Qustodio parental control software for iOS is obsolete.

I did a review of Qustodio’s parental control product for iOS on my special needs blog. It wasn’t a positive review. The product routes all traffic through their VPN — and the VPN can’t handle SSL traffic. That might have been acceptable in 2010, but it won’t work today.

I’m feeling grumpy about the time I spent finding this out — not to mention the $10/month subscription I paid for. The lost time was the bigger deal though. The reviews I’d read led me to think the base product worked, so I spent time checking out other features.

Qustodio must know about the SSL issues, but they’re continuing to sell the service. That’s not nice.

Overcast.app: the upload feature in premium is not very useful

I like to listen to medical and historical podcasts on my commutes. I have years of material in iTunes and limited listening time, I don’t need new subscriptions. I just need to queue up selected podcasts on my device. I prefer not to waste cellular data and I’m not interested in listening from newer to older (in fact many medical podcasts need to be sequenced the other way).

iOS Podcasts.app worked for this, back when I could choose a Playlist in iTunes and sync it. Today’s iOS 11 Podcasts.app is pretty much worthless.

So today I tried Overcast. I can select the podcasts I wanted in iTunes and drag them to the desktop. I subscribed to Overcast.app premium so I could upload them for download into Overcast (no iTunes support).

That’s when I found uploads are one … at … a …. time. Not to mention slow, but really I could live with slow. Overcast.app is even less useful than Podcasts.app

I wasted $10. I’ve canceled subscription renewal.

My cheap Roku TV records up to 90 minutes of OTA TV

My new $160 32” 2015 720p Roku TCL TV records up to 90 minutes of OTA TV. This “Live TV Pause” was added to Roku OS in Nov 2016 — just 3 months ago.

With a 16GB+ USB storage device you can pause OTA TV for up to 90 minutes. I used a USB thumb drive I wasn’t making much use of — easy setup and it works well.

Of course what I really want is the lost ability to time-shift OTA TV without paying a monthly fee. Like we used to do routinely in the 1980s [1]. If Roku added that in a future OS update they’d make me a crazed fan boy.

For now they recommend Tablo (requires $5/m guide?) along with the Roku Tablo Channel.

A few other notes on this ultra-cheap TV:

• Given its size and viewing distance the 720p resolution seems to satisfy my undiscriminating family. (I rarely watch TV myself.)
• When Roku dies it will probably die too. It needs Roku and a Roku account for initial configuration. It claims a credit card number is required (#$$%!) but it lies, you can skip entry. Which I did.
• Until it’s configured, which requires Wifi and a computing device of some kind, it’s useless.
• The channels include Spotify. I have an analog jack from the headphone out to my 32y+ stereo and my playlist sounds great. Really unexpected benefit.
• It has RCA inputs so I can use my old DVD player (otherwise I suppose I’d use the XBOX and HDMI input).
• It’s surprisingly easy to configure and the menus are well designed
• It has the simplest remote in the industry
• There’s an iPhone app that you can use instead of the remote.
• Wirecutter liked it (why I bought it really) even before they added the Live TV Pause.

Like the WSJ review said, it’s an interesting combination of software elegance and ultra-cheap Chinese consumer goods.

[1] The lack of consumer resistance to the end of convenient low cost OTA TV time-shifting now seems an early warning of Trump susceptibility.

What Scrivener does poorly (or not at all)

There’s a lot I like about Scrivener, a writer’s integrated development environment with compilation to platform specific documents. I’m not the only person who wants to like it, there are many enthusiasts online.

It’s easy to find tips and advice online, it’s harder to find a list of what doesn’t work. That’s important to know up front, before you commit to Scrivener.

This is my working list. I’ll expand it over time…

1. PDF export has no page footnotes. The footnotes become chapter endnotes instead.
2. Table creation within Scrivener is quite limited (Scrivener uses macOS text editing services).
3. Table creation in compiled output is poor or unusable. Formatting in PDF and RTF loses font information, formatting in Word .docx defaults table to Word “auto fit to contents” instead of “auto fit to window”.
4. It’s easy to get formatting drift between chapters, there’s no ready style enforcement (there is a process for redoing all formatting to a default)

Some of Scriveners’s limitations seem inherited from macOS text handling, others may be limitations of third party libraries. Scrivener could be more forthright about what works and doesn’t work, but that’s asking a lot of a small business.

Scrivener works best for writing fiction, though even there style support is a big issue (see also, below). It works less well for non-fiction — we need things like tables. If I do continue with Scrivener for my own book I’ll have to treat Word output as a forked version — with late stage editing being manually replicated in two locations. That’s not ideal, but it might be doable. The alternative, of course, is to use Word from the start [1].

- fn -

[1] At least in light use Word for Mac is now useable and the bugs are manageable. With the rental model Office 365 is also quite reasonably priced.

See also:

• The pain and suffering of Scrivener exports to Word | Laura Lis Scott - view from a fiction writer (no tables, but still needs consistent formatting).
• Automate Style Assignment During Scrivener to Word Conversion (2011) - Word for the “final” edit. A hack that uses Scrivener unique formats as a proxy for styles, then uses Word to turn these into Word styles.
• Scrivener to Word | Laura Lis Scott (2014) - Leveraging the format/style swap method.

SMS messaging to small groups: Apple's App Store comes up empty. Again.

It may require federal legislation, but someday text messaging services will interoperate.

Today, however, we have cruddy old SMS, held in the fierce claws of Verizon and AT&T. SMS, which has a maximum of ten recipients. SMS, which carriers have kept alive by bundling unlimited SMS with data services. SMS, which is definitely not free (in the US) for sending services. SMS, which RCS  (aka “joyn”) has failed to replace for about five years — because there’s money on the table.

SMS, which has a decent notification framework even on Android phones [1]. SMS, which is the only thing that is guaranteed to work with every member of a sports team. SMS, which is a key feature of TeamSnap ($8/month — compare to $50/month for many commercial SMS services).

Bottom line - SMS is lousy, but we need to work with it. Our Minnesota NICA mountain biking team is probably going to sign up for TeamSnap for the SMS service alone. The only real alternatives I know of are free GroupMe and iOS or Android apps that turn a list of numbers into a series of sub-10 member SMS texts that are covered by the standard US Carrier SMS bundle and sent as my personal text. That seems easy to do, and unsurprisingly there are a zillion of these apps. How can one pick a decent one?

I started by thinking about what’s important:

• A clear business model. I avoid apps that hide how they make money. Ideally a simple cash payment.
• Easy entry of numbers - copy/paste into a text field would be fine.
• Error handling - notify which texts don’t make it.
• Last update within past 12 months.
• A web site with product documentation
• Decent App Store review numbers in past year (allowing for the usual fake reviews)
• Android version nice to have
• US centric - our mobile market is weird. An international solution is unlikely to meet our needs.

From the App Store I started with

• AtomPark SMS: no reviews
• Group SMS!: $1, 110 reviews
• Group Text!: $3, 2,139 reviews. Last updated 9/2014.
• EasyGroup: $5, 427 reviews, not clear what it does
• Text 2 Group: $3, 1,885 reviews. Last updated 5/2016

My initial screen left me with Group Text! and Text 2 Group. So I read some reviews. 

 

Text 2 Group requires iMessage be disabled prior to use and has no support or web site. Disabling and reenabling iMessage is a pain in the ass on iOS (turning off data/wifi is easy though and probably has same effect). It’s also rather hard to know what this app actually does.

 

Group Text! has not been updated for 2 years but it has a web site: www.redbits.com. Which says that the manual for version 3 “is coming soon”; version 3.4 was released 9/2014. I reviewed the site and support documents — it’s pretty much unreadable. This is a dead app.

 

At the end of the day Apple’s vast app store yielded … nothing. Even basic quality screens eliminated every product sold.

 

This is probably a good place to mention that Apple’s App Store business model has been broken for years — and that’s a sign of how poorly Tim Cook is doing.

See also 

• Group text on iOS: native functionality and the Contaqs.app alternative (and GroupMe) 10/2015. Still runs into the 10 message limit, GroupMe is weird and zombified.
• Gordon’s Notes: Text Spam: Phone company text messaging must die 4/2011

[1] I had to get an Android phone for my special needs smartphone book project. I was amazed what a mess the carriers have made of Android messaging. Google’s deal with the Verizon devil has a price.

Update 8/20/2016: On app.net @jws points out that SMS messaging to groups can be done by using carrier email to SMS gateways. The form varies by carrier, AT&T processes email of the form 5551234567@txt.att.net. This scales to a large number of users. 

I think some people block these email to SMS services; I think I do.

TeamSnap uses true SMS for the US and Canada.

Android restriction (parental control) solutions: Screen Time and MMGuardian advance to next step

For my book project I searched my moto E test phone (Android 5.1) user guide for “child” and “restriction” and “parental”.  I found “products are not toys and may be hazardous to small children”.

Ooookaaay. That’s not too encouraging. My iPhone User Guide has an extensive discussion of restriction options.

Next I tried “restricted profiles” (Android 4.3 and later). Oops. They’re only for tablets, not phones. So it was time to look for 3rd party options [1].

Google found me some lousy references and two useful ones: Five parental control apps for Android devices - Pocket-lint and 10 Android Parental Control Apps - Yoursphere for Parents [2].

From these I picked up MMGuardian, Funamo, AppLock, Kids Place, Screen Time, Net Nanny, Norton Family and a few others. Between the set of these Android, for a technically sophisticated user, can have advantages over built-in iOS restrictions (iOS security models limit the value vendors can add). 

I’m most interested in products that work for teens and/or adults with atypical minds, so that eliminated a few options. Next I looked for good quality companion web sites with clear pricing — that criterial took out both Norton Family and the (not-really-free) AppLock.

I ended up with four options:

• MMGuardian: app usage, time use, texts including driving. $35/year. iOS solution from same vendor.
• Screen Time: $48/year
• Net Nanny: browser restrictions, remote access. $60/year - primary focus on browser control.
• Funamo: $20 one time purchase.

Funamo is the value option, with a more limited and geekier web site than the competition. For my target users I think more support is needed. Net Nanny has the highest pricing, which may reflect longer tenure. MMGuardian and ScreenTime seem (hey, information is limited!) to have a good balance of price and value.

ScreenTime and MMGuardian both have well done blogs with working RSS feeds. ScreenTime is Android only, MMGuardian has an iOS product too. Both have a 14 day free trial. ScreenTime has 7,600 Play Store reviews, MMGuardian has 1,200. Both have well documented uninstall procedures[3]. They are well balanced competitors.

I’m going to have to test both of them — since MMGuardian also has an iOS product I’ll start there.

- fn -

[1] Android reminds me so much of Windows; only geeks can truly use it. Why hasn’t Google bundled even minimal functionality into their OS? The sort-of-free AppLock has 3.3 million reviews. There is a need.

[2] There’s something broken in the info-sphere. Exactly two useful reviews?!

See also:

• MMGuardian - Review of an iPhone parental control and usage monitoring service 5/2016
• MMGuardian - review of an Android parental control and usage monitoring application 5/2016

Brother HL6180DW laser printer: manufacturing defect in foam roller in @ 2003 printers?

This post is based on my two star Amazon review of our 3yo paper-jamming Brother HL6180DW:

We've had this printer for 3 years.

Early on this printer had sleep/wake issues with our Mac. Sometime in the first year or so of use software updates fixed those.

After almost 3 years of regular home printing use it began jamming. The Drum was also due to be replaced. We replaced both the drum and the toner cartridge, but the jamming worsened until it became unusable.

Since this happened I’ve been in contact with Brother support. They requested photos of a key foam roller and they wanted the printer serial number. Even though the printer is 3 years out of warranty they said they'd mail me a refurb. Problem is -- they don't have any refurb devices, they've all been shipped out.

I think my year of this product had a manufacturing problem with a foam roller. It's visible when you open the rear port and flip out a plastic guide. It should be crinkled at the margins and smooth in the center. Ours has linear striations. There are blog posts about this problem. I think Brother offered the out-of-warranty refurb because they know printers in my model year are failing. They're unwilling to announce this however. This probably also explains the lack of refurb machines.

I'm actually ordering a new one. If they send me a refurb in the next 30 days I'll return it (so Brother will have another refurb to distribute!). If they send me a refurb 4 months from now I guess I'll have two. I'm ordering a new one because I have toner and drum components already.

If you have an older HL6180DW do these things before you order a new Drum for an old printer.

1. Check the foam roller and make sure it looks like it should (When you get a new one, photograph the roller.)
2. Check the Fuser lifespan remaining. After 3y we had 71% left. (it's in the manual).

I’ll add photos of the current foam roller condition and the new one once it arrives.

The last really good printer I owned was an Apple LaserWriter Select 360. Printers have not really improved since the early 90s, scanners stopped improving around 2000, dSLRs stopped around 2014, smartphones around 2016.

Update 5/6/2016: Very much to my surprise Brother phoned to say they were unlikely to get any more 6180DW, but they’d overnight ship me a HLL6200DW along with a toner cartridge. That’s the 6180 replacement.

Update 5/10/2016: I received my replacement HL-L6200DW. I can’t tell if it’s new or a refurb. The test print is vastly better than my aged 6180DW, there was more wrong than the paper jams. Installation was straightforward, save that one Mac gave me an annoying “unable to communicate with the printer art this time” over the WiFi interface. I reset the OS X print system then restarted the Mac and the printer and it worked.

I didn’t bother with the directions, I used the USB cable and OS X printer page to get  it on the WiFi network.

Some of the things I’ve learned:

1. Think very carefully about replacing the Drum Unit on a 3yo printer. The Drum Unit was half the price of a new (toner-free) printer. If I hadn’t bought the Drum Unit I wouldn’t have bothered contacting Brother on an out-of-warranty device, I’d have just bought a new printer. Faster and less trouble.
2. Brother is pretty serious about service. It took a few days of back and forth tech questions, but their responses were never unreasonable. Probably best to say you use paper they recommend when asked (in fact I did, but only by chance).
3. I was a bit annoyed when Brother said to wait for a refurb — I pointed out I’d have to buy a printer while I waited. So that wasn’t stellar, but they then phoned and said they would send a newer model. So there’s that.
4. It’s really dumb to think that a Drum Unit will help with paper jams if the paper isn’t jamming in the Drum Unit. Duh. I wasn’t thinking very clearly there. In my defense the Drum Unit was end-of-life, so I figured it was problem. It wasn’t.

Scrivener - the book compiler. Review.

I'm using Scrivener to write Smartphones for All - Using iPhone and Android to build independence for atypical minds.

It’s brilliant software. On my Mac it uses the same text editing engine as TextEdit, including the same RTF format. So, like the Nisus Writer I once used, my writing is indexable by Spotlight and almost as future-proof as plaintext. (I thought RTF was dead. Guess not.)

Apple’s text engine has its share of bugs and limitations, but for basic text work it’s good enough. The primary weakness is table layout, but so far I’ve worked around that.  Scrivener manages the tasks TextEdit can’t do, like page references, footnotes, internal links, document structure and the like.

The real brilliance though is how Scrivener merges concepts of software code management with the traditional word processor. It treats text blocks as though they were blocks of code, including simple version management and “compiling” to multiple output formats (PDF, EPUB, etc). Rather than use some horrid database store, Scrivener leverages native Mac file structures to manage its data. Extra brilliance points for that.

On this compile framework Scrivener layers a rich set of power user features. The latter, I admit, can be overwhelming. I recommend learning the basics from the initial tutorial, then start writing and learn additional features over time.

All software dies. One day Scrivener will die too. But with the ability to complete to multiple formats, and the use of native file system semantics and RTF data, Scrivener is as future proof as any power tool can be [1].

[1] Scrivener’s design is a guide to how photo management software should be built. Please, someone do this.

Quicken for Mac 2015 is not a bad application

I was once an enthusiastic user of Quicken for DOS — despite an annoying tendency to database corruption. Each month I’d receive a 3.5” diskette of credit card data and I’d update our accounts. Quicken for Windows had more bugs, but I stuck with it.

Then, somewhere around 2000, we went all Mac and there were no good personal finance products. Intuit was becoming seriously annoying around that time anyway, so we gave up and simply updated our investment balances yearly. We tried various Mac finance products, but none of them worked for Emily. Most importantly, they didn’t do a great job of automatically pulling data from our accounts, and many of them tried to push us to storing our financial data in the cloud.

Last year we made another go of it. Despite the worrisome lack of a user guide, we bought Quicken 2015.

Surprisingly, it’s worked well for Emily. Automated data download is odd to setup, but once configured it has done well. The application is relatively spartan, and not always intuitive, but it’s been reliable. With a few configuration tweaks we seem to be keeping all of our data local (these days that’s not easy to tell). The Reports are limited, but they have the main things Emily wants. She likes how the spending reports work.

Of course Quicken for Mac 2015 has only a fraction of the capabilities of Quicken for Windows, but I’m not making that comparison. It’s just useful by itself. It’s also astoundingly small for a 2015 application — only 60MB for the Application.

I don’t know where this product is going to go. Intuit is desperately trying to dump Quicken (“desktop technology” — they want to go Cloud based and many money by doing analytics on customer spending), they can’t have a very happy dev team. We’re going to hold off on 2016 until mid-2015, then we’ll look at the bug reports and evaluate 2016.

For the moment though, I’m pleased to find something that works. I assume finance companies want to lock customers in tight, it’s a real achievement to get data out of them. I doubt Quicken will find a good home, but I hope it somehow defies the odds.

Thunderbolt 2 Dock Smackdown: OWC vs Elgato. Also cheap UASP SSD enclosures.

This posts could go on for hours, but I’m racing a 20 minute timer [2]. I think it’s still worth sharing.

Until this year I used an ugly corporate Dell with a $35 dock. It could run 2 external displays and multiple USB-2 devices (now USB-3 I’m sure). I love my best-computer-ever 2015 MacBook Air, but I do miss that dock.

Ok, on to the Apple precious metal equivalent. When my 27” 2009 iMac GPU expired I executed a surprisingly painful migration to a relatively modern family platform consisting of two MacBooks, a Synology NAS for Time Capsule backups, and Synology “Cloud Station” LAN file sync. The latter replaced a traditional file server or the newly dying world of Cloud file sync. I could write a long post about why that migration was so hard but life is short.

As a part of the migration I stripped a 1TB Samsung SSD from the iMac. It needed a home, so after some research I bought a very (very) cheap Inatek SSD enclosure that claimed to support UASP [1]. UASP is one acronym for a somewhat neglected SCSI-like data interface that runs over USB 3.

The other part of the migration was a thunderbolt dock. I could have made do with a USB 3 enclosure but I wanted Firewire 800 support and a single cable for display and peripherals. I couldn’t find a trustworthy source so after some research I bought both an OWC Thunderbolt 2 dock (recent Wirecutter favorite, no UASP support, not sold in Apple Store, no cable in box, Firewire 800, lovely USB 3 port number) and an Elgato T2 dock (UASP support claimed, sold in Apple store, T2 cable, no Firewire, not enough USB 3 ports) from Amazon. I expected to return the Elgato.

I then did XBENCH performance scores. Despite lack of UASP support the OWC was roughly as fast as the Elgato. All the speeds are in MB/sec and, yes, they are all far less than the theoretical T2 speeds or even USB 3 speeds.

• Internal 2015 MacBook Air SSD: 900
• USB 3 direct cable connection: 600
• OWC dock: 320
• Elgato dock: 300 - 368 (varied with different tests, don’t ask me why)
• External Flash drive (USB 2 flash): 24 (just for comparison :-)

What stands out for me here is how much faster the direct USB 3 cable connection to the cheap Innatek enclosure was than either of the T2 connected drives. All testing was done with the Elgato cable. Nice cable, but too short. So it wasn’t worth much to me.

The lack of UASP support on the OWC didn’t make any difference in my crude testing. I suspect the T2 dock data processing is the bottleneck. The docks are so slow UASP support is wasted.

The OWC seemed fine so I prepared to return the Elgato. Then it dropped my drive connection overnight. So I returned the OWC and kept the Elgato.

The Elgato comes with a utility that is supposed to boost USB 3 port power output and provide the undock shortcut OS X doesn’t have (My Dell had it — but it tended to die when used). It’s a kernel extension. I mean, really, do I look suicidal? Clark Goble taught me how to use the far better AppleScript undock.app. I charge devices on dedicated 5 port chargers. In any case, the Elgato doesn’t have enough ports to spare.

I’ve been using the Elgato for 5 weeks. I bought an Apple 3 foot T2 cable and an Apple Thunderbolt-Firewire adapter (so both thunderbolt connections are in use). My 1TB SSD is on one USB 3 port, my 3TB drive is still Firewire 800. It all works, no dropped drives. I returned the OWC as defective (because, dammit, it is defective — and based on my research it’s a common defect) so Amazon paid return shipment.

Even though my external SSD is 50% slower on the T2 dock than with a direct USB 3 connection it’s still fine for working with a large Aperture photo library. I love SSD.

[1] They have many SKUs for a similar device and I suspect they change daily. On Amazon they all share one product rating. I got the one that’s aluminum, black, and seemed to have better heat dissipation.

[2] I lost. Took almost 30 minutes!

Update 2/27/2016:

The Elgato drops connection to the external USB3 drive when all USB ports are in use, even though only two of the ports require power. Looks like a genuine defect.

Airmail 2, Postbox and Mailbox for OS X access to Gmail -> I'm back to mail.app

I think OS X Mail.app for Yosemite is a pretty good Gmail client. The one big problem is that one must download the entire archive, though there is an option to omit automatic attachment download. That’s fine for my primary machine, but I don’t want to burden my 256GB SSD with 20+ GB of Gmail archive. So I went looking for a Gmail client.

I used Sparrow years ago and liked most of it — except the obligatory threading and conversation views. If an app is going to do that, it has to let me quickly delete all the emails I no longer care about. Sparrow didn’t.

Sparrow’s gone of course. More recently i used Airmail with some success, so I tried Airmail 2. That was … frustrating. I ran into multiple bugs and UI issues when I migrated from Airmail 1, so I tried again with a fresh start. This time while sending an email I got an authentication failure. No problem — I quit and fixed the error (I think). I then went looking for the stalled email and … it was nowhere to be found.

I deleted Airmail 2. (That was money wasted.) I then tried Mailbox.app — forever in beta, mostly abandoned, and you can’t delete individual messages, you can only delete an entire conversation. Deleted Mailbox.app. Next up - Postbox.

Postbox doesn’t support Google OAUTH2. I read the documentation on enabling “Access for less secure apps” and … I deleted Postbox.

So I’m back to Mail.app. I disabled automatic download of attachments in preferences, but I guess I’ll just sacrifice the disk storage. I considered enabling Google’s IMAP folder message visibility limits, but of course that would apply to my server too. I think in past Mail.app had some control over message downloads, but that’s gone now.

The bright side is I don’t mind Mail.app. Just hate the lose the storage...

Update 7/18/15: With ‘automatically download attachments’ off, selecting Inbox and choosing Account Info from the Context menu tells me that 80,309 messages are using 4.35GB. I can live with that.

Tivoli Radio - spending $150 to get a 1960s radio is very 2014

Ten (ten!) years I wrote in this blog …

Gordon's Tech: Tivoli PAL (or iPAL): the iPod speaker accessory of choice?

… At $130 the price isn't bad. It's not as flash as some of the iPod speaker accesories, but it's ruggedly made and comes with a great radio. It might be interesting to pair this with an Airport Express and use it as a convenient iTunes and iPod extension….

Today, ten years later the iPal features are identical but the price has gone up by $90. Despite the price bump and complete lack of feature change the product remains popular.

Capitalism isn’t supposed to work this way. We should have been inundated by Chinese clones; but instead we are swamped by much cheaper products with inscrutable interfaces. (The latter is why we bought the Tivoli.)

In any case I didn’t buy the iPAL, i bought the battery-less Model One for $140 on Amazon. It has the layout of a $10 radio from 1960 - speaker, volume, rotary tuner, AM/FM switch. The only concession to the past 55 years is an Aux setting (I lied, it’s OFF/FM/AM/AUX).

It’s so retro it’s fashionable. My 12 yo wants one bad.

The back ports do show it’s bit more serious than a 1950 knock-off. Here’s a pro picture from Amazon that obscure’s the “made in China” letters and hides some screw heads ..

and here’s the real thing, which doesn’t look nearly so pretty …

 

The radio comes with an (undocumented and easy to miss) coax connector with a 3 foot long external antenna wire. If you plug it in, do switch from internal to external. (In my photo you’ll see it’s set to internal even though an external antenna is connected. I only noticed the switch as I was editing the photo!).

There’s a (stereo) headphone jack, a 12V connector (not sure for what), a record out (!) separate from the headphone jack, and an aux in. The power cable, by the way, is very long and comes with a hefty ferrite core which may or may not help with power line hum.

The aux-in on my device is for the AirPort Express AirPlay output - just as I wrote 10 years ago. Unfortunately, it’s not working very well in our kitchen. I’m getting periodic drop outs, and the microwave completely kills any wifi. As best I can tell it should be working — but the Airport Express I’m using is at least 5-6 years old. I’m going to order a modern Airport Extreme to free up a 2-3 yo Airport Express and try that instead.  (I am annoyed that AirPlay/WiFi is not working as advertised, but I’m not surprised. We Apple veterans don’t really expect our Apple gear to work. Apple is only better than all the alternatives.)

If newer AirPort Express still fails I’ll return the Extreme (yay Amazon) and buy a Bluetooth dongle instead.

Tivoli does make a BT version of this devices for $100 more, but the Amazon reviews are damning, particularly this one …

After the Tivoli was initially paired with my mom's iPod, it would autoconnect with it every time she wanted to use the bluetooth function. However, when I paired it with my iPhone as well, that autoconnect feature fell by the wayside and every time the bluetooth function was used, you had to re-connect the device manually. Not really a big deal, but it was pretty cool when the Tivoli connected automatically. Just to be sure, I got in touch with Tivoli and they said that once the unit is paired with more than one device, it loses its autoconnect capabilities. They also said there was no way to reset it to factory settings.

This review is a few years old, so maybe Tivoli has fixed their BT problem, but they’re clearly technically incompetent. I decided to go for the simple device they seem to know how to make with AirPlay then, if that fails, an external bluetooth dongle.

The sound and tuner are both fine. So if it keeps working we’re happy — though it’s weird that we have to spend so much to buy something simple:

Capitalism is not working as expected.

ViewTV At-163 OTA Digital TV recorder - my review

Remember the great American Digital TV Transition of 2008? Our elected representatives explained that while some would see more channels and far better image quality, those who did not have “a properly oriented, high-gain antenna mounted 30 feet in the air outside” would lose free access to broadcast television. They told us that, sadly, a combination of patents, the DMCA and the burgeoning power of cable TV would vastly increase the cost of time-shifting broadcast (OTA) television. They hung their heads and admitted they were completely corrupt …

Ok, so they didn’t say any of those things. We had to learn most of them the hard way, though we knew about the corruption bit. I’d mostly ignored television from 1997 to 2013, so my light bulb only lit up when I bought a Samsung Smart TV and learned that the USB digital output was disabled [1]. Suddenly, everything made sense.

Ever since then I’ve been looking for a sane way to record OTA TV without devoting my life to hacking MythTV. Sure, we could afford to pay the monthly Tivo tax (which presumably goes to the cartel patent holders), but this kind of thing bugs me.

Alas, this is harder than you’d think. A legitimate manufacturer is going to be hit with the patent/cartel tax — turning a $50 product into a $600 (over 5 years) monster. There’s no Chinese market to draw from, I assume they just stick a USB device in their TVs. There are several startups that do sort-of-interesting time shifting things with OTA DTV, but none of them connect easily to, you know, a television. Presumably to dodge the cartel they have to connect to everything BUT a television (so you use AirPlay to get signals from an iPad to a TV).

The only source is going to be shady, something from China sold under a range of disposable brand names for a few months at a time. That’s what I found on Amazon, the home of things that fell off the back of container ships. Alas, the quality was incredibly low — it’s easily the crummiest product I’ve bought in decades. Even so, I was tempted to keep it. It kind of worked…

Amazon.com: John G … s review of Viewtv At-163 ATSC Digital TV Converter…

This is a FASCINATING device in so many ways. It is pure Chinese manufacturing of absolutely the lowest possible quality (one of the four base pads was missing), but it’s only of interest to the US market. The rest of the world doesn't need this -- they simply stick USB devices into their TVs and record directly. It's only in the US that a combination of cartel patents and corrupt politicians makes recording of OTA TV extremely expensive and difficult. When we buy a Samsung TV, for example, the recording features are disabled.

In China this is probably used to convert digital signals for the few analog TVs left in China. It probably costs $10 to make, including what I assume is a very low quality (risky!) internal switched power supply (no power brick). In the US it's sold, somewhat covertly, as a low cost no-subscription simple digital TV recorder.

The good news is that if you ignore the manual, and work through the incredibly crude displays hacked to to show English labels, and convert from the strings on the weird remote to the screen, it's not hard to configure this. You can even set up the antenna as pass-through so the signal goes to the ViewTV and is also available for TV input. It does record (!) and you can play back the recording. It even shows a list of available TV shows.

The bad news is that the tuner in my device sucked. OTA Digital TV barely works in many US settings -- we need top notch tuners. The one in our Samsung Smart TV gets barely enough channels to meet my son's sporting thirst. The tuner in this device missed most of them.

I also worry about the internal switched power supply. This ships with all the usual inspection/certification labels, but I'd be amazed if any of them were legitimate.

If only they'd shaved their profit margin a bit. It costs nothing to build what's in this box. We actually own a decent (Chinese made of course) Digital TV converter box that cost $45 — it’s much higher quality than the “ViewTv" with a far better tuner.

I hope someone else will do that -- but we have to remember the reason these features are disabled from US TVs. Anyone doing this properly is going to be hit by the US OTA patent cartel -- and forced to charge high subscription fees.

There may not be anything better in the near future. So if you have a strong antenna and good signals, and you're feeling lucky, it's worth a shot. Just be ready to return, and if you're feeling nervous leave it unplugged when you're not using it.

I tried to make this thing work, but the tuner was just too crummy. I had to return it.

Sniff.

- fn -

[1] The only explanations I’ve read are something like "Disclaimer: Only European TVs have USB recording. US models have the feature disabled due to legal issues.” I presume the “legal issues” are DMCA and patents. Explaining the full story would take a real journalist — would be a fun article for, say, The Atlantic. Might run into some dangerous characters though…

See also:

• Gordon’s Notes: After the Smart TV debacle: what we really want: modular design
• Channel Master is developing a whole-home DVR solution for cord cutters — Tech News and Analysis: seems to be dying already. Very expensive for what it does - $300 to start, iffy tuner, no antenna pass through, mediocre Amazon reviews. Most of the cost must be paying patents.
• Gordon’s Tech: How to clean up the Samsung Smart TV you shouldn’t have bought 12/2013
• Gordon’s Notes: Four decades of television: last of the rabbit ears 2/2007. An A/D converter, a simple monitor, and an old VCR has advantages over our modern Samsung.

Update: I updated my 12/2013 Samsung Smart TV post with notes on hacking it to restore recording functionality.

Trello - an orientation review

[This post was first written in 2013 and then revised in April 2016.]

When Emily said she was interested in Trello, on a day when I was at home tending to a recovering child, I leapt at it. She's done a fantastic job with Google Calendar, but she'd never found a task/project app she liked. Indeed, she has a bit of an allergy to them. Trello, it turns out, has a certain arts and crafts following.

That's a bit surprising, as I know Trello as a corporate-focused project and work management tool from Joel Spolsky's geek-loved Fog Creek software. It never occurred to me that Emily might like it.

I've used a number of Task and Project tools myself; particularly a combination of Appigo's ToDo.app and the weirdly named ToodleDo web service [1], but Trello is a bit of an odd duck. So I put together these quick notes for myself - it's a geeky introduction to Trello.

Service properties and revenue model

Trello uses a freemium web model with Android and iOS apps. It is easy to cancel the service and it passed Gordon's Laws for Software and Service Acquisition. You can use Google authorization or a local account. Google access requests are Contacts only - which is plausible.

Revenue comes from corporate sales, corporate buyers pay $200/year for  admin tools, access restrictions, bulk JSON export, Google Apps org directory integration. Non-paying customers presumably encourage corporate adoption. They've added a $5/month option for "stickers" -- if they made this $20/year I'd pay just to support them. I worry about their revenue and longevity.

How Trello is put together

Cards are the equivalent of Tasks in Toodledo or ToDo.app and they are the essence of Trello. Not all of Trellow web features are available on the iOS app, but most are. Here's how Trello works:

• Organization: A collection of Members and of Boards. Organizations are optional, you can ignore this.
• Board: A named collection of Lists. Boards do not have dates but they are a good match for Projects especially if there's a collaborator. You need at least one Board.
• type: individual or organization
• membership (for org)
• visibility: public/private for individual, for org is member only/org wide
• List: A ranked collection of Cards. Lists do NOT have dates. You can move cards between lists. A typical use of a List is state tracking - To Do, Doing, Done. Can also use a List to hold notes, ideas, etc (but I'd use Simplenote for that).
• Card: A task or, if you prefer, a lightweight project. Has a Name, a single Due Date/Time, Assigned person and... 
• Description
• Label - color icon (example, priority)
• Checklists  - these items don’t have a due date or a responsible person.
• Attachments - photo/video on iOS, on web can be Google Drive, Dropbox, Computer
• Subscribe option
• Comments (@ for autocomplete members)
• Activity record (read only)
• Links (can reference a card)
• Card’s don’t have a done or completed attribute. That’s a problem (see below).

Lists, Cards and Boards can be copied, so you can set them up as a template. Lists enable bulk operations on cards such as archive all and move all. Cards and Lists can be moved within the hierarchy.

Trello has "Power-Ups" that do things like Display Cards in Calendar format. The Calendar works well and it allows drag and drop between dates. The Calendar is supposed to have a feed that can be subscribed to from Google Calendar, but it didn’t work when I tried it. [Update 2016.04: The Calendar feed works well now, I use it to integrate project work into Google Calendar.]

Comparison of Trello to a traditional Task app:

ToDo.app/Toodledo	Trello
List/Project	Board
Completed (Yes/No)	List (state)
Task	Card (but no done status [2])

Keyboard Shortcuts

• D: card date picker
• L#: Card Label (ex: urgent, etc)

Teams and Boards

If you’re using free Trello then you want to have a single Trello account for each Person — Trello.app for iOS doesn’t support identity switching. A Person (Trello account/profile) can be a member of multiple Teams. Each team can have multiple Boards, but a Board has only one Team. A single Trello account (Person) can be associated with multiple Google IDs.

So the relationship between a Person and a Board is controlled by their Team membership. In Trello web or iOS one changes Teams to see Boards that are Team specific. (This is more clear in the app than in the web version.)

Example of Trello Lists to organize Cards

These Lists resemble states in ToodleDo. I'd personally use Labels to indicate importance rather than create a List and the use of lists to reflect a schedule seems odd...

• The Naive Optimist • 7 Do's and Don'ts for Founders - Lists include (Public Board Example)
• Big Picture
• Inbox
• This Week
• Later
• Today
• Done (archive this list daily)
• The Key Habits of Organization : zenhabits
• Most Important
• Today
• Incoming
• This Week
• Later
• Done
• Waiting On

It's interesting that these two are using Lists to organize by Time instead of moving Cards around the Calendar or assigning Dates. Their organization can be summarized as:

• Inbox: Cards that are new, not yet sorted
• Scheduled/Active: Today, This Week, Later
• Blocked/Waiting
• Done (which is archived)

I’ve done Trello with a list for an Agile backlog and a list for each iteration of a release. I’ve also implemented it with a backlog, an active list and a ‘done’ list.

 

The one big problem with Trello - no Done status

I like products that strongly represent a coherent philosophy of a willful developer. The downside of these products is said dev can dig their heels in and stick with a dumb decision. That’s how I account for absence of a “Done” status for Cards.

 

Instead of “Done” you are supposed to Archive the card. That would be ok if the Archive were a special list in which Due Dates didn’t make Cards turn radioactive, but the Archive UI is buried away. You can’t see the course of a project if you use Archive. (See workarounds.)

 

If you don’t use Archive you can use “Done” list to hold completed Cards. Or you can keep them in place and use a Label or other attribute to indicate Done; but if you don’t remove the Due Date the Card will become radioactive when it’s post-due.

 

A lesser problem with Trello - no local backup, no export

At least in the free version you can’t create a local XML backup of a Board, and you can’t create any local archive store representing project history.

 

Impression

 

Emily has used Trello as a basic task manager. In April 2016 I started using it for my work and personal projects and I rewrote this review. I’m not satisfied with any project management tool I’ve seen, but Trello is my choice at this time. 

 

Trello is far less complex/powerful that RallyDev’s Rally project management tool. That’s not all bad though — Rally got very complex and hard to use over the years. Trello is a better tool for personal and small team projects. It doesn’t support assigning Card Checklist Items to individual persons, but that’s not a big issue. The user name can always be added to the checklist item.

 

I’d like to see an improved version of Trello that would be less costly than the business version. That version should fix the weird lack of a “Done” behavior and it should allow one to backup Boards locally and export a PDF archival record of Board content.

 

- fn -

[1] Nobody would combine those two — that was a historic accident. I later moved entirely to Appigo ToDo Cloud.app. ToDo Cloud has project management features that are almost good enough, but I ultimately decided to keep those for smaller mini-projects and use Trello instead. Appigo has a similar problem with archived/old tasks and longitudinal project records.

Kobo Glo: Mini-Review

After much deliberation, and on the advice of @la and other appnetizens, I bought a Kobo Glo from, oddly enough, Common Good Books.

I ended up with the Kobo Glo largely because I can't quite persuade myself to buy the current generation of iPads, my experience with the original Nexus 7 was disappointing, and I assume the Nexus 7 Retina will have awful battery life. At the same time I wanted an ePUB reader for compatibility with iBooks.app and Google Play, and because Adobe's DRM can be removed. I also wanted simplicity of mounting/charging and transferring files via USB, and the expansion of a (micro) SD card option.

So I was left with buying either an eInk Nook or Kobo. I disliked the Nook because the one I tried was misconfigured to do an eInk full screen refresh every page; I was left with an unfair impression. It helped that while is US presence is slight the Kobo seems to have a good international market -- and Kobo's marketing angle is 'freedom' (though I think they use the same Adobe DRM as Google Play and Nook).

I paid $130 for the Glo plus tax. No bargains this time around; it seems to cost the same online. It comes in a compact box with a slender setup guide and a micro-USB cable (no charger) and no slip case or cover.

My initial experience was not good. I connected it to my Mac and ran the setup using Kobo Desktop, which seems to be a well behaved and digitally signed Mac app. After initialization an update started, but it behaved a bit oddly. I had to pull the USB cable to get the update to commence, but then I feared power loss and reinserted the cable. Although it seemed to behave and register normally, the Kobo didn't recognize any of the files I put on it via USB desktop mounting. It also, I later realized, was not showing the proper 'connect' dialog on USB cable connection.

So next I did a factory refresh, and this time instead of a desktop setup I did a WiFi connection setup. The device updated again, but this time it took far longer for the update to continue. It seemed to be stuck, cycling between progress indicators for minutes -- but I ignored it and, somewhat to my surprise, it eventually restarted. I completed my registration using the painful onscreen keyboard.

After the refresh and registration I was able to drag files to the Kobo and they were processed on device. I'd forgotten how compact ePubs are, and how big 2GB is. At 1MB or so per ePUB it will take a long time to use up my remaining 1.35 GB -- even if I don't use the micro-SD card slot.

My initial impressions are guarded; I think the iPad Mini Retina will be a better reading experience -- but it will cost far more and it's not yet available. My iPhone 5 has a better screen, but it's small for reading technical books. The mandatory eInk full page flicker, which occurs at least every 6 pages, is annoying.

On the other hand, the battery life is at least weeks long. It is a boring black and white device, so I don't have to worry about the kids fighting for a turn. When I buy my iPad Mini it will still be a useful device for someone else.

For the moment I carry it in a cloth pouch, I'll see how the plastic screen holds up.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: More ePUB (eBook) management options: Google drive + iTunes Symlink, upload to Google Play 7/28/13
• Gordon's Tech: EPUB and DeDRM: Why Google Play Store is the best eBookStore for iBooks fans. (Bonus: Fixing Adobe Digital Edition crash.)

Review: Maxell AirStash WiFi media server: iTunes movies to iPhones for long car trips

The Maxell AirStash Wireless 8GB Flash Drive [1] is designed to stream movies to kid's handheld devices on long car rides [3]. It probably has other uses, such as backing up photos or serving music, but I think movies is what everyone buys it for. That's why we bought it -- so we could stream iTunes purchased FairPlay DRMd .mv4 movies and television episodes to our 3 kids devices.

So, did it work?

Yes, but, unfortunately, not very well. I was able to stream The Avengers (iTunes SD) to two devices fairly well, but once I added a third device watching the same movie the stream became unreliable. The device is supposed to be able to stream 3 movies at once, but perhaps they mean 3 different movies. Or, more likely, it can't really stream 3 SD resolution movies at once. I suspect it can stream 1 HD movie, 2 SD movies, or 3 movies ripped to iPhone screen resolution [4].

Since we have 3 kids, this isn't a great solution. We might still consider using it, but the SanDisk Connect 64GB Wireless Media Drive Streaming is supposed to be available in the next 1-2 weeks. It is less expensive, has much higher starting capacity [2], and claims to stream a movie to up to 5 clients (so probably 3). We've processed an Amazon return on the AirStash, but we may still keep it if we can't get the SanDisk in time for our trip.

Beyond the disappointing, but not surprising, performance issues I'll quickly list a few observations:

• It's a bit bigger than it looks in the Amazon photos, it can fill a good portion of an adult hand. It fit the chargers in our van, but for some USB chargers you'll need a USB extension cable.
• Although it has an internal battery, it's clearly designed to run off a car USB charger. The manual suggests leaving it in the charger.
• It's a pain to turn on/off. I'd kill for a simple switch instead of these quirky push buttons that require a manual to use. The indicator light is worthless when the device is charging, I found I had to unplug it to know it's power state.
• It takes about 15 seconds to boot up, so be patient waiting for WiFi to appear.
• The AirStash is controlled by the (WebDav client) iOS AirStash+ app configure settings. You can use this to rename it and play media. FairPlay DRMd media is passed to Safari [5], Safari in turn passes it to iOS QuickTime player (videos.app). As long as the DRM on the movie matches the iTunes account on the iOS device then the movie will play. There are no chapter controls, you can often move through the movie timeline but not always. For a single user movies play well.
• I was able to lock up iOS AirStash+ fairly easily and had to kill and restart it several times.
• On initial use I was told a firmware update was available. The installation directions were poorly worded, and, again, it's hard to see the power/firmware update status light when the device is charging. It worked after some fiddly.
• I don't think you can stream a movie when it's connected to a computer. I'm not positive, but it didn't seem to work in my testing. It's fine when connected to a power supply.
• You can put movies directly on the FAT32 formatted SD card or plug in the AirStash and it will mount. You can use Folders to organize your media.
• It comes with a plastic cap that doesn't fit on the end of the AirStash. So it will get lost pretty quickly.
• When I typed 'airstash.net' into my desktop Safari while connected to the WiFi I did not get anything back. It's supposed to show the file system, can't say why that didn't work. I didn't pursue further since I won't use the device that way.
• I didn't test how it behaves under prolonged load, but I'd be sure to keep this near a cooling vent in the car. Heat dissipation must be a challenge and prolonged overheating destroys devices like this.
• I was able to use a 64GB SONY SD Card with the AirStash, but I had to reformat it to FAT32 on my Mac. [6]

See also:

• Using an MacBook as a car server for multi-device home sharing doesn't quite work 8/2012. I'd forgotten Charles Stross used an AirStash as his pocket NAS device.

- fn -
[1] The AirStash ships with an 8GB SD card, which is really only practical for testing. You can buy a 16GB version, but obviously that's a waste of money. Most will buy the 8GB AirStash then get a 64GB to 2TB SDXC card - but see [6].
[2] 64GB internal, plus external slot available.
[3] It is perhaps not obvious why one would want this. It's a pain to put movies on/off iPhones when traveling, this way we could take our video library with us.
[4] I suspect the ideal use case would be someone who (illegally) rents Amazon DVDs and rips them to iPhone resolution, building a compact library that is streamable with a relatively low powered device.
[5] Safari is disabled on our kids phones as a minimally effective parental control measure.
[6] SD cards above 32GB come exFAT formatted, and the AirStash won't read Microsoft's patented exFAT. Which is how I learned that whereas Windows machines won't format FAT32 above 32GB, Mountain Lion will happily do at least 64GB and the (Linux powered?) AirStash will read it.

Update: My Amazon review (A minimally edited copy of this one). I'm going to test streaming from my MacBook Air.

Update 7/27/13: Ok, forget the SanDisk: "SanDisk’s drives don’t work with video content you buy from Apple’s iTunes Store at all". So they didn't figure out the Safari workaround AirStash uses. Guess we'll try to make the AirStash work after all.

Update 8/26/2013: We used the AirStash daily for two weeks and it worked quite well. Note we ONLY have SD movies and a lot of what the kids stream is animated and uses much less processing and bandwidth. Also, it was in practice rare for all 3 to stream video at the same time. So, despite failing my 3 stream test, it worked in practice. Kids had no trouble with the necessarily awkward viewing via Safari.

The biggest problem is that the AirStash, with its protruding USB and big body, is an accident waiting to happen. One child stepped on it and partly broke the plastic body. It continued to work, only insert with a flexible USB extension cable and making a protective container from a plastic "tupperware" dish.

The biggest annoyance is the on/off switch switch. I'd love a simple on/off slider. It was often hard to tell if the device was running.

Update 3/27/2014: You can use the AirStash to move files between iOS devices - including ePub files. It shows up as an option in the iOS share list in many apps; from AirStash.app use the copy function to move to AirStash device. Firmware updates are scary; if you plug it into a Mac you need to Eject before update will commence. Really, when doing firmware updates, plug it into a plain charger.

Brother HL-6180DW - personal experience, AirPrint, and Printopia incompatibility/obsolescence.

I used an Apple LaserWriter Select 360 for about twenty years. When I could no longer buy a cartridge for it I got five years from a Brother MFC-7820N, then three years from a Brother 2140, and lately 3 months from a Brother HL 2270DW.

I'm not sure, but I think I might be seeing a bit of occult inflation.

The Wirecutter-recommended Brother HL 2270DW didn't actually malfunction, it simply turned out to be extraordinarily expensive to operate. We got about 600 print pages out of a $50 "2,600" page Brother toner cartridge. Seems Brother has brought the ink jet business model to the formerly respectable laser writer.

So I handed that printer off to some friends who really only need occasional printing, and I went looking for a respectable alternative. I'd like to say I bought something that wasn't Brother, but making marks on paper is a dying industry. The competition is no better, and at least Brother printer drivers seem relatively Mac friendly.

I ended up buying the HL-6180DW (today's dynamic Amazon price is $254, I paid $230 a week ago). it comes with a 3,000 page cartridge (no fake starter cartridge) and you can buy a 12,000 page TN780 cartridge for about $106. The drum is good for about 30,000 pages (at which point it will cease working whether you like it or note), so we might get five years out of this one.

Compared to the compact 2270 the 6180DW is less than an inch wider, but its at least 4" taller. It just fits the space I had for it. It's reasonably quiet and of course it prints quite adequately. I didn't try to enable the WiFi [4], it has an ethernet connection to my Airport Extreme so it's a networked ethernet printer. Our laptops find it because, after all, it's on the network (no print server needed). [3]

I like to keep my printer installations simple, so after downloading all the manuals [5] but not the latest drivers [1] I switched to my Admin account [2] and added the printer through Mountain Lion's interface. That worked well, but, unlike the 2270 DW, the print queue didn't provide a link to the printers web admin GUI.

So I had to find the printers IP address to get the web GUI. From the LCD panel, choose machine info, then print network settings [8]. That gave me the IP, paste into Chrome or Safari to get the Admin GUI.

There's no default pw, you can set one if you like. I don't know how to do a password reset, so be careful not to lose it. [9]

From that GUI note two key settings under Print:

• Toner Save: turn ON. Seems to print fine with Toner Save on and we know Brother makes its money from toner sales.
• Continue Mode: This controls what happens when your printer hits Brother's 20% remaining (600 pages in this case) mark. I believe the default means the printer will stop printing. I set it to "Auto". 

This all went relatively well, but then I discovered Printopia wasn't letting me select my new printer! Exasperating, since my #1 son loves printing from his iPhone. There were no error messages, but the new printer didn't appear. 

All was not lost however, as I discovered that AirPrint "just worked" [7]. Since the printer was on my mixed wired/wifi network, and since it supports AirPrint, my iOS devices saw it. No need to mess with printer's complex wifi settings [4]. So I removed Printopia, it was no longer needed. (I suspect it doesn't manage AirPrint devices, would have been nice to have shown a message of some kind.)

I didn't make too many other changes. I disabled NETBIOS (why not?), and clicking around I turned off TCP/IP for wireless. Don't do that! There's a UI glitch/bug, this turns off all TCP/IP support. I had to use the LCD panel network reset to get access back.

- fn -

[1] There's a firmware update but I didn't check to see if it was needed. I did need to download the 10.5 drivers for our old G5 iMac, that worked quite well.

[2] This may be a quirk of my Mountain Lion install, or simply a bug, but if I try to do the install/download from a non-admin account it fails even after authentication. I bet this is a 10.8.3 bug. 

[3] TCP/IP still feels magical to me. 

[4] If you do want WiFi don't even look at the insanely complex Quick Start Guide. Go to the web GUI (above) and find Wireless Personal, then change Communication Mode to Infrastructure and figure it out from there. I didn't try!

[5] Elsewhere I found the very esoteric Brother Laser Printer Technical Reference Guide.

[6] There may be an LCD control for this but I didn't see it. 

[7] A sadly rare event with Apple 2013. It turns out AirPrint is a misnomer, it should really be called iOSNetworkPrint.

[8] If you install Brother's driver software, the Print Queue window includes a status icon. Open that, and if you click twice on the icon for the printer Safari opens with the correct IP address. Yes, that's obscure.

[9] After I setup a password the next time I returned there was a Login field at screen top. There's no username, just enter the pw you defined in this field to get accdess to admin screens. I don't know how one would reset a lost passwords -- so be careful!

Update 10/27/13: AirPrint and toner spill

Looking at Amazon reviews I see this printer has a reputation for toner spillage. I ran the starter cartridge to the end and it did leak a small amount, so this might be a real problem and not just a counterfeit cartridge problem.

iOS devices can't see the AirPrint printer when the device is asleep. So to add the Brother as an AirPrint device first make it active. I don't know if it will waken in response to an AirPrint request.

Is Brother running a scam with its HL-2270DW printer and TN-450 toner cartridge?

I think with the HL-2270DW  and its TN-450 toner cartridge Brother has figured out how to apply the ink-jet business model to the previously cost effective laser printer. The printer may be cheap, but the toner isn't. At our current use this $150 printer will cost us about $450 a year to operate. Using its default settings it's a good printer for very occasional use, but a poor printer for regular use. Wirecutter's recommendation is undeserved.

I'll describe our experience, two workarounds you need to know about, and why you should consider a different printer.

Our experience is that in printing 1,459 pages we have completely consumed the 150-200 page "starter cartridge" that comes with the printer and almost two "2,600 page" ($45) TN-450 cartridges. We're getting about 600 pages out of the "ISO/IEC 19752" 2,600 page cartridge.

This is quite different from our previous MFC-7820N and 2140 printers. At first I thought Amazon had shipped a defective or counterfeit cartridge, but I had almost exactly the same results from a different supplier. Both packages had Brother's standard hologram; I don't think they were counterfeit. This printer simply uses a lot of toner when printing text pages with images, and Brother charges a lot for its matched cartridges.

Ah, but who uses a b&w laser printer to print images? It's a kid thing in our house. It means we're running into this problem a lot sooner than most, but if you found this page via Google you may be seeing a lesser version of it.

Did Brother design this printer and cartridge to consumer large amounts of toner, or was it a happy accident? I don't know, but it doesn't matter. If you're using this printer for anything more than the occasional letter you need to read the manual [1] and turn Toner Save on.

With Toner Save on, and Replace Toner Continue, toner consumption starts to resemble other low end printers. The print quality is lighter but tolerable.

 

Really though, if you do anything but the most occasional printing, you shouldn't buy this printer. The 1,500 pages we've printed (I just printed another) mean we're already at 12% of the 10,541 page drum life. We'll be finished with this printer in about 16 months. What a waste!

So, if I were to do it all over again, what would I buy? I'd love to say I'd get something from HP or Samsung or anything else, but the truth is the home printer business is dying. Brother was always the best of the lot, and even though this printer is a bit of a scam the competition looks even worse. Sadly, I'd probably buy another Brother, but one made for heavier use.

The Brother I recommend is HL-6180DW ($230); its TN-780 is "12,000" pages ($105, so half the page cost of the TN-450 even if this Brother also burns toner) and the drum life is 30,000 pages. It also ships with a standard "3,000 page" cartridge instead of a 200 page "starter" cartridge. Over the cost of a year, for even moderate users, the HL-6180DW is better and cheaper than the HL-2270DW. Buy that one instead. [2]

- fn - 

[1] If you don't want to read the manual or install Brother apps, the quickest way to the web interface is print preferences, open queue, choose settings, click on Show Printer Webpage:

 

[2] Brother has an HL-5450DN that ships with a 3,000 page cartridge, has a 30,000 page drum, and costs $150. I was insane to listen to Wirecutter and buy the HL-2270DW. I hope I've learned my lesson.

Contaqs.app - A contacts.app replacement - with a flaw since fixed

I have about 2,200 Contacts, and if they could speak they'd all complain about iOS Contacts.app. The bizarre Groups implementation, the limited search options, the crummy search result display ...

Frustrating.

So I've been looking for an alternative. Most of the App Store alternatives failed the smell test, but Clark pointed me to a relatively good one - Contaqs.app. It looked good enough that I bought it.
My initial impression was pretty good. Search results show the company name. You can search on names, company names and phone numbers. You can edit group relationships (!). There's a smart-tag and geolocation function and you can create new tags. Seems fast.

Then I tried searching on my wife and didn't get any hits.

This test explains the problem:

Contact: John Paul Jones
Search in Contacts.app on John Jones: 1
Search in Contaqs.app on John Jones: 0
Search in Contaqs.app for John Pau: 1

The sound you here is my head repeatedly hitting the wall.

Instead of what's called 'starts with word search' the authors of Contaqs.app implemented phrase search. This means that you need to include the middle name if your Contact has one.

I'm sure they had some reason for this, but it wasn't the right choice. If Contaqs.app were to implement 'starts with word search' they'd be a 4-5 star app. As it is I'm tempted to rate them 2 stars, but that's frustration speaking. I'll give 'em 3 for now. I might use it to clean up Group relationships, but it doesn't replace Contacts.app.

Darn it.

Update 6/11/13: They've fixed the search problem. Confusingly they call the new search 'phrase search', but it's starts with word search. The middle name problem is gone. Performance is a bit sluggish on my i5, probably why this feature is only for newer devices. Still, it's a great improvement.

Review: Snapfon ezONE-C Senior mobile phone (GSM, unlocked)

I bought my 83 yo mother the unlocked GSM Snapfon ezONE-C Senior Cell Phone with Big Buttons for about $80 (it's $60 now) along with its car charger (forgetting she doesn't drive any more!). I then carried it to her home in Montreal and activated on a Roger's 40 cent/min (but 0$/day) PayGo plan.

My mother likes her Mac Mini and iPad, but she's largely blind, quite arthritic, and has peripheral neuropathy reducing her sense of touch. So most phones won't work for her. This was the only phone we could find that she might be able to use. She needs, for example, to be able to call for help when Montreal's sometimes unreliable wheelchair transport service fails to show up - leaving her stuck in her wheelchair as snow swirls, water freezes, and hungry wolves approach over the ice.

It is impressive how few devices are made for people like my mother.  I assume the demand isn't there. Certainly if she were younger she might do well with a VoiceOver iPhone, but the combination of age and diminished touch make VoiceOver hard for her. In any case that was my best guess, but the next best choice to this $60 phone is probably a $700 iPhone 5.

Based on limited use, here are my impressions of the device. I'll also add a modified version of this review to Amazon.com. I'll start with the bad, then the good. Bottom line: I think it will work, but I'd rather buy a better version for $100 than the current phone for $60.

The Bad

• It doesn't get its time settings off the mobile network. Very weird.
• I fear it doesn't  persistently store its configuration. I don't want to test this, but I think prolonged removal of the battery will wipe all setup - and setup is a bit painful. File this under "suspicion" not proven. Settings do survive a quick battery swap. (Maybe it's storing some data on the SIM card, in which case I might have been confused by a SIM swap.)
• This is a very Chinese product -- feels like it was built for the Chinese or Japanese market. That is, it has a number of weird add-on features like an FM radio and a flashlight that mostly add complexity and seem weird for the US market. On the other hand, I think my mother might actually use the FM radio. It uses the ear set as an antenna. In my testing it worked well with an iPhone ear set and with iPod ear buds despite the manual saying only Nokia and SNAPFON earphones work.)
• It has too many features that can simply cause confusion and will never be used, like 'conference call' and 'call waiting'. Even SMS is of dubious value. The radio introduces many options.
• The power connector is small and hard for my mother to find. I stuck a rubber matt near it so she could find it. It is easily confused with the headphone jack.
• It feels fragile and unreliable. We're not talking iPhone 5 build. I'd happily pay $40 more for better build quality.
• Display is small and text layout is a bit off. I suspect it was designed to show characters, not Roman letters.
• Buttons take some push -- they are cheap!
• It comes with "PureTalk"; it's probably not the best PayGo solution but it's not entirely bad. For the US market I'd suggest H2O Wireless instead.

The Good

• Big buttons!
• Ringer is LOUD and voice loud even at intermediate settings.
• The instruction manual is large type.
• I could get a camera lanyard into the lanyard hoop with a bit of fiddling (essential accessory, should be bundled with phone).
• It speaks numbers as they are entered. Great feature!
• Seems to have very long battery life.
• The quick dial numbers will work well I think, even though we decided not to enable the SOS feature for now.
• Yes, the flashlight and radio are quirky, but my mother might actually come to like them.

I created a large print 1 page handout for my mother that included a simplified version of usage directions and the numbers I programmed in for her.