Over the last few years, I’ve read about a number of developers that have “gone indie” in that they left their jobs and are now independent developers. Maybe make it sound glamorous that they no longer have a boss. While this technically may be true, they still have to answer to someone, be it their clients or their customers. There is nothing inherently wrong with being independent, but thinking that doing this will make all of someone’s work problems go away is misleading.

People that are self employed swap one set of problems (e.g. working for a large company) with another. Being self employed means doing accounting, marketing, sales, support, etc. (or hiring someone for these positions and having to be a people manager). In addition, income is not guaranteed which could lead to stress and many people have a hard time separating work from home and thus put in more hours at their “job”. I’m not saying that working for someone else is better or that being self employed is better (I’ve done both), it is just different.

I personally had a good run being self employed (granted my independent software business was only about 20% of my income with the rest coming from contracting), but at this stage in my life, working for someone else brings stability and has actually reduced my stress over my job (I have other stresses, but work isn’t one of them). When I was self employed, I used to put in 70+ hours per week between my software and contracting. This was not sustainable for me.

I wish developers going indie the best of luck, but just because I work for someone else (a large company in my case), I’m not a sellout and have no regrets.

I few weeks ago I wrote about issues I was having with Bluetooth 4.0 interfering with standard Bluetooth, specifically my heart rate monitor was causing clicks on my Bluetooth headset while running. I filed an Apple Radar issue that was promptly closed as being a duplicate and the other one was closed as well, but Apple wouldn’t provide me any information about when it would be fixed. Typically when I report bugs to Apple it either takes years from them to get fixed or they never get fixed (I still have a number of open bugs).

When Apple released iOS 6.1, I checked the update information and nothing about this issue was mentioned. However, Apple never documents all the fixes which is a bit annoying for a tech person like me, but understandable as it could show what security holes were patched or could get customers saying “that was my bug, but you didn’t fix it”. Knowing that there were likely lots of little issues fixed, I went ahead and tried my previous experiment of running with my heart rate monitor and Bluetooth headset. So far on three runs, I haven’t noticed a problem! Was the issue fixed? I think it is still too early to tell, but so far it looks pretty good. Now if Apple had only told me in my bug report the OS version it was fixed in (since I’m a member of the developer program, they will tell me to test it in an unreleased OS version sometimes), I wouldn’t be wondering.

As many that read this blog know, I started scanning in all of my receipts over 6 years ago and pretty much every piece of paper (of some value) that comes into my house gets scanned and then shredded or filed (I’m still not sure why I file it; some places don’t accept copies of receipts, but a lot of paper doesn’t need to be saved). I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner along with Mariner Software’s Paperless to store everything. I’ve used a bunch of scanners and still have a few lying around my house.

Yesterday I saw a tweet from Dan Frakes, an author at Macworld magazine about using an Eye-Fi card with a Doxie scanner to wirelessly scan. This got me thinking as I had an Eye-Fi card that was just lying around; my wife and I both have iPhones and use them for a majority of our pictures (the best camera you have is the camera you have with you). I also had a BulletScan M40 that was unused. Since the M40 takes an SD card, I thought this would make a great combination.

My plan was to setup the M40 and Eye-Fi card to send all the images to my media center (it is on all the time) and then use Dropbox to sync the files back to my main machine. (If this sounds familiar, I setup something similar two years ago with my Brother scanner.) This morning, I went to set everything up only to discover that for some reason the M40 didn’t recognize 8 GB cards, both the Eye-Fi one and one I had lying around. It didn’t have a problem with the 256 MB cards. I reformatted the Eye-Fi and tried lots of tricks and basically gave up. However, after staring at it, I realized that the SD card reader that came with the Eye-Fi was lying on my desk. I plugged the Eye-Fi card into the card reader and then the card reader into the M40. Presto, everything started to work.

To put the finishing touches on my new setup, I used Automator to setup a Folder Action that would rotate the images downloaded from the Eye-Fi and then move them to a folder on Dropbox. This offloaded the processing and saved me a step on my main machine.

My 5 year old son was so mesmerized with the scanner, all he wanted to do was scan receipts and see them show up on my machine. He has no idea all the magic that goes into it; he just knows that the scanner is not connected to my computer and receipts show up. Now all I have to do is recruit him to scan in all of my wife’s receipts!

(Yes the ScanSnap is much faster at scanning in receipts, but this setup will be much easier to use for my wife and she doesn’t have to take over my computer to enter her pile of receipts.)

One of the most popular ways to test Internet connection speeds is to use speedtest.net. The problem with using a site like this is that providers sometimes have a feature that increases the bandwidth for the initial part of the download. This allows for faster downloads of smaller files. Unfortunately this really messes with speed tests. For instance, I’m now getting 15 megabits per second down, but the tests are telling me that I’m getting 28-30 megabits per second. This would be fabulous if I got it, but I don’t. A more accurate test is to download a large file from a fast host. In my case, I download stuff from Apple and get about 2 megabytes per second which is 16 megabits per second. This is more in line with what I’d expect.

In the last few years, people have taken their frustrations dealing with customer service reps to social media. Companies, in turn, are reacting quite quickly to complaints and reaching out to customers. While I’m not sure I’m a fan of jumping on social media before giving companies a chance to fix the problem, it seems to be an amazingly effective tool.

Last month I returned my cable modem to avoid the $3.95 monthly lease fee that is now being charged and replaced the cable modem with the same model that I bought off eBay for $23. I had to goto a Time Warner Cable store to do this and got a receipt for the return. Like all the paper I collect, I scanned in the receipt and stored it in Paperless. When I received my next bill, I saw that I was still being charged for the lease (it is billed one month in advance), so I contacted customer service via the web chat and tweeted about it. I got a direct message asking if they could help, but I had already gotten it “resolved” via the standard channel. I thought my tweet complaining was legitimate as I shouldn’t have had to contact customer service after waiting at the store and returning the modem. Problem solved, or so I thought.

I just got my latest bill; it had a $3.95 credit on it, but the cable modem lease fee was still being charged. OK, so now I’ve gone through the official channel twice to fix this issue. I tweeted again and this time corresponded with their social media folks who said they escalated the issue. Awesome service on a Saturday by the social media folks, but this kind of issue shouldn’t have required me to do this.

So the moral seems to be, if a company wrongs you, they are much better at fixing the problem if you complain in public. I’m not saying that this is the way to go, but if the front line folks aren’t capable of doing their jobs correctly, then I’m not going to waste my time and will just use Twitter as my complaint board. While I’d like to say that companies will do a better job at fixing things the first time, social media probably isn’t going to change that.

I have my fingers crossed that I’ll not only get credited the $3.95 for the charge for the cable modem this month, but the recurring charge will be taken off my bill. However, given the track record, I suspect that I’ll either get the recurring charge taken off or the credit, but not both. If that is the case, I’ll be taking to Twitter again next month and possibly doing a chargeback on my credit card; I have very little patience for things not done right the first or second time. Yes, it is only $3.95, but it is the principal that matters to me.

In a post I wrote yesterday, I commented that the new display I got kept causing my UPS to click on and off. I got so fed up with it yesterday that I unplugged the display. The problem still happened, so I unfairly blamed the display. After considering getting a new UPS idea, I came across a video which explains how to change the sensitivity on my APC BE750G UPS. I made the change and so far, so good. I even turned on my printer which normally caused the behavior and haven’t heard it clicking.

I’m not sure what changed to cause this new behavior, but I’m please that I may have found a solution.

Now that Apple has announced the iPhone 5, it’s time for me to upgrade! Yes, I did just get an iPhone 4S last year, but luckily for me, staying on top of iPhone technology is part of my job. Now that my wife has an iPhone, it’s easier for me to justify upgrading as I can give her my old one and get the discounted pricing. Would I pay full price for one? That’s a tough question that luckily I don’t have to answer.

I don’t think I’ve been so enamored with devices as I have been with the iPhone. Initially I was pretty ho-hum about it because I felt I had to be against it due to all my work centering around competing devices. While the improvements of each iPhone seem pretty minor, I can imagine them being quite useful to me. It isn’t cheap to keep upgrading devices, but as my wife puts it, I deserve it as I work hard.

Will I be first in line to get one? I won’t go out of my way to get one, but I’ll order when I can.