Tag: Technology

When I signed up with AT&T for my iPhone, I got the lowest number of minutes I could get, 450 per month as I don’t talk on the phone much. AT&T has rollover minutes which will let me rollover the minutes I don’t use until the next month and they add up for a year. Well, most people have pretty consistent phone usage, so if they get a plan that has more minutes than they need, the rollover minutes start adding up and will never be used.

I’m about half way through my billing cycle and I’ve used 23 any time minutes. At this rate, I’ll use maybe 50. If I keep this up for 12 months, I’ll have almost 5000 rollover minutes. For someone that doesn’t make voice calls all that often, what am I going to do with that many minutes? Effectively I’ll never go over my minutes. Too bad I can’t cash them in at the end of the year for a prize or a discount!

Rollover minutes sound great in commercials, but serve very little practical purpose. Yes, I realize that there are some people that may have unexpected phone calls one month and it will help, but for those people that are always way under their minutes, it’s useless.

I’ve been listening to the MacBreak Weekly podcast and the biggest topic lately is the iPhone 4 antenna mess. It seems that there are 2 technical problems with the iPhone 4 related to this. The first affects all iPhones going back a few years and that has to do with the number of bars. The second is the “death grip” that causes the bars to go down and to drop calls.

Everyone has discussed both of these to death, but I’d like to throw in my 2 cents. The number of bars is not a true indicator of anything. How do I know this? Well, I’m actually someone that has written code to display antenna bars. I wrote the Mac status software for Franklin Wireless. In that software, I read the RSSI value from the modem and put up the bars. Well, I was told to change the bar “calculation” a few times. When I say calculation, it was more like, “if it is in this range, display x bars”. There is absolutely no rocket science involved here; the modem gave me the dB of the RSSI and I displayed bars. So when Apple says they messed up the calculation, it is, in my opinion, a bunch of baloney. I believe it is more likely that someone either tweaked the value to make it look like there were more bars (AT&T says “more bars in more places”) or someone was given the wrong table (you could argue that the latter is actually the wrong calculation, but it was probably overlooked as it looked like there were more bars). So Apple’s upcoming fix will make AT&T look worse which they may deserve.

On the “death grip”, I think people are over reacting (we’ll know more on Friday when Apple has a press conference). The reported fix is to use a bumper or a case. I had ordered Apple’s bumper, but cancelled my order because it would take too long to arrive and the $35 (including tax and shipping) just didn’t sit right with me. So, I decided to go on eBay and see what they had. I picked 4 different cases for a total of under $5 including shipping, direct from China. All of the cases arrived this week and the case that I’m using right now is a silicone case that cost $0.99. If I, as a consumer, can get a case that effectively solves the “death grip” problem for $0.99 with shipping, Apple can easily get cases for half that. At this point (with the information at hand), I think that Apple should send everyone that is having a problem a free bumper. This would allow them to save face and move on. Going forward, they can include the bumper or coat the metal with something.

It’s amazing to me how blow out of proportion this has become; everyone knows about it, even those people that don’t care about the iPhone. I wish Apple the best of luck on a quick resolution, but for me, I’m quite pleased with my phone and haven’t had any issues with it.

As I indicated in a previous post, I planned to get an iPhone 4. I pre-ordered it, but since I was late to the party, it wasn’t going to arrive until July 15th or so. I had wanted it sooner as I was going on 2 trips before then; I don’t travel all that much, so having it would have been convenient.

I tried Wal-Mart, but they didn’t have any on launch day. So, on Thursday night, right before the Apple Store closed in Fashion Valley, I called and asked about stock. The guy I spoke to said that they should get more on Friday and people would be lining up before they opened at 8 am. So, I decided to give it a try on Friday. I arrived at around 8:05 am and got in line. The employees that came out indicated that they had stock, so I waited. I spent about an hour and 10 minutes in line and finally got in the store. It took about another 15-20 minutes to process my order and I was out the door with my phone.

So I bought into the hype and lined up for a phone; however, I didn’t line up at 5 am like other people did. Apple constrains supply and I think fudges numbers to get on the news, which is what happened. If Apple had stock to sell me, why couldn’t they ship me a phone and have it delivered the day after launch? I guess that wouldn’t get them the free publicity.

Now that I have my phone in hand, I’m reasonably impressed with it. I’m less impressed with AT&T and their coverage, but we’ll see how that goes. I did find what I consider to be a very annoying bug with the cellular radio in the phone; if you go out of coverage area for an extended period of time, the phone stops searching for a signal. I had to put it into airplane mode and then turn off airplane mode to get it to search again. I understand power conservation, but you’d think that it would simply try less often to get a signal. What is also strange is that I had coverage, went inside a building, completely lost coverage (the building was a wood framed building, I believe) and never got a signal back. Someone else next to me had a Palm Treo on AT&T and had 2 bars of coverage.

A few weeks before Google announced Google TV, I experienced the future of TV, at least as I see it. We normally record our programs with the EyeTV hooked to a Mac Mini. However, sometimes the EyeTV has a fit and we don’t get everything recorded, but that’s another story. Since our media center is a Mac Mini, I simply used screen sharing to access the Mac, used a web browser, went online to CBS’s Web site (I think it was CBS), and played a show in HD. It streamed quite well on our TV and the commercials weren’t all that annoying. The only problem, however, is that the Flash ads sometimes pop the viewer out of full screen and require me to use my laptop to put it back. If I wanted to watch TV without my laptop on my lap, this would be a problem.

We’ve now started to watch more shows this way and it is convenient. It allows us to watch shows that we haven’t recorded; convenient during the summer when our standard shows aren’t on.

My hope is that Google TV will build upon this concept and allow people to use a television remote to watch TV on the web without having to pay a ton of money for cable. We’re a family that only subscribes to basic cable (it comes with HD for the broadcast channels as it is required by law), so the concept of Google TV could work for us if it let us watch shows that are already available online, free of charge.

When the iPhone first came out, it looked amazing, but I hoped it would fail. Why would I wish such a thing? It was quite simple; my work centered around writing synchronization software for smartphones and if the iPhone succeeded, then I’d have to find other work which is always a scary thing to do. Then about 2.5 years ago, my work transitioned away from sync software, so I was doing some iPhone work and was generally pleased with the device. Fast forward another year. I went to work for a company that sold Sprint service, so while I didn’t want the iPhone to fail, I couldn’t  really go around saying it was the coolest phone out there, now could I since Sprint didn’t sell it.

Another 18 months have passed since then and almost of all of my work is now iPhone development (and soon to be iPad development), so I can truly be excited about the iPhone without thinking that it will hurt my job nor will me saying I like the phone negatively reflect on my company. So now, I have an iPad, iPod Touch, and an iPhone 3GS (not activated).

When the iPhone 4 was announced, I had to make a decision if I was going to get one. For people that already have an iPhone, getting an iPhone 4 is a relatively minor additional cost. For me, an iPhone will cost around $2000 (the 2 year cost) as I don’t have AT&T service. It’s not practical for me to port my phone number and drop my Sprint plan as the plan I have is a family plan that is very cheap for what I have (over the years I’ve had a number of discounts applied and even the base plan you can’t get these days). My wife, said to go ahead and get the iPhone. As I don’t like spending large amounts of money, I hemmed and hawed over it and decided that if I’m going to say I’m an iPhone developer, it kind of makes sense for me to carry an iPhone.

So there you have it, iAm an Apple fan boy. I really like the products and enjoy writing software for them. Did I get my order in early enough to be one of the first to get one? Unfortunately no so I have to wait until mid July for mine to arrive.

My wife does a lot of USPS shipping via PayPal for her jewelry business. She has been printing the labels on 8.5 x 11 on our laser printer, but to not waste labels, she would print the labels to PDF, put them in Word, crop them and print 2 to a page. This, of course, takes a lot of time. Things got even worse when she runs out of labels; she cuts out the label and tapes it to the shipping envelope.

I decided to look for a better solution and decided to get her a DYMO LabelWriter 4XL. The printer prints 4×6 labels. Unfortunately, PayPal’s Mac support for this printer is non-existent. After a lot of research, I came across an article that explained how to get PayPal to print to the printer. I started following the instructions, but had trouble installing CUPS-PDF on my wife’s Leopard machine. After I managed to get it installed and running (I finally found an older version), I was testing it and found a much simpler solution.

Here’s the quick and easy way to print shipping labels on the LabelWriter 4XL printer using a Mac.

1. Install the DYMO drivers (make sure you grab them from the DYMO Web site as DYMO using strange numbering and version 8.2 isn’t the same as 8.2; the latest version is 8.2.2.1172. I had an 8.2 version that was earlier and didn’t support the 4XL.
2. Set PayPal to print labels to a laser printer or inkjet printer. From the PayPal home page, click Profile. Click Shipping Preferences. Click Edit Printer Settings. Select  Laser/Ink Jet Printer. Click Save.
3. Print the label by clicking Print Label on the Print Postage Page.
4. When you goto print, create a custom paper size called 4×6. However, configure it a little bigger than 4×6.
5. Setup the printer to be landscape, print page 1 to 1 (sometimes there is a second page).
6. Click Print.

The screenshots were taking on Snow Leopard, so Leopard is a little different. However, that’s the jist of how to “easily” print shipping labels from PayPal. Granted there are a few steps involved, but this sure is easier than taking the labels into word, cropping them, printing them and then cutting them out. This seems quite simple, so I’m not sure why no one else figured this out with other 4×6 printers. Granted the LabelWriter 4XL is a new printer, but there are other printers like it.

I hope this helps someone.

Several weeks ago, the VPS (virtual private server) that I use to host my blog and Web site went down for more than 6 hours. The service, like most VPS services, has a 99%+ uptime guarantee. Well, the uptime guarantee is kind of useless as the site is still down and the few bucks credit I got aren’t really worth much. Their support folks didn’t get back to me until the end of the outage and then gave some excuse that they were short staffed. By the time the site had come back up, I had already signed up with another VPS and restored my site (I have scripts on the VPS that backup nightly and then everyday, my Mac syncs down the backups). The whole setup process takes me about 2 hours as my VPS isn’t all that complicated.

So, now I’m trying out 123Systems Solutions on their second level VPS (25 GB disk space, 1 TB traffic, 512 MB RAM burstable to 1 GB). I found a discount code and brought the price to just over $10/month. Like the last one, they offer an uptime guarantee. This one has only been around for a few months, so we’ll see. Worst case is I move my VPS again; a little time consuming, but definitely not the end of the world. They have been quite responsive when I submitted a ticket and have communicated when they’d be short staffed. I’m also impressed with their control panel to manage it. However, their reverse DNS doesn’t seem to work properly. Oh well, not the end of the world.

Yesterday, my wife asked if I wanted to come with her to pick up our son that was spending the day at my parents. I asked her what time and she said that she’d leave around 4pm. Hmmm, I had a 4 pm meeting. I said “sure”, but she’d have to drive. 4 pm came around, I got on my phone call, turned on my Sprint MiFi, switched my Mac over to the MiFi’s network and was all set.

I hopped in the car, put the MiFi on the dash and my wife drove. The hard part was seeing my screen, so I had to put a jacket over the screen.

No one was the wiser about my mobile office! We didn’t encounter any dead cell spots, so the call went flawlessly and I was connected for the entire 30 minute or so ride.

I’ve had a MiFi for about a year, but for some reason I didn’t use it much. Now that I’m paying for my own service, I feel compelled to use it to its fullest.

A friend pointed me to Dropbox the other day to transfer PDFs to my iPad. I’m not sure why I didn’t sign up earlier. It’s free for up to 2 GB and it works so seamlessly. It’s actually easier to use than dragging and dropping files across my network; just place the file in the Dropbox folder on one machine and it appears on the other machine almost instantly. It really couldn’t be any easier.

I’ve reviewed their specs and they say it is secure where even their employees can’t view files. I haven’t read anything to the contrary, but who knows. Will I put my accounting data on it? No. Will I put temp files that I need to move around on it? Sure.

Give it a try and see if it can work for you.