Category Archives: Macintosh

Waiting is the hardest part

Posted on by
Reply

Waiting for Verizon. It’s the hardest part of my February so far. For those who have been keeping track, the IRS came and tried to strangle our wireless infrastructure to death, but apparently failed. I’ve been on-again-off-again with Verizon but now we’re firmly on-again. I’ve sent neatly wrapped missives to management but have yet to hear any response.

All of this would be maddening if Verizon was ready. Thankfully it isn’t maddening because Verizon isn’t ready. In fact, from what I’ve seen from my local Verizon sales rep, they don’t even have a vocabulary yet, let alone any plans or packages for sale. So while I struggle with this nominal Blackberry, I watch the time tick away waiting for Verizon to get off their duff and give us details on plans. Then I can take that information to management and maybe goose them into action.

Last night was a problem because I couldn’t make an outbound call with my minimally acceptable Sprint service on my Blackberry. I had to turn off Automatic Roaming, go up to the upper level of my house where I could get the weakest of signals and make a call to order pizza for dinner. Sprint’s network is wretchedly bad, and it almost never was the case before.

I haven’t the heart to call Sprint and tell them what I’m planning. So far all they know is that the IRS is likely going to be the reason why we close our contract. It’s a total straw-man, and as far as today, a rather nifty fabrication. The last time I told them I was contemplating leaving Sprint for Verizon they sent my sales rep, a VP of sales, and a third fellow who had the word “synergy” in his title, or something to that effect. Truth to be told, I don’t have a problem with my Sprint sales rep, or the VP of sales that came to visit, but that third guy was aggressive, abrasive, and thoroughly an unpleasant human being. If Sprint ever gets around to thinking about why they lost my business they can look no further than this third-man they brought with them. Leaving him in his cubicle may be the best move for their future business, if they have any after Verizon poaches every single one of their customers.

I couldn’t properly express to Sprint exactly why the iPhone on Verizon was so compelling. They kept on pushing Android on their network — Are you serious? Verizon is a double-dunk. The device has pretty much already sold me. The Verizon network is the other half of the power-shot and the fact that Verizon is willing to drop the pretense and become a commodity wireless service vendor means the biggest fear I had about the iPhone on Verizon went up in smoke. They aren’t going to nail it down, cover it with obnoxious Verizon “VZ” bullshit, they are going to simply put the device on their network and let the chips fall where they may.

This is like a hat-trick from heaven. Sprint pre-occupied with an IRS straw-man, iPhone on Verizon, and Verizon keeping their ugly branding out of the pot. Bam Bam BAM! If anyone wants to know why, that’s why. A hat-trick.

Now if only Verizon would get back to me… tick tock tick tock gentlemen!

iPad Apps #4

Posted on by
Reply

Continuing the series…

  1. Telephone – Gizmo and GV Mobile + – These two apps function together as a pair. GV Mobile + operates as a Google Voice client, playing the middleman between the POTS phone system and wherever Google Voice can route calls to. Gizmo project is a routing target for Google Voice. I can initiate a call with GV Mobile + and route it to Gizmo and use my iPad as a telephone, free. The quality isn’t very good, but it is free.
  2. Weather
    1. TWC Max+ – The Weather Channel app lost it’s place on my home screen because it was sluggish and crashed a lot. It hasn’t really earned the respect it lost back and so it languishes in this group.
    2. WeatherStation – A very simple app that displays basic weather details for a place. Haven’t had much use of it since I picked it up.
  3. Navigation
    1. Trapster – A great free application for the iPhone/iPad that enables you to socially share the location of speed controls and speed traps on the open road. It isn’t a guarantee that you’ll be able to avoid cops, but it helps give away their location so you can prevent them from ruining someone elses day.
    2. Glympse – An app that supposedly shares your location and travel details with others socially, however the security model bolted onto this app really prevents it from being useful.

—

And that concludes my app choices that are all valid up until the end of January 2011. Several of these apps will likely be deleted in the days to come, not because I need the space, but because they are clogging up my menus. I hope some of these were helpful to people, if there are any apps you think I should check out, please leave me a comment! Thanks!

iPad Apps #3

Posted on by
Reply

Series continued…

  1. ComicZeal4 – This app proves that the iPad can be a home for open-source non-DRM comic books. This app can read CBR and CBZ file types which are just ZIP or RAR compressed groups of JPG images with their extensions renamed. The filing system for ComicZeal4 is quite good and it’s trivial to establish a connection between Dropbox and ComicZeal4. Not only can you import comics over the iTunes File Sharing setup, but you could also copy your books into Dropbox and then open them one at a time using Dropbox and ComicZeal4. This app is one of the few that I have running constantly in the background. I’ve written at length about how comic books should adapt to the new device or perish, so we’ll save everyone the arguments which have been made before.
  2. Food Apps
    1. Epicurious – A pretty well fleshed out collection of recipes. I’ve only used it from time to time. There is a display glitch last I checked for the “Back” button, and the only way to fix it is to unlock rotation lock and fiddle until it comes back. Not enough to stop using the app, but enough to stop using it for other apps.
    2. Lose It! – A great calorie tracking app with only one glaring problem. If you are like me, your food intake is principally novel with little dependable repeatability and creating new foods reliably is a headache. It’s the principal reason why I haven’t used this app, after a while it runs off the rails and you just don’t have the time or interest to bang-in dishes I have once and never try again. The program could benefit from a meal-guess entry “I think I ate 650 calories”. *shrug*
    3. ShopShop – A shopping list app that on first glance is very good, but on extended use you eventually find that the logic used to construct the app is not the same logic that someone would use when trying to use the app in real life. The app just languishes because it’s not really convenient or usable.
    4. Urbanspoon – Answering the question “Where can we eat?” this app does a great job. The only glitch with this app is no way to pre-define your login to the web portion of Urbanspoon, so you have to scrabble at the login screen, crash the app, and try it again and hope that you catch the website with its pants sagging, enough to “get it on”.
    5. Cookbook by Betty Crocker – Quite a number of “American Standards” but I haven’t explored it enough to form an opinion.
    6. Yelp – A social reviewing site, I suppose it’s useful but haven’t gotten it to work locally enough to see how useful or not it is.
    7. GoMealsHD – This app resembles LoseIt! in functionality but it’s usability isn’t enough to have it out of a folder or feature it on the front screen. I haven’t used it since the start and will likely delete it for space.
    8. Convert Units – This is an overdone unit converter. It’s “minimally useful” and will likely be replaced with another app when I get around to shopping for a replacement.
    9. Meijer Find-it – I was so surprised to see this in the App Store that I had to get it. It only works for supermarkets in Grand Rapids, but I have hope that they’ll expand the program. For the time being it’s just a conversation starter.
    10. AllRecipes – Supposedly a bigger repository of recipes but I haven’t used it enough to feel confident that I have a good enough opinion of how it works.
  3. Comics
    1. DC Comics … and…
    2. Marvel Comics – are both powered by Comixology’s basic app functionality. These apps fail because their host companies don’t take digital comic books seriously enough. So instead of going to these apps to read my comic books I go to ComicZeal4. The people who defend Comixology love to chat up the panel-by-panel enhancements which I agree are very nice, but until DC and Marvel take digital comics seriously, I’ll be on the periphery looking in. I would love to spend money, but if they don’t take it seriously, I can’t either.
  4. Arcade
    1. Pinball HD – Super fun and a great conversation starter
    2. Labyrinth 2 HD – Incredibly fun and addicting game. Worth every penny
    3. Sudoku Tablet – I wouldn’t play Sudoku without this app.
    4. Bubbles – I found this floating around from my old iPod Touch before it died. I discovered quite to my shock that this app is surprisingly Universal.
    5. Pocket Pond – Good to relax to and a good conversation starter.
    6. Words HD – It took a while to realize that the only way to win is to play dirty with a Scrabble dictionary. I haven’t played in a very long while.
    7. Words – Not very good as an iPhone-only app, but it’s got the Scrabble dictionary in it and helps you come up with words when you don’t have all the letters.
    8. Game Table – Another conversation starter. I’ve yet to find anyone who wants to play the old board games using the iPad.
    9. Dice HD – Silly little toy, mostly a conversation starter.
    10. iMahjong – If you like Solitaire and/or Mahjong you’ll like this app. It’s a great way to burn time.
    11. Osmos HD – Antother addictive game, this immersive one is very clever and the best way to enjoy it is to dive head first into it.
    12. JirboBreak – A ball-breaker game, nice way to waste time.
    13. uzu – Not really a game, more of an interesting way to provide a workout to the graphics and touch processing subsystems in the iPad. 🙂
    14. UNO – Love playing this game to just piss away the time. Lots of features and sounds and multiplayer mode, which is nice.
    15. Clinometer – Makes the iPad a balance bubble using its internal sensors. Cute.
    16. MagnetMeter – A display interface for the iPad’s internal compass, I suppose it’s useful, but I haven’t figured out how.
    17. WordSearch – Find the words game, easy.
    18. Planets – In the summer I’m looking forward to using this with my telescope.
    19. Mixology – I’m a drunk. Come on.
    20. Solitaire HD – If you like Solitaire games this works nicely.
  5. Streaming Media
    1. StreamToMe & ZumoCast – These two apps do very similar things. They have a server component and a client that sits on the iPad. You can then call up your home computer from anywhere on the Internet and bring up your library of music or video stored there. In design this makes living with 16GB of storage on my iPad a non-issue. In practice however these apps don’t really work that well. Mostly the calling-home feature works if you are lucky.
    2. Pandora – A great app to run when you need background music for dinner or entertaining.
    3. Boxee – Remote control for Boxee. This would be more useful if Boxee wasn’t a fragile pile of broken glass.
    4. Netflix – Good for what it does.
    5. TuneIn Radio – A great way to get streaming radio stations over the Internet on your iPad. For all those stations that don’t have agreements with TuneIn Radio, you’re pretty much left in the cold. Not enough to keep me from using it.
  6. Time
    1. Night Stand – A great app to have displaying the time during meetings. Keeps people from asking “What time is it” questions. Also a great way to throw a fake alarm to get out of an awkward situation.
    2. ZazenLite – A nice little meditation timer.
    3. WhiteNoisePro – I can’t fall asleep unless there is a random white noise in the background. This app fits every little “background sound” niche there might ever be wonderfully.
    4. Chronology – Best cooking timers and “take a break” timers EVER are in this app. It sucked terribly before iOS 4.2.1 because the timers would never work properly while the app “wasn’t working” but now that it does work in the background, it’s everything you’d want in multi-timers.
    5. Observatory – I don’t understand much of this app, but it’s a pretty conversation piece.
    6. Clock Radio – TuneIn Radio has replaced this one, it’s heading for the dustbin.
  7. Cloud Services (Networking)
    1. Box.net – Ever since Drop.io sold out to Facebook and left us high-and-dry we switched to Box for our needs. This app works adequately.
    2. Dropbox – Everyone needs to get a free account and install this on their iPad right now. Stop reading, get it. Come back, resume reading. 🙂
    3. Air Sharing – I thought I’d get more out of this app, but with all the other storage options out there, it never really wound up to be much and not enough to purchase.
    4. VNC – A quick and dirty VNC client for remote access. The mousing feature is broken or not-even-written so I only use it when I don’t have access to my MacBook or any other computer when I need to do a remote control operation.
    5. Offline Pages – At first this seemed really neat, but I never really used it much, so it languishes.
    6. Speed Test – Basic network test, great way to catch cablesystem sales people with their pants down.
    7. Transfer – At first this was useful, but only had a few uses before it lapsed into uselessness. It languishes.
    8. Shazam – Everyone gets this app for the cool-neat-whizbang when it works. It doesn’t work well and fails quite a bit. It is a good conversation starter especially when it behaves.
    9. Boxcar – Notifications for everything. This app is great and I would install it on any iPad. The notifications are a little too much, but I’ve gotten to the point where I prefer to see them and have them interrupt me than not. Each to their own.
    10. Google Earth – It could be in Arcade, but I only use it for conversation starters and Gee-Whiz-Look-At-This demo stuff.
    11. Find iPhone – Now that I’m managing a batch of other iPads for work, this app has become more useful.
    12. Junos Pulse – Our organizational VPN system requires this app, that’s the only reason it’s loaded. A necessary evil.
    13. StumbleUpon – For those that enjoy StumbleUpon, it’s a great app. I never really end up using it much, but not because of the design, but mostly because of time.
    14. Picbox – Mass uploading of pictures to Dropbox. At first it seemed a great idea, but the file-at-a-time slowness really is quite draggy and there are usually better ways to get photos off my iPad, even if I have to wait until I can get to a computer with a USB port.
    15. FIleBrowser – At first this was a mistake purchase, but after I realized that my institutions wireless system was the culprit I can endorse using this app. It allows for SMB access to whatever servers you have on the Internet. It was one of those missing features that my coworkers asked for and the app does it’s job well, as long as the network path is plain and untroubled.
  8. Arts
    1. Brushes – Wowed by an ad. Realized that drawing is not for me. 🙂
    2. iDraft
    3. Comic-Con
    4. Voice Memos – Quite neat if you ever need to record voice memos, otherwise not so much usefulness.
    5. Eyewitness – Pretty pictures from the news.
    6. Galleries from Reuters – Same as Eyewitness.
  9. Entertainment
    1. ABC Player – I used it to watch an episode of Lost and then lost interest.
    2. Flixster – Works very well to find new movies that are playing and works very well for our local Rave Theater to buy tickets.
    3. Phases – Knowing the phase of the moon is important for a Cancerian! 🙂
    4. VLC – I got it before they removed it from the App Store. It plays lots of different file types and is good for Windows Media files.
    5. U-Verse – If we spent more money on U300 this app would be kickass, since we don’t, it doesn’t.
    6. Choices – Random selection app, don’t use it much.
    7. Compass – Supposedly is useful, haven’t found an application for it yet.
    8. Tally Counter – A neat little iPhone app for counting. Eventually may find it useful, not yet.
    9. iTranslate – Good for when you need to bang out some text in a foreign language, but otherwise it languishes.
    10. IMDb – Great to resolve movie questions and “God that person seems familiar” questions
    11. Brain Wave – Quite fun little app that has proven to me at least to help me nap, sleep, and sometimes stay awake at work.
    12. BinauralBeat – Mostly pre-canned programs, not as useful or as adjustable as Brain Wave, it languishes.
    13. redbox – An iPhone app for accessing the Redbox system. I suppose it’ll come in handy when we need to make some serious use of the Redbox system.
  10. Finance
    1. eBay
    2. PayPal
    3. Calculator – The iPad needs this very badly, however this replacement one I don’t use very much.
    4. WindowShop – I wish I could use this Amazon.com app to manage other Wishlists and maybe buy gifts through it, but currently it only works for your own lists and getting things for yourself. Not as useful as it could be.
    5. Bloomberg – Answering questions about Gold or Stocks despite not really caring.
    6. Deliveries – An app that maps and tracks delivery service details. Great for FedEx, DHL, and UPS – utterly useless for USPS.
    7. Calculator XL – Better calculator than I’ve found in a long while.
    8. PNC Mobile – Access to my PNC accounts. Works well, but can’t take background existence in iOS 4.2.1. *Shrug*
    9. CheckPlease – Way more useful on iPhone than iPad, only because I usually don’t have my iPad with me when I go out to dinner.
    10. Alice – This site sells grocery type items such as cleaners and air fragrances and toothpaste. I was curious enough to download the app, but not really to use it after that.
    11. PNC VirtualWallet – Much like the other PNC app, I wish it had an iPad version that would display more *shrug*


iPad Apps #2

Posted on by
Reply

The continuation of the series…

  1. QRANK – This rather fun trivia game has some good social competition aspects to it and is quite fun to play. The only thing I wish for this app would be a QRANK HD, so I wouldn’t have to scale it up from iPhone-App size to iPad size.
  2. Checkbook – Probably the most indispensable app I have on my iPad. I manage my budget of $260 a week with this app. As I spend I mark it in the app and it tells me how much of my budget remains and makes balancing my books on Sunday mornings very easy. I just look at the top line, add or subtract from 260, and that’s what I pay for my weekly expenditures. Very nice.
  3. 1Password – Without a doubt my number two go-to app. The heroin for this app is how it syncs with Dropbox, so I can have my 1Password database updated and ready for me to use on every single machine I use. My machines at home, my machines at work, my iPad, all together. This app I am sure has saved me tons of worry and kept my online life secure.
  4. News Apps – These apps are lumped together, there isn’t much to rave about here and I barely use them.
    1. NPR
    2. ABC News
    3. NASA
    4. Mashable
    5. NYTimes
    6. NewsRack
    7. MacLife
    8. Huff Post
    9. BBC News
    10. 3D Sun
    11. USA Today
    12. CNN
  5. Notable but little used News apps include:
    1. River of News – Lost out to Reeder due to Reeders interface design.
    2. Sandpit – I downloaded it, but never really used it. (huh)
    3. FeeddlerRSS – Useful in that you can save images from Google Reader Feeds. The interface is sluggish. If Reeder would have a way to save pictures this app would go out the window.
  6. Social Apps
    1. foursquare – iPhone-only App, silly game, I play but I don’t know why. I suspect it’s more knee-jerk than for fun anymore.
    2. Wikihood – Cute but limited. I used it a few times, it didn’t piss me off enough to earn a deletion, so it just sits around.
    3. BirdEye – Great for people with photo-heavy Twitter feeds.
    4. Scruff – Another gay chat talker. This one supposedly caters to Bears, but so far it’s just another litterbox.
    5. Grindr – Tounge-in-Cheek gay chat talker. Everyone is looking for sex but can’t say anything sexual. It’s where the frustrated and masochistic go. Another litterbox.
    6. FBF_Albums – Facebook Photo app. I can’t remember the last time I used it, probably should delete it.
    7. IM+ – Links up a bunch of instant messaging systems and has a neat push feature so the app can let you know there are incoming chats even if it’s in the background.
    8. VisibleVote – Cute and fluffy, but ultimately meaningless. Should delete this one as well.
    9. Jack’d – Again another gay chat talker. Much like Grindr it tries to be something that the Apple App Store categorically refuses to vend. I keep it around because it doesn’t take up much space.
    10. HootSuite – Annoying Twitter and Facebook app. It’s only claim to fame is that you can post to both Twitter and Facebook with one posting. It’s not enough of a feature to actually use the app.
    11. Kik – Doomed to failure because it is not ubiquitous. Perhaps it will gain traction sometime in the future.
    12. Tree To Go – Applet from Ancestry.com. Allows you to rattle off names and relationships but doesn’t really have much more to offer than that.
    13. Groupon – Coupons reinvented for Generation X and Y.
    14. Facepad – Behaves like the Twitter app does for Twitter, only for Facebook. Originally was oddly out-of-focus and a little annoying to use, so it’s relegated to the internment camp of the Social folder.
    15. Twitteriffic – Used to be my go-to app for Twitter before the Twitter app came along. Lacks some key features that the native Twitter app has, so it hangs out in la-la-land.
  7. Books
    1. nook – I don’t use it, but I have it!
    2. Kindle – Again, I don’t use it, but I have it.
    3. Discover – Turns Wikipedia articles into magazine-formatted booklets. Cute.
    4. Dictionary – Actually use this a lot to get new words, clarify meanings, and get pronunciation help.
    5. GoodReader – Has a lot of file features and is very manageable, however it collides functionality-wise with iBooks, so not a lot of use.
    6. Google Books – I don’t use it, but I have it. It’s not very good.
  8. iLife / Productivity
    1. Pages – I bought it for my iPad and my MacBook. So far, it’s quite a competent word processing app. It’s got all the polish and refinement that you’d expect from a native Apple app.
    2. Numbers – I bought this in a crunch because I didn’t have a good spreadsheet program on my iPad, and I needed to use a spreadsheet program that could understand Excel. Numbers fit the bill, the interface is a little annoying, but it does work.
    3. Dictation – I trot this out to display the how-cool-is-that feature of the app, but I don’t use it. I find I type far better than I dictate.
    4. iThoughtsHD – Once I got started using XMind I found myself with brainstorming sessions and all I had handy was my iPad. This app fits the bill quite nicely. I’ve done some very good work with this app and it really helps. It’s well worth the money.
    5. PlainText – This simple notebook editor syncs with Dropbox. It’s principal power is that synergy. Otherwise it’s very plain jane.
  9. Mercury Web Browser Pro – As a replacement for Safari it does quite well. Unfortunately the system is fixed to open websites with Safari, so this app doesn’t get the kind of use it really ought to. There are some clever settings it as, like the User Agent String adjustment, which is kinky. The only down-note to this app is that it can’t automatically pick up all of Safari’s bookmarks. You have to manually herd them yourself.
  10. Toodledo – My go-to app for tasks and one of the apps that I run a lot and almost always have in the background on my iPad. It syncs online, has a full-fledged iPad app, a nice website, and keeps me alerted to tasks that I need to accomplish at home and at work. Add in that I can email to my Toodledo and it creates tasks based on the emails and it’s damn near perfect for task management. I can’t recommend this app strongly enough!

iPad Apps Series

Posted on by
Reply

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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”
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.

Picky picky

Posted on by
Reply

What arrived in campus mail today was a marvelous surprise. It was my reimbursement request, sent back to me by the central bureaucracy that not only was my request rejected because it lacked a business purpose but also that my reimbursement would not include the sales tax that I paid. =Insert rude gesture here= 🙂

Really, the sales tax comes down to $2.22 but like many things, it isn’t about the money as so much as it’s about the principles behind it. I can’t buy iTunes Cards or iPad Apps directly with my University Procurement Card, so I’m stuck, so the only way to move forward is to fund it privately and request reimbursement. This was something I was fine with, it helps everyone get along and business can continue without interruption. That was, until I discovered that getting said reimbursement is an uphill battle and that I won’t get a fair shake because there is a policy that people can hide behind when convenient.

So, knowing the rules of the ‘game’ now, between me and my employer, I elect to withdraw my initial “helping out” because it is plainly not equitable. I pay money on behalf of this institution and I don’t get a fair and proper reimbursement. I don’t blame this place for the failure, I blame myself. I was dumb enough to volunteer my resources to further the efforts of this institution and that was a mistake. So, a few moments ago I logged into my work-based iTunes account and removed the reference to my credit card. Since there are no funds attached to the account and no credit card, future App purchases are effectively dead until WMU decides on how it’s going to proceed on its own.

And that’s kind of the core of this blog post. How can an institution like this cope with the 21st Century. At first it was just a quaint little nothing, a bird on a radar screen – the iTunes App Store. Ever since Apple pursued this strategy further with OS X 10.6.6 and introducing the App Store to the Desktop, now we have something. Plus these devices are not simply going to go away. iPads are not a fad that is going to just fade away like Bell Bottoms, they’re here to stay and finding ways to integrate them into our “enterprise” existence has led us all to a knotwork of difficulty. The professional instrumentation that exists lacks elegance, to put it mildly.

It’s not my job any more to fret and wring my hands and get all bent out of shape that this place screwed me once again. I’m not angry. I see it as an education. Now I know through a real object lesson what happens when I do something like this, and what have I learned? I’m never going to do this, or anything else like this, ever again. Once bitten, twice shy mostly. My biggest fault is electing to forget about all the times when this place has failed me or let me down or in this case, lead to a wee bit of financial loss. In a way it’s good that I suffered financial harm during this entire endeavor, perhaps that will be enough to keep the memory alive so when I face something like this in the future I can fail to offer anything beyond what is strictly a business option. Reimbursements? Nah, never again, thanks.

Now I await with bated breath to see how this institution copes.

1Password Bug

Posted on by
2

I ran into this little nasty earlier today. First to set the scene:

  • Mac OSX 10.6.6
  • 1Password Version 3.5.3 (build 30812)

I got an email from Trapster.com informing me that my account may have been compromised. Since I started using 1Password I’ve been making unique 16-character passwords for each individual site, so if a hacker gets my password for one site, he may own that, but nothing else. So I opened up 1Password and my highlight was on another entry related to another item. I went to the search field, typed in “trap” and found the entry for Trapster. I edited it, clicked on the password generator and made a new 16 character password. I clicked the “copy” button in the Password Generator dialog box and 1Password decided to replace the password for the previous highlighted item with the generated password that I meant to go into Trapsters entry. I did this three times just to make sure I wasn’t losing my marbles.

The way around this is to not use the search feature at all. If you browse and highlight the Trapster entry and put in a new password that way, everything is fine.

I just thought I would blog about this to help anyone who might have run into this bug on their own, it isn’t your mind, it’s the program. I’ve forwarded the bug report to the people who write 1Password, we’ll see what response we get.

Verizon iPhone 4

Posted on by
3

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:

  1. 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…
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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?

iPad Apps – January 15th 2011

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s a quick list of all the apps on my iPad. Enjoy!

  1. Front Page
    1. Calendar
    2. Contacts
    3. Evernote
    4. Wx
    5. Flipboard
    6. WordPress
    7. Reeder
    8. Instapaper
    9. Wikipanion+
    10. Twitter
    11. Facepad
    12. GetGlue
    13. QRANK
    14. Checkbook
    15. 1Password
    16. News
      1. NPR
      2. ABC News
      3. NASA
      4. Mashable
      5. NYTimes
      6. NewsRack
      7. MacLife
      8. Huff Post
      9. BBC News
      10. River of News
      11. 3D Sun
      12. USA TODAY
      13. Sandpit
      14. CNN
    17. Social
      1. foursquare
      2. Wikihood
      3. BirdEye
      4. FBF_Albums
      5. IM+
      6. VisibleVote
      7. Tumblr
      8. HootSuite
      9. Kik
      10. Tree To Go
      11. Twitteriffic
      12. Friendly
    18. Books
      1. nook
      2. Kindle
      3. Discover
      4. Dictionary
      5. GoodReader
      6. Google Translation
      7. Google Books
    19. iLife
      1. Pages
      2. Numbers
      3. Dictation
      4. Notes
      5. iThoughtsHD
      6. PlainText
    20. Settings
    21. Home Row
      1. Safari
      2. Mail
      3. Photos
      4. iBooks
      5. Toodledo
      6. ComicZeal4
  2. Second Page
    1. App Store
    2. Food
      1. Epicurious
      2. Lose It!
      3. ShopShop
      4. UrbanSpoon
      5. Cookbook
      6. Supercook
      7. Yelp
      8. GoMealsHD
      9. ConvertUnits
      10. Meijer Find-It
      11. AllRecipes
    3. Comics
      1. DC Comics
      2. Marvel
    4. Arcade
      1. Pinball HD
      2. Labyrinth 2 HD
      3. Sudoku Tablet
      4. Bubbles
      5. Pocket Pond
      6. Words HD
      7. Words
      8. Game Table
      9. Dice HD
      10. iMahjong
      11. Osmos HD
      12. JirboBreak
      13. uzu
      14. UNO
      15. Clinometer
      16. MagnetMeter
      17. WordSearch
      18. Planets
      19. Mixology
      20. Solitaire HD
    5. Streaming Media
      1. YouTube
      2. StreamToMe
      3. ZumoCast
      4. Pandora
      5. Boxee
      6. Netflix
      7. TuneIn Radio
    6. Time
      1. Night Stand
      2. ZazenLite
      3. WhiteNoisePro
      4. Chronology
      5. Observatory
      6. Clock Radio
    7. Cloud Services
      1. Box.net
      2. Dropbox
      3. Air Sharing
      4. VNC
      5. Offline Pages
      6. Speed Test
      7. Transfer
      8. Shazam
      9. Boxcar
      10. Google Earth
      11. Find iPhone
      12. Junos Pulse
      13. StumbleUpon
    8. Arts
      1. Brushes
      2. iDraft
      3. Comic-Con
      4. Voice Memos
      5. Eyewitness
      6. Galleries
    9. Entertainment
      1. iTunes
      2. ABC Player
      3. Flixster
      4. Phases
      5. VLC
      6. U-Verse
      7. Choices
      8. Compass
      9. Tally Counter
      10. Game Center
      11. iTranslate
      12. IMDb
      13. iPod
      14. Videos
      15. Brain Wave
      16. BinauralBeat
    10. Finance
      1. eBay
      2. PayPal
      3. Calculator
      4. Windowshop
      5. Bloomberg
      6. Deliveries
      7. Calculator XL
      8. PNC Mobile
      9. CheckPlease
      10. Alice
      11. VirtualWallet
    11. Telephone
      1. Gizmo
      2. GV Mobile +
    12. Education
      1. Michigan
      2. Purdue
      3. iNKU
      4. Laker Mobile
      5. CMU
      6. iRockets
      7. SouthCarolina
      8. iFullerton
      9. CSU Vikings
      10. Seton Hill
      11. MobileCSU
      12. UMUC
      13. iStanford
      14. DukeMobile
      15. Texas
    13. Weather
      1. TWC MAX+
      2. WeatherStation
    14. Navigation
      1. Maps
      2. Trapster
      3. Glympse

 

Moving to Verizon iPhone

Posted on by
Reply

So I have done it. I have sent an email to my Verizon representative, Mr. Steven Miller with a letter expressing extreme interest in transferring our mobile infrastructure away from Sprint and towards Verizon on the iPhone device. We’re going to move 5 connection cards and 17 phone lines from Sprint to Verizon.

Now I wait with bated breath for the quote! Light I’m on pins and needles! To be free of this abominable Blackberry, I hardly know what to do with myself!