Apparently the term was originally born as a jab about those people who drool all over their newest bit of technology in public. Of course this term was given to us by the same people who insist on using the term “fanboi”, yes, with that awful spelling. A lot of the words born on the Internet, usually spread like wildfire by forum trolls, make me cringe. It’s as bad as people who use all the abbreviations popularized by texting even in long form media. This new abuse of the English language might, in my opinion, be the worst. It certainly has jumped straight to the top 5 at any rate.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Anyway…

One feature I’ve always wished would be added to the iPad is the ability to select a default browser rather than always being forced to Safari every time that I click on a link. Apple doesn’t seem interested in adding that functionality. Normally the “walled garden” approach that Apple has adopted doesn’t bother me. I like that for most things the device just works. Still some of the things Apple seems anxious to lock down make little sense to me, especially from a usability standpoint. Maintaining control isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however singsong a strangle hold is, and that’s what it feels like Apple is intent on doing sometimes. With all that in mind I finally decided it was time to jailbreak my iPad.

Greenpois0n was recently updated allowing an untethered jailbreak of iOS 4.2.1. I read up on it and skimmed a couple forums to see if people had been experiencing very bad things when using it to jailbreak their iPads. Other than a couple incidents which read like idiot user syndrome rather than an issue with the software, I didn’t find many negative reports. So after backing up my iPad I decided to take the plunge.

I followed the instructions I found on padgadget.com which seemed simple enough, but the update kept failing. Each time my ipad booted back in to its normal non-jailbroken self so I wasn’t worried about bricking it(I did a complete back up of it before I started). After looking around a bit I found some advice on a couple of forums that worked like a charm. Basically I had to use the terminal to open up greenpois0n directly from the .app package rather than double clicking the pretty icon. For whatever reason opening it via the terminal worked and the loader for Cydia showed up on my iPad. It was only about ten minutes from start to the point where Atomic was set as my default iPad browser.

Not bad for a days work – which could have been only a few minutes of work if I hadn’t ran in to problems initially. So far everything seems to be working well and I haven’t had any stability issues.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Virgin Mobile has had the Samsung Intercept for a little while now. It’s the first Android phone that they’ve offered and I can safely say I wasn’t overly excited by it. It got pretty bad reviews for being laggy and having a very non-responsive touchscreen. Then there is the price. Sure, with prepaid the phone prices are always on the high side as there is no contract that helps to subsidize the phones cost, but for what the Intercept offered the price was bad. Today Virgin Mobile announced the LG Optimus V. Not only does it look like a much nicer phone (early reviews are backing that up), but it’s 100 bucks cheaper which puts it squarely in the range I’m willing to pay.

Sure, this is by no means a top of the line phone. That’s the one drawback with a lot of the prepaid services, they tend to sell at best mid-range phones that tend to be “outdated”. However seeing as how a phone has never been, and likely never will be my primary device of communication, having the latest and greatest isn’t a major priority for me. When I’m out and about it’ll let me quickly check email or look up something on the web which is all I’m really looking for. And of course all this comes in at 25$ a month for unlimited texts, email, web, data. Sure, it only gives me 300 minutes of voice a month, but right now I average about 30 minutes a month. With my current phone the highest voice minutes used in a month was a little over 200 and that was used by Denise who was having issues with her phone and spending all my minutes trying to get someone to fix her problem.

I’ve still got 60 days and gobs of minutes with my current prepaid so I’ve got time to ponder it, and to see what other phones might come out in the prepaid arena. But right now I’m thinking that come my birthday I might finally be joint the smartphone generation.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

The iPod touch has been a real champ for me over the past couple of years, but the size had it’s limitations. It was good for light browsing and some quick e-mails, but it got a little tiring for protracted use for me. Not to mention the battery wasn’t suited to all day use. It’s a great little media device, but after a couple years I couldn’t help but want more.

Once it was announced that iOS 4 wouldn’t run on the 1st generation iPod touch I knew it was about time to start looking in to a replacement. To be honest at that point I still hadn’t really considered the iPod and was eagerly awaiting the 4th generation iPod touch as that’s what I was pretty sure I was going to upgrade to. When it was announced I was fairly impressed by it, though like many others I felt that using an underwhelming camera just to make the device thinner was a rather annoying move – likely one meant to minimize cannibalization of iPhone sales. Still I gave it a good look and was still fairly certain I was going to go with that. Then I played with the iPad demo at Best Buy. I was hooked.

I’m now a little over 24 hours in to owning one and it’s been a good experience so far. Most of the iPad specific apps I’ve played with are well thought out and imaginatively take advantage of the extra space the iPad screen offers. The web use is fantastic and I can’t say the lack of flash has been an issue. Sure, I don’t have much against Flash and wouldn’t mind seeing it on the iPad. I was most impressed by the ESPN website which normally uses quite a bit of Flash, but detects that you’re on the iPad and adjusts accordingly, taking out the flash and replacing with what I’d suspect is HTML 5.

I’ve yet to play with the 3G options on it, but the built in GPS is more than adequate. It might not zero in on my exact position, but it comes close enough for my needs on a device like this. I’ll have more to say about the 3G and traveling with the iPad after my upcoming trip to California.

After a day of use (and going gaga after the great battery life) I love the iPad.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

One thing I pick up on right away is the fact it doesn’t list all the tags I’ve used in the past, allowing me to select ones I want from a list. It makes it a touch inconvenient having to remember the different tags that I use as I don’t want to always keep adding new ones, or having to go bag and fix the tags later.
The other problems I have with it are things that are lacking in the writing of a post. Seemingly I can’t use the more tag or split something in to multiple pages. Also missing is an easy way to add links, and especially to shorten them. These are small things, but things that really should be part of a mobile app.

I know the app is a work in progress and it’s not as if WordPress has massive developer resources that they can throw at the problem. Still I’ve seen some well thought out and feature-filled apps released by just a couple of developers so I don’t think it’s much to as to see a WordPress app with a little more usability.

I’ve got some high hopes for version 2.6. Hopefully I’ll be blown away.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

To be prepared for writing this I went ahead and Googled myself.  It had been awhile and I was curious as to what I might find.  Under “Alex Schwartz” it took until page 22 to reach a reference that was actually to me and that was a link to Dan’s florn.net podcast.  Under Alexander Schwartz the first reference I hit was after a few pages, and that was a link to my Amazon profile and wish lists.  Nothing terribly damning there other than learning which X-Box games I long to play, and what books I want to get next.  Trust me, it’s not that interesting, take a look if you don’t believe me.  Googling me doesn’t reveal much of anything about me(yahoo and Bing both turn up next to nothing while searching my name). In some ways it’s a good thing because I don’t have to worry about people finding out things about me that could be damaging.  I’ve been pretty good about avoiding putting anything online that could be taken the wrong way.  By the same token sometimes not finding anything speaks volumes.  Are people going to wonder if I’m secretive?  Not very interesting?  Haven’t done anything with my life?  A luddite (well, okay, checking my Amazon wish list, or the fact that I run my own domain, disprove that theory in a hurry)?  Not even real?  It leaves a lot of room for people to speculate and just plain wonder.  Paranoid?  Maybe a touch, but let’s face it, online life has been, in many ways, merging with our real world lives.  People have lost a shot at a dream job simply due to a dumb comment, or inopportune picture posted to the web.  Just like at a face to face meeting, you want the first impression of your online identity to be a positive one.

So assume rather than my meager innocuous findings, I discovered several things during my search that I’d rather other people, especially potential employers, not see.  Not everything is lost.  Many sites allow you to easily remove the comment or photo in question.  Even when they don’t have a mechanism in place for you to do it yourself, writing the maintainers of the site a polite e-mail will often yield great results.  People who manage web pages understand these sorts of predicament and will often be more than willing to help out so long as you’re polite about it.  If they aren’t willing to remove the offending material your list of options becomes quite short.  I’m not sure if there are legal methodologies that can come in to play, you’d have to consult with a lawyer about how to handle that situation.  If the situation can’t be remedied before someone might be inclined to run a search on you, then you can either keep your fingers crossed, or you can be upfront about it, let them know what they might find if they search for you, and explain it, put it in to context to help disarm the situation.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

First I have to say that while I use multiple machines, only one of my machines is responsible for being the “keeper of data”.  I do, however, make sure that certain commonly used files are accessible across all my machines.  Since I use multiple operating systems as well I went with Dropbox to take care of my file syncing needs for those that I need access to no matter which machine I’m on.  While I am not using is as a backup per se, it does mean if one of my drives fails, those files are still safe and accessible to me on my other machines.  Right now I’ve just been using the free 2 GB version and it’s been happily running on all three of my machines.

My main work horse machine, the one on which all my important data officially resides, is my MacBook.  I use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable cloned drive of the laptop on an external USB drive.  On a weekly basis I update the changed files on the cloned drive so that worse case scenario if I have to completely replace the laptops hard drive the image I can restore it with will be at most 6 days old.  I also make sure to update the cloned drive before traveling or running a system update.  I’ve been fortunate enough to never have encountered a disaster when upgrading my system, but I’ve read enough horror stories that I’m not willing to take that chance.

As a second layer of local backup my MacBook nightly runs an rsync of my home folder.  If I accidentally delete a bunch of files, or just have some data corruption that only affects my home folder I don’t want to have to restore the entire drive.  The rsync makes a copy of my home folder to an external drive that is plugged in to my Airport Extreme.  Once upon a time I ran Time Machine back ups to that drive, but I’ve had some off and on issues with Time Machine and finally gave up on it.

Those layers of backup help me to feel safe in the event that either data is lost, or a hard drive dies on me (which has happened more times than I’d like to admit).  However is something horribly drastic such as theft, or a fire struck my home all that local backup would be pretty useless.  Any backup strategy worth its salt should have an offsite component.  Once upon a time when I had a job with an office I used to keep a cloned drive there.  That’s no longer an option for me so I’ve turn to Mozy Home Backup to provide my offsite backups.  Right now Mozy is only running on my laptop and it’s currently backing up my home folder.  While having to rebuild a machine from scratch is time consuming, only the contents of my home folder are irreplaceable.   I have it set to run nightly backups, and other than once when I had Time Machine issues because of Mozy, it’s ran wonderfully for me.

I’ve lost data in the past and its helped make me be a little more paranoid about backups.  I’ve thought long and hard about the value my data has to me and take what I feel are appropriate measures to help protect that data.  There are probably better strategies, and certainly there are people far more paranoid about backups than I am.  The only other recommendation that I’d make is that no matter what your backup strategy is, do some test runs of restoring from backup.  Nothing is worse than having a drive failure, believing you’re data is safely backed up, and then learning there are issues with the restore.  Having a multi-layered approach to backing up makes sure you don’t rely on any one backup mechanism.  It’s good to have fail safes in case one particular backup procedure fails.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

My first impression was “Damn is this thing small!”  My wife got a new MacBook for Christmas, and putting this thing next to it made for a striking size comparison.  An older model MacBook has been my prime machine for a couple of years now and after just a little while of playing around with the Netbook it made a 13 inch screen seem gigantic.  The machine has a 63w, 6-cell battery that makes in back heavy.  The plastic case feels nice and solid, not like a cheap little toy.  Like many people have commented it is a finger-print magnet.  For me this doesn’t detract from my overall impression of the machine as it is easy enough to keep a microfiber cloth hand to periodically wipe it.  While many people complain that it has a glossy screen rather than the less reflective matte screen, I’ve become used to using the glossy displays and actually like the more crisp graphics the provide.  Though the glossy on this screen doesn’t seem nearly as glossy as the MacBook.

Technologically speaking this machine isn’t exactly a speed demon.  Windows 7 Starter loaded fairly quick on it (though the first boot I had to jump through Windows 7 setup hoops).  While I haven’t actually tracked the boot time, it seems to go from powered off to the login screen quicker than my MacBook running Snow Leopard.  But that’s about the only time it beats it in speed.  You can certainly feel a pokiness when browsing certain webpages, or doing other tasks.  It’s not unacceptably slow though.  Going in to owning a Netbook you have to understand that you’re trading some speed capability in return for a small and inexpensive form factor.  However for most of the normally daily tasks I do online the speed of the Asus is more than adequate.

Right now I’ve been splitting my time between the Windows 7 Starter edition that came with the netbook, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10.  I’ll go in to my thoughts between the two in a separate post.  Suffice it to say, both operating systems are fairly snappy on the netbook.  Certainly no matter which way you go in terms of your OS I’d say you’d be quite happy with the performance.

The built in web camera is actually better than I expected it to be.  While in most literature it lists the webcam as a 0.3 Megapixel model, it certainly captures images that are on par with my Macbook’s 1.3 Megapixel camera.  When testing it out with Skype I was told my video was coming through clearly.  It stays fairly sharp as long as you have adequate lighting.  In dimmer lighting the image can get fairly grainy, though for most of what I’d use a built in webcam for, it was acceptable.  The microphone doesn’t have as much pick up as I’d like, and I was told during the Skype conversation that I sounded a little more muted, as if I was positioned further from the mic than when I used Skype on the Macbook.  Still, if you’re going to be doing a lot of Skyping or other types of voice chat I’d imagine you’d invest in a decent Bluetooth headset or microphone.  The speakers are fine for being small.  It certainly wouldn’t be my first choice for listening to music on, but it’s certainly no worse than a lot of FM channels from a decent radio.  It was also acceptable for most Youtube videos.

Speaking of video I tried out a few different things.  DVD’s I ripped using Handbrake’s default settings ran just fine under VLC media player.  There were only one or two little pauses during an approximately 2 hour long movie.  It certainly didn’t detract from the film.  The screen is bright and crisp and the video looked clear and attractive.  It was very easy to sit back and enjoy a movie with the netbook on my lap.  As I mentioned earlier I haven’t had problems watching Youtube videos that other’s have mentioned when reviewing this model.  I attempted to watch some videos on Hulu and this is where I ran in to problems.  Flash is a resource monster, it devours all that it can find.  While watching animated shows such as the Simpson, or Family Guy, I only noted some stuttering, watching a live action show was painful at best.  Even lowering the quality of the playback did little to alleviate the problems.  I had similar problems watching things via Netflix.  For hockey fans, I was able to watch NHL Gamecenter in fullscreen mode, though I had to drop the streaming speed to the middle setting.

The killer aspect of this machine for me has been the battery life.  I had seen the advertised 10 hour battery life for this model, which I took with a grain of salt.  My Macbook was originally rated at just shy of 6 hours, but even turning down the brightness, and keeping the wireless off I am lucky to get about 5 hours.  So I was wondering how much I’d have to throttle back the netbook in order to see anything close to the 10 hour rating.  So after installing and updating things I made sure the battery was fully charged, unplugged it, and began my normal activities(using Windows 7 Starter).  Checking e-mail, IM’ing friends, web browsing, and the occasional video – all activities I primarily wanted a netbook for.  As I didn’t have any Bluetooth devices to use with it I kept Bluetooth turned off.  The day wore on and the battery meter ever so slowly inched its way towards zero.  All told, I was able to eke out a couple minutes shy of nine hours with the machine set for battery saving settings.  Yes, some application load times, and response times were a tad sluggish, but it was a compromise I was willing to make in return for the long battery life.  I’ve been pleasantly surprised to continually see these long lasting battery times during regular usage.  The only time I saw shorter battery life was when I did heavy downloads, updates, and installation – things that were fairly hard drive and processor intensive.  Even then I was able to continually get at least 7 hours of battery life.  I can say I am quite pleased that entire workday can be had on just a single charge.

On to the smaller items.  First off the keyboard is cramped. I am happy for the nearly full sized keys, but they are pressed quite closely together.  I don’t have overly large digits, so I haven’t found it painful to do lots of typing on the machine.  When switching to or from a machine with a larger keyboard it does take me a bit of time to adjust, but overall I’m happy with the spacing/size/and responsiveness of the keyboard.  The bumpy trackpad through me off at first. I wasn’t sure what to make of it and it felt a bit odd on my fingers.  However after a little use I quickly came to find it perfectly acceptable.  The two finger scrolling doesn’t always work as well as it should.  My biggest trackpad complaint is the button.  It feels a bit on the flimsy side.  Also I would prefer a separate left and right click button, not the long button bar they provide.  While it does its job I’m not overly fond of it.  Mostly I’ve been using the tap-to-click on the trackpad as a way to avoid the button bar.

My overall impression is that this is a well designed and thought out portable computing machine.  It’s not going to be a workhorse.  I would be hard pressed to use it as my primary machine, but as a supplemental machine to use for travel (either around town or across the country) it fits the bill, and even exceeds several of my expectations about it.  As long as you understand the limitations of using a netbook, then you will find this machine a joy to use.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.

That’s a pretty sad state of affairs.  Though I still don’t think it will keep me from complaining about the lackluster internet in the US – especially when I compare it to many other countries who once upon a time we were on par (or ahead of) technologically speaking.  We’ve been back sliding for awhile now and I’m not sure what it will take to catch up.  However I will remain thankful I don’t have to resort to pigeons.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Two days later I installed the 10.5.8 update via Software Update.  It appeared that everything went smoothly.  It wasn’t until the next day I realized the little indicator for Time Machine was constantly spinning.  When I checked on its status it seemed to be stuck on “Preparing…”.  Hmmm.  This wasn’t happy behavior.  I fiddled with the settings a bit.  Stopped the backup and started a new one and again it hung on the same thing.  I decided since I had created a new cloned drive image after getting the new drive up to speed I would reformat the drive I used for Time Machine.  I don’t really deal much with incremental file versions so I wasn’t worried about losing months of access to those. (for the record I have an Airport Extreme (pre-dual band versions)with a 500GB USB drive plugged in to it that I back up to via the wireless network).  After reformatting the thing I began starting it up as a new Time Machine drive and once again it stuck on “Preparing…”.  Checking out Console.app showed it was having problems accessing Spotlight related files on the new drive image.  This of course was odd as it was a brand new sparse.image file, but all the same it could neither read/create/nor find whatever it was looking for and was throwing up several errors a minute.  Searching around the web revealed a few other people with similar problems, but no solutions at first.  After awhile some people began posting that they had that issue but let it keep going for a few hours and suddenly the backup kicked in.  The theory being that Spotlight needed time to reindex everything after the 10.5.8 update.   Okay, I could buy this.  So I started up Time Machine and let it go overnight.

Fast forward over 12 hours and the machine was still preparing.  There’s only 40GB’s in use on this drive so I find it hard to believe it was still attempting indexing.  Next I invoked  mdutil -E to the laptops hard drive to force it to index.  Spotlight showed it was indexing, and I clicked on it so I could watch its progress bar.  20 minutes later the drive was reindexed.  Awesome I thought.  Fired up Time Machine… and again it stuck on “Preparing…”  I let that go for hours before finally giving up.

Hopefully this is a widespread enough problem that Apple introduces a patch, or some instructions on fixing the problem as I would like to be able to use Time Machine again, especially after seeing how while it recovered my machine after a drive failure.  In the time being I will continue updating drive clone images with Carbon Copy Cloner, as well as continuing all my other back up practices.

Edit 1 (13:13 EST): This is the error message that I receive over and over: “8/8/09 1:13:27 PM mds[23] (/Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/0111E1B8-84EC-4CBD-8233-CD50D5F40A6B)(Error) IndexCI in CIMetaInfoCreate:Tried to create index when index already existed /Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/0111E1B8-84EC-4CBD-8233-CD50D5F40A6B”

I’ve also gotten:  ”8/8/09 1:14:27 PM mds[23] (/Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7354B10D-A419-47E1-9EB5-1A89A95436FA)(Error) IndexCI in ContentIndexOpenBulk:Could not open /Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7354B10D-A419-47E1-9EB5-1A89A95436FA/0.; needs recovery “

Edit 2(August 14, 4:11 EST): Well it seems that the problem actually has to do with 10.5.8 and the most recent build of Mozy for the Mac (1.4 I seem to recall).  While Mozy was working fine it was doing some weird cosmic thing to certain sets of permissions that caused Time Machine to throw up all sorts of errors.  I uninstalled Mozy (saved the prefs) and Time Machine immediately started working like nothing had ever happened.

Be Sociable, Share!

•