Tag: Technology

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Gadgets still in use

As a technology person, I always have gadgets lying around. I’m very attracted to them, but I lose interest in many very quickly which should make me think harder the next time I’m going to buy some technology product.

If we exclude the gadgets I’ve needed for projects (like a PSP, Palm devices, etc.), there are only a handful of devices that I still use.

  • TiVo We’ve had our TiVo 3.5 years and it is probably the single piece of technology that if it broke, my wife would tell me to immediately replace.
  • SqueezeBox When I installed our home stereo system a few years ago, I knew that I had to have a way to play music other than just the radio through it. I bought the SqueezeBox and it has been invaluable. When I found out that we could stream XM Radio through it, I had to buy a second one. Two may seem like overkill, but one lets me listen to my music and the other is usually tuned to XM Kids.
  • Garmin Forerunner 305 While I don’t plan on running another marathon any time soon (my brother-in-law suggested we both run one in less than 2 months…he’s crazy!), I like being able to track my short runs as well as our walks. I may get the Forerunner 405 as I still love running.
  • Chargepod It wasn’t cheap and looks kind of funny, but having one charger on my desk that my wife and I can both use to charge our phones and iPods is extremely handy.
  • Apple TV Not for the real purpose of the Apple TV, but to run our music server. We just don’t have the energy to watch long movies and buying TV shows on the Apple TV doesn’t interest me.
  • iPod Nano I still using my iPod when I run or workout; these days I mainly listen to podcasts, but it still gets used frequently.

I could start listing the devices that I have on the shelf, but that would start to get depressing to know how much stuff I didn’t really need to buy.

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Samsung Instinct – Nice try, but…

Last week, Sprint announced the Samsung Instinct. It is a nice try to compete with the iPhone, but it just isn’t an iPhone. It runs on a great network (Sprint has an excellent data network), but Samsung and Sprint aren’t known for their cutting edge user interfaces. In addition, the iPhone has iTunes which is an easy to use application and actually works on the Mac; will the Instinct ever have Mac software? Unlikely as Sprint’s commitment to the Mac is mediocre at best. Granted it does have EVDO and some other cool features, but it doesn’t have the buzz of the iPhone and won’t have the third party applications that the iPhone will have in a few short months.

I’d love to see the iPhone on Sprint, but with Sprint heavily invested in this phone, even when the iPhone exclusivity with AT&T expires, the chances of this happening will be almost zero. I really like the iPhone and the only thing I have against the phone is AT&T.

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Cool Cheap Camcorder

Last Sunday, I saw on Richard Wanderman’s blog a note about David Pogue’s review of the Flip Ultra. Last year I was contemplating getting an HD video camera to record our son’s first year and eventually his first steps. I spent a long time researching and thinking about it. I was about to purchase one, but decided against it as it isn’t all that convenient to use any camcorder.

When I saw the Flip Ultra, I said cool. The resolution, 640×480 is four times the resolution of the video clips on our digital camera, so what did I have to lose in getting one. I ordered on Sunday from Amazon for about $142 and received it yesterday. It is so easy to use, it’s unbelievable. I’ve only taken a few clips with it, but I can see us using it a lot and hopefully we’ll always have it handy to record our son.

The only downside I see right now is that it uses the 3ivx codec. Why is that a problem? Well, if you want to playback the video, you have to install the codec and if we want to post video online, others have to also download the codec which isn’t all that easy for novices. However, since I have QuickTime Pro, I can export video to H.264 which pretty much everyone can view these days. (I realized today why they chose 3ivx; it has to do with money. The H.264 and AAC codecs could amount to several dollars per unit shipped and with the Flip Ultra costing $140, a few dollars can make a huge difference.)

I think that I’m going to be quite happy with this as the main purpose was to shoot better video than what our digital camera does and at the resolution it does, it easily meets that requirement.

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Buying a computer? Wait a week?

I’m not sure where I heard it, but I love the saying that says if you want to buy a computer, wait a week. There will never be a good time to buy technology as it will always get “better” and become cheaper. I had been planning on purchasing a new MacBook Pro after I paid my taxes, my my dog’s root canal put that on hold. Today, I’m sort of glad I waited and will be waiting for the new round of MacBook Pros to come out (whenever that is) because Fujitsu announced a 320 GB 7200 RPM portable drives. I always get my portable machines with 7200 RPM drives as I like the extra speed for development. As of now, the largest you can get (at least from Apple in a build to order configuration) is 200 GB for a 7200 RPM drive. Hopefully Apple makes the Fujitsu an option or other vendors increase capacity for the 7200 RPM drives.

Waiting, however, will be hard as my current machine is approaching 2 years old which is an eternity in computer time.

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iPhone SDK: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Apple announced the iPhone SDK the other day and there is a lot of discussion about it among those that I know. Overall, I’m quite happy with Apple’s offering; while I don’t have a huge interest in writing handheld applications anymore (I wrote Newton and Palm software for way too long), it might be fun to dabble in some stuff. In addition, I have some clients interested in apps.

The Good

  • Xcode is the development environment.
  • There is a simulator.
  • Apple is charging money to get a certificate and release applications; this might keep out some of the weekend developers that don’t have good development practices.
  • The SDK looks very complete.
  • Background applications can’t be written. Yeah, hopefully this will make the platform more robust.

The Bad

  • Apple won’t take my money to become a developer, yet. I applied, but who knows if I’ll be accepted.
  • The $99 fee is too low. Yes, I said it. The barrier to entry is so minor, that every Tom, Dick, and Harry will sign up. I don’t want my iPhone to crash and have people write crap. I’ve been through that with the Palm; there is so much crap that people just throw out there. I want quality and people that are serious about development. I have nothing against hobby developers (except they drag the value of software down by releasing stuff for next to nothing), but the entire iPhone platform will get a bad reputation if people download software and have their iPhone crash. Maybe Apple will yank the apps that crash.
  • No Interface Builder support, yet (I’m impatient).
  • Enterprise developers are charged more than commercial developers; I’m not sure what this is about, but maybe it has to do with a different distribution mechanism. I have a client that wants to sign up and doesn’t have a problem with the fee, but it seems to me that Apple should just have one fee.
  • Why were some companies chosen to get early access and others weren’t? I’ve been developing handheld applications for over a decade and no one contacted me. I guess they were just looking for the wow factor; one of the companies that was selected has written garbage in the past on other platforms, but the company name means something…I guess quality doesn’t.

The Ugly

  • Apple underestimated the demand. It took hours for me to grab the SDK; to top it off, someone brilliant put a link to the SDK on Apple’s homepage to drive even more traffic to it.

I’ve only poked around in the SDK as I’m trying to get ReceiptWallet 2.0 out the door, but will take a closer look in the upcoming weeks.

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The OS war continues

Yesterday I was talking to 2 people that had completely different views on operating systems. The first person had just switched to a Mac and bought his wife one as well. He was extremely pleased and said that Vista actually caused him to switch as it was slow and then he had to upgrade his hardware to run it. He also thought that he’d need to run VMWare to run his old Windows apps, but found he only uses it for some media files (probably those with DRM) that don’t play on the Mac. On the flip side, the other guy was completely anti-Mac because he said it confused him and he didn’t like how iTunes arranged his music. Fair enough to not like iTunes as iTunes is designed for most users that don’t care where iTunes actually puts the music; he is the exception.

I always say that you should use the tool that gets the job done; if you want to use Windows, that’s your choice, but don’t ask me for help. People have also said, buy a computer that the person you know who knows most about computers uses so that you can ask them questions. With that kind of thinking, please buy Windows so you don’t ask me questions :-).

I think that most people that sit down with a Mac for awhile and get used to it, will find that it works well and may be less confusing than Windows. With all the software that ships with Macs, it makes it a no-brainer for many people.

The OS war will never end; however, these days with Intel based machines, it is much easier to convince people to move to the Mac.

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My first podcast interview

Today I had the opportunity to be interviewed on the T4 Show. I’ve never done an audio interview before (I was interviewed back in high school for the recycling project I started for the local paper), so I was a little nervous. I tried to focus and think before speaking. After a few false starts with Skype (I’ve never used Skype before), we switched to iChat and things worked well.

You can listen to the whole interview by downloading the podcast. If you like the podcast, you can subscribe via iTunes.

I’ve listened to the show once (I actually have a number of episodes on my iPod, but only got around to listening to it the other day). I had a lot more time to listen to podcasts last year when I was training for my second marathon; now that I just goto the gym a few times a week, I don’t have as much time (I can’t just listen to them when I’m working as it hurts my concentration).

I’m not sure how I did on the interview, but I enjoyed doing it. I hope it is the first of many interviews.

Thanks, Michael!

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Backup, backup, and backup again

There are two types of computer users, those that have lost data and those that will. Yes, I know this is a profound statement, but computers are prone to fail (they are made by humans, who do, of course, make mistakes). I’m very religious about my backups as I have lost data in the past, not much data, but some. For years, I did weekly archives to CDs and then DVDs. These were good as I could go back in time and get old data, but it turns out I never did that. Last year I shredded years of old CDs and DVDs. My current strategy is to protect against hardware failure and software corrupting data. The first part is easy, just backup to an external drive every day. I do this and rotate between 3 drives; one is always offsite in my safe deposit box. I goto my safe deposit every Friday (the tellers know me I’m there so often). This is a great strategy and has served me well. I did have a hard drive failure several years back, but recovered quite easily (not quickly because my most recent backup that was a few hours old was sitting in the safe deposit box that I couldn’t get to for 2 days as I dropped it off on a Saturday). Every day I use SuperDuper! to backup and I’m very pleased with this. I’ve added Time Machine to my mix and that has also saved me. I believe you can never have too many backups. Oh and I forgot, my virtual private server gets an archive created daily and then once a day, it is synced down to my machine and then weekly copied to a drive going to my safe deposit box. So, I’m pretty well covered.

Why did I write all this? I got a panicked email from a user that used Carbon Copy Cloner to backup his drive, erased his computer and then installed Leopard. However, he apparently didn’t verify that this backup (his only one) worked. When he fired up DocumentWallet, all his documents that he had created over the last 8 months were gone and he wanted to know how to get them back. I’m not sure what the final result was, but I told the user where DocumentWallet stores his data and to search his hard drive; hopefully he’ll find his documents. At any given time, I have 4 backups of my data (1 Time Machine and 3 cloned drives with SuperDuper!). Could disaster strike me? Sure, if I delete a file and discover months later that I need it, I won’t have it. This has happened a few times, but it wasn’t critical. With all my source code under Subversion version control, I have another layer of protection that lets me roll back to older versions of my source.

So the moral of my story is make sure you have a backup strategy and always do backups. Either use an automated system or make sure you are extremely consistent about it. (Mine is semi-automated; I have a cron job that launches SuperDuper! everyday at 5 pm and then I shove in one of my drive.)

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Disappointed in new MacBook Pro Offering

I see that Apple released new MacBook Pro machines today. The upgrade seems quite minor. I was hoping for more. While I will get a new machine (after I pay the tax man and see what is left), I really wanted something faster than 2.5 GHz (the 2.6 GHz upgrade for $250 is a waste in my mind) with a larger 7200 RPM drive (the largest 7200 RPM drive I can get is 200 GB). In any case, it will be a nice upgrade from my almost 2 year old MacBook Pro (2.16 GHz Core Duo with 100 GB hard drive). Apple is still out of whack with its RAM pricing; I can go down to The Chip Merchant and buy 4 GB of RAM for $110; Apple wants $400.

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Mess of wall chargers

Yesterday I went to use my Sony Reader and it said “Low Battery”. This was very strange as it had been plugged into the charger for 2 days, so it should be charged. I looked at the Reader and it said it used a 5.2 V charger. I looked at the charger and it said 5 V. Hmmm. That was strange, so I dug through my chargers and found the 5.2 V charger. The 5 V charger was from my PSP; I plugged the 5.2 V charger in and this morning, the Reader was all set to go. Now, the two chargers had identical plugs on them, so it was quite easy to make the mistake. If Sony had a clue, it would have made the same charger for both products as it would have saved on manufacturing costs and would have reduced confusion for people like me that own both products.