Lost phones: advice for everyone

Although this article is written about a lost iPhone, it's really applicable to all phones: Six things I learned from losing my iPhone 3G.

Be sure to read the comments as well. I'd already followed most of the recommended practices, but I hadn't checked with my home owner's insurance to ask what it would cost to insure the phone against loss. One comment mentioned their policy increase was only $10 a year, another said the deductible was prohibitive. Note that most high end phones cost about $500 to replace unless your contract is nearing its two year renewal date. (I think for AT&T in Minnesota they'll provide the new phone subsidy if the renewal date is less than 4 months away).

I didn't realize that under some conditions AT&T will mark a phone as stolen, and may be able to retrieve it if someone tries to use it with a new account.

I photographed a business card and turned it into my wall paper. Dull, but effective. I also implemented the "delete data on 10 password retries", but some of us have young children who may try to hack a phone. If you implement this be sure to have sync regularly.

Apple's iPhoto and MobileMe photo blunder: when full quality isn't.

Adam Engst is far too kind to Apple in this article (emphases mine) ...

TidBITS Media Creation: How to Share Full-Quality Photos via iPhoto

A reader recently sent me email asking why sending a photo via email using the "Actual Size (Full Quality)" option in iPhoto resulted in a photo that was significantly smaller than the size of the photo within iPhoto...

A quick test on my system confirmed his results. My Canon PowerShot SD870IS's test photo started out at 3.1 MB and 180 dpi before dropping to 1.7 MB and 72 dpi. When I opened both the original and the reprocessed photos, Preview's inspector window showed the change in dpi and file size, though the dimensions of the photos were indeed identical.

... iPhoto always compresses photos sent via email to reduce the file size...

... posting the photo to your MobileMe Gallery won't help either, since iPhoto compresses uploaded photos there as well, even when you use the Actual Size option in the Advanced preferences for a MobileMe Gallery album...

... is an EmailCompressionQuality key in the com.apple.iPhoto.plist file that's set to 0.75 ... When I bumped it up, the size of photos sent via email did increase, but when I set it to 1.0, the file size nearly doubled from the original....

Arggghhhh.

Adam is glossing over some key points in an understandable effort to be sweet to Apple.

The problem is not that "iPhoto [always] compresses photos", it's that iPhoto is decompressing the original JPEG (SD870 is JPEG, not RAW), then recompressing it at a severe .75 JPEG compression factor. The decompression/recompression factor is why, when Adam moved the quality index to 1, the resulting JPEG was twice as big as the original. (You'll see the same thing with any image managed this way.)

This is a big deal for photo geeks. Try putting an image through four sequential JPEG 0.75 save/edit cycles and you'll get a mess. When I put "full quality" images on Picasa Web Albums or SmugMug one of the things I get is a high quality backup of my image. We now know that's not true of MobileMe -- it only looks that way.

The discovery that "full quality" images posted on MobileMe are being put through the same decompress/recompress cycle, while being sold as "full quality", ought to be red meat for a lawyer. Anyone know of a hungry lawyer taking charitable contributions for yet another Apple lawsuit? I don't care about winnings, I just want them to suffer.

For my part I'm going to give this a try with Google's Picasa Web uploader and see what I get back. I don't use MobileMe, and I'm not likely to start now.

Incidentally, a more subtle version of this stupidity occurs in Aperture. If you import a JPEG image into Aperture, don't apply any edits, then export it from Aperture using a standard JPEG setting with quality 1 you'll see the same (pointless) decompression/recompression at work.

Update 5/26/09: Apple doesn't apologize, but it effectively confesses to the blunder. No promises of a fix, however.

Yikes! Disastrous iTunes 8.1.1 AppleScript bug!

Wow.

This iTunes 8.1.1 bug is probably the nastiest bug that's bitten me in years.

I have long used an AppleScript to delete the first 'n' characters from an iTunes column string for all selected columns.

In iTunes 8.1.1 it ignores the selection, it processes all the items in a playlist.

So about 300 items have lost the first few characters of their name.

I'll have to restore from backup.

Update: Well, isn't that sweet. My backups appear to be good, but my restores are failing with a Retrospect error code of "-519", which means network error. I have reason to suspect this is actually a hardware error on the old Windows XP machine that runs my Retrospect Professional backup server.

Looks like this is going to be one of those days.

Update b: I dropped the XP to 10mbps and rebooted the XP box and the iMac. The backup is now crawling along; it will take about 12 hours (!) to complete if it continues. I'll delete all the AppleScripts associated with iTunes and see if can figure out if this is a known bug.

As for the networking issue -- it's not the first odd networking problem I've seen lately. Sad thing is this is just as likely to be hardware (switch, XP box, iMac) as software! If Retrospect 8 were in better shape (still no PPC version!) I'd probably buy a modern iMac and get rid of the XP box.

Update 5/4/09: The 45GB restore at 10 mbps took about 12 hours, but it worked. Interesting lesson about modern apps -- the script bug only knocked out a few bytes of data distributed across about 300 MB of music, but I had to restore all 45GB.

So now I have to address the network problem that blocked restores at 100 mbps. In the past I'd have been confident this was a software bug in either the iMac or the XP box. Nowadays nothing's so simple. It could be an emergent bug. It could be an XP BIOS problem triggered by the 1 TB external USB drive, a drive that's far out of spec for that old system. It could be a subtle motherboard problem on the iMac -- the G5 iMac line is notorious for mb failures (one of Apple's crappiest products).

I've already ruled out switch or cable problems.

I'm going to take a semi-informed gamble and install a new 1 gbps Intel NIC in the XP box and retest. If that doesn't work I'll have to start testing the iMac for a motherboard failure.

Update 5/6/09: New NIC worked, but not exactly sure why.

Testing Firefox 3.5b4

Firefox 3 has been very slow on a single CPU PPC G5 iMac. It quickly pegs my CPU.

Happily Safari 4beta has been a great improvement over Safari 3, and Google's Safari (4) support is finally respectable. So I've been using Safari -- really for the first time. (Camino runs into too many Google oddities, otherwise I'd use it over FF 3. We do use Camino on an ancient G3 iBook running 10.3 -- and it's marvelous there.)

Now, however, James Fallows reminds me that FF 3.5b4 is a real option. I've started testing ...

Welcome to Firefox 3.5 Beta 4

... This release is being made available for testing purposes only. You should read the release notes before getting started.

We want to hear all of your thoughts about this beta, especially if you encounter broken sites or other web weirdness. Drag this feedback button onto your bookmarks toolbar and click on it when you have something to tell us...

I know how to test it.

First impressions? It's fast and responsive so far, and my CPU is running at about 35-50% -- which is about the same as Safari. The mouse wheel scrolling is particularly smooth, and Macintosh copy/cut shortcuts work in the rich text editor (not sure that's new, I switch platforms so often it's all a bit automatic).

The release notes mention ...

• There are Gmail oddities, fix by refresh
• Uses Tracemonkey - so faster Javascript, maybe fewer memory leaks
• Location aware browsing (I'll turn it on of course)
• HTML 5 offline storage (like webkit and chrome)
  

Updates to come, but this feels like a good one.

Update: Google Gears is not compatible with the beta (unsurprisingly). So you'll lose offline Gmail if you install. Also I found one bug. In a multi-user OS X machine the install reports a privileges error if another user is active, even if FF is not in use in the the other session.

OS X parental controls - bug?

Yes, my eldest is of that age.

So I'm checking out the Parental Controls ... and I discover they only go back a month. When I change the date range to anything over a month no information is displayed at all!

Since you can't export or otherwise analyze the logs they're not terribly useful anyway -- but they also don't work.

Apple really doesn't take children seriously -- I'm not sure they believe in them! This didn't used to be true -- parental features in Classic were excellent, as was Simple Finder.

None of that survived OS X, and it's clear Apple doesn't really test this stuff. I figure they put it in to keep regulators of their backs.

FMTouch – the closest thing to FileMaker for iPhone?

I’d been hoping FileMaker would do an iPhone version, like the one they did for the Palm.

They haven’t. This morning I decided on a whim to look if there was any rumor in the blogs I read. Google Reader search turned up an older post that led me to FMTouch - FileMaker Mobile Software for the iPhone and iPod touch.

They’re at version 1.35 now; it is supposed to work with FileMaker 8 – 10 (I’m on version 8; FM Inc hasn’t done anything of interest to me for a while – I’m only on v8 because OS X required an update).

Problem is, it’s $70, and there’s no “LITE” version to test with.

Other signs are not incredibly encouraging.

The App Store reviews are marginal; some of the more positive ones smell suspicious. The app is reasonably popular, but the vendor’s blog has been pretty quiet and the web site has been poorly maintained (ex. “A new updated user Guide will be available 9/12” and I don’t think they mean 9/12/09). The “tutorial” on sync is a screencast only. I can’t find any reviews from my usual trusted sources.

I’m tempted ... but it smells wrong. I’m going to see if FileMaker does anything when version 3.0 comes out.

Update 4/27/09: An FMTouch developer wrote in with a detailed response to this post. I'll update with an excerpt later, but for now see also an unrelated comment below.

So FMTouch is not "smelly" to me any more, and I'm even more tempted. They'd benefit enormously from a web site refresh and a "LITE" version that would serve as a "trial" app (since the app store doesn't support trial versions). I'm going to review the app store money-back guarantee procedure; maybe that will make it easier for me to pull the trigger.

Update 4/27/09b: The FMTouch developer posted a response in comments, and also wrote a less diplomatic response on the FMTouch blog (subsequently amended so it's quite diplomatic now). This is a passionate group of developers, and that's a good thing.

Update 4/27/09c: Six more passionate comments from happy users. Ok, Ok, I'll buy the damned thing tonight! Sheesh. Review to come in future. This was not one of my better posts!

Firefox for OS X bug: non-admin user and auto-update

With Firefox 3 a non-admin OS X user cannot uncheck the "update Firefox" advanced option. The checkbox is grayed out.

Only admin users can uncheck "update Firefox".

This is wrong.

Video Chat for elder parents over OS X: Google Video/Gmail, Google Notifier, Firefox and LogMeIn

This is a bit complex to describe fully, but I hope these hints will be of use.

Briefly, I wanted to be able to establish a video chat connection to my elderly parents. Since we both use OS X and both have at least one Intel machine I considered iChat and Google Video Chat. I didn’t consider Skype or Yahoo because that would introduce new account issues and because, as best I can tell, Google has the best technology and no worse reliability than Skype or Yahoo.

I was unimpressed with iChat; it needs to be shot (see also). That left Google Video Chat, but it has a hellacious user interface. In fact, it has the lowest usability of just about any app I routinely use. Not well suited for my 80% blind and very arthritic mother. (I’m sure that will change when Google integrates GVC with Google Voice, but really Google needs all those usability people who’ve recently quite in disgust.)

At the same time I was exploring remote maintenance options and finally settled on LogMeIn Free.

This is the combination of technologies I’ve now cobbled together:

• Gmail/Google Video Chat: My mother’s email is managed via a Google account, even though she reads it using OS X Mail (IMAP). So she had an account.
• Google Notifier: In theory this keeps my mother logged in to Gmail so she doesn’t have to know her username and password. In practice I’m not sure this works; these day’s I might try FF with local caching instead.
• Logitech QuickCam Pro
• Firefox: For better or worse this is what my mother is accustomed to
• LogMeIn Free.
• I created a deskbar shortcut with is simple a Gmail desktop shortcut with the iChat icon pasted into it. So it looks like a Chat app.

Here’s how it works

1. I initiate the call from my Macbook using Firefox
2. I use LogMeIn to take control of my mother’s machine using Safari. Then I “answer” my own call (not hard).
3. I resize the window for my mother then drop the remote control connection.

Best ever subscription page

Kevin Kelly -- KK* Lifestream is too energetic. He's a one person blogging machine, with an exotic seeming blog platform all his own.

I particularly appreciated his subscription page, including feedburner email notifications.

Best I've ever seen. I'll have to give him a try.

Submit your product ideas for Blogger

Google is now soliciting product ideas for Blogger.

Be sure to vote for any BlogThis! suggestion and take a look at all my suggestions.

Update: I'm not impressed with the popular requests, and I'm surprised how many voted against my (flawless) suggestions! In fact none of the suggests I liked are getting much traction.

FreeMyFeed - Getting Twitter feed to Google Reader

I've been using Facebook's Twitter Application so that my "tweets" (hate that word, not that "blog" is a fave either) go to Facebook. That's handy since there are lots of convenient apps on various platform for creating twitter updates -- and it lets me simultaneously communicate with my very few friends who are Twitter-centric.

 I don't want to have monitor Twitter and Facebook for updates however. So I've turned off all the FB email notices and I've added the wall and notification Facebook feeds to Google Reader.

That does a great job for FB -- better than the native app really. Unfortunately Twitter uses authentication rather than unique URLs, and Google Reader doesn't support authentication.

Which is where FreeMyFeed (Free Your Feed From Authentication) comes in. You provide the service with your Twitter credentials, then it encrypts them into a Feed URL that you keep. When requested FreeMyFeed decrypts the URL and logs in. Yes, there are obvious trust issues here.

FreeMyFeed claims they don't store the Twitter credentials, but of course they could cheat. So if you go down this route use a unique pw with Twitter that's not tied to anything important -- that way only your Twitter account is at risk. With this method I can monitor both Twitter and FB from Google Reader.

Oh, and Twitter needs to adopt the same "secret URL" approach everyone else uses. The authentication requirement for Twitter feeds is extremely annoying.

Update: You can also use Yahoo Pipes to make an authenticated feed accessible to Google Reader and FeedBurner. I might try the latter.

Update 2: I switched to the FeedBurner technique because it turns out (who knew) my Gmail authentication also gives me FeedBurner authentication (feedburner.google.com). The way you encode the authentication credentials is a bit gross (see the link) but it works quite well: "you now need to add your twitter username and password into the link as follows http://username:password@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/nnnnnnn.rss"

Brother MFC machine scan to USB features

I've long wanted a home scanner that would scan to local or network storage without intervention. In the 1990s I thought about ways to add such a facility to an existing scanner, but it didn't make business case. About 3-4 years ago scan PDF to network shares appeared in our office machines and my Brother MFC -7820N, and now our office scanners store PDF scans on an internal drive.

It's a fantastic feature, but the 7820N implementation is quirky. It doesn't work well with multi-user machines and it requires an oddball embedded server run on the recipient machine.

Today I discovered that the Brother MFC-9440CN will scan to a local USB store. Based on the Scan to USB documentation this is now available for 3 networked multi-function machines

DCP-9045CDN
MFC-9440CN
MFC-9840CDW

The MFC-9440CN was first introduced in 2007 (and is probably about to be replaced, so it's on sale now) and I'm writing about this now. Since this is a feature I'm extremely interested in I think there's a bit of a marketing failure here.

Brother's web site has some additional documentation ...

Scan | Brother

1. Scan to USB
   Brother’s Scan to USB enables you to scan documents direct to a USB memory device without the need to start up your PC. This means you can make digitised copies of documents immediately, including handwritten meeting notes, certificates, business cards, and drawings so you can be sure everything has been captured on the USB memory drive for later use.
2. Scan to file
   Save scanned data into a selected folder for easy information sharing.
3. Scan to FTP ...

Both options 1 and 3 are great for us. I could easily setup an FTP server on my OS X machine that would work in a multi-user environment, and of course the USB function is very simple. The Amazon reviews suggests this feature works, though they also point out that the replacement toner cartridges are fantastically expensive and that B&W printing drains the color toner [1]

I'm going to have to look into these capabilities. The fact that they're not marketed more widely does emphasize what a weird bird I am ...

[1] Every vendor I know of is guilty of some form of toner scam. It's an instance of irresistible emergent fraud. In the case of my Brother MFC -7820N the cartridge stops working even when it has ample residual toner. You cover up a transparent port to get a few more months of light duty printing. The scams for these color printers are substantially nastier.

Google Reader share broken? Check your Friends list

Google has been flailing about with their Profile / Social graph strategy.

Recently they refactored Gmail/Google Contacts, and created a new classification of contacts: "Friends", "Family" and "Coworkers". The result broke some of my Google Reader shared feeds.

More details here:

Gordon's Notes: Google's confusing social graph strategy: Google reader friends via Google Chat

... Jacob R is seeing my shares, we have a [Google] chat relationship, but I'm not seeing his shares. I added his share stream as a distinct feed for now. ... turns out when Google switched to their even more befuddled social strategy I wasn't in Jacob's "Friends" group, so his sharing feed went away. He added me in and it reappeared....

...Google has things set up so you do the feed stream share thingie with ONE of (not both of)

• Your chat contacts
• "Friends" as defined by Gmail - "Friends, Family, and Coworkers are groups to help you organize your contacts. You can move contacts in and out of these groups at any time. Various Google products let you share information with people in these groups.
  In addition, you can create a Google profile to help people in these groups keep in touch with you. They will be able to easily find your profile from various Google products."

In both cases of course the Chat contact or Gmail Friend must have as an email address the Gmail address associated with their Google Reader shares....

Just imagine how this hairball plays out when you introduce synchronization of Google Contacts with external contact stores.

It's a Googlicious screw-up.

Now waiting for version 3 ...

Google Voice iPhone apps coming out

The first entry I know of is GVdialer from MobileMax (these are being filed under "Productivity" in the App Store directory). Unfortunately the early reviews are devastating; happily reviewers are getting their money back.

GVdialer is being relaunched at a lower price point, but I can wait.

iPhonefreak has a very encouraging review of GV Mobile that mentions a few others ...

Aside from GV Mobile, there are also three other Google Voice apps for the iPhone that I am aware of. They include VoiceCentral, GVdialer and a third that I cannot name just yet..

I've read that there's no Google Voice API yet, so all apps need to do the modern equivalent of "screen scraping". Even so they're able to offer some great features like Contacts integration, SMS integration (no charge for sending!) and outgoing calls showing one's GV number rather than the mobile phone number.

Of course Google has a "mobile" web client for GV, but it's miserable. I prefer to simply call my GV number from my phone, tap '2', then tap in the number I'm dialing, tap # and go. Since I'm really only calling one number from GV that's tolerable for now. I assume they'll deliver something better in time but I bet they're currently focusing on the GV API (that's where things get even more fun).

Unless the initial reviews are as bad as those for GVdialer, I'll be reporting on my GV Mobile experiences once that app is available. It will launch with a free "lite" version as well as the pay version -- that's a good sign of a quality product in the rapidly evolving App store scene.

Geek joy.

PS. I'm so impressed by the iPhoneFreak review I'm adding them to my bloglist for a test.

TripIt - trying them out

I don't see how they can possibly build the "TripIt" communities they want, but with some reservations I'm giving TripIt | Online travel itinerary and trip planner a try.

The trick is that once your email addresses are registered (and I assume you need to register them for work, home, etc), you can email itineraries of various forms and TripIt managers them and also organizes them into calendars that have .ICS feeds.

Then you add the .ICS feed to Google Calendar and you can view them there. Presumably you can also copy appointments into Google Calendar.

Since I sync Google Calendars to my iPhone this is appealing.

More when I have some experience to report. They also have some LinkedIn support ...