A sislaw’s Pre review

Sislaw Nettie (sister to sislaw Martha and to Emily) has a Pre.

I trust her reviews far more than the pro reviews – am I the only one to notice that Amazon’s product reviews are much better than those printed in magazines?

Like me Nettie misses Graffiti One. She likes her Pre a lot, but unsurprisingly the battery is troublesome. iPhone users can feel smug about the Sprint crapware infesting the Pre. NASCAR … brrrrrrr

My Little Pre « Nettie’s World

…I can’t delete the Sprint NASCAR app – other posters on the Pre forums yesterday confirmed this. RI-DI-CU-LOUS. So now I need to see if there’s any possibility of hiding it, although the thing I object to most strenuously is the fact that it’s taking up my 8GB space in the first place, of course.

6. Battery life. It wasn’t a very promising feeling when I woke up on Sunday morning. The battery had been at nearly 100% when I turned out the light (I had spent 10-15 minutes cleaning up contacts -more about that later) and all apps were closed. When I picked it up to say “Good morning dear Pre” the battery was at 65%! For 7 hours of (nothing?) — all I could think was that the WiFi connection was what was dragging it. The Pre forums also complained about poor battery life – and some constructive posters also provided tips, a few of which I’ve put into practice like dimming the screen a bit, syncing email a bit less frequently, turning off IM and WiFi when not needed. I think I also have to do more reading on better management of lithium ion batteries in general – a few posters said things like, “It typically takes a new battery a week of so to condition itself for maximum results” — is that really true…

No, I don’t think the “week or so” story is true – more like wishful thinking. Maybe Jobs was right about the battery cost of multitasking, though I could believe the Pre OS might be more energy efficient than OS X.

Nettie, if it makes you feel better my iPhone battery will run out by day’s end if I talk more than about two hours during the day (it’s almost a year old now). In airport mode it will last a few days even if I use WiFi occasionally.

Condolences on the Sprint crapware Nettie. Apple was in a stronger bargaining position with AT&T, though I’ve hear rumors AT&T has been fighting mightily to put their garbage on the iPhone. Rumor has it Jobs arose from his sick bed to smite them (ok, I made that up).

VMware academic discounts: Fusion and Windows Workstation

Post-Waterloo I'm a VM geek.

So, as a part-time faculty person at the U of MN I was pleased to see that VMware has large academic discounts.

VMWare Workstation is $114 academic ($190 list), Fusion (Mac - I use this) is $40 academic ($80 list).

Google's summary of their OpenID and federated authentication approach

This is what enables me to auto-authenticate with Facebook when I'm logged into Gmail. I've linked the accounts from Facebook using this Google API:

Google Code Blog: Google OpenID API - taking the next steps 

... the user is not just signing in using her Google Account, but is also sharing specific information from her Google Account with the Relying Party website. This information may be either static fields (using Attribute Extension) such as the user's email, first and last name, preferred language and country, or allowing access to any available Google Data API such as the user's Contacts List, Web Albums, or Calendar (using OAuth)...

I am concerned about authentication bugs causing me to be locked out of my Google account, so I'm proceeding with some care.

Fixed: Post 10.5.7 WiFi problems and XP IP address conflict bug

File this one under requiem for a geek and complexity crash.

Sometime around I updated our MacBook to 10.5.7 it developed a WiFi connection stutter. It would connect to the family network, pause, disconnect, and reconnect. On the second reconnect it would ask for the network password even as it took the correct password from the keychain and displayed it inline (so if one hit return it would connect).

Before the update, about 3-4 months ago I experienced some odd XP networking issues, sometimes including messages that there was an IP address conflict 10.0.1.5 - yet that address did not seem to be in use. I was seeing other problems at the same time, so I set hat aside.

Today, when walking new our Airport Express, I noticed our iPhone-converted-to-iTouch was only showing 2 bars in its network display. It clearly wasn't connecting via the closest WDS station.

With that last clue I decided to inspect our older-device 802.11 b/g Airport WiFi WDS network.

After installing the latest Airport Utility update I discovered that while our Airport Express light was green it was not, in fact, authenticated on the network. It was in a twilight state. At some level it was connected, but at another level it was not.

That could explain the MacBook stutter, since the MacBook is often moves between the Extreme and Express domains and could connect to either one.

Power cycling the Express alone didn't fix it, so I moved it next to the Airport Extreme. This time it did show up. I tweaked some settings, including auto-setting the clock to time.apple.com (I thought this used to be set, but was turned off on both my devices when I inspected them. Is it new?)

That's when I saw the Express was assigned 10.0.1.5, which may explain the odd XP address conflict message and networking issues.

Now the MacBook WiFi network address stutter appears to be gone.

Simplify is one of my post complexity-crash themes. There's too much emergence in the modern computational world, and too many ill-defined membranes.

10.5.7 update: don't let your screen lock

I'm thinking 10.5.7 is one of those OS X point updates from hell. It smells like a bridge to 10.6, meaning it breaks quite a few things but will be supported until 10.5 expires.

I think it's broken the Airport Extreme base station to Airport Express peripheral network bridging as well as some printing and faxing peripherals.

The latest update bug I've found is related to screen locking that occurs during the update process from 10.5.6 on a PPC iMac. If a screen saver locks during the update, you may get a view of the screen cursor but you don't get an unlock dialog.

The iMac appears to be unable to awake from a sleep state.

If this happens to you I recommend letting the machine sit for at least 30 minutes. If you don't hear any disk activity then power cycle it. I did that and the update appeared to complete normally.

I also recommend all peripheral drives be detached during the 10.5.7 update. That's always a good recommendation, but it's easy to forget.

Apple's software quality has passed through the toilet stage and is reaching for the sewer stage!

See also: Requiem for a gerserker (geek berserker)

Pre syncs To Do lists with Google?

Pogue claims the Pre can sync "to-do lists with Google".

I hadn't heard of any app synchronizing with Google's To Do lists. Interesting if true.

Internet Explorer 8 - still a lousy feed reader

Try searching on "IE 8 feed reader". Right. Nothing much there.

That's because Internet Explorer 8's feed reader capabilities are no better than IE 7's. In other words, absolutely lousy.

Of course Firefox is little better and there are really no good Windows desktop feed readers left, so IE's not alone. Still, if you're hoping for reader improvements over IE 7 look elsewhere.

Thunderbird is said to have a decent feed reader, but of course it can't manage Active Directory authenticated feeds (on the other hand, maybe that's a feature). Outlook 2007, incidentally, is not only a bad feed reader, it's a bloody dangerous feed reader.

Opera has a mail integrated reader, which is unfortunate since feeds are structurally different from email. Safari 4beta for OS X has a feed reader, but the link to subscribe via bookmark doesn't work (the first thing I've found in Safari 4 that doesn't work). It looks like it's setup for subscription in Mail.app anyway.

Gee, do you think someone's trying to tell me something?