Spinning Governor

Posted on April 2, 2012 by bluedepth

I’ve come up with ways to cope with the network connection throttle that I recently discovered was behind a lot of my network woes here at work. In my regularly scheduled workaday use of the Internet I usually find myself consuming at least 150 connections if not more because everything I use was built with the assumption that establishing multiple connections is free and easy. There is no parsimony when it comes to using the network, and you see this exemplified most of all in the design of browsers like Firefox. When you fetch a page, most modern browsers will attempt to also-fetch possible pages you may want so that they can appear faster. This is fine if you have an unlimited number of connections that you can make to the network. That isn’t the case here.

I can live with the throttle. I understand why it’s in place and knowing that it exists helps in that it keeps me from questioning my sanity when I didn’t know it existed and thought the problem was with me or my computer. It’s neither. So there are some ways to address my problem. Specifically the route to a better life is ironically through the same devices that are at the center of the entire ‘running out of IP space’ problem, iOS devices. My iPhone and iPad have apps that can bring me interfaces to Internet resources that I need to use, and they can free up my computer so that I can help avoid the connection quota throttle. For example, instead of opening up Toodledo in Safari I can open up the Toodledo app on my iPhone. Different device, different connection quota. My iPhone doesn’t make so many connections and if I did need that feature I could very easily drop wifi and use the 3G data circuit. I can do a lot of other things too, like manipulate Asana, run my eMail through my iPad, that sort of thing.

So, in a way, the connection throttle has shifted the load from one device to three. At first this was kind of a pain in the ass, but over time I’ve come to see that this could become more efficient. It frees my computer up for the heavier things, like Google Reader and such. We’ll have to see how it goes.

QR Codes

Posted on February 16, 2011 by bluedepth

Today at work I was playing around with my new Verizon iPhone 4 and found a suite of apps related to scanning QR codes. These codes are square speckled two-dimensional bar codes that can contain a surprising amount of information.

I found a great site and discovered that it had a paired iOS app:

QR Code Creator Site: http://bit.ly/dziTfL

QR Code App: http://bit.ly/h97j6H

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you should check them out!

So that got us started on possibly weaving QR codes in a lot of our promotional materials. Some of the ideas I’ve entertained revolving around these codes are:

History of a building, photos of its construction, where the funding came from and some of the neat things about the building that people might like to know.
Raffle codes on the back of WMU game tickets, we insert a random QR that people have to SMS or Email to enter a raffle to win a prize, or something.
If these codes are up on billboards, we could provide a full vCard for WMU including admissions, our website, and other contact information.

As I got to thinking about the QR codes, it’s an avenue to enable printed material to have a digital effect, in a way it completes a round-trip for information. The path from digital to physical is usually via printers, and this is a way for physical to cross back into digital. The information technology, marketing, and pure geek factor are all very high – it’s very exciting!

iPad Apps Series

Posted on January 30, 2011 by bluedepth

Over the next few blog posts I will be listing about ten iOS Apps that I find worthy to be on my iPad. I’ve written about my iPad before, how the device has changed my life and it appears from what I can see in the incoming Google Searches that hit this blog, that people might find some of these interesting. One short note to add however, I will not be including the apps that come with iOS 4.2.1 by default, since we all have those and can appreciate them. Since iBooks is pushed when you first touch the App store, that too will be left off the list, as everyone should already have looked into it to see if it fits their needs.

So, without further ado, here’s the first ten:

Evernote – The app has a crashing problem and a display glitch. That being said, having your Evernote library handy even off-network is worth it’s weight in gold.
Wx – Excellent short-and-sweet weather app. NWS is changing some key XML files which might break the app, but maybe the author will cope in time.
Flipboard – The ultimate browser for Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader. It received a huge shot of adrenaline in the arm recently, but the biggest feature, multiple accounts for everything, is very much overdue.
WordPress – The WordPress App. It’s an okay way to blog and it works natively with the WordPress interface. I’m never quite sure whether my blog posts get in properly or not and I’m always wary that the entire app could crash at any moment. It hasn’t done so yet, but I definitely get the sense that failure is just over the next river bend.
Reeder – My Go-To App for browsing Google Reader RSS feeds. It is very clean and very slick, with shortcuts for Instapaper and Twitter/Facebook. The only thing I would like to see with this app is a “Clip to Evernote” feature. Perhaps it’s coming.
Instapaper – Buy this app, enjoy the service. Nothing brings on the Instapaper love more than sitting at work at 5pm, knowing you have to go, seeing a flurry of unread tabs in Safari and with a few clicks, saving each page to Instapaper, saving it for later… very useful indeed.
Wikipanion+ – Great app to query Wikipedia and keep page details offline when you can’t reach the network. Some people get bent out of shape when they discover that the information in Wikipedia isn’t curated by some scholar. I think they are spending too much time with very nit-picky academics. Sometimes Wikipedia is “Good Enough”
Twitter – The home Twitter client is probably the best of all the Twitter apps out there. I can’t quite make up my mind between Twitteriffic or Twitter. Currently Twitter is on the home screen and Twitteriffic is stuck in a folder.
Friendly – I bought this Facebook app when it was paid and I’ve found it steadily getting better with time. It might as well just be picked up by Facebook as their official iPad app. I don’t think that will happen until Facebook realizes that the iPad is just as useful as a computer or an iPhone to access its services.
GetGlue – At first I thought this app was going to be another lame Foursquare ripoff, but the ability to check in to shows, movies, wine, or a host of other topics really works surprisingly well. The first thing I noticed about GetGlue was that it socialized popular media. You could see who watches Primeval for example and develop new social contacts based on that kind of lead-in.

Verizon iPhone 4

Posted on January 19, 2011 by bluedepth

Everyone is weighing in on a device that hasn’t been released yet, and everyone already has formed opinions based on rumors and suppositions. Since this is the way it is going, I’ll just toss my unrequested three-cents in with the rest of the noise and babble.

Key Differences between AT&T and Verizon on the iPhone 4:

No 4G Service – Who cares to have broadband speeds in your pocket? Eventually there is a good-enough-speed that people reach, with 3G and WiFi pretty much available everywhere this claim is only going to make the really geeky miffed. If you need such speeds in your pocket, what exactly are you doing IN YOUR POCKET? At some point extra speed only benefits BitTorrent users. The only exception to this is media streaming, but frankly my dear, if you are sitting back and enjoying a movie, chances are you are doing so in the comfort of some place that has WiFi. Just like FaceTime Chat…
iPhone 4 Antennagate – CDMA doesn’t have the same antenna as a GSM phone has, so physical attenuation isn’t a problem. The Verizon phone won’t have the grip-of-death, while the AT&T phone will.
CDMA-GSM Simultaneous Data and Voice – I have to admit to living without this as such a thing is by the design of CDMA very unlikely if not impossible to bring off. I’ve never needed both data and voice services at the same time. My logic is that people smush the phone against their face to talk, they aren’t going to smush-tap-tap-smush-tap. The fact that AT&T can do this is pretty much a cute empty little extra. People who have been using CDMA won’t notice at all.
Network Size – AT&T has done NOTHING to address signal quality in key markets that I find important. Really it comes down to Kalamazoo. AT&T bought out Centennial, along with all their 3G towers in the area. The fact that AT&T hasn’t enabled those towers speaks volumes to me. They don’t care. They claim that their network reaches 97% of Americans, and it does, some are graced with 3G service like the people in Grand Rapids or Chicago, while the rest of us have to contend with their EDGE network. So, what about Verizon? They’ve got a giant network and they have 3G in Kalamazoo. I live in Kalamazoo, it is an important market. I would argue that Kalamazoo is more important than Grand Rapids. So, when it comes to 3G network traffic, who wins? Verizon.
Finally, It’s AT&T PEOPLE! – AT&T, which lets face it is just a shelled out mask that Cingular wears to ritzy dinner parties (yes, it wears another’s tanned hide) is still CINGULAR. Just because it’s wearing AT&T’s dead face and animating it doesn’t mean that it’s somehow got a new soul. Both Cingular and AT&T were as I regard them, abhorrent companies. Cingular for their lameness before trapping and gutting AT&T, and AT&T for being inherently EVIL. Many people don’t recall, and it’s understandable, that AT&T used to be Ma Bell. The giant monster company that abused it’s customers, ran a monopoly, and retarded real technological innovation for decades! This is less of an argument based in reality as it is a name-game since Verizon also was a shard of Ma Bell’s evil empire. It’s not that somehow Verizon is good, of course they aren’t, they are just as evil as AT&T is, but AT&T is stupid and evil. Verizon is clever and evil. It’s a very fine difference.
Waiting around for iPhone 5 – Great, so Verizon is going to get iPhone 4, but Consumer Reports goes on at length about how they are going to wait until iPhone 5 before they’ll look at it again. What exactly are people waiting for? Isn’t the iPhone 4 “Good Enough”? What can Apple do to make the iPhone 5 compelling enough for everyone to suddenly acquire buyers remorse regarding the iPhone 4? They could make the device thinner, perhaps make it transparent, change the shape perhaps but in every other instance the iPhone 4 can be field-upgraded to whatever iOS revision is coming down the pike unless Apple is serious about enabling things like BitTorrent on the iPhone. For this class of device, how much can change? Is it enough to continue to suffer with AT&T? In my case, is it enough to continue to suffer with Sprint? My answer is no. I don’t care what is or is not coming out in June or July. I’ve been waiting for the iPhone 4, without the grip-of-death, on a competent 3G network FOR A VERY LONG TIME. Who cares if you are locked into an iPhone4 for two years? It’s not like an immense base of other iPhone 4’s out there are suddenly going to just vanish. Just because there is something new doesn’t mean it’s needful. Sometimes what you need is right in your hand all along, or in this case, in the traveling roadshow that is Verizon.

For me, this entire release of a CDMA iPhone is mana from heaven. I’m willing to give up data+voice simultaneously for fewer dropped calls (in AT&T’s case) and way fewer impossible-to-make calls (in Sprint’s case). My professional recommendation is that the Verizon iPhone 4 is exactly what people need and they should pounce on it immediately. If you are beyond your ETF-barrier on your contract with AT&T or Sprint, you owe it to yourself to leave them behind and hop on. Even if a few months down the line iPhone 5 comes out, it’s not going to be revolutionary, it’ll be evolutionary. The same way the iPad 2 is not going to make me love my iPad 1 any less. A device is still a device and if it works well, isn’t that enough?

Comic Con Day 3 – iPad is Disabled

Posted on July 24, 2010 by bluedepth

Just exited the Family Guy panel on Day 3 of San Diego Comic Con and after it was done I opened up my Apple iPad and to my chagrin it said “This iPad is Disabled, please try again in 4 minutes” and my Bluetooth was active. I immediately thought that someone was being hacky and clever with my open Bluetooth stack being a security risk. I left Ballroom 20 with concern that somehow my iPad had been broken into and was now for some reason vulnerable. As I walked along, trying to reset the iPad and turn it on and off to no effect I waited and eventually the device was unlocked. I opened up Google on my POS Blackberry and looked up the phrase, “iPad is Disabled”.

This is where my chagrin was firmly planted. I also brought with me my Apple Wireless Keyboard today, and didn’t think anything about it. While I’m traveling I have my iPad in secure mode with a passcode. Apparently somehow my Apple Wireless Keyboard turned on (probably a nudge) and then it started to feed my iPad guesses to the unlock code. With enough wrong guesses the iPad started to limit access. I’m thankful that I caught it when I did, after 10 wrong guesses my iPad deletes all the content within it.

Apparently my handy Apple Wireless Keyboard has a very touchy power button so now when I travel I’m just going to pull it’s batteries out. A part of me wishes it wasn’t that hard to screw everything up, and another part of me is embarrassed that I even let it happen.

If you are traveling with an iPad and an Apple Wireless Keyboard, check your batteries!

Apple iPad App Review – Page 1 Line 5

Posted on June 7, 2010 by bluedepth

The final line on the first page, quite a few applications have shuffled about, and the remaining reviews will be a straight shot through the rest of the pages. Here’s the last line on my iPad:

Pandora – Quite possibly the greatest background filler to a game of Scrabble that I could imagine. Plugged in (preserving batteries) you can set it to create whatever atmosphere you wish for whatever may be going on. Mozart or Mahler for Scrabble, great choice. The App itself is great, as all apps are that work the way you imagine they should.
Wikipanion – This app gives you a custom interface to Wikipedia. It’s truthiness aside, I find Wikipedia ‘good enough’ for basic information and I absolutely love the ability to save Wikipedia articles for later viewing.
StreamToMe – Best $2.99 I’ve spent in the App Store for my iPad. This application and it’s free server software for my Mac gives me the ability to stream video and music content from my Mac Mini connected to a data pig. Instead of having to store all the media on my iPad, I can stream it over my wifi network at home, works like a charm.
Settings – The go to place for pretty much all system level adjustments, from Wallpapers to accessing VPN services. On the front page so I don’t have to go a-hunting for it elsewhere. Both my iPod Touch and my iPad have the Settings icon on the first page. Couldn’t imagine it anywhere else.

Apple iPad App Review – Page 1 Line 3

Posted on April 9, 2010 by bluedepth

Continued from my previous post, these are the apps on my iPad home screen, line by line:

WordPress – The best way to write this review is to actually use the app, which I am doing now. The landscape orientation keyboard does take a little bit to get used to but it is easy to type on. The only variance I can see between the web-based WordPress interface and the WordPress app is the apparent lack of formatting controls, in the app it’s down to raw HTML markup if you wish to prettify your text. There is also a lack of proofreading tools for the app, but I expect the app will grow up to include them. The iPad does a very good job at keeping my spelling in check as it uses the system spellchecker to do the heavy lifting. I have my iPad playing classical music in the iPod app while I type this, all I lack is a latte. 🙂 One thing that I have sensed with the WordPress app that may be a bug is that spellchecker doesn’t properly replace text if you select the proper spelling. Just a slight oddity is all.
USA Today – The USA Today app is a early morning must read for me. There is something very satisfying about waking up my iPad, tapping on the USA Today and being able to swipe through the days news and proceed through the sections of the newspaper as if I had it in my lap. This app only failed epically once, I had the display rotation locked, then turned it unlocked the rotation, exited, and then tried to reenter. The app would not properly start, I had yo remove the app and download it again, which was an annoyance. It hasn’t failed again since, so maybe it was a fluke. This app, when it gets the crossword and sudoku games will grow up into it’s own, and I can definitely see it taking flu advantage of the iAd system that Apple released in the iPhone 4.0 software update release.
iPod – The iPod functions just like you would expect it to, except that it doesn’t appear to have cover flow capability, which is odd. The function is solid and is the one app that can take full advantage of the background audio capabilities that already exist in the classic iPod Touch feature set.
Epicurious – This app is a kitchen blessing. You can search their vast recipe collection and construct a shopping list and email it or keep it in your iPad. I don’t see many people wandering the supermarkets with their iPads open, but that may change as the iPad saturates more of the market.

Stay tuned for my next post, Page 1 Line 4!

Apple iPad App Review – Page 1 Line 2

Posted on April 9, 2010 by bluedepth

Part 3 of my Apple iPad App Review, what I have on Page 1 Line 2 continued:

Netflix – The Netflix app is free and provides access to the streaming content of the Watch Instantly system present in a basic Netflix account. The application works well, it has yet to crash, but I did run into a usability headache early on while trying it out. With all video on the Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad the native presentation of the video appears with slight letterboxing, depending on how you orient the device while you watch it. There is, in almost every video application a button control to remove the letterboxing and expand the video to use the maximum amount of screen real estate. While using the Netflix app, early on, I mistook the exit button for the letterbox-resize button so every time I would start a movie and try to maximize it, I was actually asking Netflix to go back to the previous video selection screen. I became quite irate at the Netflix app for what I perceived as a epic failure until I realized that I was pressing the wrong control. Now that I know where to expect the control to remove letterboxing, the app behaves as it was designed to, and I’m quite happy with it. The movie quality is at best 720P but that is perfectly acceptable to be able to hold it in your hands or against your legs while you watch. I predict that this, and any front-facing camera adjustment to the iPhone/iPad will melt down any 3G network in a red-hot minute.
TweetDeck – A true Love-It/Hate-It app if there ever was one, the TweetDeck app on the iPad is acceptable, it’s worth the cost, which is to say free. In the portrait orientation it wastes a fantastic amount of screen real estate meaninglessly, but at least it doesn’t crash with wild abandon as it does on the iPhone. The biggest gripe I have about TweetDeck, both the iPod Touch version, the iPad version, and the Adobe AIR version is the impossible-to-reconfigure font and font size in twitter text on the display. This app is ripe for relocation and/or removal.
Videos – The factory included Videos app is a delight to use, much like the other factory included apps. The folding metaphor when you select videos is very visually appealing and the video itself is crisp and beautiful and all the controls work as you would expect them to. The first video I played on my iPad was Airplane!, it’s how I inaugurate all my Apple devices. Funniest movie of all time, meet best device of all time. 🙂
YouTube – I’ve just touched on the YouTube app only sparingly. I suppose other people get a kick out of watching inane people doing inane things. I haven’t posted a video on YouTube and I guess I’m too old to ‘get it’. This app will likely be relocated, as factory apps can’t be deleted from the device. YouTube works for Google, it works for a lot of people, but I don’t really care that much for it. Technically however, it does work well, much like the other video apps on the iPad, and it hasn’t crashed on me so I don’t have anything negative to share.

Next, Page 1 Line 3…

iPad App Reviews…

Posted on April 7, 2010 by bluedepth

Everyone is a critic, and thanks to encouragement from TUAW, and the surprising hit-count on my Apple iPad Review I’m going to review my Apple iPod Apps that I find, use, and enjoy. I’m going to spread these reviews out not by theme, but by where they live on my iPad screen. Two birds, one stone. 🙂

Being the inaugural post, I will cover the iPad Dock first, these are the lifeblood apps:

Safari – The only web browser available for the iPad. This version of Safari is more stable and thanks to the A4 processor more snappy than the Safari in my 1st Generation iPod Touch. It works wonderfully well and frankly I haven’t missed flash one bit. Until Apple approves Opera for the iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad this will likely be cemented in place.
Mail – Much like the ubiquitous Mail.app on my myriad Macintosh computers the Mail app has grown up out of the little niche that is my iPod Touch. The application is acceptable as a Mail application, it has some tweaks, but it won’t be stellar until they have a unified mailbox. Thankfully Steve Jobs has indicated that this is coming, so we will reserve our pitchforks and hot tar for later.
Photos – The Apple iPad shines when it comes to displaying photos. With the proper bracket to hold it properly this device could double as an awesome photo frame. This application, the Wifi built-in, and the long battery gives me hope that someone will create an app that can stream photos from local computers just as StreamToMe can stream video content. Then I’ll have reached that Nirvana – being able to queue up my giant amateur photography library and have it display without having to futz around with a 64GB memory stick.
iBooks – What a wonderful application. The iBooks app contains all the ‘epub’ format books that you have either purchased or created for yourself with Calibre. This isn’t the first time I’ve worked with ebook readers but it is the first one I’ve actually taken seriously enough to use from day-to-day. This application continues to surprise me, as I discover that there are more features to it than what you see just on the iTunes Store page. It remembers how far you’ve read in each book in your iBooks Library, it uses a yellow-highlighter mark for its bookmark system, it has access to the system dictionary, and as we discovered last night, if you point at a word you can use that gesture to find that word in other places in the text. As Scott mentioned to me when he discovered that feature, it would be a landslide blessing to research, to have that functionality. Thanks to Calibre you can convert any open format into the ‘epub’ format, and iTunes is adept at managing the files. There are so many killer apps for the iPad, but this is the showcase app.
Toodledo – This app pairs with the Toodledo website and I find it indispensable in my line of work to not have competent todo management. This app synchronizes with the Toodledo site and any one of my devices save for my iPod Classic can access and sync data back and forth so I’m never without my todo list. For anyone who is event-driven in their lives or their work, this application and site are built expressly for you.
Twitterific – I love this Twitter client application. It presents, in portrait mode a very pleasing view of my Twitter stream, with pleasantly large text and color-coded rectangles indicating the source of each particular tweet, part of the stream, a reply, or a direct message. The application is somewhat stable, I’ve only run into one glaring problem and I believe it was some sort of snafu in synchronizing the Twitter Stream with what is cached in my iPad. The fix was to remove Twitterific and re-install it. I’ve only had the failure once and it has not reappeared. My iPad has the ability to play sounds, so this is the first time I’ve heard any sound effects from my apps. The chime and bird sounds are a delightful touch.

Next up is the first line at the top of page 1 on my Apple iPad…

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