Month: May 2014

Posted on

Review: Studio Neat Cosmonaut Stylus

A few weeks ago, my wife were in the dollar store (I needed a bag of salt to mix in with vinegar to try to kill some vines) and I saw that they had touchscreen styluses. I haven’t used a stylus on a device in years and decided for $1 to give it a try. I started using it and was surprised (not sure why) that it required pressure to use due to a capacitive touchscreen versus a resistive touchscreen. I was intrigued enough to purchase a Studio Neat Cosmonaut stylus based on a number of reviews.

The stylus is big and thick and is more like a big piece of chalk than a pen when makes it easy to grip. Like the cheap one I tried out, it does require you to apply some pressure when using. This means that my iPad has to be on a solid surface or grasped well in order to recognize the movements. It doesn’t work so well if my iPad is on a stand and I lightly touch it.

I know that the iPad wasn’t designed with a stylus in mind, but using the stylus is great for reading articles (my iPad is mostly a consumption device). I can keep my dirty paws off the screen and easily browse.

The stylus isn’t cheap by any means, but feels solid. Only time will tell if the springy tip lasts. It looks like it could get punctured, but as long as I don’t do anything crazy with it, it should be fine.

Pros

  • Solid feel
  • Comfortable grip
  • Tip works well

Cons

  • Cost
  • Unsure about the reliability of the tip

Summary

Not everyone needs a stylus for an iPad, but if you primarily use your device for reading/consumption, a stylus brings an interesting experience to the device. Even though I’m mostly using the stylus for reading, I’ve been working on a presentation built in Keynote on my iPad and using the stylus isn’t bad, but doesn’t help when I need to use 2 finger gestures. If a stylus interests you, I’d definitely try out some less expensive options before this one. I am please with the purchase and am using it daily, it seems like more of a luxury item than a necessity.

Posted on

Delivering on what was promised

In October, I purchased a 50″ Vizio TV to go in our freshly remodeled home. It had all the standard TV features, but 2 that interested me were the “apps”, in particular Amazon Prime streaming, as my Apple TV didn’t do that and the WiFi direct remote. the Amazon Prime app turned out to be such a dud that I ended up buying a Roku box primarily for that feature. However, the WiFi direct feature was one that I really wanted so that I didn’t have to aim the remote at the TV. This became even more important due to a poor design decision where Vizio basically put the IR receiver on the bottom left of the TV. Since our TV wasn’t mounted above a fireplace, the IR window wasn’t really visible, so the IR remote didn’t always work.

When we got the TV, the WiFi direct feature was promised in a firmware update. I waited and waited and waited. I contacted Vizio a few times and was told that they were rolling out the update in waves. I read on forums that some people had the newer firmware and some were still waiting. Newer TVs that people bought had the newer firmware.

This past Friday, I finally got real tired of waiting and called Vizio support with the same story. When the rep said that I’d just have to wait, I said that I’d contact the Vizio CEO and attorney general because they advertised a feature that wasn’t available. In addition, I’d file a suite in small claims court. Those would be drastic measures, but after waiting 7 months, I thought it was about time to resolve this. The rep was very nice and said he’d transfer me to executive services. After a few minutes, he came back on the line after talking to upper level support folks and walked me through a firmware update as they flagged my TV as getting it. We tried it a few times to no avail. He talked to another person who said to wait about 20 minutes and the TV will get the update and if it didn’t to call back.

I went about my business and turned on the TV later and almost fell down when I saw that the firmware update with the WiFi direct remote was enabled. Support had told me numerous times that there was nothing that they could do to get the update pushed to a TV which turns out to be a complete lie.

Now my TV has all the features that were advertised. It is interesting to note that Vizio is no longer advertising WiFi direct as a feature for the remote. I guess if companies are pushed hard enough, they’ll do what is right for the customer.

Posted on

Tweaking a web server with Nginx

A few weeks ago, I started playing with nginx as a replacement for Apache. The exact reasons I decided to do this are a bit unclear, but I think it had something to do with me playing with node.js and MongoDB. The initial setup was pretty smooth and the configuration files are much easier to understand than Apache for my sites. However, I also decided to offload the PHP processing to php-fpm and that’s where the problems began. My VPS is pretty lightweight and doesn’t have a lot of RAM. My blog was running out of memory all the time and php-fpm stopped responding.

After a lot of tweaking to reduce memory usage, I managed to stabilize the system and get much faster response times for my blog; it doesn’t get a lot of traffic, but I think I’ve done a decent job with performance. If I ever get hit with a massive load, I’m sure my server will keel over.

Is there a real reason to use nginx vs Apache? I’m sure some people will say yes, but for me the jury is still out. Things are going smoothly, but was it worth the trouble? I have no idea.

Posted on

Drones and Privacy

A few months ago, I received a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter for a present. For most people, a quadcopter is called a drone. Call it whatever you want, it is a fun toy for me (tool for others). I have it outfitted with a GoPro camera and a video transmitter so that I can see what is going on during flight. In a conversation with my in-laws where I was showing my father-in-law how it flies, my mother-in-law indicated that she thought the devices were creepy because they can be used to spy on people. This is the same thing that the media is playing up and catering to the fears of people.

The quadcopters are first off, noisy, you can’t sneak up on people and take a picture; you know they are coming. Second off, the cameras on these copters aren’t all that great for details. The GoPro is a decent camera, but if you want to take a picture of someone in a house, you’re going to have to have the copter right at a window. Third, if you live in a 2 story house, it’s likely that you can already see in your neighbor’s yard. We live on a hill and can easily see into our neighbor’s backyard from our backyard.

In the current state of copters, I find it quite hard to really invade someone’s privacy without them knowing. Also, as I’m just learning to fly, I only fly on my property. When I get more experienced, I’ll goto a park and fly; flying over people’s houses may not be the smartest thing to do.

Time will tell what lawmakers decide to do to this new found hobby of mine.

Posted on

Thoughts on Storyboards

When Apple came out with Storyboards in Xcode, I thought that they would be quite useful in making it easier to see how an app was laid out. However, after attempting one project with them, I determined that they had limited utility as they wouldn't scale and wouldn't work well for multi person teams. I left storyboards for a year and didn't revisit them.

I started another project about a year after my first experience and decided to give it another go. This project was a small project and I was the only developer, so it was well suited for storyboards. The project grew and grew. Storyboards worked OK, but the layout in Interface Builder was almost too hard to manage. I finally decided to see about splitting up the storyboards into multiple storyboards.

The app was a tab bar based app, so the logical breakdown was one storyboard per tab. It only took about 15 minutes for me to do this and undo a poor initial decision. However, there were still one or two links between storyboards that were easy to fix in code. Some peopl have come up with ways to link storyboards like RBStoryboardLink which looks interesting, but I haven't explored it.

Multiple storyboards seems scary at first, but it is worth doing to keep difference parts of an app more contained and easier to visualize.

I haven't used XIBs in about a year and I'm not sure there is a good reason to use them as storyboards are easy to work with and make it simple to use custom UITableViewCells and UICollectionViewCells.

Proudly powered by WordPress