iPodian

iUnless you have been away, perhaps visiting another planet (a planet with no access to our earthy Internet or other news sources), you probably know Apple released the iPad. This had several immediate effects:

1. Apple haters went into a tizzy about how useless it was, and why only those who have been borged by the Apple would have one, and how the inital sales were all to "fanbois", and no self respecting microsoft person would have one, and on and on.
1. They cost too much.
2. They had no camera (despite the fact that the form factor is downright stupid for a camera)
3. The were too heavy
4. They were too light
5. They were too big
6. They were not big enough
7. They were closed (despite being Jailbroken in less than 24 hours)
8. There were no apps (even though every iPhone app I have tried works on it)
9. There weren't really netbook replacements (although I gave away my Netbooks upon getting an iPad)
10. etc
2. Apple Mavens went for them of course. Probably no point in even mentioning that
3. The middle grounders stood back and watched and commented. One guy at PC World who had pre-declared dislike of them played with one and changed his mind. Even the middle grounders are all over the place:
1. iBooks was cool
2. iBooks had too much extra fancy stuff. Kindle was better. Or Goodreader.
3. Kindle was great
4. Kindle was going to die soon
5. And one and on..

While many consider me an Apple fan... I guess because I replaced all my MS stuff with either Linux or Apple gear, I consider myself to be a middle-grounder. I like Apple stuff because it just works, and I love the design points, but I hate DRM and the closed nature of the ecosystem and the MS-like things that Apple does to keep people locked out and locked in all at the same time.

I have an iPhone. A 3GS. Jailbroken but *not* unlocked (because I like AT&T's service better than Verizon's, at least here where I live, and because the spirit of the contract with AT&T was that they paid for part of my phone in exchange for me using their service for a short while.) That being said, Apple may have screwed up with the iPad, and with me in particular.

If I have an iPad (which as mentioned I do), I do not need an iPhone nearly as much. What I need instead is a phone that lets me tether, and that is the Palm Pre + right now, or maybe the Nexus One: either of which appear worthy and which I would love to have. The Nexus more than the Pre because it does not have a chicklet keyboard. Hate those.

AT&T and Apple are on a timer now: unless the new iPhone is spectacular, my smartphone may stop being an iPhone. I previously noted here that the iPhone was a tablet PC. Now it is not the best tablet PC. iPad is.

Sidebar: Even my non-smartphone, the Blackberry Storm, can't tether, but that is because it is a work phone and they have not allowed it. Further digression: My old Sony Erricson on AT&T let me tether without issue. Slow to be sure: This was before Edge even.

There are two other smartphone players here that look like, from where I am sitting, to be willing to take better care of me. Since I have the non-3G iPad, I do not have cellular data or GPS... those two functions are still required in the smartphone. Having a Kindle app will also be a plus, since then I can read no matter where I am or which device I have with me. That is a hit against iBook: Only one platform. No Mac version even. No iPhone version. With Kindle I have it on my Mac, iPad, and iPhone, and they stay sync'ed. That may be the iPhones one smartphone-saving grace. Kindle is not on the Nexus One. As near as I can tell it is not yet on the Palm Pre either, though several forums seemed to think it might be coming because it appeared in a commercial.

So, my original Apple tablet is in danger of being replaced unless Apple and AT&T get tethering figured out soon. I pay 30 bucks a month x 5 phone on my family plan to AT&T for unlimited data on each phone. Enough is enough. I am not adding another plan for the iPad. I will go to whoever lets me tether my iPad.

The iPad is a netbook replacement, and it is largely a laptop replacement except when I am doing anything heavy duty, like editing photos. It is not a new category: it is just the Internet tablet finally done mostly right. So much more right than anything that has come before it that all previous attempts pale in comparison. I still have a Grid table with a 386-25 running Pen Windows 3.1. An HP-UX LX620. An NEC MobilePro 800. The Dell Mini-9 and the Acer Aspire One. Actually, I gave the Mini-9 to my mom, and the Acer to my son.

None of them are anything like the iPad, and all of them are replaced by it. My MacBook gets far less use as well, but is not totally sidelined. Ditto my bigger Linux laptops like the Dell D620 and the IBM T43. Still use them. Just not as much.

Not just for FanBois

I can not walk into a room right now without people wanting to touch the iPad and play with it. At one point seven grown men were passing it around, and then griping at me that I was a bad influence because now they would have to get one. None of them were / are Apple people. One did that very night, and then played with it all night, and then blamed me for his loss of sleep. His wife wants one too.

iPads are just fun, and they are hard to put down. I have been reading books on the Kindle app every night till well past midnight. Reading the news. Checking the weather just for the heck of it. I am sure all this will wear off, but for now it is quite the attention getting device. It would be easy to write books like how to pick up the opposite sex, using the iPad as the ice breaker.

Sure, the haters will maintain their distance. Some won't go near it because they do not trust themselves. Some won't go near it because they find it noble to do stuff like cut off their nose to spite their face. Either way, this thing is going to be big, but what I will be more interested in is what it does to the iPhone: the original Apple Internet tablet (not counting the Newton, which was cool, but not iPad or iPhone cool, at least where the Internet is concerned).

Tech is fun. Can't wait to see what happens next.

The iPhone 3GS and the Storm

I am sure there are about a million posts on the Internet comparing the iPhone to the Blackberry Storm (and soon, the new Storm 2). This, as they say, is one of them.

I have an iPhone 3GS as my personal phone, and I recently got a BB Storm as my work unit. It replaced a much unloved Blackberry 8830. I did not expect to like the new Storm as much as the 3GS, and I do not. It has been pretty much exactly what I thought it would be. It is better than the 8830 in most ways though.

Chiclets

At the core of my dislike for the 8830 were two things: Crummy (small) screen and tiny mechanical keys. I am firmly in the virtual keyboard camp. I had a slight hope that the Storm's virtual keyboard would be better than it is, even though none of the reviews supported that hope. I based it off one thing: That every review I read of the Storm virtual keyboard was that it was *not* a mechanical one, like a proper BlackBerry should have.

I had not really realized it till I was reading about the Storm ahead of getting one but there is a huge contingent of people that like... even prefer... mechanical keyboards on their cell phones. Watching someone that is really good at the BB keyboard is pretty amazing, I have to admit: Their thumbs blazing at what is probably 50 or 60 WPM.

Getting going that fast on the 3GS would be a real challenge, and doing it in the Storm would not be possible. The Storm does have a virtual keyboard, but it is hampered by several things:

1. The processor is too slow / the OS is too slow. I do not know which it is (I have the 3rd release of 4.7: The latest Verizon has issued), but there are pauses and herks and jerks that keep the keyboard from being a fast-to-register-a-keystroke affair.


2. The entire screen has to be pressed to register the keystroke. the Storm 2 is supposed to fix that. I supposed the idea was to make the virtual keyboard more like a real one, and it utterly missed the point *of* a virtual keyboard.


3. The idea of the feedback to register the keystroke was the illuminate the key being pressed is blue, with a slight halo: All well and good, except I have wide fingers and I can't see it.

For all of this, I prefer the Storm keyboard to the 8830. I can at least read the markings, and the blue backlight of the 8830 was useless in the dark: I had to find a strong light source to use the keyboard.

The 3GS keyboard is more or less the same as it has been since the Generation 1 iPhone, except that more apps work in landscape mode, and in landscape mode I can fairly fly on the iPhone. Not as fast as the Mini 9, or the Macbook, but not too bad either.

Screen and Flip

The Storm display is very nice, and reading email on it is *far* easier than the 8830 every was. It is not just the size of the screen, or its better colors and backlighting, although those are all huge helps: it is also that the email app uses a better, more readable font, and when you are looking at letters that small, that really helps.

The apps listing is OK: Readable, if not easy to configure. The 3GS's way of allowing icons to be re-arranged is infinitely better than the setup process you have to use on the Storm, but at least it can be done.

The Storm 2 is supposed to add inertia to the screen flips, and that is sorely missed. Having to page up and down the screens on the storm is far slower than being able to flip your finger on the 3GS and the faster you do it, the faster and farther then screen rolls, in a very intuitive way.

Looking at pictures on the Storm is way better than the 8830, and nearly as nice as the 3GS, but pan and zoom are horrible.

Smile

The quality of the 3.2 MegaPixel camera is OK, and not that much worse than the iPhone (in bright light), but once again slowed either by the OS or a slow processor: it takes forever to focus and snap a picture on the Storm. Movies looked more or less the same on either unit though. The Storm overall seems to favor slight overexposure of the images relative to the iPhone.

In low light, the Storm camera is far better than the iPhone's, other than having to wait forever for it to focus. It also has a "light", which I have never used, but should mean that the Storm is good for even lower light situations than those I have tested: Places where the iPhone would not work at all.

Going to the Store

This really has very little to do with the Storm per-se, since the same App StoreWorldthingy is on all BlackBerries. It is easier to "shop" on the storm, with its superior-to-keyboarded-BB's screen. If this comparison was to any other BB, then Storm would be killer here. However, the 85,000+ apps of the iPhone, and the far better in-phone store app, not to mention the iTune Store shopping option just make the BB's couple of hundred apps appear quite feeble. Wimpy. Not even trying.

The few apps I have loaded are also pale shadows of their iPhone brethren. The Facebook app for example is truly wretched on the Storm. I can not imagine what it is like on any of the smaller screened BB's. The new 2.x iPhone version is in some way better than the web interface.

The Web

The built in browser on the BB used to be a joke. The one on the Storm is actually not too bad. It is slow, and does not render everything the 3GS built in Safari will, but it is light years ahead of the old browser. I put Opera on, and that helps, especially for things like zooming in on areas of pages to be able to read them.

None of them use the gestures of the iPhone, and in Safari, with flicks and pinches and amazing speed, the web is still more accessible on the iPhone.

Maps

Really RIM? Why did you even bother? The built in Map app is a complete waste. No OS integration. No gestures. No resolution in the maps. No composite views. No GPS or Compass integration. Low resolution. Slow slow slow. Not even trying. The Storm 2 or at least OS 5 *has* to have a better map app than this... right? Or at least Google maps in the app store?

This app is the very definition of a checkbox exercise:

"Hey! They have a map app! Do we have a map app?"

"Yeah Boss: We got a map app. Got it right here. See, It says 'Maps' on it and everything."

I went to our office in Minneapolis this week, and I was told that people with Tom Toms and other GPS had gotten utterly lost because of how weird it is to get to the building. I'll have to admit that the iPhone Maps gave me some choices about possible locations, and the first one I went to was not it: but the second one was, and it knew the weird route to get to the building. All the really means is that Google knows that route though, and that is what the BB needs: Google Maps.

(update: I have been told by some that there are Google Maps for the BB. They are just not in the App Store. You have to manually install them.)

Verizon and AT&T

My Storm came from Verizon, and of course the iPhone is AT&T. I have to say that I do not understand anyone that says that AT&T's network is not as good as Verizon's. I can not imagine where that is. It is no place I go.

At any given place, and at any given time, the iPhone and the Storm have about even chances of having or not having a signal. And I can move two feet, and have signals invert in strength between the two, especially in downtown areas.

Standing on Fishermans Wharf in San Francisco, both are strong. In North Beach at Rogue Public Ale House the BB is weak, and the iPhone slightly degraded. Up the street towards Chinatown, the BB gets a slightly better signal for a few blocks.

Most places they both have 4 or 5 bars. Same in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Minneapolis, Dallas, Alpine, Fort Davis, Marfa .... on and on. Neither one is obviously better than the other, with this single exception: when the signal is weak, and the phone is powering up its amplifier to pull in the weak signal, the Storm, and the 8830 before it, will eat its battery in a matter of a few hours: Far faster than the iPhone will. Not that the iPhone won't eat its battery fast: it does. Just not as fast.

This inverts when Bluetooth is the radio in question. If the iPhone can not find the Bluetooth ear piece, it will burn through the juice in the matter of less than 8 hours, where as the Storm and the 8830 seemed to not obviously use any more power when their paired earpiece was off or out of range.

(Update: Actually, the Storm does appear to use battery far faster when it can not find it's headset. Still not as bad as the iPhone, but the 8830 was the king here.)

As for speed: There is no comparison. As long as I have digital service the iPhone is far faster. the iPhone in Edge is about the same speed as the Storm on "1XEV'. That probably means the high speed EVDO is not the bottleneck more than likely, but the speed of the OS and the hardware is.

Smart Phone

If there had never been an iPhone to compare it to I would be amazed by the Storm, but the fact of the matter for me and my virtual keyboard loving ways is that it is not as good a design as the original iPhone was, more or less the 3rd generation iPhone. I assume the Storm 2 will be better on all points, but I also assume from some early reviews that it will be only reaching some sort of parity with the Generation 1 iPhone, and still be a long way from where the iPhone is today. If nothing else the push-the-whole-screen-to-register-a-keystroke thing is gone.

I rode in an elevator the other day with a man who had a Storm. I asked him how he liked it. He shook his head, and said "I had a Google phone before this one. I wish I had it back".

On the plane the other day I sat next to a man with a Palm Pre. I watched with interest as he flicked about the bright, beautiful screen. It looked very iPhone like, at least until he opened the keyboard. Gaah! Chiclet keys! What were they thinking?

Still, from what I can tell, the Storm is not as good as iPhone's, Palm Pre's, and Android based phones. It is not just a hardware problem either: the OS is a mess. It feels like three of four different OS's crammed together. Configuration screens don't match in style or function, and are spread all over, The Apps are weak, and un-unified in look, feel, and OS integrations. The Storm, running WebOS or Android would be leaps and bounds better, and not having the push-to-click screen of the Storm two would fix the Storms major weakness: Really: That idea is like New Coke. It may have tested well, but in reality it is a pain.

I'll have this Storm for another two years I guess. Hopefully by then RIM will get it right. In the meantime, it *is* far better than the 8830 that came before it, so I am not ungrateful. And the camera isn't bad.

The iBook and the XO-1

3.5 years ago, my daughter and I assembled from parts an iBook. The donor computers for the new Franken-iBook came from eBay, and we had purchased them at the time to get our original 500Mhz dual USB white iBook going again. It had stopped charging its battery.

The original iBook was the camels nose under the tent wall: It was purchased used from someone at the office, and was mostly an experiment to see what the new Apple world with OS.X was all about. I was deeply curious about OS.X because I had used previous MacOS version and did not like them. OS.X, with its BSD underpinnings seemed to me to be the first OS from Apple I could get into.. and it was. That was then. Now we have an all Linux and Mac household, with MS Windows only around for historical reference and research.

That original (to us) iBook unit failed when something called the "DC-in" failed. Looks like this:

http://www.pbparts.com/shop.php//9226647.html

... but I did not know anything about Mac / iBook hardware at the time, so we bought a pile of broken iBooks from eBay to experiment on what it would take to get it going again: the iBook was sorely missed, and seemed worth the gamble / experiment.

iBooks are a nightmare to take apart. No kind way to put it. Apple really never meant for it to be and end-user operation. Here is the procedure over at ifixit for how one gets at the DC-in bit and replaces it: Even after having done it many times now, it still takes me at least two hours to get the iBook apart, the part replaced, and the iBook reassembled.

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/iBook-G3-12-Inch/DC-In-Board/50/16/

Once the original iBook was running, my daughter and I looked at the pile of parts, and decided we had enough bits to get another iBook assembled as a gift. We tested various things like screens and motherboards, and got together a 500 Mhz iBook and gave it to my brother for Xmas in 2005. It was the perfect gift we thought: Something he would never buy for himself, something we had spent hours making, and would help free him and his wife from MS Windows.

He powered it up, used it for a bit, and we noticed something. It was not charging. It had been when we built it, but it was not anymore. He had the time  of one battery charge to play with it. Having just been through that "No Charge" thing on my iBook I suspected, and it did in fact turn out to be turned out to be the DC-in bit. His gift was a few days late, since I took it home, and replaced the DC-in with another from the junk pile and tested it again.

That DC-in lasted 3.5 years, but it apparently had failed again.

My brothers other computer is the Mint 4 handbuilt desktop box I gave him a while back, and that was fine for email, web surfing, and school work, but you can not sit if front of the TV looking up stuff, like "What other stuff did that actor / actress star in? They look so familiar....". The iBook had been that computer for them for years. But I had to haul it away for another screwdriver session.

At some point repairing iBooks, or really any computer, becomes like that joke about the hammer: "I like this hammer. It is my favorite one! I like it so much I have replaced the head twice and the handle three times."

I had with me (as at all times) my OLPC XO-1. I handed it to them as a replacement for the iBook till it was repaired, showed them how to open up the lid by first flipping up the ears (this always gets adults for some reason). There was general notice of how cute it was, how tiny the keyboard is, etc. By the time I got home I had an email from my brother from gmail and the XO-1 about how much they liked the little unit. It would be fine till the iBook was back among the living.

This made me feel better: While I was pretty sure the problem was the DC-in bit as ususal, if it *wasn't*, I was going to give them the XO-1 as their in-house laptop. That they actually liked it helped make that idea easier.

I ordered a new part from pbparts (although ifixit has them too), and a week later it arrived. I put it in last night, and the iBook is back among the living again. With a fresh rather than used part, I hope it will last another 3 years at least. The next thing to fail will probably be something other than the DC-in.. you would think. Although this is clearly not a quality part / design relative to other parts of the iBook... or any other Apple gear.

Once nice thing about the iBook is that it looks like, at least for now, that parts are plentiful, and this one can keep rising from the dead for years (like the proverbial favorite hammer): at least until Macbooks drop down to this pricepoint, when it will probably be time to move on.

Even nicer though is that the XO-1 was there and worked for them for what they wanted it to do: be the living room laptop. Given the way the XO-1 is built, it should be able to do that for a very very long time to come. Aaannnnd .... it is cute as a bug and runs Linux. Hard to beat that.

A week with 2.0.1

I have been on vacation in Far West Texas for about a week now. This is actually my real home out here, as I just rent in the Space City.

2.0.1 has been a mixed bag: Stability is better, but still not great. keyboard hangs are still there. Battery life is pathetic still.

On the Amtrak train out here, I exhausted the Lenmar external battery and was at about 50% of the internal battery when I finally arrived in the Alpine, TX train station. We were running about two hours behind because every time a freight train needed our tracks, we pulled over on a siding and waited. It is a crime of epic proportions that we in the US have let our railroad system decline like this, now when we need it most. Really: Tracks in both directions guys! The carbon footprint of me on a train going 600 miles to Far West Texas is just a tiny fraction of me in my Honda Fit driving the same route. But I digress...

The Lenmar was good for about two full charges, so that means in 17 hours I charged my phone twice, and then used it down to 50% again. First company that makes a decent auxiliary battery I can just leave strapped on gets my business.

Here is what I was doing: I watched about five hours of movies, listened to 10 hours of audiobook, and occasionally used the GPS to get a fix on what city I was near. From the specs, I should have used slightly less than two charges worth, and it did not seem to be the movies or audiobooks doing the damage to the battery. The visible drop came when I was using the GPS / Map function.

This matches an observation I made when I was in SanFran a few weeks ago: I went to the city with a full charge, and I *only* used the GPS / Map function while there. Nothing else. By then end of about 8 hours of walking around the city and getting fixes (mostly for fun: I knew where I was most of the time) the battery was in the red.

GPS eats battery.

Another thing I have never really thought through about this: If you can not see a cell tower, the GPS is worthless. If it can not load a map, so it can draw a pin on it, it just goes into la-la land. Not even a basic longitude and latitude readout appears. That seems like an oversight: Another assumption that people will never be out of sight of a cell tower.

On the train, we were following I-90 most of the way, but at one point we skimmed within feet of crossing over into Mexico. For a while, I had no signal at all. Then I had only signal from Mexican cell infrastructure, which AT&T warned me about with a nifty IM telling me that International rates now applied.

I slapped it into airplane mode for an hour, and when I took it back out, it was back to "no signal". I was glad to see it went in and out of Airplane mode: I had read that some were having trouble with that after the 2.0.1 upgrade.

Since arriving, the iPhone has been in Airplane mode most of the time: my house sits in a Caldera, and the rim walls of the volcano contain enough iron that no cell signal penetrates. No Internet either, although that is because of a problem over at the cable company.

To Jailbreak, or not to Jailbreak?

So far I have not Jailbroken my iPhone 3G. The App Store has for the most part kept me fairly happy with the things that it offered. Fairly. I will more than likely jailbreak it though at some point: Whatever it will take to get tethering going. I seem to be spending a fair amount of time lately in places where the only electronic communications I have working is my iPhone.

As I write this I am sitting in the Amtrak train station in Houston. It is a total backwater of the Internet. To write this post "natively" on Blogger (I.E., Web 2.0 style, with Internet access to the Blogger built in editor) is just not possible from here: In fact, I am sharing the one electrical outlet I could find in the train station with another guy who is working on a report for his job on his iBook. (addendum from the future: I created the post in HTML in Komposer on the Mac. I uploaded the HTML to Blogger, and then I had to go back and fix all the messed up carriage returns and line feeds that Google had added to the HTML: Instead of honoring the CR/LF and other tags, it made a right mess of the posts... so I had to come back with the online editor and clean it all up. Grumble. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog, already in progress..)

This is in the heart of Space City, just a few blocks from downtown! No Internet at all!

The train is over two hours from leaving yet, so it is the perfect time to write, except that my Macbooks battery is now getting old, and I have to be near power plugs to work.. and to charge my iPhone to the top for the upcoming 15+ hour train ride, in case there is no power near my seat. My handy Lenmar battery is already topped up and ready to go.

In this situation, and in other recent one where Internet access meant iPhone only, I really need to be able to tether. It does not have to be 3G. It does have work. I used to have this with my
Samsung A series phone, and it was way less sophisticated than this iPhone is. Null River ever released a 10 dollar application called Netshare that would allow one to tether with an iPhone. Apple took it down. Then put it up. Then took it down. (As of August 4th, 2008, when I was fixing the CR/LF mess, Nullriver's web site still said they were "working with Apple to get NetShare back up on the AppStore") I do not wish to be subjected to the vagaries of Apple for things like this. I like the App Store, but as soon as I see a Jailbreak app that makes it work, this phone is getting jailbroken. Till then, I will wait. And fume.

My wife tired of the un-jailbroken 3g faster than I did this time. She spent a long and frustrating time getting hers opened up, only to find out that Installer.app was not yet ready, and that the reason she had Jailbroken it did not really exist yet. It was long and frustrating because the pwnage tool was still a work in progress as well: I read it is easy now.

I watched her in interest to see how well the new tools worked on the 2.0 / 3G phones, and it looked to me that the hackers were pretty close to getting around the roadblocks Apple had thrown up with 2.0. I wonder why Apple even tries?

My son got my wifes "old" iPhone, and we told him to leave it at 1.1.5 and jailbroken rather than upgrading to 2.0 because sadly:

1. It was more stable
2. It was better on batteries. My daughter has my original
   iPhone, put 2.0 on it, and can't pass an electrical outlet anymore.

That has been the big disappointment of 2.0 and the 3G for me so far. Well, these three things:

1. Crashing apps
2. Crashing OS
3. Dismal battery life

And that is with 3G turned *off*.

Don't get me wrong. I love the 3G: The GPS and location based stuff are huge fun and deeply useful. And after some testing I have noticed that the WiFi signal reception is better with the 3G than the first gen unit. That is goodness. And badness. I preferred the first generation units aluminum case overall: Less fingerprints and the like. Cooler to the touch. And I preferred the feel in my hand of the first one to the new one, but I am in a huge minority there. Most like the tapered edge case of the 3G. People that have not held a 3G pick mine up and usually saw "ooohhhhh.... I like that". Guess I just have to be different. For me, the Wifi improvement is worth the plastic case, even though I view it as a tradeoff.

I did put the 2.0.1 upgrade on that came out today. So far, the main thing I have seen it do is make a few apps I had installed but that had disappeared re-appear. New apps install from the app store a little faster too. Backups via iTunes still take forever. I have not had it on long enough to evaluate if it does anything for battery life or stability yet. Before I did this I researched the state of the Jailbreak and Installer.app for 2.0.1 / 3G. Looks like when I get back from vacation it will be ready.

I'm ready now... here in the train station...without Internet.

The only reason I can see not to jailbreak it will be if Apple and Nullriver set the tethering app free again. Or there is no tethering possibility coming anytime soon on the jailbroken iPhones. I guess there is one good thing: I went way longer leaving this one un-hacked than the first gen one. I guess that means Apple is making strides in the right direction.

Still: If I have to buy a different phone that already had tethering working, and flip the SIM back and forth, I am not above that, but it will be silly, and all Apple and perhaps AT&T will have proven with their roadblocks is that they do not want people to use the tools the way that we want or need to.

One last thing about the 3G hardware, and this is on the annoyance side: Why in the world can't I charge off Firewire and other older devices? I get that the data side may be costly to keep dual circuits a around for, and that Apple has capitulated to USB, but still: 5 volts is 5 volts. Use it! It is not just my firewire charger brick that is not working: I have a Maxell USB charging stand that it won't use. And my Altec Lansing portable speakers. My wife even has a battery backup unit that is nothing *but* 5 volts, and the iPhone 3G says "Nope: not gonna use it", but the 1st gen iPhone does.

Stupid. Annoying. Unnecessary.

iPhone and Blackberry

Been a while since I wrote anything for this blog. Life has a way of getting in the way of writing, especially when one is getting ready to move, and to change cities at that.

I have had this short post knocking about in my head for a while now. A few months ago a new, second phone appeared in my daily life. I now have a work phone and a personal phone. I wanted the new phone to be able to see and stay in sync from my calendar at the office (since we don't have enterprise iPhones... yet)

The new unit is a Blackberry 8830 "World Edition". It is not the latest and greatest, but I have since held and played with a Pearl and Curve, and they are not that different from the 8830. World edition in this case means it has both GSM and CDMA radios. CDMA for the US, and GSM for the more wirelessly sane rest of the world. Two radios! I guess the AT&T / T-Mobile version of this phone just has the GSM though.

Going back and forth between the iPhone and the BB requires getting used to a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. Modern phone. Ancient Phone. Intuitive interface. Learn by rote interface. Easy to use keyboard. Nasty hard to read hard to use keyboard. Beautiful screen. Not as pretty screen. Etc.

The BB does the one thing I need it to do: It syncs extremely well to my calendar. Meetings will get canceled 15 minutes before they start, and the BB knows about it right away.

Other pluses:

• Battery life is pretty good
• Sound quality of the earpiece is good, although the mic is tinny
• Bluetooth headset works well with it: At least my Motorola H681 does.

When the new iPhone 2.0 firmware is released, and there is a real, enterprise way to get calendar and email going with it, the BB loses its only advantages except maybe battery life (and the new iPhone 3G may address that with a better battery). Then its disadvantages become even more painful by comparision:

• Tiny, hard to read keys with lousy backlight and non-standard special symbols placement
• Smaller screen
• Worse Calendar app (if you can get a meeting onto the iPhone, it is much easier to read and manipulate there)
• Worse email app
• Worse phone book
• Far far far worse browser. Did I mention far? And I have Opera 4.1 on the BB, but that only makes things slightly tolerable.
  
• Both of my supplied cases broke within the first week! That would be a leather case with pivoting belt clip, and the hard plastic dock looking thing. Both broke at the same place too: who thinks a pivot made with a 1 or 2 mm plastic center axle is strong enough?

The whole thing has the feel of an OS / hardware platform that was not designed but sort of grew organically. Stuff was bolted on to the side over and over again. It is a hodgepodge of stuff, none of it intuitive. I had to read the stupid manual to find the *mute* button for the movie theatre, never mind the goofy way the ringer volume is managed!

I know a large number of people are not happy with Apple and the things they have been doing with the iPhone. Lock in to AT&T, controlling the application delivery mechanism, and so forth. I sort of agree, but you know what is also true? It is easier to hack an iPhone and install whatever you like on it than it is to use the approved install mechanism on the BB.

If the trueism about why Linux is not winning the market space is the MSWin has all the apps is true, then the same thing applies to the iPhone and the BB, with the BB playing the part of the application underdog. And all that is *before* the iPhone App Store even gets going.

One of unhappy sets of folks has to be RIM. They are really going to have to re-think their device line and their OS, and soon. Right now they are bringing a pen knife to a machine gun fight.

The Macbook, the Optibay, and Entropy

My Macbook Pro (MBP) is two years old next month. Following my own advice about buying laptops (noted in Linux+ magazines 3/2007 issue), I went with the best MBP I could afford, so that it would be as future-prrof as technology stuff ever is.

Two years later it is still a pretty good unit. The processor and memory are not that far behind current times, and it is still the fastest computer I own. There is ... or at least was.... just one problem. About six months ago, after burning a raft of CD's and DVD's for Linuxworld, the Superdrive gave up the ghost. Died. Went to meet its maker. It was an Ex-Superdrive. The only reason it was still in the computer was that it had been nailed there....

Sorry... slight rift in the Monty Python space / thyme continuum. I think we just about have it nailed up. Now back to the Cheese Shop sketch, already in progress....

I did not buy the extended warranty or anything. I never do. I figured, after rebuilding iBooks, how hard could the MBP be to work on? I got a chance to find out.

One of the bad things about the MBP was that when mine was built, there was no ultra-thin 8x version. Only 4x. This was updated in a later MBP hardware revision, but my unit had the slower DVD burner. Another was that only 120GB was available. With Linux VM's under Parallels I eat 120 GB for breakfast. Space management was a constant "opportunity"

It is not normally my way to plug products, but this post is going to be one. In this case for MCE's Optibay DVD hard drive replacement. They are at http://www.mcetech.com. Disclaimer: I have no fiscal relationship with this company whatsoever, other than sending them money. I am only a customer.

This little product is very cool. MCE has created a little plastic sled that holds a 2.5 inch hard drive, and "slides" in exactly where the Optibay DVD is in the MBP. As mine was broken, no loss. Even better, they have an option for an external 8x DVD burner, powered by USB or Firewire, so that I could replace the broken 4x with a working 8x. The total cost of this operation was 100 USD *more* than what just replacing the internal DVD would have been, about 349 USD instead of 249 USD, give or take an elephant.

The new drive is 160GB, and is from Western Digital.

Opening the MBP was far far easier than the iBooks were. 10 screws on the edge, two inside the battery compartment (do *not* mix these up with the others. These have to be *short* or they jam up the case latch), three screws on the memory cover, two torx screws under that, and then the top of the MBP slides out fairly easily to review the amazing interior of the MBP. These things are so much nicer than the iBooks in here too. Three screws (one of which is another, different size torx) , one strip of yellow tape, and a ribbon cable release the broken DVD. Move the ribbon cable to the plastic sled the new HD is sitting on. No screws hold this in. It has foam tape to buffer it at the edges. Foam tape that you do not take the sticky covers off. They are there only as foam shock absorbers.

Putting the top back on is slightly tricky, getting the snap fit around the front of the Optibay to work right, but after that it flies back together. Total replacement time was less than thirty minutes. Now I have a 120GB and a 160 GB HD inside the MBP, plus a working, bootable 8x DVD I can carry around. The external DVD is in a case designed to match the MBP's: Silver aluminum, although not as rounded looking at the edges.

With a second disk, I can dual boot the MBP between 10.4 and 10.5, run two VM's at the same time without a performance hit on I/O, and carry a raft of ISO's and VM's of Linux to mess around with.

I normally never pimp products, but this one is just too cool not to. I can even see the I/O light peeking through the former DVD slot. Apple never lets you see those things for some reason, but I love to have the feedback about disk I/O they provide.

MCE also sends a Philips 00 screwdriver that is better than any I owned, and the Torx wrenches needed.

If I have one gripe at all about this solution it is only that the plastic sled seems a bit cheesy. I would have preferred something that mounted back into the MBP case using the same hard points as the former occupant, the 4x DVD drive, rather than the foam tape shock absorber things. It does not rattle or anything once together so I may be objecting about something of small consequence.

MCE says that the decrease in battery life is minimal with two hard drives, and so far that seems to be true. OS.X keeps the HD's spun down unless it needs them. I would think that two VM's running at the same time would be death to runtime, since both CPU cores, and both disks would tend to stay fairly active.

This mid-life upgrade puts all sorts of usable lifetime/capacity onto the MBP. I should be good to go for another year or so, till I need to replace the battery. Lithium Ion batteries tend to last about three years before they poop out. So far the after-market has not done very much to extend the life of the replacement batteries, offering a 62 watt hour battery to replace the stock 60 watt hour unit. I assume that with all the battery fires in the Dells with the Sony cells that Lithium Ion is pretty much at its peak, and that safety is now more important. The battery bay is only so big, and the stock unit feels pretty densely packed already.

Till then the MBP is back into fully operational mode, ready to burn DVD's and run Linux virtual guests for the next LinuxWorld / IT360 I'll be doing in April in Toronto.

Waiting on the iPhone Community to fix Apple

Apple is being deeply clueless lately, at least about the iPhone.

I am not talking about iPhone unlocks here. I do not get why Apple does not sell an unlocked model at a higher price-point than the unit they sell via AT&T here in the states. Seems like a no-brainer, so I assume it is contractual with AT&T that they do not.

I don't really care: I know there are folks who really have issues with AT&T but I am unable to discern any major differences in moral character between any of the carriers here in the US. The price is the price, I have looked at it, decided it is worth it, and am willing to pay it.

I also do not care about the iPhone sealed battery, no GPS chip, or no 3G. I have looked at each of these issues, and decided that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. For ME. I also do not expect that others needs, wants or desires here are the same as mine, and I expect that others will stay away from the iPhone because they don't like these two features *more* than they like what the iPhone is. [update from the future: Ok, that was three features, not two. Doh.]

I am pretty clearly on record as loving my iPhone... mostly. It is as much a portable computer as anything else. That is what I wanted from the converged device.

However....

Apple is not meeting my needs in the application department. I want things other than what they offer. I get the whole web 2.0 thing. I still want certain classes of things to run locally on my iPhone. My deepest disappointment to date is that there is not a decent Klondike time waster available for local install. Not from Apple, and not from the iPhone community at large, even with their local applications installer. I know about the web site solitaire sites, and so far none of them are making my socks roll up and down.

I have the Nullriver Installer.app, and have used it to install all sorts of the stuff that Apple forget to install or at least make available as options. Things like a native IM client No iChat... what *were* they thinking. Give me this great keyboard, and I can't use it to IM! I am not a big IM'er. I don't do it at work much at all. When I have time to IM is when I am sitting on the subway someplace, or in a waiting room at the Doctors office or something. When I am with my iPhone, not my computer.

Other missing stuff I want are things like an RSS news reader, VNC, and (as a geek) the BSD subsystem so I can open a terminal and SSH around to things.

There should have been an SDK from day one, and when Apple did not create it, they should not have been surprised that the community was not going to sit around and wait for them to figure it out.

I am in the interesting position now that I will not install the new 1.1.1 version of the code on the iPhone because it is attempting to break my applications (and perhaps brick my iPhone in the process), and I value the community developed applications far more than any ability to directly download music to my iPhone,(iTunes store access being the only really new thing in 1.1.1, and "Just In Time Music" is not something I live for. I can wait till I get home.).

It would be nice to have iTunes Store access from the iPhone, but I do not want it more than I want all the other cool community applications. I mean really: has Apple *seen* Navizon? I don't care that the iPhone has no GPS chip. Don't need it with Navizon.

Instead of taking the opportunity to build community, not to mention get great feedback about what people really want their iPhones to do, Apple appears to be trying to make the community mad. It won't be long before folks just say "This isn't worth it. Great hardware though. Time to install FreeBSD / Linux and just be done with this."

I don't think that is what Apple wants: an lPhone. That is exactly what they are incenting. The law of unintended consequences is a cruel master.

So, like the Chuck Norris joke, I am waiting (Chuck Norris doesn't sleep, he waits). I am waiting for the community to fix 1.1.1. I am watching what Apple does next. I am deciding.

I don't *have* to buy Apple stuff. I do so far, but I am fully willing to not do it in future if Apple continues not getting it. Linux is taking off in the Smartphone market. There is probably a reason.

Come on Apple. Please figure this out!

Sometimes Its Just Hard(ware)

Sometimes Its Just Hard(ware)

Yesterday I posted over at TalkBMC about a new-to-me Dell D620 I received at BMC. That post was mostly about installing Mint 3.0 on the D620, making it dual boot with XP, and the fact that, like my personal Acer 5610, Linux installed dead easy. Everything worked right out of the box. The only fiddling around was to install things that did not by default come on the Mint 3.0 LiveCD. Things like Evolution and the Exchange connector, LMSensors, HDDTemp, gsynaptic, and gkrellm.

In the few short hours since that post, I have installed VMWare Server via Synaptic (really: having an APT tool and a touchpad tool with nearly the same name can be confusing), and brought up SimplyMEPIS from my VMWare machines inventory as a test. All still goes extremely well on the D620. Another data point in support of my article about Linux laptops in the current (3/2007) Linux+ magazine.

At the end of the TalkBMC post, I moved on to a point about hardware, and that there are common bits that all vendors use. Things like hard drives or Wifi Cards all come from a small set suppliers. Both my MacBook and my IBM T41 have Wifi chips from Atheros. My Dell D620 and my IBM T41 both have hard drives from Hitachi. The difference in using these common parts comes with the device drivers used and other hardware support bits in the OS, or the heat and shock isolation of the deployment environment. Quick example mentioned there: Both my eMachine 5312, and my wife's Toshiba M45 ran *way* hotter when running XP Home than when running Fedora. Fedora was better at telling the CPU to go to sleep and therefore use less power when the CPU was not needed for things.

Even more confusingly, sometimes the computer being hot means that everything is OK. My Macbook case is aluminium, and it is warm to the touch all the time. That is because aluminium conducts heat extremely well, and the case actually is part of the heat sink: the internal CPU temperatures are more or less the same as they are in my Acer 5610 or my Dell D620, hovering in the 48 to 52C ranges, depending on what I am doing. I have punched it up to 72C when I was doing movie rendering on the Mac, but I stopped doing that when I got the iMac. That is now what it is for. I wanted the Macbook to last, and it already gets carried all over the place. It does not need to be inferno-hot all the time too.

Even Good Parts Go Bad

The idea that parts can fail, even in the best deployments is probably no real surprise to anyone that reads technical blogs. I bring this all up because there does seem to be an attitude among some about Apples and other high end gear that they should never fail. "I paid more for them. They are supposed to be good." Or Linux: "Hey: I thought Linux was all better than everything else, but my hard drive crashed and I lost stuff!"

Everything gets dropped. Everything has cosmic rays beating down on them from out space. No really. My wife used to work at a computer company called Amdahl, and they had a series of mainframes that kept failing mysteriously back in the 1980s. Turned out to be cosmic rays disrupting the chips. And, as a co-worker pointed out to me while I was relating the recent Mac rebuild experience, there is always the "Loose Nut At The Keyboard" factor. yeah. That would be me. I admit. I experiment. I trash and destroy and rebuild all the time. It is how I, as a manager for the last 20+ years, can stay technical.

The Tale of the Failed eMac

Winding back the clock a decade or less: My mom bought on my recommendation an HP Pavillion that ran MS Windows 98. It was a nice little system, but I rebuilt it more or less every six months. It was not hardware then: it was the OS. It internally self destructed under daily usage. Mom net-surfed, and did word processing on the system. That was mostly it. But it just could not survive even that rigor. In talking to others at the office, six months was the generally accepted median lifetime for Win98 systems. Mom replaced the Win98 system with an eMac. I stopped having to fix things. Well... mostly.

A year before the eMac died... to the extent that it died.... the lights at Moms house started going wacky. Dim/Bright. Dim/Bright. Over and over and over. The Linksys WAP died, and was replaced. Then the eMac started to hang at odd times. We put a UPS on it, but too l late. The damage was done. Even an Apple eMac can not survive a year of flaky voltages. A new iMac came in (on the UPS this time) and there have been no further issues. It turned out that the power company finally found a floating ground in the house feed. As the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows says "All was well".

Huh? How could it be well... all that data on the eMac? Did it survive? Oh yes.

Apples have a cool trick. Hold down 'T' when booting, and they turn into a glorified Firewire harddrive. You hook a Firewire cable to another Mac (or Linux, since it can read HFS+) and you can snarf all the data right off that hard drive. The eMac would run for days in Firewire "Target" mode (thus the "T" at boot). It was weird, but very happy that it did so. Mom lost nothing, and my total housecall on the work was a matter of a few hours.

I could have achieved the same result by removing the hard drive, putting it in an external Firewire or USB enclosure, but not every computer is easy to get the hard drive out of. Target mode is really handy. In fact, this next bit is a great case where taking out the hard drive would have been a whirling PITA:

The Death and Life of the Macbook.

My 18 month old Macbook is starting to have some problems. For one, the internal CD/DVD is stone dead. I have an external device that lets me get around that problem, but someday I'll have to take the MacBook apart and fix that.

I admit I do all sorts of things to the OS of any computer I own to try new things. OS.X is not exempt from my fiddling. I had removed Rosetta early on because I wanted to only run Universal or Intel only apps. I had pulled out the various languages because in the very worst sense of being an American, I only speak one language. That is not a point of pride, just a remnant of youthful stupidity. For 18 months I have installed and removed tons of things. Beta versions of things like Vmware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. System monitoring apps that use undocumented APIs.

SMART never reported there being anything wrong with the hard drive (The Google disk study says that does not mean much), but the Apple disk utility said the hard drive was in serious need of repair. Pointers were whacked. Freespace was not being reclaimed. Permissions in left field. I booted the OS.X 10.4 install disk (on the external CD/DVD device), and ran the disk utility. To fix the boot disk, it has to be this way. Disk Utility will not touch the boot disk while one is booted off it. The utility reported everything was fixed. And that was the end of Macbook booting at all.

Sigh.

I knew OS.X 10.5 was coming soon. I had planned on a clean install then. I guess the time table was moved up.

The iMac has about a terabyte of disk space on it, so I held down the 'T' on the Macbook, hooked them together, and then sucked the "Users" directory off the Macbook to the iMac. Like the eMac, everything was recovered.

The install felt a bit MS Windowsy. I clean installed the 10.4, logged in and installed the 10 updates it needed (about .5 a GB of updates too) and then rebooted. And it needed another 8 updates. And another reboot. Shades of Redmond! Reboot city. Then I pulled the stuff back from the iMac, one directory at a time, making sure that I had all of "Music" installed before I ever fired up iTunes, and all of "Pictures" back before I ever fired up iPhoto.

Total recovery time was something like 10 hours, but eight of those were doing the data copies to and from the Macbooks hard drive.

Now the Macbook is back, happy, clean, and very much faster. Ready for 10.5.

All is well.

What Was It?

Was it a loose nut at the keyboard? Did SMART just not report hardware problems? Does HFS need to be replaced with ZFS sooner rather than later? Maybe it was Cosmic Rays?

Of that list, the only one I know for sure is yes: OS.X needs ZFS. But that is a different post all together.

The one thing I know for sure: Even good computers can fail and even what is normally considered bad ones can last for years.

Apple tablet computer

As rumors of the iPhone Nano swirl, and folks have handbuilt Apple tablet computers and Axiotron has their "Modbook", it occured to me that Apple has just delivered their first table PC. They just called it "iPhone".
Now imagine all that scaled up to 3/4's Macbook size, and still 1/2 inch thick.
Betcha Apple has thought about that long ago. All the tech: the touch screen, the virtual keyboard, the gestures...
Sigh. I think I better start saving my money. Again....