Tag: Technology

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The end of standalone GPS units?

Recently I’ve started using RunKeeper when I walk the dog as well as when we went to the zoo a few weeks ago. I received email from them the other day indicating that they now support heart rate monitoring via the Fisica Ant+ Sensor key and a heart rate strap like the one I have with my Garmin Forerunner 405. This got me thinking that I could replace my Garmin Forerunner 405 for running. One device down as the RunKeeper software works pretty well; my only issue would be wearing my iPhone in a case on my arm. Will the moisture stay out? Will it be too heavy? I’m not sure, but definitely worth looking at sometime in the future when my 405 breaks (or about $100 lands in my lap).

In addition to using RunKeeper for tracking runs/walks, I used it to geotag photos that my father took at the zoo. This now replaces the i-Got-U device I have used for geotagging. Using the RunKeeper Web site, I can export the GPS track and then use it for geotagging.

Last Friday I used my Garmin nüvi 765 to get me to a meeting near the convention center. It took me on a strange route that may be due to year old maps or due to strange software routing. Then on the way home, I got to see the 32nd street Naval Station, a place I’ve never seen in all my years in San Diego! While these 2 issues may just be anomalies, there is pretty much no chance that there will ever be a software update for this unit and the maps are not going to be cheap to update.

There are a number of navigation applications available for the iPhone that didn’t become viable until this past summer when iOS 4 was released. Up until then, navigation apps couldn’t run in the background on the iPhone and really weren’t up to par. In addition, these applications are including full maps and not loading from the network (one of my major complaints about phone based GPS was that loading maps off the network is too slow and can’t route fast enough). The exception to this is Garmin’s Street Pilot application; Garmin has decided against putting the 1 GB or so of map data on the device which I think is a huge mistake.

While I haven’t purchased one of these navigation apps, yet, I’ll likely do it for a future trip. I’m sure I’ll be pleased compared to my aging Garmin, at a much lower price.

So I’ve just identified that my iPhone, a device I carry all the time, will replace my Garmin nüvi 765, my Garmin Forerunner 405, the i-Got-U, as well as the iPod Nano I use for running. Is there a reason to keep these devices? I don’t think so. A year ago, I wouldn’t have said this, but the iPhone 4 and iOS 4 have really come a long way in delivering a quality GPS experience.

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Facebook as a news source

My wife is so addicted to Facebook that I always ask her what is happening in the world after she checks Facebook. She actually does find out stuff on Facebook about the world which I have also learned from more reputable sources. Last night when we were watching the local news, they had a story on the Mountain High Ski Resort where the newscaster said that the Mountain High Facebook page said that people started lining up at 6 a.m. That struck me as odd to use Facebook as a source for a news story. I would have expected them to at least call Mountain High and either get a quote or verify the information, but relying on a post on a Facebook page seems like poor journalism.

Maybe this is what journalism is in the future; get facts from potentially unreliable sources, don’t verify them, and then report them. Then the game of telephone starts where the unverified facts get distorted on and on. I think I’m living in the past where I trusted journalists.

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Review: Brother 7840W Multifunction Printer

I’ve been a huge opponent of consumer grade all-in-one devices (printer, scanner, copy, fax), so when I was talking to some friends at lunch and they recommended Brother devices, I had to see for myself. My biggest complaint on these devices is that the drivers are just awful and perform poorly. I picked up a Brother MFC-7840W from Office Depot that was on sale for $229 (which is apparently now the regular price). I read Apple’s support article on which devices had support built into Mac OS X 10.6; a few years back at WWDC, Apple said that Snow Leopard would have much better scanner support, so having drivers included in the OS meant that at least I could blame Apple if it didn’t work well.

When I installed Snow Leopard, I didn’t install the Brother drivers, so I thought there would be a problem. However, I plugged an Ethernet cable into the device, powered it on and then configured it in Print & Fax. The device was recognized, but said that it would use a generic driver. No problem as Apple’s support article said that just do a software update after that and it would download the correct drivers. That’s precisely what happened. A few minutes later and it was all setup and I did a test print. Now that printing worked flawlessly, it was time to check out the scanning (I don’t have a phone jack on the side of the room where the device is, so I ignored the whole fax stuff and fax is something I never use).

I fired up Image Capture (Apple’s scanning/camera utility), selected the device and was easily scanning. I was pleasantly surprised as everything worked on the first try and scanning from the document feeder worked equally as well. So far, so good. The next step was to see how easily I could integrate scanning into an application using Snow Leopard’s ImageKit and if the Brother device worked with it. I’ve done worked with TWAIN and Image Capture and both were a nightmare. Apple has sample code called ImageKit Demo which is basically the Image Capture application. Code worked and I was scanning from within an app; there is minimal code to do this, so again I was pleased.

The Brother device also has the ability to scan directly to FTP. While I would have liked Scan to Email, Brother only put in email functionality to report status on the printer and even in that case, didn’t bother supporting SSL, so it doesn’t work with Gmail as an SMTP server. After a few minutes of thinking, I figured out a clever way to use Scan To FTP. I have a Mac Mini setup as a media center that is on all the time, so I turned FTP on (I dislike FTP as it is an ancient, insecure and hard to use protocol due to how it uses 2 TCP ports). I setup a profile using the Brother web interface to scan to a folder I setup on Dropbox. So after the scan comes in, it goes to the Dropbox folder and then transfers to my Mac pretty quickly.

BrotherDropbox.png

The downside of this is that it doesn’t like mediacenter.local as a host name, so I had to give it a static IP address (not a problem as I used my Time Capsule base station to assign a static address to my media center). Note that the Brother broadcasts itself via Bonjour, so the engineers at Brother clearly know about Bonjour and using Bonjour addresses. Turns out that this setup came in handy as I was in Portland the other day and needed something scanned, so I just asked my wife to put the item on the scanner, choose Scan to FTP from the front panel and a few minutes later, I had the file, all without my wife having to install drivers or learn how to use Image Capture (the drivers are on her computer as I setup the printer on her machine as well).

The printer is very fast compared to the HP LaserJet 2100 TN that I’ve had for 8 years (I bought it used off eBay), is quiet, and the scanning is a dream. The document feeder doesn’t do double sided scanning (at least not that I’ve found) and isn’t as fast as my Fujitsu ScanSnap, but it sure is convenient to scan directly from the front panel.

Pros

  • Easy setup.
  • Drivers are distributed with Snow Leopard.
  • No junky scanning application.
  • Web based interface for setup.
  • Networkable.
  • Convenient scanning.
  • Fast printing.
  • Decent price.
  • Quiet when it goes to sleep.

Cons

  • No scan to email from front panel.
  • Email settings for reports don’t handle SSL (no Gmail support).
  • Scan to FTP doesn’t recognize Bonjour addresses.
  • Not as fast as a dedicated scanner.

Summary

So far, this device has completely changed my mind on all-in-one devices. The easy to use scanning interface without a dedicated scanning application makes scanning a breeze. The printer is fast and produces decent output. When the device goes to sleep, it is virtually silent; I always turned my old printer off after using it as the buzzing drove me crazy. The sticker price isn’t that bad and overall this device is the machine I would like to have seen years ago. I had an HP and EPSON all-in-one device (both inkjet instead of laser like the Brother) that were both put out to pasture awhile ago due to their poor drivers and not so user friendly interface.

If you’re shopping for an all-in-one device, this Brother device may be for you. I’m extremely impressed with it and should have gone with Brother years ago (granted some of the Bonjour stuff and Scan to FTP might not have been there).

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Four years of going Paperless

I’ve always been good about keeping receipts, but I just shoved receipts in folders sort of ordered by date. Just over 4 years ago, I was looking for a receipt and got frustrated that I couldn’t find one. The idea for ReceiptWallet (now Paperless) was born as there was no other Mac product on the market tailored to receipt management. Two weeks of work later, I had a working version of the software and released it to the world a few weeks later.

Ever since then, I have scanned every paper receipt, stored every web receipt, as well as every manual I’ve received. To many, this may sound like overkill, but I’ve had no problems easily pulling up receipts for everything I’ve bought. Some stores accept copies of receipts and I hope that more will do so in the future. I’ve gone one step further and pretty much every piece of paper that comes in our door gets scanned as it make it so simple to find documents that there is almost no reason to use a regular filing cabinet (OK, I still file the paperwork after scanning and storing) as scanning is easy and storage space is cheap.

More and more documents are being delivered electronically, so it makes sense to store everything electronically (as long as you have sufficient backups). Printing out documents is usually a waste.

I still keep the paper receipts, but this year, I’m going to do more cleaning and get rid of all the ones I can no longer read and ones for items that I’ll never return.

If you haven’t started a system for storing documents electronically, there is really no reason to delay; scanners are cheap and fast and storage space is plentiful. I highly recommend the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner and have recently been impressed with the Brother MFC-7840W all-in-one (more on this device in a future entry).

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Computer sleep vs hibernate

While troubleshooting my computer today to see if I could prevent it from crashing if it went into hibernate mode (where the OS saves out the contents of RAM before sleeping to the disk and completely shuts down the system), I again came across information on how to disable hibernate. I’ve seen this information a number of times, but didn’t really pay attention to it. Recent Mac laptops, by default, have hibernate turned on which is great if your machine loses power completely and you haven’t saved your work. However, I always save my work and rarely let my machine get all the way down such that the battery is completely dead. So, hibernate simply makes it longer for my machine to sleep; with the addition of 2 more GB of RAM, it takes even longer to write out the contents of RAM.

Basically to disable hibernate mode, you issue the following command from terminal:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

To re-enable hibernate mode, you do:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3

(Information from Apple’s documentation.)

 

So with that set, my machine should goto sleep faster and no longer crash on wake (due to a firmware issue with my SSD).

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Unsupported MacBook Pro RAM upgrade

As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to get more performance out of my 2 year old MacBook Pro. When I purchased machine, I got it installed with the maximum amount of RAM that I could, 4 GB. Newer machines support up to 8 GB of RAM and I’ll definitely get 8 GB when I get a new machine. I had read reports of people putting 6 GB of RAM in my vintage machine and as RAM is one of the limiting factors in performance, I did a little investigating and everything I read said that there were no issues. Typically putting more RAM in a machine than the hardware supports leads to kernel panics and random crashes.

I decided to give the 6 GB of RAM a try as it would let me put the 4 GB in my machine in my wife’s machine (she had 2 GB) and speed up her machine a little. OWC had a 6 GB upgrade kit that wasn’t too expensive (the drive has dropped $15 from when I got it a month ago. (I realize it sounds like I’m spending money like crazy on things, but my computer is a tool that I use to earn money, so getting better tools, I can do my job better.)

The only downside to 6 GB is that there is a slight performance increase by having paired memory modules and 6 GB comes with a 2 GB and a 4 GB module. However, what I’ve read has shown that the increase in RAM outweighs the paired performance.

I easily installed the RAM and so far, I haven’t had a kernel panic due to the RAM (only kernel panic has been due to my machine hibernating with my new SSD). The extra RAM has been quite nice as I can run more apps at once without apps paging out to virtual memory. If you have a machine that is the same vintage as my MacBook Pro, I’d definitely recommend this RAM upgrade. It’s not that expensive and has huge benefits (more RAM is always better).

 

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Review: OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD

As computers are the tools that I use to earn my living, I invest in getting the best machine for my needs and replace my main machine about every 2 years. My current MacBook Pro 15″, I bought in October 2008, so when Apple announced an event this past October, I was hoping for a significant update to the MacBook Pros, but instead they announced a new MacBook Air. (Apple did announce a 2.8 GHz option for the Core i7 MacBook Pros, but that wasn’t enough for me.) So I decided to wait until the next upgrade which I hope will be in the first half of next year.

What was I to do to squeak a little more performance out of my aging workhorse? While many developers have decked out Mac Pros with lots of RAM and horsepower, I prefer a laptop as it lets me work anywhere and having a main machine and a secondary machine is just a nightmare trying to find files (I’ve done that before). A colleague had mentioned that he had put an SSD into his development machine and seen a nice performance increase. So after a little research, I decided to get a Mercury Extreme SSD (240 GB) from OWC. Since Macs don’t support TRIM, I needed a drive that wouldn’t degrade performance over time leading me to the Mercury Extreme (since I purchased the drive, other drives have come onto market that apparently don’t require TRIM support in the OS).

Installation was as easy as any internal harddrive in a MacBook Pro (a few screws and presto) and copying my old drive to the SSD was very easy using SuperDuper!. I placed the old drive in my Voyager Q drive dock and waited for the copy to finish. Once the copy finished, I restarted and presto, it booted quickly and my SSD was running.

I’ve been using the SSD for about 1.5 months now and it has been working well with one exception. There is a firmware bug that causes the Mac to crash if the machine goes into hibernate mode and then you try to wake it. OWC has told me that a firmware upgrade should be available soon. I’ve only hit this twice as my machine rarely goes into hibernate.

Most of the speed tests I’ve seen on SSDs compare boot times, but I don’t reboot all that often, so while the speed is nice at startup, it’s kind of a pointless test for me. During everyday operation, I’m actually a little disappointed in the speed. I expected my machine to be blazingly fast after reading all the positives about SSDs. There are 3 factors that affect computer performance, processor speed, RAM, and I/O speed (hard drive/SSD is typically the limiting factor). Maybe I’m spoiled, but this upgrade was a bit expensive for the little gain I’ve seen (or maybe now I’m used to the faster speed and can’t remember the slower speed).

Pros

  • Decreases boot up time.
  • May have a small performance increase in overall machine operation.
  • Silent.
  • Less prone to damage causing by moving the machine (hard drive platters could get damaged if they aren’t parked before moving).

Cons

  • Expensive.
  • Performance increase may be minimal depending on how the machine is used.
  • Firmware bug crashes machine on wake from hibernate.

Summary

I’m not sure that adding an SSD is going to be worth it for most people. I’ve read lots of reviews showing the drives as amazing, but routinely show decreased boot up times which I only see rarely as I put my machine to sleep all the time instead of shut it down. SSDs are coming down in price, but still you can get a much larger 7200 RPM mechanical hard drive for a whole lot less and the 7200 RPM vs 5400 RPM that comes stock in most machines may be a better use of money (I’ve had a 7200 RPM drive in my machine since day one).

When I buy my next machine, I’ll definitely get an SSD in it direct from Apple as it will let me eek every last bit of performance out of the new machine. If the price of SSDs drop significantly, then replacing a mechanical drive with an SSD will become an easier decision.

 

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Review: Apple Magic Trackpad

I’ve been using trackpads on my laptops for many years and used them on the desktop for awhile as well, so when my father started raving about the Apple Magic Trackpad, I thought I’d give it a try. I had read a few reviews of it and heard people talk about it on podcasts, so I thought I’d immediately like it. When I received it, I easily paired it to my MacBook Pro and tried to use it. As I had always been a mechanical click kind of person, I found the trackpad hard to use even though it had mechanical buttons in the front feet. I kept trying to use it for a few days and then simply put it away and forgot about it.

Last week we travelled to San Jose for Thanksgiving and stayed in a hotel (if you go some place for Thanksgiving, I highly recommend staying in a hotel instead of with the in-laws; much easier to have your own space for an extended stay). We put our son down pretty early and I didn’t want to disturb him with the mechanical clicking of my MacBook Pro’s trackpad, so I turned on tap to click. I spent several days learning how to use this feature and first, it was hard to use, but once I changed the double click settings to be slower, I got the hang of it. The hardest part was dragging as every time I was trying to drag, it would double click (hence changing the settings).

When we got back, I pulled out the Magic Trackpad and started to use it again. I had been using my Handshoe Mouse which I really like. My only complaint was all the dirt it picked up which made it feel gritty when I moved it. Within a few minutes, I understood what my dad had been saying about it. It works quite well once you turn on tap to click; if you use the mechanical click, it works poorly as dragging is almost impossible (at least for me). Now that I’ve been using the Magic Trackpad, I’m almost ready to put my mouse out to pasture. The only area that I seem to switch back to the mouse is when I use the iPhone Simulator and have to swipe up as it seems harder to do with a trackpad.

 

Pros

  • Takes up very little room.
  • Easy to pair with my Mac.
  • Reasonable price.
  • Very customizable (there is a free app called BetterTouch Tool that adds even more customizations).
  • Large surface area (larger than my MacBook Pro’s trackpad).

Cons

  • Mechanical clicking works poorly.
  • Tap to click/drag can take a little getting used to if you haven’t used it before.
  • Doesn’t come with rechargeable batteries (when I replace the batteries, I’ll use the Eneloop ones that I’ve had for a few years).
  • Bluetooth is sometimes annoying if I take my MacBook Pro in the other room and the trackpad randomly connects/disconnects (other room is maybe 15 feet away).

Summary

It seems that Apple is moving in the direction of touch for everything and the Magic Trackpad is a natural extension. If you’re tired of dragging a mouse around or cleaning a trackball, the Magic Trackpad is worth considering. The customizable gestures, including the pinch to zoom and swipes is the future of where Apple is going with input, in my opinion. The only real downside I see to the device is the learning curve, at least for me. If I hadn’t forced myself to get used to the tap to click, I would have definitely said that this device was a waste of money. However, once I figured out that this was my problem, I’m happily using the trackpad and am using my MacBook Pro’s internal trackpad more efficiently as well. I would not be surprised if Apple drops the mechanical click in the future.

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You get what you pay for

When I sold ReceiptWallet (now Paperless), I no longer had a real need for a VPS (virtual private server) as all it hosted was this blog. So I decided to shop for something cheaper (I was paying about $40/month). I found one site and paid maybe $15/month, but after an extended outage and poor support, I switched to another provider, costing less than $11/month. I stuck with them for awhile after a number of outages and IP address changes. Last week, they changed my IP address again and not until I received an alert from the monitoring service I use, did I know they had done this. That was fine as I quickly changed my DNS, but then they had a few hour outage yesterday and the explanation was that they had a networking problem. Enough with the problems!

Well, I finally gave up and switched to another provider. This time, I decided to spend a few extra bucks ($20 per month) and go back to the provider I used in the ReceiptWallet days, VPSLink. While their service is a little more expensive and I don’t get as much RAM, bandwidth or storage space (the only thing I miss is the RAM), I’m crossing my fingers that this is a lot more reliable. I’m either going to pay in money or time to keep this site running as well as my wife’s site for her business.

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XPAL Power and the MacBook Pro

Last year I wrote about hooking up my XPAL Power XP 18000 to my MacBook Pro. My method was a bit wacky, but worked fine. As I was surfing the web the other day, I found that XPAL now offered a connector to the MacBook Pro. Very interesting, I thought, so I looked at it. As Apple has a patent on the MagSafe connector, no company has been able to create a knock off cable. What did Energizer do? Well, they created a cable that connected the battery to a female connector that you then use the Apple airline adapter with MagSafe connector. Very clever, but an added expense.

In my case, I already had the adapter, so I used my free tips for life and for $4, I got the connector. The connector works fine and is a bit cleaner than my solution. However, there is a slight difference between my cable and the XPAL Power solution. The Apple airline adapter doesn’t charge the computer when connected (the MagSafe connector has electronics in it to indicate if it should charge the computer). The cables that I used were regular charger cables, so they charge the computer when the battery is connected. In my case, the battery heated up quickly as it was charging the computer. With the XPAL Power solution, my computer didn’t charge, but the battery stayed cool.

So, having said all that, I think that the XPAL Power solution is better than my solution as I’m seeing better battery life. As I compile code a lot, my main battery only lasts about 90 minutes, so if I can get another 1.5-2 hours out of the external battery, I’m quite happy. I believe that the XPAL Power is now going to give me that (before I maybe got an extra 1 hour to 1.25 hours.