Blog
Tuesday, May 06, 2014
Streaming Music Services
In general, I've never been the kind of guy who likes to listen to music at work. And in most of my previous jobs, I really wouldn't have been able to listen to music, since there were a lot of interruptions and interactions that would have prevented me from getting too far into anything before I'd have to take my headphones off to answer a call, or run over to a user's desk, or whatever. But, in my current job, I'm doing a fair amount of "heads down" programming, with few interruptions. And I'm actually finding that some of the office noise distracts me enough that drowning it out with music allows me to be more productive.
For a while, I tried just listening to Coffeetivity. This was kind of helpful, but also kind of boring. I may give it another try at some point. I also tried focus@will. The idea here is kind of cool, but I'm not convinced it would make me more productive than listening to music of my own choosing. Again, I may give it another try at some point, maybe the next time they run a 50% off sale on a year's subscription to their "premium" service. And, as I've mentioned previously on this blog, I was really in love with turntable.fm. Unfortunately, they shut down a while ago.
After messing around with all this stuff, I settled into a habit of listening to Pandora a lot. I set up some "stations" based on my favorite artists, and that worked out pretty well. About a year ago, I paid $36 to subscribe to Pandora One for a year, so I could get rid of the ads. That didn't seem like a bad price, even though it really doesn't buy you anything other than ad-free listening.
This past weekend, I got a notice that it was time to renew. (Normally, that would have happened automatically, but my credit card got stolen a while back and I had to replace it, so they couldn't put through the charge on my old card.) I really wanted to just renew it for another whole year, but Pandora discontinued the annual plan a while back. So the $36/year (effectively $3/month) plan would become a $4/month plan with no annual billing option. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go forward with that, so I basically just let the subscription lapse. Then, on Monday, when I looked again, I realized that I was no longer eligible for the $4/month "loyalty price," and would have to go on the new $5/month plan. So I decided that was a but much, and I'd look around at other options.
For now, I've settled on Slacker. The ad-free version is $4/month, and it gets you a few things that you don't get with Pandora. The one feature I really like, and I wish Pandora allowed, is the option to download stuff for offline listening. I can't use my employer's wifi to stream music to my phone at work, so I have to rely on my Verizon data connection. This generally works OK, but I can wind up getting pretty close to my data cap sometimes, and I think it drains the battery a lot more than listening from a local cache. So just being able to download a cache of stuff over my home wifi, before leaving for work, is useful.
I'm also finding that Slacker's "curated" stations are interesting. I listened to "The Current" station today, and it was really good. I'm not sure how often the content on that station is refreshed, but I could see myself listening to that one quite a lot. So, overall, I'm finding Slacker to be just as good as Pandora, but with a few more bells and whistles. Over time, I'll see how well it holds up -- whether or not there are any glitches with the app, how often content is refreshed, and stuff like that. But I'm feeling pretty good about it.
For a while, I tried just listening to Coffeetivity. This was kind of helpful, but also kind of boring. I may give it another try at some point. I also tried focus@will. The idea here is kind of cool, but I'm not convinced it would make me more productive than listening to music of my own choosing. Again, I may give it another try at some point, maybe the next time they run a 50% off sale on a year's subscription to their "premium" service. And, as I've mentioned previously on this blog, I was really in love with turntable.fm. Unfortunately, they shut down a while ago.
After messing around with all this stuff, I settled into a habit of listening to Pandora a lot. I set up some "stations" based on my favorite artists, and that worked out pretty well. About a year ago, I paid $36 to subscribe to Pandora One for a year, so I could get rid of the ads. That didn't seem like a bad price, even though it really doesn't buy you anything other than ad-free listening.
This past weekend, I got a notice that it was time to renew. (Normally, that would have happened automatically, but my credit card got stolen a while back and I had to replace it, so they couldn't put through the charge on my old card.) I really wanted to just renew it for another whole year, but Pandora discontinued the annual plan a while back. So the $36/year (effectively $3/month) plan would become a $4/month plan with no annual billing option. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go forward with that, so I basically just let the subscription lapse. Then, on Monday, when I looked again, I realized that I was no longer eligible for the $4/month "loyalty price," and would have to go on the new $5/month plan. So I decided that was a but much, and I'd look around at other options.
For now, I've settled on Slacker. The ad-free version is $4/month, and it gets you a few things that you don't get with Pandora. The one feature I really like, and I wish Pandora allowed, is the option to download stuff for offline listening. I can't use my employer's wifi to stream music to my phone at work, so I have to rely on my Verizon data connection. This generally works OK, but I can wind up getting pretty close to my data cap sometimes, and I think it drains the battery a lot more than listening from a local cache. So just being able to download a cache of stuff over my home wifi, before leaving for work, is useful.
I'm also finding that Slacker's "curated" stations are interesting. I listened to "The Current" station today, and it was really good. I'm not sure how often the content on that station is refreshed, but I could see myself listening to that one quite a lot. So, overall, I'm finding Slacker to be just as good as Pandora, but with a few more bells and whistles. Over time, I'll see how well it holds up -- whether or not there are any glitches with the app, how often content is refreshed, and stuff like that. But I'm feeling pretty good about it.
Sunday, May 04, 2014
a little more on digital comics
As a follow-up to my post earlier today, I spent some time today looking through my e-mail receipts for Comixology and Dark Horse Digital purchases, and made lists in Evernote for stuff I've read and stuff I haven't read yet. First, let me say that I was surprised to see how much stuff I've bought, in both apps, but haven't actually read yet. But now that I have decent lists to start from, I should be able to keep track of it all, going forward.
Thoughts on digital comics
OK, this is going to be my obligatory post on Amazon's purchase of Comixology, and possibly some related topics, depending on whether or not I run out of steam before I get to all the stuff that's in my head right now. :-)
First, let me say that I have hundreds of books in my Comixology library. I can't tell you how many, because Comixology's web interface for browsing your library really doesn't tell you much. (OK, picking up my iPad and looking at the app, I can see that it's apparently 635. But there's no way to see that on the web, as far as I can tell.) This is the main beef I have with Comixology, both with their web interface and their apps. Since their books are DRM'd, I can only store them and read them in the Comixology apps (and site), and they really haven't put much work into making any of their interfaces really useful for people with more than a handful of books. Even something as simple as keeping track of read vs unread status across devices would be nice. They have said that they're "working on it" and "we need to do this", but they really haven't done it. The iPad app will mark as "new" stuff that you've just downloaded and haven't read yet. But that's only tracked in the app itself. The "cloud" view doesn't track when or if you've read something. And since they just replaced their apps with new versions, all that info from the old app is effectively gone now.
I've recently started using Goodreads to keep track of my reading for dead-tree and Kindle books, and I'm thinking that maybe I should use it for Comixology too. Though single-issue comics don't fit well into Goodread's model, really. Maybe I should just track them in Evernote? The thing that really clutters up Comixology is all the free comics. Not that I'm complaining about all the free comics I've downloaded from Comixology, but it can make it hard to find the stuff I've actually paid for. Even just having a simple user-contolled tagging system or folder system would solve this problem. How hard would that be to implement?
Moving on to the subject of Amazon's purchase of Comixology, this could be good or bad. Removing the in-app purchasing option wasn't a big surprise. You can't do in-app purchase in the Kindle iPad app either. I want to say that Amazon's purchase might let them spend more money on both the web and app interfaces, and maybe implement some of the stuff I'd like to see there, but then I remember what the interface looks like in the Kindle app, and on the Kindle itself, and I laugh at the idea that Amazon might implement nested folders or useful tagging in the Comixology app. (Not that I'm bitter or anything..)
Meanwhile, I just recently bought Comic Zeal for my iPad, so I can have a nice interface for managing and reading my DRM-free comics. Previously, I'd used Goodreader to read some comics I had in PDF format. Goodreader is a pretty great piece of software, and it works OK for comics, but it's not perfect for them. So I looked around at comics readers, and Comic Zeal seemed to have the best reviews. I've loaded a bunch of stuff into it, including comics I've bought from Matt Howarth and some stuff from Drive-Thru Comics. I really like the ability to organize stuff. It's quite easy to put stuff in folders by series, to tag books, and to reorder the list of books. The software does keep track of your reading progress in individual books, but I haven't found any option to, for instance, show only unread books. But really, since I'm only using it for DRM-free books, I can just delete stuff that I've already read, and just keep that stuff on my PC. In terms of the actual reading experience, I've found it to be a bit slow on page-turning for some PDF comics. I really haven't used it enough to have formed much of an overall opinion yet though.
I'm thinking about picking up the Image Comics bundle that Humble has on sale right now, so that would give me a bunch of new stuff to load into Comic Zeal and enjoy. If I do that, and actually get around to reading some of it, then I'll probably post a follow-up with more thoughts on how well Comic Zeal works in practice.
First, let me say that I have hundreds of books in my Comixology library. I can't tell you how many, because Comixology's web interface for browsing your library really doesn't tell you much. (OK, picking up my iPad and looking at the app, I can see that it's apparently 635. But there's no way to see that on the web, as far as I can tell.) This is the main beef I have with Comixology, both with their web interface and their apps. Since their books are DRM'd, I can only store them and read them in the Comixology apps (and site), and they really haven't put much work into making any of their interfaces really useful for people with more than a handful of books. Even something as simple as keeping track of read vs unread status across devices would be nice. They have said that they're "working on it" and "we need to do this", but they really haven't done it. The iPad app will mark as "new" stuff that you've just downloaded and haven't read yet. But that's only tracked in the app itself. The "cloud" view doesn't track when or if you've read something. And since they just replaced their apps with new versions, all that info from the old app is effectively gone now.
I've recently started using Goodreads to keep track of my reading for dead-tree and Kindle books, and I'm thinking that maybe I should use it for Comixology too. Though single-issue comics don't fit well into Goodread's model, really. Maybe I should just track them in Evernote? The thing that really clutters up Comixology is all the free comics. Not that I'm complaining about all the free comics I've downloaded from Comixology, but it can make it hard to find the stuff I've actually paid for. Even just having a simple user-contolled tagging system or folder system would solve this problem. How hard would that be to implement?
Moving on to the subject of Amazon's purchase of Comixology, this could be good or bad. Removing the in-app purchasing option wasn't a big surprise. You can't do in-app purchase in the Kindle iPad app either. I want to say that Amazon's purchase might let them spend more money on both the web and app interfaces, and maybe implement some of the stuff I'd like to see there, but then I remember what the interface looks like in the Kindle app, and on the Kindle itself, and I laugh at the idea that Amazon might implement nested folders or useful tagging in the Comixology app. (Not that I'm bitter or anything..)
Meanwhile, I just recently bought Comic Zeal for my iPad, so I can have a nice interface for managing and reading my DRM-free comics. Previously, I'd used Goodreader to read some comics I had in PDF format. Goodreader is a pretty great piece of software, and it works OK for comics, but it's not perfect for them. So I looked around at comics readers, and Comic Zeal seemed to have the best reviews. I've loaded a bunch of stuff into it, including comics I've bought from Matt Howarth and some stuff from Drive-Thru Comics. I really like the ability to organize stuff. It's quite easy to put stuff in folders by series, to tag books, and to reorder the list of books. The software does keep track of your reading progress in individual books, but I haven't found any option to, for instance, show only unread books. But really, since I'm only using it for DRM-free books, I can just delete stuff that I've already read, and just keep that stuff on my PC. In terms of the actual reading experience, I've found it to be a bit slow on page-turning for some PDF comics. I really haven't used it enough to have formed much of an overall opinion yet though.
I'm thinking about picking up the Image Comics bundle that Humble has on sale right now, so that would give me a bunch of new stuff to load into Comic Zeal and enjoy. If I do that, and actually get around to reading some of it, then I'll probably post a follow-up with more thoughts on how well Comic Zeal works in practice.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
InstaCast
After my issue with podcasts that I posted about last week, I decided to switch from using iTunes and the Apple podcast app to Instacast. I bought both the Mac and iOS versions. After using both for about a week, I'm mostly satisfied, but there are definitely a few shortcomings.
First, on the plus side, Instacast hasn't arbitrarily deleted a bunch of podcasts from my Mac, as iTunes did last week. Instacast has a pretty interesting way of dealing with podcast files, actually. It's not quite perfect for the way I'd like to do it, but it's reasonable. Basically, you set a maximum amount of space that you'd like to use for podcasts, and Instacast deletes stuff once it reaches that limit. It's pretty sensible about picking what to delete -- it goes for episodes that you've already played and haven't marked as favorites first, if I understand it correctly. I've set it to use up to 10 GB on my Mac, and 1 GB on my iPhone, so that should be good enough. I kind of wish, though, that you could set certain podcasts to keep forever. There are a few podcasts, like Warren Ellis' SPEKTRMODULE, for instance, that I'd like to just keep forever. With Instacast, I can't really do that, and I guess I'd want to copy the files out of Instacast and into a separate folder.
Which brings up a separate point: Instacast does allow you to right-click on a given podcast episode and select "Show in Finder", so that's good. But, unlike iTunes, it doesn't organize individual podcasts into their own folders, now does it keep the original file names. Instead, it puts all of its files together in a single folder, and names them with (I assume) random GUIDs. So, to copy out all of the episodes of a given podcast, I'd really have to do "show in finder" on each one individually, and copy them one at a time. (And if I wanted the copied files to have reasonable names, I'd have to rename them too.) So I'm not too happy about that, but it's not a terribly big deal.
In terms of the actual functionality of the apps, let's start with the Mac app. It seems to be a reasonably well-written Mac app, not taking up too much memory or CPU, and launching pretty quickly. (I wish that was something I could take for granted with a commercial Mac app, but alas, no...) I'm using the Mac app mostly to watch Tekzilla. (If there were any other video podcasts that I was interested in, I'd use it for those too, but there isn't anything else I'm following right now.) It does a good enough job on that. Basically, it just plays the video and gets out of the way, which is what I want. It works fine for playing downloaded episodes, and it can also stream episodes that you haven't downloaded, which is nice.
For the iOS app, that also works reasonably well. I use it only for audio podcasts, and I follow a few of those. You can set it to download episodes only when on wifi, which is a good thing, as my Verizon data usage has been a problem lately. I've had it randomly stop playing a podcast twice so far, which is a bit puzzling. In both cases, I could start the podcast back up where I left off, no problem. I was driving both times, so I didn't see what happened. I'm not sure if the app crashed or if it just stopped playing. And I think it was the same podcast file both times, so maybe there was just something wrong with that file. If this keeps happening, I'm going to get frustrated with it pretty quickly, but we'll see what happens over time.
There's a function built into both the Mac and iOS apps called "Up Next" that lets you create an on-the-fly playlist of a few random podcast episodes, so you can set yourself up if you've got a long drive. I used it today for my 90-minute drive down to a friend's house, and it worked well. There doesn't seem to be a way, though, to tell it to just continuously play consecutive episodes of a single podcast, which is a bit weird.
There are a few other things I could mention, but this post is long enough as-is, so I'll leave it there, and just say that I don't regret spending the $20 on the Mac app and $4 on the iOS app, but I'm still not sure if I'll stick with it or switch to something else in the long term.
First, on the plus side, Instacast hasn't arbitrarily deleted a bunch of podcasts from my Mac, as iTunes did last week. Instacast has a pretty interesting way of dealing with podcast files, actually. It's not quite perfect for the way I'd like to do it, but it's reasonable. Basically, you set a maximum amount of space that you'd like to use for podcasts, and Instacast deletes stuff once it reaches that limit. It's pretty sensible about picking what to delete -- it goes for episodes that you've already played and haven't marked as favorites first, if I understand it correctly. I've set it to use up to 10 GB on my Mac, and 1 GB on my iPhone, so that should be good enough. I kind of wish, though, that you could set certain podcasts to keep forever. There are a few podcasts, like Warren Ellis' SPEKTRMODULE, for instance, that I'd like to just keep forever. With Instacast, I can't really do that, and I guess I'd want to copy the files out of Instacast and into a separate folder.
Which brings up a separate point: Instacast does allow you to right-click on a given podcast episode and select "Show in Finder", so that's good. But, unlike iTunes, it doesn't organize individual podcasts into their own folders, now does it keep the original file names. Instead, it puts all of its files together in a single folder, and names them with (I assume) random GUIDs. So, to copy out all of the episodes of a given podcast, I'd really have to do "show in finder" on each one individually, and copy them one at a time. (And if I wanted the copied files to have reasonable names, I'd have to rename them too.) So I'm not too happy about that, but it's not a terribly big deal.
In terms of the actual functionality of the apps, let's start with the Mac app. It seems to be a reasonably well-written Mac app, not taking up too much memory or CPU, and launching pretty quickly. (I wish that was something I could take for granted with a commercial Mac app, but alas, no...) I'm using the Mac app mostly to watch Tekzilla. (If there were any other video podcasts that I was interested in, I'd use it for those too, but there isn't anything else I'm following right now.) It does a good enough job on that. Basically, it just plays the video and gets out of the way, which is what I want. It works fine for playing downloaded episodes, and it can also stream episodes that you haven't downloaded, which is nice.
For the iOS app, that also works reasonably well. I use it only for audio podcasts, and I follow a few of those. You can set it to download episodes only when on wifi, which is a good thing, as my Verizon data usage has been a problem lately. I've had it randomly stop playing a podcast twice so far, which is a bit puzzling. In both cases, I could start the podcast back up where I left off, no problem. I was driving both times, so I didn't see what happened. I'm not sure if the app crashed or if it just stopped playing. And I think it was the same podcast file both times, so maybe there was just something wrong with that file. If this keeps happening, I'm going to get frustrated with it pretty quickly, but we'll see what happens over time.
There's a function built into both the Mac and iOS apps called "Up Next" that lets you create an on-the-fly playlist of a few random podcast episodes, so you can set yourself up if you've got a long drive. I used it today for my 90-minute drive down to a friend's house, and it worked well. There doesn't seem to be a way, though, to tell it to just continuously play consecutive episodes of a single podcast, which is a bit weird.
There are a few other things I could mention, but this post is long enough as-is, so I'll leave it there, and just say that I don't regret spending the $20 on the Mac app and $4 on the iOS app, but I'm still not sure if I'll stick with it or switch to something else in the long term.
iBooks on the Mac
I have a few things I want to write up and post today, and, taken together, I think they're going to make me look like a cranky old man. But that's ok.
I bought a couple of Microsoft Press ebooks from O'Reilly today, since they're having a "Farewell MS Press" 60% off sale right now, so I thought I'd snag a couple while they were cheap and still DRM-free. It looks like MS Press is moving to Pearson for distribution, starting April 1. It's unclear as to whether or not they'll continue to offer DRM-free ebooks, but (being a pessimistic and cranky old man), I'm guessing no.
So, after downloading them, I wanted to drag them into iTunes so I could read them on my iPad with iBooks. (That's a lot of iProducts, huh?) Well, I hadn't done that in a while, so, for some reason, I launched iBooks on my Mac. I don't think I'd ever actually done that before, as I don't really read books on the MacBook. It prompted me to import my books from iTunes, so I went ahead and did that. Now I'm cranky.
Having a dedicated app to read books on the Mac seems like a good idea. There's no particularly good reason books should be kept in iTunes. But, after going through that import process, I'm not entirely happy with the result. iTunes kept books in a nicely-organized folder, with sub-folders by author name, and files named (sensibly) according to the book title. And (of course) if you pulled in a book with bad metadata, you could press Command-I on it in iTunes and edit the metadata.
iBooks, on the other hand, stores all the books in one folder, no sub-folders, with names that appear to be randomly-assigned GUIDs. And there's no right-clck "View in Finder" option in iBooks, so there's really no telling which one is which. And there's no way to edit metadata in iBooks, so if you import a book with bad metadata, it's quite a task to change it. (There's some more help with that here.) Or I could switch back to iTunes, but that's pretty darn complicated.
I'm starting to wonder if I should switch to a third-party reader app (much as I did with podcasts last week) and give up on iTunes. Almost all of the ebooks I want access to on my iPad are DRM-free ones from O'Reilly and Packt. I already have a few apps on my iPad that might do the trick, including GoodReader, the Kindle app, and OverDrive. Maybe I need to pick one that works well with DRM-free epubs or mobi files, and stick with it.
I bought a couple of Microsoft Press ebooks from O'Reilly today, since they're having a "Farewell MS Press" 60% off sale right now, so I thought I'd snag a couple while they were cheap and still DRM-free. It looks like MS Press is moving to Pearson for distribution, starting April 1. It's unclear as to whether or not they'll continue to offer DRM-free ebooks, but (being a pessimistic and cranky old man), I'm guessing no.
So, after downloading them, I wanted to drag them into iTunes so I could read them on my iPad with iBooks. (That's a lot of iProducts, huh?) Well, I hadn't done that in a while, so, for some reason, I launched iBooks on my Mac. I don't think I'd ever actually done that before, as I don't really read books on the MacBook. It prompted me to import my books from iTunes, so I went ahead and did that. Now I'm cranky.
Having a dedicated app to read books on the Mac seems like a good idea. There's no particularly good reason books should be kept in iTunes. But, after going through that import process, I'm not entirely happy with the result. iTunes kept books in a nicely-organized folder, with sub-folders by author name, and files named (sensibly) according to the book title. And (of course) if you pulled in a book with bad metadata, you could press Command-I on it in iTunes and edit the metadata.
iBooks, on the other hand, stores all the books in one folder, no sub-folders, with names that appear to be randomly-assigned GUIDs. And there's no right-clck "View in Finder" option in iBooks, so there's really no telling which one is which. And there's no way to edit metadata in iBooks, so if you import a book with bad metadata, it's quite a task to change it. (There's some more help with that here.) Or I could switch back to iTunes, but that's pretty darn complicated.
I'm starting to wonder if I should switch to a third-party reader app (much as I did with podcasts last week) and give up on iTunes. Almost all of the ebooks I want access to on my iPad are DRM-free ones from O'Reilly and Packt. I already have a few apps on my iPad that might do the trick, including GoodReader, the Kindle app, and OverDrive. Maybe I need to pick one that works well with DRM-free epubs or mobi files, and stick with it.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
disappearing podcasts
I wanted to watch a little Tekzilla this morning, and was surprised to find Tekzila had completely disappeared from my iTunes library. Then, I noticed that about half the podcasts I download are completely missing from iTunes. Some of them are video podcasts, and some are audio. Some are podcasts that I sync to my iPhone, and some aren't. No particular pattern.
The ones that I sync to my iPhone are still on the iPhone, but not on my Mac. And there doesn't seem to be any way to get them back up to the Mac. They're not in the file system, but just missing from iTunes. And they're not in the trash. They're just all gone.
I've looked around Apple's support forums, and I've seen that a lot of people have had similar problems, but I haven't found any solution that really matches my particular problem. I'm pretty sure that, at this point, I'm going to have to re-download all the podcast episodes that I haven't listened to yet, so that's a pain, but I really don't know if the problem is going to recur, or if this was just a one-time thing.
I'm so annoyed with this now that I want to switch to a different podcast client, but I'm not sure if there's a good one that actually does what I want it to -- download on the Mac, and sync selected stuff to the phone. I'm looking at Downcast and Instacast right now. I'll probably post a follow-up on this at some point, when I figure out what I'm doing.
The ones that I sync to my iPhone are still on the iPhone, but not on my Mac. And there doesn't seem to be any way to get them back up to the Mac. They're not in the file system, but just missing from iTunes. And they're not in the trash. They're just all gone.
I've looked around Apple's support forums, and I've seen that a lot of people have had similar problems, but I haven't found any solution that really matches my particular problem. I'm pretty sure that, at this point, I'm going to have to re-download all the podcast episodes that I haven't listened to yet, so that's a pain, but I really don't know if the problem is going to recur, or if this was just a one-time thing.
I'm so annoyed with this now that I want to switch to a different podcast client, but I'm not sure if there's a good one that actually does what I want it to -- download on the Mac, and sync selected stuff to the phone. I'm looking at Downcast and Instacast right now. I'll probably post a follow-up on this at some point, when I figure out what I'm doing.
Labels: Apple
Thursday, October 24, 2013
grab bag
OK, I haven't written a blog post in a while, so this one is going to be a bit of a grab bag.
First, on the weight loss front, I'm down 15 pounds so far, over about eight weeks, so I'm losing almost two pounds a week. My plan was to shoot for one lb per week, so I'm doing fine on that. I'm also getting in maybe five or six hours of walking a week, which is pretty reasonable. I still haven't figured out what I'm going to do when it gets too cold to walk outside though.
On the tech front, I picked up a new iPhone 5s a couple of weeks ago. My previous phone was an iPhone 4, so there's a good bit of new stuff for me in the 5s, including Siri.
First, on the weight loss front, I'm down 15 pounds so far, over about eight weeks, so I'm losing almost two pounds a week. My plan was to shoot for one lb per week, so I'm doing fine on that. I'm also getting in maybe five or six hours of walking a week, which is pretty reasonable. I still haven't figured out what I'm going to do when it gets too cold to walk outside though.
On the tech front, I picked up a new iPhone 5s a couple of weeks ago. My previous phone was an iPhone 4, so there's a good bit of new stuff for me in the 5s, including Siri.
- I'm finding that I'm not using Siri much, though it's kind of fun and does seem to work well.
- The fingerprint sensor works quite well, and I'm using that to unlock the phone most of the time now.
- Overall, I've found that the speed of the phone is greatly improved over the iPhone 4, especially for certain things, like using the camera.
- The battery life is pretty bad. I'm usually at 50% by the end of the day, and I really don't think I do anything that crazy with it.
- The iPhone 4, on Verizon was 3G. The 5s is LTE. I haven't seen much of a difference in speed, in everyday use. But I haven't really done much that would stress the network connection. In general, anything that relies on the internet connection over LTE has worked well.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
contact and calendar management
A few years back, I wrote up a couple of blog posts on my search for the "holy grail" of contact and calendar management. Back then, I had a BlackBerry, and I was hoping to find a good way to keep things in sync between the phone, my PC, and my Mac. I went through a few less than perfect options, which aren't worth going into at this point.
Nowadays, I've got an iPhone, and I've found that iCloud does a fine job of keeping the iPhone, iPad, and Mac in sync. On the PC, I really don't bother trying to keep a full set of contacts in Outlook anymore, nor do I keep my calendar there. I can always look anything up on icloud.com or on my iPhone. And, while I use Gmail for most of my mail, I don't really feel a need to keep my Gmail contacts fully up-to-date either. There's really only a small set of people who I e-mail regularly, and they're all in my Google contacts, so there's no problem there.
So, since everything's working so well, of course I'm starting to mess around with it. I installed the vipOrbit app on my iPhone this week. It's a program for managing contacts and calendars. Right now, the iPhone and iPad clients are free, the Mac desktop client is $30, and the sync service that I would need to subscribe to is $45/year. So I thought I'd start out by trying the iPhone app, and see if it was worth going any farther with it. The app imported my contacts from the main iPhone contact app with no problems. But, I found that it did not import all the fields. In particular, it didn't import birthdays or the free-form notes field from contacts. The app has several user-defined fields available, so maybe there was a way to map those and import the birthdays and notes into them, but it wasn't obvious how I could do that. I played around with the app a bit, and, while I think it might be useful for a salesperson tracking leads and/or customers, it's not really useful enough for me to justify both the price and the inconvenience of keeping my contacts and calendar outside of the normal default iPhone apps.
Next, I may choose to try out fruux. Fruux is just a sync & backup service for contacts, calendars, and tasks. So, I'd keep using the default iOS apps, but would keep things in sync with fruux instead of iCloud. I honestly have no good reason to do this, except "just for the hell of it". Or maybe so I can say I'm not 100% tied in to the Apple ecosystem.
Nowadays, I've got an iPhone, and I've found that iCloud does a fine job of keeping the iPhone, iPad, and Mac in sync. On the PC, I really don't bother trying to keep a full set of contacts in Outlook anymore, nor do I keep my calendar there. I can always look anything up on icloud.com or on my iPhone. And, while I use Gmail for most of my mail, I don't really feel a need to keep my Gmail contacts fully up-to-date either. There's really only a small set of people who I e-mail regularly, and they're all in my Google contacts, so there's no problem there.
So, since everything's working so well, of course I'm starting to mess around with it. I installed the vipOrbit app on my iPhone this week. It's a program for managing contacts and calendars. Right now, the iPhone and iPad clients are free, the Mac desktop client is $30, and the sync service that I would need to subscribe to is $45/year. So I thought I'd start out by trying the iPhone app, and see if it was worth going any farther with it. The app imported my contacts from the main iPhone contact app with no problems. But, I found that it did not import all the fields. In particular, it didn't import birthdays or the free-form notes field from contacts. The app has several user-defined fields available, so maybe there was a way to map those and import the birthdays and notes into them, but it wasn't obvious how I could do that. I played around with the app a bit, and, while I think it might be useful for a salesperson tracking leads and/or customers, it's not really useful enough for me to justify both the price and the inconvenience of keeping my contacts and calendar outside of the normal default iPhone apps.
Next, I may choose to try out fruux. Fruux is just a sync & backup service for contacts, calendars, and tasks. So, I'd keep using the default iOS apps, but would keep things in sync with fruux instead of iCloud. I honestly have no good reason to do this, except "just for the hell of it". Or maybe so I can say I'm not 100% tied in to the Apple ecosystem.
Tuesday, July 02, 2013
New MacBook Pro
I got myself a new MacBook Pro this week. (OK, technically not a *new* one, but a refurb.) It's the 13" mid-2012 model described here. My previous MacBook was purchased in 2007, so I was definitely due for a new one. I had done a few upgrades on the old MacBook, so the basic specs are pretty much the same -- 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB hard drive. The processor is, of course, newer, and hopefully better (i5 vs Core 2 Duo).
I set it up last night, transferring files from my old MacBook via FireWire. I used the migration capability built into the initial setup program. I've used this before, and it always seems to work well. It took about four hours to complete.
The old MacBook was on 10.7, since it's not upgradeable to 10.8. (The new MBP is, of course, on 10.8.) So, this is also my first experience using OS X 10.8. There's not much new in it, compared to 10.7, from what I've seen so far, so I'm not having any trouble there.
Overall, there really isn't much difference between this new machine and the old one.The keyboard layout is pretty much the same, so it's nice not having to get used to a new layout for once. And the general form factor and weight are very similar to the old MacBook.
So far, It doesn't appear to be noticably faster than the old one, which is a bit disappointing, though I didn't really expect much in that area. I don't think I really do much to stress the processor.
I don't really like the direction Apple is going in, with respect to upgradability, but the basic MacBook Pro is still reasonably upgradeable, per iFixit. So, a year from now, if I want to upgrade it to 8 GB of RAM and maybe replace the hard drive with a bigger one or an SSD, I can probably do that.
I set it up last night, transferring files from my old MacBook via FireWire. I used the migration capability built into the initial setup program. I've used this before, and it always seems to work well. It took about four hours to complete.
The old MacBook was on 10.7, since it's not upgradeable to 10.8. (The new MBP is, of course, on 10.8.) So, this is also my first experience using OS X 10.8. There's not much new in it, compared to 10.7, from what I've seen so far, so I'm not having any trouble there.
Overall, there really isn't much difference between this new machine and the old one.The keyboard layout is pretty much the same, so it's nice not having to get used to a new layout for once. And the general form factor and weight are very similar to the old MacBook.
So far, It doesn't appear to be noticably faster than the old one, which is a bit disappointing, though I didn't really expect much in that area. I don't think I really do much to stress the processor.
I don't really like the direction Apple is going in, with respect to upgradability, but the basic MacBook Pro is still reasonably upgradeable, per iFixit. So, a year from now, if I want to upgrade it to 8 GB of RAM and maybe replace the hard drive with a bigger one or an SSD, I can probably do that.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
jailbreak
I jailbroke my iPhone on Friday, using evasi0n. (Apparently, I am one of many!) The process was fairly simple, and there haven't been any negative side-effects, so far.
I've been pretty happy with my iPhone, but there have been a few, fairly minor, things that I've wanted to do, but that weren't possible with normal Apple-approved apps. Now that I'm jailbroken, I can fix a few of these little items.
First, I've always wanted to have more useful info show up on the lock screen. I played around with both IntelliScreen and LockInfo this weekend. I'm liking LockInfo a bit more. Intelliscreen can give you access to quite a lot of info on the lock screen, but I really don't want that much, so LockInfo seemed a better fit for me. Mostly, I just wanted weather info. I always check the weather before I leave the apartment in the morning. Now, I can do that without unlocking the phone. A minor thing, but nice.
I've also got f.lux installed, which is kind of nifty. And SBSettings, which is pretty useful. And BiteSMS, which is a bit of an improvement on the standard iOS SMS app.
First, I've always wanted to have more useful info show up on the lock screen. I played around with both IntelliScreen and LockInfo this weekend. I'm liking LockInfo a bit more. Intelliscreen can give you access to quite a lot of info on the lock screen, but I really don't want that much, so LockInfo seemed a better fit for me. Mostly, I just wanted weather info. I always check the weather before I leave the apartment in the morning. Now, I can do that without unlocking the phone. A minor thing, but nice.
I've also got f.lux installed, which is kind of nifty. And SBSettings, which is pretty useful. And BiteSMS, which is a bit of an improvement on the standard iOS SMS app.
Labels: Apple
Saturday, December 01, 2012
My MacBook's birthday
I was looking at some old notes this morning, and I realized that I bought my current MacBook on December 2, 2007. So, tomorrow will be the MacBook's fifth birthday!
I had been planning to replace it at the end of this year, but, as I've been thinking about it, I may put that off for a while more. It's still working fine, and I don't really have anything I need to do that I can't do on this one.
I'm running OS X 10.7.5 right now, and I know that this machine isn't supposed to be upgradeable to 10.8 (Mountain Lion). That's really the only reason I'd feel the need to get a new machine.
I had been planning to replace it at the end of this year, but, as I've been thinking about it, I may put that off for a while more. It's still working fine, and I don't really have anything I need to do that I can't do on this one.
I'm running OS X 10.7.5 right now, and I know that this machine isn't supposed to be upgradeable to 10.8 (Mountain Lion). That's really the only reason I'd feel the need to get a new machine.
Friday, August 24, 2012
WIndows 8, Mountain Lion, and Ubuntu 12
I have to do a 10pm web site rollout tonight, so I find myself at home with some time to kill. I haven't gotten much of a chance to play around with Windows 8, so I decided to download the 90-day eval, and install it on my old laptop. I have the ISO downloaded and ready to go now. However, I had installed Ubuntu 11 on the laptop back in February. I haven't really played around with it much since then, and I was ready to wipe it out, but when I turned it on, I got an update message letting me know that I could update it to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Well, I decided I'd rather upgrade the Ubuntu install on this laptop rather than wiping it out and starting over with Windows 8. It's running now, and seems to be chugging along smoothly.
I did a little searching, and it looks like 12.04.1 was only just released. There's an article about it on ZDNet, dated yesterday. And I guess the original 12.04 release was a few months back, based on the date on this Lifehacker article.
There's been a lot of OS-related news lately, with Mountain Lion just released and Windows 8 nearing general availability. My old 2007 MacBook can't handle Mountain Lion, so I'm sticking with plain-old Lion on that for now. I'm tentatively planning to buy myself a new MacBook Pro early next year, but I'm not really that worried about it right now. And I'm curious about Windows 8, but not that enthusiastic about it, given what I already know. I read an interesting CNET article this morning, comparing Mountain Lion and Windows 8. I think I agree with his conclusions, for the most part.
I will likely upgrade both my Windows desktop and laptop to Windows 8, when the consumer version is released, but I'm not that excited about it. Meanwhile, maybe I'll play around with Ubuntu a bit more!
I did a little searching, and it looks like 12.04.1 was only just released. There's an article about it on ZDNet, dated yesterday. And I guess the original 12.04 release was a few months back, based on the date on this Lifehacker article.
There's been a lot of OS-related news lately, with Mountain Lion just released and Windows 8 nearing general availability. My old 2007 MacBook can't handle Mountain Lion, so I'm sticking with plain-old Lion on that for now. I'm tentatively planning to buy myself a new MacBook Pro early next year, but I'm not really that worried about it right now. And I'm curious about Windows 8, but not that enthusiastic about it, given what I already know. I read an interesting CNET article this morning, comparing Mountain Lion and Windows 8. I think I agree with his conclusions, for the most part.
I will likely upgrade both my Windows desktop and laptop to Windows 8, when the consumer version is released, but I'm not that excited about it. Meanwhile, maybe I'll play around with Ubuntu a bit more!
Thursday, July 19, 2012
IPredator
I keep thinking that I ought to sign up for a third-party VPN service, so I can put all my traffic through an encrypted tunnel when I'm on public (or quasi-public) wifi. I meant to do something before I went off to San Diego, but I just didn't get around to it. Some of the services I've seen are fairly expensive. These guys, for instance, are $15/month.
I just found one that's reasonably simple and inexpensive: IPredator. It's € 15 for 3 months, which comes out to about $22 US. So, about $7 per month. And it doesn't auto-renew, so if I stop using it, I can just let the account go inactive until I decide to start using it again.
I have it set up on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad now. Setup was easy enough, and the speed seems reasonable. I need to do some more experimenting on that front.
I'm curious to see if it will work on the wifi at my office. We have a SonicWall security device on our network now, and it can be a bit agressive about blocking stuff. I'm not sure if it will let the VPN traffic through or not.
I just found one that's reasonably simple and inexpensive: IPredator. It's € 15 for 3 months, which comes out to about $22 US. So, about $7 per month. And it doesn't auto-renew, so if I stop using it, I can just let the account go inactive until I decide to start using it again.
I have it set up on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad now. Setup was easy enough, and the speed seems reasonable. I need to do some more experimenting on that front.
I'm curious to see if it will work on the wifi at my office. We have a SonicWall security device on our network now, and it can be a bit agressive about blocking stuff. I'm not sure if it will let the VPN traffic through or not.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Drupal 7 clean URLs
I have today off from work, so I've been sitting around at home, messing with Drupal.
I couldn't quite figure out how to get clean URLs to work, until I stumbled across this article. (See the "post-installation tips" section at the end.) Pretty simple really, and I should have been able to figure it out on my own, if I'd read as far as the RewriteBase section of the main clean URLs article on drupal.org.
I also went a bit nuts at www.packtpub.com today. They are running a special, 5 ebooks for $60, so I bought four Drupal books and one PHP book. I'm building up a bit of a library of ebooks that I've bought on sale, mostly from O'Reilly. I never seem to have time to read them though!
I couldn't quite figure out how to get clean URLs to work, until I stumbled across this article. (See the "post-installation tips" section at the end.) Pretty simple really, and I should have been able to figure it out on my own, if I'd read as far as the RewriteBase section of the main clean URLs article on drupal.org.
I also went a bit nuts at www.packtpub.com today. They are running a special, 5 ebooks for $60, so I bought four Drupal books and one PHP book. I'm building up a bit of a library of ebooks that I've bought on sale, mostly from O'Reilly. I never seem to have time to read them though!
Thursday, December 22, 2011
xAMP on the Mac
I've been trying to learn a bit about Drupal recently. It looks like we might be getting some Drupal projects at work, so it seemed like a good idea.
To get a working setup for Drupal on my Mac, I wanted to get all the pieces in place -- Apache, PHP, and MySQL, basically. Apache is, of course, already there, and I already had that turned on, so no problem.
PHP was already installed, but apparently got turned off during the 10.7 upgrade. All you need to do to turn it on is edit httpd.conf, and uncomment one line, per this SO page.
For MySQL, there's an installer that works pretty smoothly, per this page. One odd thing I stumbled across at one point is that you usually need to refer to your local server as '127.0.0.1' rather than 'localhost'. Long story, but something worth noting. Also, if you're not sure how to set the root password, take a look at this SO page.
I tested to make sure that MySQL was working from PHP using this litle test script:
I can't remember exactly where I found that, but it's a pretty basic script.
I then got a little ambitious and decided to try to get phpMyAdmin working. I made a couple of simple mistakes here, including not quite understanding that config.inc.php needed to be in the root phpMyAdmin folder and not in the config subfolder.
Also, the warning from phpMyAdmin about mcrypt not being installed was bugging me, so I decided to try and fix that. That turned out to be kind of complicated. I followed these instructions, and they worked, but only on my second try. I must have gotten something wrong on the first try. Also, I found another page with similar instructions, so referencing that may help if anything on the first page seems confusing.
In the end, I think I really should have just gone with MAMP, but of course I was doing this as a learning exercise, so it was valuable to go through all this, even if it took a lot longer than was probably necessary.
And I still don't have Drupal installed. Maybe tomorrow!
To get a working setup for Drupal on my Mac, I wanted to get all the pieces in place -- Apache, PHP, and MySQL, basically. Apache is, of course, already there, and I already had that turned on, so no problem.
PHP was already installed, but apparently got turned off during the 10.7 upgrade. All you need to do to turn it on is edit httpd.conf, and uncomment one line, per this SO page.
For MySQL, there's an installer that works pretty smoothly, per this page. One odd thing I stumbled across at one point is that you usually need to refer to your local server as '127.0.0.1' rather than 'localhost'. Long story, but something worth noting. Also, if you're not sure how to set the root password, take a look at this SO page.
I tested to make sure that MySQL was working from PHP using this litle test script:
<?php
$db = mysql_connect("127.0.0.1:3306", "root", "password");
if (!$db) {
die('Could not connect' . mysql_error());
}
echo 'Connected successfully';
?>
I can't remember exactly where I found that, but it's a pretty basic script.
I then got a little ambitious and decided to try to get phpMyAdmin working. I made a couple of simple mistakes here, including not quite understanding that config.inc.php needed to be in the root phpMyAdmin folder and not in the config subfolder.
Also, the warning from phpMyAdmin about mcrypt not being installed was bugging me, so I decided to try and fix that. That turned out to be kind of complicated. I followed these instructions, and they worked, but only on my second try. I must have gotten something wrong on the first try. Also, I found another page with similar instructions, so referencing that may help if anything on the first page seems confusing.
In the end, I think I really should have just gone with MAMP, but of course I was doing this as a learning exercise, so it was valuable to go through all this, even if it took a lot longer than was probably necessary.
And I still don't have Drupal installed. Maybe tomorrow!
Labels: Apple, drupal, PHP, programming
Saturday, December 10, 2011
digital comics
I just spend $38 on $76 worth of digital comics from Dark Horse. I had a
50% off coupon, good even on stuff that was already on sale. I now have
nearly all the Hellboy and BPRD comics that came out since i stopped
buying them regularly in 2009. Plus the first 16 issues of The Goon,
which I've wanted to read, but never got around to buying. A little over
50 comics total. Digital comics never seem worthwhile to me when
they're priced at close to the regular print cover price, but for less
than $1 each, they're not a bad deal.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
iOS programming
I'm more than half-way through my iOS programming class at NYU. I've missed one class due to a flat tire, and I've been a bit under the weather during a couple of classes, but I'm definitely getting something out of the class.
I've made a Hypotrochoid generator the basis for my previous two homework assignments, so that's been kind of fun. I didn't figure out the code for this myself. Rather, I took the C# code found here, and converted it to Objective-C / Cocoa.
All of my homework code is up on my Github page, if anyone wants to look at it for some reason.
And here's a quick screencast of my app. Not that exciting really, but fun to write.
I've made a Hypotrochoid generator the basis for my previous two homework assignments, so that's been kind of fun. I didn't figure out the code for this myself. Rather, I took the C# code found here, and converted it to Objective-C / Cocoa.
All of my homework code is up on my Github page, if anyone wants to look at it for some reason.
And here's a quick screencast of my app. Not that exciting really, but fun to write.
Labels: Apple, NYC, programming
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Dark Horse
I've bought a few digital comics via the Comixology iPad app over the last year, but I hadn't bought any through the Dark Horse app until today. I just bought the new Groo mini-series (which apparently came out in print in 2009), and a Classic Usagi Yojimbo mini-series, which may be a digital-only release. The bundle pricing on these books is pretty reasonable, but you can only buy the bundles through the web site, not the app.
I've found myself reading comics on the iPad a lot recently, mostly while I'm on the train. I should really be working my way through the Programming iOS 4 ebook that I started a while ago, but I've been finding that my brain isn't really up for that sometimes.
One interesting comic I've been reading via Comixology recently is Vision Machine. The whole three-issue series is completely free. It originally came out just about one year ago, and there was a panel about it at last year's NYCC, moderated by Andy Ihnatko.
I've found myself reading comics on the iPad a lot recently, mostly while I'm on the train. I should really be working my way through the Programming iOS 4 ebook that I started a while ago, but I've been finding that my brain isn't really up for that sometimes.
One interesting comic I've been reading via Comixology recently is Vision Machine. The whole three-issue series is completely free. It originally came out just about one year ago, and there was a panel about it at last year's NYCC, moderated by Andy Ihnatko.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
iOS 5
I haven't updated either my iPhone or iPad to iOS 5 yet, but, as a programmer, I'm happy to see that they're finally doing automatic reference counting in Objective-C. I'm wondering if the instructor for my NYU iOS class is going to work any iOS 5 stuff into the class or not. I could see where it would be hard to update class materials on the fly for this stuff, and our classroom iMacs probably still haven't been updated to the latest version of XCode, but I'm hopeful.
Labels: Apple, programming
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
RIP Steve
So sad to hear of Steve Jobs passing tonight. Only 56 years old.
I'm starting an iOS dev class at NYU tomorrow night. That first class is going to feel a little weird now. I remember, years ago, being kind of mad at Steve for killing off the Newton, and its OS. It took a while to get from the Newton to where we are now with iOS, the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, but we wouldn't have gotten here without Steve Jobs. And I have to grudgingly admit that killing the Newton was probably the right decision. Sorry Steve.
Labels: Apple
© 2011 Andrew Huey
