What I learned from reading the iPhone 5 manual

I've spent thousands of hours on iOS since I bought my 3G, but it was only two weeks ago that I learned I could control appointment color assignment (iOS 5).

 

Clearly, I needed to read the manual. So, on a recent flight, I began with the current iPhone 5 [1] doc (I have a 4S on iOS 5, I'm waiting until more bugs get worked out). I got about 1/4 of the way through because I was learning so many new things I started taking notes. 

 

So, for the benefit of fellow veterans who haven't read the manual for a while, here's what I didn't know (most is iOS 5 and higher, a few are iOS 6)

• If you encrypt your iOS backups then your credentials will be backed up (otherwise you need to reenter them)
• Prevent iPhone from trying to correct a word or phrase:  Create a shortcut, but leave the Shortcut field blank.
• Siri (the user guide has more detail than I've seen in any article, FAQ or book)
• To cancel a request and start over the magic word is "cancel". (I couldn't find out how to do that last Feb)
• Remember to tell Siri which Contact is "you". (I thought I had, but it was null). Add phonetic pronunciation of unusual names. Add relatives (wife [2], mother) and kids. Add work address. Add distinctive nicknames for people who are hard to pick out from the crowd. (This enables things like: "Remind me to call my daughter when I leave the office")
• When you start using Siri listen for two quick beeps. That means she's listening.
• If Siri doesn't respond when you bring iPhone to your ear, start with the screen facing you, so your hand rotates on the way up.
• Headset call button: press and hold. To continue a conversation with Siri, press and hold the button each time you want to talk
• If want Siri to relearn your voice, turn it off and on (this can help if Siri is persistently unavailable too, easier than a full communications reset)
• Training Siri
• use headset you use in car and without
• don't talk into bottom of phone
• make a bunch of requests and correct: tap on Siri description 
• If documents and data are enabled iCloud will share your personal dictionary between devices. (Don't know if it will share Siri speech files.)
• Dial pause: press and hold *
• Dial wait: press and hold #
• Last number redial: tsp call
• Conference calls to five are GSM only. Call forwarding and call waiting may be GSM only too. 
• FaceTime: you can move your local image around the screen.
• Get voicemail when visual voicemail isn't available:  Dial your own number (with CDMA, add # after your number), or touch and hold "1" on the numeric keypad.
• Change the indentation (quote)level:  Select the text to indent, tap the right arrow icon at least twice, then tap Quote Level.
• In iOS 6 there are a lot of interesting advanced options for email, some of which make Gmail less awkward.

I suspect there are at least as many gems in the rest of the very well done manual. I wonder if anyone else has ever read it (excepting book authors).

[1] http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/iphone_user_guide.pdf I read the iBook version.
[2] Siri can't understand Emily's last name, but 'my wife' she gets. If I say "my son" I get a list of all my children (sons and daughter) and it's easy to select one. If I say "friend" then Siri scopes the search to friends in my contact. These tricks help when you have large numbers of contacts (ex > 1,0000). 

Missing Windows 7 User Folders after restore from backup (Retrospect Professional and ?)

I don't think this is a common problem, but unanswered questions found in my failed Windows 7 searches suggest it's not rare.

I ran into the problem after my corporate laptop died. This happens fairly frequently, I suspect the encryption software we use great increases the risk of unrecoverable errors resulting in effective drive failure.

Since I was traveling I knew I'd lost a bit of work, but fortunately my notes were still on paper and I run my own automated office backups [1] using Retrospect Professional (Retrospect Windows now). I was a bit nervous though, because I consider backup to be an unsolved problem. Even though I do a test restore to my system every few weeks I still don't trust my backups.

Despite my worries the restore went well. In an hour or two I had 30 GB of Windows 7 data I could access from a workstation while I waited for my laptop repair.

Except ... I couldn't see my User Folder (ex: User/jgordon). I could see other folders, but not my User Folder (where most of my data was).

I knew my files were there, something was taking up 30GB of storage. Retrospect could see the files, Windows 7 couldn't. (Later I showed that XP could see them too.)

Hilarity ensued. I'll spare you the details of the fixes we tried including icalcs resets, updating access privileges for all children of the visible container folder, escalated privilege command.com and so on.

The trick was a setting in "Folder Options" that's been around for over a decade, but whose meaning changed @ Windows 7 (Vista). In Folder Options find and and uncheck the "hide protected operating system files" option. Suddenly everything appeared.

Why was this so hard for us to figure out? There were several contributing factors:

• Google was no help. Even after I knew the the cause of our problem I couldn't find an answer on the net (now there is one).
• This didn't come up in my test restores because I was restoring to the same User Account I backed up from.
• This is an old setting whose meaning had changed. In XP, even with this checked, I could see all User Folders.
• The setting impacts all access, not just Folder Access. So it's in the wrong UI location. The folder was invisible to the command line utilities too.
• This setting is orthogonal and independent of all user and permission settings.
• On my own systems I routinely make everything visible, so I'd forgotten that wasn't the default on the workstation I was temporarily using.

Like I said, backup is an unsolved problem. [2]

See also

• How do I restore security settings to a known working state? (Win 7 equivalent of OS X Permissions Repair)
• Icacls 

[1] There's no officially supported way to backup a large personal drive where I work. This is more common in large corporations than civilians could imagine; I have far more robust backup at home than at work.
[2] To solve it vendors would need to design the OS to facilitate backup and restores. Apple did this to some extent with iOS. 

File sharing with Time Capsule or AirPort Extreme - Secure with a disk password

For several years I've used a Time Capsule drive to share slide show images for our home machines and to quickly pass files between users and machines. The lack of permission enforcement is a feature, not a bug. [1] (I believe the AirPort Extreme can do this as well.)

For much of this time I did not secure the shared disks, I just enabled Read/Write Guest access. This seemed to work, but it was unreliable. OS X seemed to drop the connection and it took some time to reestablish it with a connection dialog that defaulted to username/password. I had to switch to guest.

This has gotten worse recently, perhaps because my Time Capsule WiFi is dying [2]. On a hunch I enabled "secure shared disks" and simply set a disk password:

I then connected from every machine and saved the password in the key chain. I left Guest as a read-only option.

Since doing that I think connections are much faster, and drops are much less frequent. I think sometimes OS X restores a dropped connection, whereas before it couldn't.

Wish I'd made that change years ago.

[1] It's rather hard to find out what operating system Apple uses with its Time Capsule and Extreme. I've read that at one time they used Wind River VxWorks, later NetBSD.
[2] Apple WiFi devices last longer than most, but even they seem to die after 3 years or so. I don't know why; I assume they die of overheating. 

How long has it been possible to assign iOS calendar colors for Google Calendars?

Our family uses a (free) Google Apps domain to manage our email, calendars, contacts, documents and so on.

For years we've used Google's little known m.google.com configuration to sync multiple calendars to each device (English only). So we all see the Family Calendar, we see our own calendars, I see Emily's calendar, etc. Including various sports teams and organizations we often interact with 10-25 calendars.

It works surprisingly well; certainly better than iCloud/iCal. Except for one really annoying limitation -- color assignment is absurd. I run into color collisions pretty often and I can't fix the OS assigned colors.

I've complained about the problem quite often. I figured there was no chance of a fix.

Wrong.

Today I had to reconfigure my son's phone after unlocking it, and I noticed something weird. There's an Edit button and it lets me assign colors to individual Google Calendars. 

Click Edit, and I get a screen where I can assign colors.

Ooookaaayy, so I'm demented. I knew that. But I have a screen shot from 7/2011 and there's no Edit button there:

 

So when did the Edit button appear? I'm on iOS 5, not iOS 6.

Well, once I realized what had changed, I learned it came with iOS 5 last October. One friggin' year ago: "Another new option allows you to change the pastel colors of your calendar(s); you can’t pick colors willy-nilly, but you may choose among seven lovely hues."

I knew the calendar had changed; I'd spotted the week view on my own and I knew of the other changes. I just didn't notice the calendar creation/color option (you can't add calendars for Google ActiveSync, but you can for Exchange sync).

So Apple quietly fixed one of my multi-year complaints about iOS. Too quietly.

Am I the only guy that totally missed this? What else have I missed? How come nobody was shouting this fix from the rooftops?

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: iPhone's very annoying calendar color limitation 8/2010
• Gordon's Notes: The iPhone calendar.app color assignment debacle makes Android look good 7/2011

Replacing Google Reader Share: Options emerge with Buffer, App.net, IFTTT and others

On the Day of the Dapocalypse Google ended Google Reader Share, though my old shares are still accessible almost a year later.

Google left a hole in the net that hasn't been filled yet (alas, hivemined).

Something's emerging to fill that space. It's not Google Reader Share; but you can still see the shape emerging.

Today I'm using Pinboard, alpha.app.net, IFTTT and buffer.

IFTTT is the glue that ties things together. Buffer and Pinboard are the note capture mechanisms. Buffer has more style, but Pinboard has the essential structure (title, link, comment) and it's willing to accept cash. App.net is the wild card; a rapidly evolving set of services that may be the foundation for future solutions (see app.net #googlereadershare)

I still miss GoogleReaderShare, but I'm curious to see what will come next.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: How to replace Google Reader: 11/2011 - the 7 core components
• A Parallel Universe In Which Google+ Enhances Google Reader 10/2011 - what could have been. Nice guide for a future replacement.
• Gordon's Tech: Twitter to WordPress via ifttt - limitations: 12/11 - tweets don't have enough structure
• Gordon's Tech: Posterous - a Google Reader social replacement? (nope. Later they were acquired by Twitter)
• Gordon's Tech: After the fall of Google Reader: Posterous, Tumblr and Zootool with Twitter on the side 11/2011
• Gordon's Tech: Microblogging and Google Reader: Tumblr Fails 11/2011

Use Mac speech recognition and language support to learn French speech.

Mountain Lion includes a very basic continuous speech to text conversion tool. It relies on Apple's servers, and is widely assumed to use the Siri infrastructure. It is speaker-independent; the "calibrate" system preference option is to support command recognition, not speech engine customization.

It's not nearly as useful as the speech recognition functionality built into iOS or Android, but it has one great advantage for the use case I'm going to describe. Like Windows 7 speech recognition, it's built into a multi-user operating system and its free.

That means I could do this:

I set up a user account called 'French' on my MacBook and configured it for French use, adjusting even the language location and keyboard preferences. Then I activated speech recognition so that a function key double tap invokes the recognition microphone.

I'm using the simple Notes app to practice. The theory is that if the machine can recognize my mangled French, then so will mere humans. 

There is very likely a way to do something similar with Android or iOS speech recognition, the advantage here is that I could set up a special user rather than changing system preferences. I suspect it would be relatively easy to create an Android app that would switch preferences for educational purposes (iOS is more closed).

(I have a long way to go. "Je suis un homme" became "je serai enorme".)

Kindle Fire data plan - only beats iPad at the low end.

There are two interesting things about the Kindle Fire HD.

One is that it introduces parental controls to Android. It even includes OS X like scheduling controls that are missing from iOS 5. I don't know how well they work, but they can't be worse than Apple's feeble restriction system.

The other is the inexpensive $4/month 256MB data plan. That's only enough data for messaging, light email, downloading books (they are tiny!), and perhaps a bit of Facebook on occasion. But it's still a good rate - esp for AT&T. Even Ting, a Sprint MVNO, charges $3/month for only 100MB. The iPad 250MB data plans is $15!

Things are different though as you move to the 3GB mark: 

The Catch in Kindle’s Data Plan - Digits - WSJ: "Kindle users who know they’ll want more data will have to pay a lot more than $50 a year: $30 a month for 3 gigabytes or $50 for 5 gigabytes – plus a $36 activation fee (which isn’t charged with the Amazon promotional plan, but will apply to any upgrades)."

Not coincidentally, the iPad is $30 for 3GB on AT&T (LTE).

So it was only at the very low end that Amazon was able to extract a better deal from AT&T. Even so, Amazon got a better deal Apple - that's an achievement even if they're somehow paying AT&T for the honor.

So what's in it for AT&T? They must estimate that a significant number of Fire users will convert to the 30GB plan. 

We're all keen to see if Apple gets a similar deal ...