Fi router that uses Verizon’s 3G network to provide Internet access for up to 5 devices simultaneously. Since it uses Wi-Fi it doesn’t require that any software be installed on the computers that connect. It just shows up as a wireless network. Any device that has Wi-Fi, whether it be a laptop computer, cell phone, Zune or other WiFi-enabled MP3 player like an iPod Touch can get on the Internet quickly by connecting to the MiFi’s Wi-Fi network. With the ability to connect any 5 devices simultaneously, sharing Internet with family or friends becomes possible as well.

The device itself is very small. Tiny, in fact. It is exactly the same size as a stack of 8 credit cards, so it easily fits in a pocket. Or easily left in a backpack without even noticing that it is there. It’s quite light as well, weighing just a few ounces.

More than half of the volume of the device is for its battery. And since it is battery powered, it doesn’t have to be plugged into anything at all for operation. Just press the (only) button to turn it on, and it automatically connects to Verizon’s 3G network and enables its built-in access point. From there, all you have to do from a computer is connect to its WiFi network and you’re online. If that computer is setup to automatically use the MiFi’s network it all happens without any additional button clcking. Very easy, very slick.

The Wi-Fi router has WPA/TKIP security turned on by default, and the SSID (access point name) and security key are printed on the bottom of the MiFi for easy access. It also supports WEP (yuck) and WPA2/AES, so all flavors of 802.11b and 802.11g are supported. The SSID and security key are both customizable. It also offers many of the other options you expect to find in modern Wi-Fi routers.

This is not my first mobile Internet access device. I have had several over the years. In addition to tethering from my cell phone for the last 3 years, I have also purchased a T-Mobile EDGE PC Card and Cricket USB modem. T-Mobile’s EDGE has worked well aside from the relatively slow speeds compared to those of 3G networks, but I have been on a plan that allows unlimited data for just $20 per month, so I haven’t cared much. In most areas T-Mobile’s EDGE is a lot faster than AT&T’s (220-250 kbps downstream has been typical), so it has been quite usable. In the right geographical areas it actually feels fairly snappy. But tethering is a little inconvenient compared to a USB device, so I picked up the Cricket USB 3G modem a few months ago. It has worked pretty well, but Cricket’s network covers a pretty small area compared to other carriers. When I arrived in Lubbock this last week I knew that Cricket would not be available so I borrowed an AT&T 3G card, but its reliability and performance were disappointing at best. So I picked up the Verizon MiFi about a week ago and I have loved it.

Setup would have been a breeze if the first one I got actually worked. It powered on, but didn’t show up at all in my Device Manager when connected to my laptop. A quick phone call to Verizon’s tech support confirmed my suspicions that I had gotten a bad one, but one more trip to the Verizon store and a swap with another resolved that problem. Once I plugged in the second one it showed up as a CD-ROM drive on my computer with the setup software. Once installed and launched, a click on the Activate option got it up and running. It only took a few minutes from start to finish. It would have been nice to not have to go through the activation process, but considering how easy it was, it isn’t much of a hurdle.

It has been so incredibly easy to use and reliable that during the 2nd half of my trip I gave up using my hotel’s Internet access entirely in favor of access via the MiFi. The connection in my hotel was fast, but went down fairly consistently. I happily gave up the higher speed in favor of something that just worked reliably, and the MiFi and Verizon’s 3G network did not disappoint. It just worked everywhere I went.

So far performance has been excellent. Below is an actual speed test for the device I performed just prior to starting this blog post. The download speed is actually faster than my Internet connection at home, though the higher latency (ping time) makes general web browsing feel noticeably slower. Upload speeds are quite good for a mobile device (cable modems, for example, usually max out around 0.38 Mbps), though much slower than my connection at home. Upload speeds really aren’t very important in a mobile environment, though, so I can’t knock it too much. I don’t believe that this should be considered as someone’s sole Internet connection, but it sure makes a great mobile alternative.

I haven’t really tested its Wi-Fi signal range, but I have read online that it is good to about 30 feet. Plenty for its intended purpose. In most cases it will probably be sitting just a few feet away.

The device, as great as it is, isn’t quite perfect. Because of its small size the battery isn’t very large, and as a result about 5 hours is the maximum anyone can ever expect to get out of it before needing to plug in. Fortunately, though, it can be charged using an included USB cable. I found the battery to drain faster than the quoted rate, but a lot of that is due to the fact that I’m a heavier user than most will be. The more data transferred the shorter the battery life will be, so I expect shorter run times. As always, YMMV.

It takes around 12 hours to charge via USB, but that same USB connection also provides Internet access for the connected computer while plugged in. Unfortunately, plugging into a computer via USB also disables the Wi-Fi radio so ONLY the connected device will have access to the Internet. This is not true of the AC power adapter, however, which both charges the device and allows the Wi-Fi router to remain active. Charge time is reduced to 7-8 hours via the AC adapter, but that is still a long time. (One down side is that while being charged the device is always powered on.) It would be nice if the charge time was less than (or at least the same as) its battery life, but I guess I won’t complain too much. How often will I need 5 hours of Internet access in one sitting while mobile anyway? And being able to use the device via USB makes the battery life limitation seem a lot less confining. It also has a mode that emulates a USB network adapter, so unlike many mobile devices I don’t have to manually dial a connection to get online when plugged into USB; just plugging it in gets me connected to not only the Internet but also my home network via VPN all automatically.

The other big complaint is with the wireless access plan that Verizon offers. At $60/month it is the same as the other major wireless carriers, but it still seems a bit too high for just 5 GB of data. I would be a much happier customer if that rate were cut in half. Verizon offers less expensive plans (a monthly plan offering 250MB for $40, or an on-demand plan at $15 per day), but neither of these is really very useful unless a device like this is going to be used very rarely. (Unlike AT&T, streaming video from the Internet is not prohibited by the Verizon contract, making the need for 5 GB all that more significant.) I think that anyone willing to invest in this thing is probably going to fall into the crowd where need of 5GB of transfer is more likely than either of the other options.

So far I have not been able to get my phone to connect to it either. For some reason it doesn’t even see the MiFi’s wireless network at all, and even when I manually enter the information necessary to connect it still won’t make a connection. Not a huge deal since my phone already has its own Internet access, but it is confusing nonetheless. I’m going to have to investigate that one a little further.

The purchase price was $150, less a $50 mail-in-rebate with 2-year contract. Not great, but not terrible either. The 2-year contract has a $175 early termination fee (which goes down by $5 per month of active service).

Overall I highly recommend the MiFi2200 to anyone who needs mobile Internet. It offers so much more functionality than other mobile broadband devices, and does so without much of a price premium. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to get anything else right now.

Lies, Damn Lies, and HDTV Spec Numbers

2009-07-28T20:35:00.001-06:00

If you are considering the purchase of an LCD HDTV any time soon, it’s a good idea to be armed with some information before stepping foot into the store. Of course that’s always true, but it’s especially true when buying LCD TVs, because for some reason manufacturers, web sites, retailers, and sales people try to get you to focus on the wrong numbers when trying to figure out what TV to buy.

Screen resolution is important (720p? 1080p?), but it isn’t the most important number when buying an LCD TV if you’re looking for a good picture. The real numbers that give you a guideline on how accurate a model’s colors and brightness are much more important, but your salesperson isn’t going to know them. The single most important number in assessing the quality of an LCD TV is the static contrast ratio, but you’re probably going to have a hard time finding it.

Last week a friend of mine texted me from the local electronics store asking me for advice on what to get. I told her to ask the salesman what the static contrast ratio was. Not only did he not know, he got defensive and told her that that number is meaningless and that the dynamic contrast ratio was much more meaningful. He couldn’t have been any more wrong.

Allow me to define a few things.

Contrast ratio is a number which represents the disparity in brightness between the brightest white and darkest black that a TV can display. If a measurement of the brightest white on a TV is 10,000 (units don’t matter) and it’s measurement of darkest black is 100, that TV has a 100:1 contrast ratio.

Dynamic contrast ratio is the ratio between the brightest white that a particular model can display and the darkest black it can display.

Static contrast ratio is the brightest / darkest ratio at a given time.

The exact method used by different TV manufacturers to determine dynamic contrast ratio is all over the map. But basically they might turn up the brightness on the TV all of the way, take a measurement of the white level, turn the brightness down all of the way, then take a measurement of the blackest black. Or worse yet, the TV will artificially turn up or down the brightness of the backlight behind the screen while taking the measurements.

Static measurements are taken with both black and white are on screen at the same time.

The problem with the dynamic measurement is that when we watch TV, we don’t watch test patterns. When was the last time you watched a show that was just a black or white picture? There is some full brightness white and full darkness black on the screen nearly all of the time with real video (some part of the image will be white, and some other part will be black), so the static contrast ratio is much more meaningful. It much better represents how a TV’s picture is going to look with real video, not test patterns. The dynamic number is a cheat.

The manufacturers’ marketing departments want the dynamic contrast ratio number to be as high as possible, and the people taking measurements to create the specification numbers on the box will use whatever methods they want to come up with whatever numbers they want. If you see a number like 10,000:1, that number is really bogus and meaningless. No real image you could display on your TV would ever be able to achieve that number. It’s a little like putting 500 MPH rated tires on a car with a speed governor of 30 MPH. That 500 MPH just isn’t ever going to happen.

Why does it matter?

Well, for one, when blacks aren’t really black, the TV is effectively adding a little bit of white or gray to everything on screen. Colors become much more muted. The picture details in the darker parts of the image become difficult, if not impossible, to discern. It just looks… blech.

Televisions that have great static contrast ratios have color that pops yet looks realistic. You can see details in the shadows of the picture. Blacks actually look black instead of gray.

You’ll have to dig through the web sites of various TV manufacturers to find static contrast ratios. A television with a 2000:1 static contrast ratio is EXCELLENT, with numbers around 1000:1 being much more typical. If you’re seeing numbers over 5000, they’re giving you the dynamic ratio, not the static. Keep looking. If the manufacturer lists two contrast ratios, the static number is always going to be the lower of the two. Many web sites mix these numbers up frequently.

When going into a store to buy a TV, the first question you should ask the salesperson is, “what is the static contrast ratio on this TV?” If they give you a blank stare or tell you it isn’t important, thank them for their time and walk away. They aren’t going to be even a bit helpful in helping you make your buying decision.

A few other helpful tips:

720p vs. 1080p : If the distance between your couch and the TV is more than 3 times the width of the TV you’ll never see the distance between 720p and 1080p. The closer you sit, or the larger the TV, the more of a difference the higher resolution of 1080p makes.
Viewing angle: LCDs only have just one small “sweet spot” where the picture looks best, usually straight on horizontally and vertically. The viewing angle numbers advertised for TVs are more or less totally bogus. When in the store, take a step off to the side so you’re looking at the screen at a 45 degree angle. The best TVs show little or no difference in brightness or color from an angle. Look for areas of the picture where whites start to get darker, blacks start to get brighter, and where color intensity begins to fade or even shift toward another color altogether. Walk back and forth between straight on and viewing at a 45 degree angle. If you can see significant changes in the picture while moving back and forth, pick another model. But even the best models have some color shift at just 15 degrees off of center.
Best size: A good rule of thumb here is to get a TV at least as wide as one third your viewing distance. If you will be sitting 12 feet away, a TV with a screen four feet wide is idea. Keep in mind that TV sizes are given diagonally, so multiple by 0.87 to get the picture width. You can always make a TV look bigger by rearranging your room so it’s closer to your sofa.

Measure the distance from where you’ll be sitting to where you want to put the TV. Multiply by 12 to get the distance in inches, divide that by three, then multiply by 1.15. There’s your ideal minimum size TV.
LCD vs. Plasma: Plasma TVs have the potential for a better picture than LCDs do, but it varies by manufacturer, model, TV settings, and elevation (yes, distance above sea level). The higher your elevation the harder it is to make a plasma TV look good and keep it quiet. But plasmas are becoming a better and better buy as the prices drop to compete with LCD. Plus plasmas don’t have the viewing angle issue above, and have more control over contrast ratio. Just watch for flashing and crawling dots on the screen.
Projector vs. Television: I have people asking me why I don’t use my projector to watch TV all of the time. Two primary reasons: (1) the bulb in the projector costs hundreds of dollars to replace and is only good for a couple thousand hours, and (2) projectors look terrible if you can turn off every light source in the room. For a projector to look good during the day all windows in the room would have to be totally blacked out. Any light in the room whatsoever will wash out the picture. Ideally the side walls and ceiling would be painted with a dark color in non-reflective finish as well. Projectors are great for watching movies when you have total control over the lighting in a room and a high quality screen to project on, but they are terrible any other time.
The best TVs generally won’t do much on their own to make standard definition television look like high definition, but the more expensive models will definitely do a better job than the cheapest ones.
If you aren’t going to be sitting close enough to see the details in 1080p vs. 720p, Blu-ray isn’t going to help you either. It’s hard to see the difference in picture between a good upscaling DVD player and Blu-ray on a 720p model.
Invest in a good quality (more than $80) upscaling DVD player. It makes all of the difference in the world when watching DVDs. If your DVD player is more than 2 years old, or isn’t connected using an HDMI cable, retire that player to the bedroom and get a new one. If you’re using your game console for DVDs (even the PS3 or Xbox 360), it’s time to give it up and get a real player. You’ll thank me, I promise.
My favorite television brands are the ones that start with S, T, and P: Sony, Samsung, Sharp, Toshiba, Pioneer, and sometimes Panasonic. They’ll give you a better picture and last much longer than TVs from other brands. The L brand can be okay too.
A TV that lasts you 10 years (S, T, P) but costs 50% more than one that is going to last 2-3 is a much better buy, even if it means postponing your purchase to save up the difference. Spend the extra initially and you’ll save in the long term and have a better experience the whole time.
TVs look much bigger once you get them home than they do in the store. Much bigger.
Check reputable sites like www.cnet.com for unbiased reviews on different TV models before buying. Take consumer reviews with a grain of salt; unhappy customers will always post their opinions, while happy customers rarely do.
Televisions with 120 Hz or 240 Hz panels are nice, but if you get one turn the motion enhancement feature off. Not only is it disconcerting, but it’s having to remove detail from your picture for the feature to work. It’s a gimmick that actually hinders your viewing experience.
Glossy screens may make blacks look blacker, but they also act like a big mirror and reflect any light in the room. Skip the glossy screen and get something with a matte screen instead.
Do NOT buy HDMI cables from your local electronics retailer unless you want to get ripped off. Try www.bluejeanscable.com or www.monoprice.com. Any HDMI cable that actually works is just as good as the most expensive one you can buy. Spending more on one is foolish and a waste of money.

Hope that helps. Happy TV shopping!

Apple Tablet: Small Mac, or Big iPhone?

2009-07-26T22:13:00.001-06:00

There are rumors circulating that Apple will be releasing a tablet device sometime early next year. There are certainly a lot of Apple fans that are very excited about such a device, even though they don’t even know what it will be. (Can you think of anyone besides Apple that can get people excited about something that doesn’t even exist (and hasn’t even been announced) yet?)

There is very little information to go on at this point. The rumors seem to be indicating that it will be a 10.1” touch screen device priced around $799. Other than that we really don’t know much, including what it will do, or even whether it would run a full version of OS X or a modified version of the iPhone OS. There is a rumor that the device will have some sort of cellular radio for Internet connectivity as well, but again, none of this is confirmed.

But even amidst Apple’s perpetual silence on future devices, I think there is a lot about it that we can conclude, should such a device actually come to pass.

The pricing alone could tell us a lot. If it is priced at $799, it is $200 below the price of the white MacBook. And about $200 over the selling price of the iPhone (price to carriers, not consumers). That alone tells me that the device will be one of two things: either it’s going to be a lobotomized netbook, or a large multimedia device.

I come to that conclusion based on the products that Apple already has in its lineup. Think about this: the current Mac “netbook” is the MacBook Air. In a lot of ways it is much like the PC netbooks that are on the market: small device, lightweight, low power, missing devices like optical drives and myriads of connectivity. In fact the specifications on PC netbooks aren’t that far off of the MacBook Air, aside from the 13” screen that the Air offers where the screens on netbooks are usually 9-10”. (Even the CPU isn’t that different between the two.) An Apple netbook would have to be essentially a smaller, even more stripped down version of the Air at a lower price.

But we know that the device will have a touch screen. That adds to the cost of a device. And Apple won’t be happy if it doesn’t support multi-touch, and multi-touch capable touch devices are more expensive than the touch screens used on Tablet PCs. For Apple to be able to release an OS X-powered computer that offers decent performance, plus a multi-touch touch screen, the price is going to be somewhere near where the MacBook Air is now, if not higher. Nobody would buy it.

The other problem with trying to go the OS X route is that OS X just isn’t designed for a touch screen interface. I develop software for touch screens and have learned a lot about what works and what does not work. Menu bars, like the one that stays at the top of the screen all of the time in OS X, are totally unusable on touch screens. Buttons, in order to be clickable, must be at least 3/4” wide and high. A typical button in the OS X user interface would only be about 3/8” high on a 10.1” screen, making them too hard to press accurately. A screen that size is simply WAY too small to even consider doing general purpose computing. Even the 15” screens we use as part of my business are too small for that without software being designed specifically for that application. Applications on OS X are not.

This, of course, ignores the fact that a tablet device lacks a keyboard. Much of what people do on computers is based on having a keyboard. People, especially Mac users, use their computers to browse the Internet, read email, write documents, edit photos, listen to music, and watch and create videos. As we have seen with the iPhone, browsing the internet can be done on a keyboard-less touch screen device, but it is usefulness is limited. Composing email without a keyboard is totally impractical. And editing photos and creating video are both difficult (at best) on a low resolution screen, especially when the likely low capacity hard drive of the device is considered. That leaves us with browsing (sometimes), watching video, and listening to music. What does that list of activities sound like? Yep. There’s your iPod Touch/iPhone functionality.

Yes, I know the iPhone has an on-screen keyboard. And that works okay for creating short text messages, or even short emails. But for composing larger emails or documents, a touch keyboard just won’t do. People like having the tactile feedback of actual keys to press when typing, especially as keyboards become larger than the screen on an iPhone. A decent size on-screen keyboard on a tablet would fill more than half of a 10” screen, and that doesn’t leave any sort of room for software to run. You couldn’t even rest your fingers on the screen because the act of just touching the screen would activate the capacitive touch sensor, so you’re left hovering your hands above the display. This becomes very tiring very quickly. Short of the tablet device being a netbook with a real keyboard, I just can’t see Apple trying to run OS X on a device this size.

I think the prospects of an Apple tablet being based on the iPhone OS, however, are much higher than something based on OS X. Nearly everything sort of falls in line with what we know.

Since tablet devices are, by their very nature, touch-based, it would make a lot more sense for Apple to start with a product that is already based on touch. OS X is not, and it would take a major overhaul of not only the OS but all of the applications that run on it to work in a touch screen environment. The iPhone OS, on the other hand, is totally designed around a touch screen. Touch, swipe, pinch; all of these are the fundamental operations that take place on a touch device and they’re already supported on the iPhone.

One of the problems with the iPhone and iPod Touch is the small screen. Watching videos on something that small is not fun, especially if you are trying to share content with someone else. You can’t comfortably have a group of friends crowd around an iPhone to watch a video; it makes a lot more sense to take turns. Or for Apple to release a device with a larger screen.

An iPhone-like device with a 10” screen could be a very good multimedia player. It’s big enough for the kids to watch in the back seat of the minivan. Or large enough to watch a video comfortably on an airplane. Or perhaps even large enough to become an ebook reader that competes with the Amazon Kindle. (Yeah, battery life wouldn’t be as good, but I think most people are used to charging their electronics every night anyway.)

Creating such a device wouldn’t be without its own set of hurdles, though. Something with a 10” screen absolutely has to have a higher resolution screen than the iPhone, so all of those apps in the App Store aren’t going to work without significant reworking to fit the larger screen (or look absolutely horrendous after being blown up to fill the larger display). So should the mysterious Apple tablet be iPhone-based, expect that it will be limited to off-the-shelf iPhone capabilities for a while after release until developers have a chance to rewrite their software to fit the new screen. But it would surely have music and video playback as well as web browsing built-in from the start.

But one of the biggest indicators to me that something like this will be iPhone OS-based is that Apple has a hole in their lineup of multimedia devices. You can listen to music and watch videos on tiny devices like the iPods and iPhone, or something big like a computer monitor or TV by using the Apple TV. There is a class of devices between the iPod and computer that is missing. Apple wants to sell you iTunes content, but they don’t have anything that competes with portable DVD players. The largest portable device (aside from laptops) for watching iTunes video is the iPhone.

Also consider this… there are rumors that Apple is in talks with Verizon for a partnership for mobile data for the tablet device. $799 might be a little steep for the average consumer. But if the device were to be tied to a mobile data plan (like the iPhone is), that $799 might come down to $299 or $399 with Verizon contract. That puts the out-the-door price right in line with the iPod Touch and Apple TV, and iPhone. All of which target the same demographic they are already catering to.

I really don’t see Apple releasing a device based on OS X if it is strictly a touch screen. And such a device certainly wouldn’t cost $799. There is already a Mac-based device with a tablet display, the Axiotron Modbook. It’s very expensive, and its only interesting to a very small segment of the market. A $799 multimedia device is much more appealing to a nearly infinitely larger group of people.

The other thing that really leads me to believe that this will be a multimedia device rather than a computer is that tablet computing is not something that the masses are interested in just yet. Microsoft’s Tablet PC features are very well implemented in Vista and Windows 7 and yet those devices are only being picked up by a very select group of people. Outside of the world of doctors, salespeople, and maybe a few in the construction industry, a tablet computer just doesn’t make a lot of sense. And among that group, a device at $799 might as well be $1999; they’ll pay whatever it costs. Trying to target people for a $799 tablet just doesn’t make a lot of sense for Apple or its shareholders, especially considering how much they like their premium product markup.

Since Apple likes to charge a 50-100% premium for their products, we ought to look at what’s in the market that would compete with a $799 product. Yes, netbooks fall into that category, but not tablet PCs. The other thing we find in that segment would be… you guessed it, portable video devices.

All of this coupled with the total lack of rumors or information leaks of Apple’s upcoming Snow Leopard having any sort of support for a touch-based Mac, and the rumors of an unidentified device running the iPhone OS lead me to believe that there is absolutely no way that a touch screen 10” tablet device is going to be running OS X as we know it now. Aside from creating a brand new OS family for such a device, the only choice Apple has is to base something on the iPhone OS. It makes perfect sense, while all of the other possible options just defy logic.

To Netbook, or Not To Netbook, Part II

2009-07-25T14:45:00.002-06:00

Yes, I have written about netbooks before. But it keeps coming up and people keep asking me questions. So here’s take two.

For about the last year or so there has been a huge craze around “netbook” computers. They are selling like hotcakes. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever purchased any hotcakes, but I’m told that they set the standard for product sales. Nevertheless, netbooks are very popular. But before you consider buying one yourself, it might do you well to understand what they are and aren’t good for.

Simple Tasks, Simple Machines

Netbooks can be manufactured and sold at low prices because they use lower cost (slower, often older) parts than regular notebook computers. The price you pay (in addition to the lightening of your wallet) is performance and usability. Netbooks are fine for some tasks, but are horrendous at others.

Simple tasks like reading email and browsing most web pages usually work fine on netbook computers if you can live within their attached limitations. Personally I don’t find their slow processors to be much of an issue (most of us don’t really need fast CPUs), but they have other limitations that might be show stoppers.

Tiny Screens

The most significant for most netbook computers is the screen. Not only are the screens small, but they are of low resolution so you can’t display very much on screen at a time. In fact, if you install a couple of toolbars in your browser, nearly HALF of your vertical screen space will be used up with buttons, menus, etc. even with your browser set to Full Screen mode. That’s an awful lot of space being taken away from the web site you wish to view. Email might not be much better. The Preview Pane in Outlook only shows about 4 lines of each message… hardly useful at all.

Dell and HP both make netbooks with High Definition screens, which are MUCH better, but these are rare, must be specially ordered, and add noticeably to the price tag. (Don’t expect to pick one of these up at Best Buy.) The screen resolution on netbook computers is typically 1024 pixels wide by 600 (or 576) pixels high (that’s 0.6144 megapixels for anyone counting). The width is fine, but the height can become a real limitation. We’ve become used to high resolution monitors on our desks, and so have software developers and web page designers. Everything is designed around larger screens, so expect to do a lot of vertical scrolling no matter what you’re doing on a netbook. And please don’t expect to be editing photos or videos on screens that small unless you happen to enjoy pulling out your hair.

Storage

Storage may or not be an issue as well. Many netbooks come with Solid State Drives (SSDs for short). These use memory chips to store your data instead of rotating hard disk drives. While being more resilient to vibration, SSDs are much more expensive than hard disk drives for an equivalent amount of storage. So to keep prices down, netbooks with SSDs have VERY small amounts of storage when compared to models that have hard disk drives. One of the main virtues of more expensive SSDs is that they can be much faster than hard disk drives, but don’t expect any wonderful performance in the low-end SSDs used in netbooks. My advice: the only real reason to consider a model with an SSD is to lengthen battery life. Otherwise I recommend going with a traditional hard disk drive instead.

Keyboard

One last limitation to look at is the keyboard. Some models are okay. Others stink with a capital S. The keyboard on my Dell Mini 9 is infuriating. In order to make a keyboard fit on a small device Dell decided to relocate the apostrophe/quotation key to its bottom row. Each time I go to add a ‘s to the end of a word I die a little inside. Other keys have been moved too, and it’s really hard to adjust back and forth between the keyboard on the Mini 9 and a regular keyboard. Most other models tend to be much better about this, but I strongly recommend taking a look at a netbook’s keyboard before considering a purchase. Any funkiness in the layout will be sure to enrage later on.

Memory

Netbooks also nearly always come with 1 GB of RAM or less. This is probably fine for people who run one or maybe two programs at a time, but it probably isn’t enough if you’re someone who regularly keeps 5-6 applications open all of the time.

Saving Money… Really?

The most common reason for people buying netbooks vs. a notebook computer is their low price. (Some truly buy for portability, and I won’t argue with that… much.) But I’m not sure that the apparent lower price is worth it.

A typical usable netbook configuration is going to be in the $400 ballpark. Sure you can get one for a lower price, but you have to give up something to get there. For between $400 and $500 you can also buy a reasonably-spec’d full-size notebook computer. Yes, the prices have dropped that much. Most manufacturers offer at least one or two models in that price range. And you get a lot more. Faster processor, more memory, bigger hard disk drive, larger (higher resolution) and higher quality screen, more external connection ports, bigger battery, just to name a few. If you’re considering a netbook because of its price, you’d probably be a lot happier buying a notebook instead, without denting your wallet too much more, if at all.

It also isn’t uncommon to find that low price netbooks run the Linux operating system instead of Windows. This is strictly a cost-saving measure. Linux is free, Windows must be paid for. But unless you’re already a Linux guru (in which case you probably wouldn’t be reading this post), skip it. It isn’t worth it.

It’s Cute ‘Cause It’s Little

Size is a different issue altogether. Netbooks are indeed smaller and lighter than notebook computers. They typically come in at around 2.5 pounds, and around an inch thick. They tend to be much smaller in person than you expect based on pictures online. Modern small notebook computers, on the other hand, are usually 4.5+ pounds, have a much larger footprint, and are just over an inch thick.

While netbooks are small, they aren’t tiny. If I were a woman I wouldn’t carry one in my purse “just because.” I certainly don’t take mine everywhere I go, but when I need something to browse the internet, check email, or answer a customer support call, my netbook is my preferred device because of its small size and light weight.

Time to Buy?

Now is probably not the best time to be buying a netbook; it might be better to wait until late this fall if you can. The reason is Windows 7.

Windows Vista does not run well on netbook hardware. Vista's hardware demands are a little bit too much for netbooks to handle, so netbook manufacturers have been shipping the machines with Windows XP instead. Windows XP runs pretty well. But Windows 7 runs very well on them also, often better than XP.

Windows XP was discontinued before the netbook trend even started, so it hasn't been updated or optimized for netbook hardware. Windows 7, on the other hand, has been. It knows how to handle and optimize for the CPUs and storage devices used in netbooks; XP doesn't. I have been running Windows 7 on my netbook for several months and it works wonderfully! It has fewer issues than XP ever did, and the performance is just as good, if not better. It was also much easier to setup on W7 than XP because I didn't have to go find drivers for the hardware that was too new for XP to recognize.

Many regular notebooks being sold with Windows Vista are eligible for free upgrades to Windows 7 when it ships in October. But netbooks are left out for two reasons: (1) Windows XP, and (2) pricing. Windows XP doesn't qualify for the free upgrades, and computer manufacturers are actually paying for the Windows 7 upgrade on behalf of Vista users. Since the price on netbooks is so low, there isn't enough markup in any netbook for the makers to pay for that upgrade, even if they did include Vista.

Presumably sometime this fall netbooks will begin to ship with Windows 7. The official release of Win7 is October 22nd, but manufacturers are free to decide when they will begin to put 7 on the machines after that date. Some will probably act quickly, while others drag their feet. But either way, I really think it is worthwhile to wait for Windows 7 instead of running Windows XP now.

Should I Get One?

If size and portability are more important to you than power and capability, a netbook might be the right thing for you. I don’t think price alone is a good reason for one, though.

One last bit of advice: don’t make it your only computer. You’ll probably learn to hate computers if you don’t have something else to work on regularly. Netbooks are supplementary devices, not designed to be anyone’s primary machine by any stretch of the imagination.

Using a netbook can be sort of like trying to ride a scooter on the freeway. Yeah, it gets you to your destination, but it probably won’t be very fun getting there.

8% Cash Back on eBay Purchases

2009-07-23T12:51:00.001-06:00

You can get 8% cash back on eBay Buy-It-Now purchases from Microsoft by using their Bing search engine.

1. Sign up for a Bing Cashback account (it’s free, only Windows Live and PayPal accounts are required).

2. Perform a search of what you are looking to buy using the bing.com search engine.

3. If there isn’t an eBay link at the top of the page, do another search for something more common or generic (like iPod, Xbox, etc).

4. Click the eBay link in the tan box to perform the search again at eBay.

5. After arriving at the eBay site, you can search again for the item you are looking for.

6. Buy an item using Buy-It-Now, and pay for the purchase using PayPal.

7. On the page that confirms your auction has been paid for there will be a link to claim your cash back. Click that link and log in to your Cashback account.

8. The credit will not show up in your account immediately; it will take a few minutes.

9. Funds will be available in your Cashback account in about 60 days, at this point they can be transferred to your PayPal account.

I just bought a projector lens this way, and sure enough, 8% of the purchase price showed up in my Cashback account. Pretty easy way to save.

There are restrictions that apply. You should probably click the cashback link on the eBay site and read over them there.

Finally Got a P&S Digital Camera

2009-07-23T00:02:00.001-06:00

I finally broke down and got a decent point & shoot digital camera this last weekend. I’m sure some will be surprised that it took me this long.

I did have one before, but I hated it, so I never used it. In 4 years I shot a couple hundred pictures on it in total, maybe. Probably significantly less.

So this time I did a little bit more homework, and decided on the Canon PowerShot SD960 IS.

I got the pink one. Just kidding! They only had silver, and that was fine with me.

I ultimately picked it over other models because it’s small enough to fit in a pocket, has pretty good image quality (though no P&S comes even close to the quality of a DSLR), has a 4x optical zoom, and it does 720p HD video. It also has a really fast user interface, so I don’t have to wait for it to react to my button presses like some other cameras I played with. It still has some shutter lag (time between you press the button and when it actually takes the picture), but it’s better than most, and the only way to cure that problem is with, again, a DSLR. It’s also the first P&S from Canon with the widescreen LCD, which is nice, as I prefer wider images over the standard almost-square 4:3 aspect ratio that most cameras use.

So far I like it, though I haven’t really had much of a chance to use it just yet. I bought it for a concert I was going to go to on Saturday night, but I was late because of an accident on the freeway on the way, and they had stopped selling tickets before I finally arrived, so I missed it. D’oh. Oh well, I’ll find other occasions for it.

Once in a century

2009-07-08T12:34:00.001-06:00

Happy 12:34:56 7/8/09!