Tralfaz

Category: Tech

  • Comcast Sucks

    When we first moved to Arizona, I splurged and bought a Tivo. It was an old one, and it was wonderful. Worked great, super intuitive interface, great integration. Back then it had to call Tivo every day to get the latest listings.

    In 2006 or so, we went HD, and upgraded to a Series 2 HD, with the cable cards. With the exception of a failed HD in 2012, replaced via Weaknees, it has been wonderful.

    At both our places in Arizona, we had Cox cable. It was reliable, reasonable, and it gave us absolutely awesome internet speeds.

    Fast forward. We have moved to the San Jose area. Our stuff is still in storage, and we are in temporary housing. The apartment we are in has Comcast Xfinity service. Internet, TV, and telephone.

    I guess I should be happy that it has a DVR, but the UI is so fucking primitive, it is painful to use. It is slow, non responsive, and the search function truly sucks ass. Yes, there are lots of channels, but unless you search precisely right, it will not return anything, and then you get to go back to square one.

    I can only hope that we have a choice wherever we end up, but I suspect that we will have the choice between Comcast and AT&T U-Verse.

    I guess I will once again go back to Tivo.

  • Apple Mail Madness

    A bit of a rant here, sorry. I use Google for my personal domain(s) email service. Google Apps is a good deal, even for the two accounts my wife and I use. Solid performance, wicked good junk filtering, and they do a great job of detecting phishing and spearphishing attacks.

    I use the Apple mail client, setup to use imap to connect to the gmail servers and provide a local cache of my email. Worked pretty good to. (note: “worked” is the operative word.)

    Starting in OS-X 10.7 the mail client began to get lame. I think Apple was really trying to be a better ingester of gmail accounts, but something got wonky.

    I should point out that I have probably 20K email messages in my main account, a similar amount in my true “Gmail” account, and significantly less in my auxiliary accounts. Apparently, Apple mail starts choking above 10K messages, and I am over that by at least 30K messages.

    Constantly needing to reindex my inbox is a major detractor (there are a few messages in my inbox that are “perpetually” new, no matter how often I refresh the indices.)

    Add to that the pretty piss-poor junk mail filtering that Apple mail has, and I am getting pretty frustrated. The last straw was when my daily NY Times update was flagged as “junk” and I couldn’t figure out which of my computers set this rule. Apparently, even if you turn off junk filtering explicitly, it can sometimes turn itself back on. Sigh.

    So I am evaluating options. I don’t mind the Gmail web interface, it is just a pain in the ass to have to relogin all the time.

    There are some stand alone apps to help, but I suspect that the real problem is having huge imap mailboxes and the task of keeping them locally sync’d.

    I am trying an application that essentially is a shell for the gmail web interface. So you get instant access, cool main UI notifications (a big plus) and all the google tools that make gmail a good experience. It is called “Mailplane” and it seems pretty solid. I will use it exclusively for a while and see how I like it.

    One benefit would be to free the 12gigs or so of email cache on my drives. Not a lot of space, but it kind of defeats the purpose of imap to have physical copies of everything locally.

    And then the Apple mail application will be used only for my icloud, yahoo, and godaddy account. Woot.

  • Saying Goodbye to a Faithful Friend

    It is with sadness in my heart that I must announce the passing of my Cateye Enduro 2 cycling computer.

    I acquired it in early 2002 when I bought my road bike, and it has been a rugged companion since then, logging and recording over 9,000 miles on the bike.

    It was not the first (my first cateye was on a roadbike I bought in 1988), but it will be remembered as the last.

    The Cateye Enduro 2The UI was meh. The process to set it up and program the correct wheel circumference was a bitch. But it kept decent time (I think I reset the clock only a couple of times in the 12 years it was on the bike).

    But its real strength was in the design. As an embedded system, with a very limited size envelope, it lasted 12 years on one CR2032 battery. Crazy in this day of having to recharge your cell phone every day.

    The engineers who designed this fine piece of equipment knew how to optimize for low energy usage, and long battery life. 12 years, 9000 miles of pulses on the speed sensor is a mighty impressive feat.

    But alas, in the era of the iPhone, GPS, and cool bluetooth connectivity, I log more and better data to my phone than ever before. The concept of a dedicated cycling computer is dying.

    I will miss it, but the future is bright.

  • Pleasant Surprise – Cell phone

    Yesterday I had a great experience at the local AT&T store, and I have to share.

    My wife has been a Verizon customer forever. She chose them way back because they had better coverage where she spent a lot of her time. Being somewhat of a luddite, she has been using a flip phone (a pretty plain, but solid LG flip phone) for about 5 years. As time went on, she began to use it more, and often went over limits on messaging and phone calls, so she has increased her plan accordingly.

    About 2 months ago, I spied one of her bills, and almost threw up. She was spending $80+ a month on her boring, non-smart phone. About the same time AT&T came out with their mobile share plan, where all phones/tablets etc were pretty cheap to add, and shared a big pool of data.

    We can thank T-Mobile for starting this trend, but it is really refreshing.

    I had been dallying lately on getting her moved/added to my account, and giving her my old iPhone 4S (still very serviceable) since she had been dealing with her parents, and other things that kept her away from home.

    Yesterday, we just drove to the AT&T store in Gilbert at the San Tan Village. In the space of about 20 minutes, that phone was reactivated, added to my mobile share account, my ipad moved to it, and we have a 10G plan to share.

    As a last thing they asked who I worked for, as I might qualify for a discount. Thinking this was a waste of time, I played with them. Sure enough, I will get an additional 22% discount on my bill. Net results is that we add my wife to the plan, get two iPhones, plenty of data, and my ipad, all for about $40 less than we paid for our separate cell plans.

    Oh, and it took about 15 minutes for her number from Verizon to port over. Sending calls immediately, receiving them before we left the store.

    Awesome.

  • Going legit. Real photoshop

    I have an admission to make. I have long been a scofflaw. I have been a Photoshop pirate. I am not proud of this. And indeed am somewhat ashamed. But to be fair, I haven’t used it for professional purposes, and mostly have used it to re-sample images for use on the web.

    I have not felt too guilty, as I have purchased Photoshop Elements a few times. So Adobe has gotten money from me for my photoshopping in the past. I also have a version of Acrobat pro that I have bought (with my cold hard cash). Yes, I use that just about every day for my job.

    Photoshop is one of those programs that you love to use, and is probably the most pirated program apart from Microsoft Windows.

    What tipped me over the edge?

    Well, I have been less than thrilled with the direction Apple has taken Aperture. Aperture was/is the Apple “pro” package for photography workflow. It does work well. Or at least it did.

    Lately, Apple has spent more time updating it to be more iCloud friendly, working with streams, and sharing. All things I don’t give a rat’s ass about.

    So, I was going to the Adobe site, looking for a evaluation version of their photography workflow product, Lightroom, when I was hit with a banner. Get the Adobe photographer’s creative cloud package for $9.95 a month. Get access to both lightroom, and photoshop. Install it on every computer you own.

    Yes, I know that it is ~ $126 a year perpetually. But no longer do I need to buy two licenses, one for my PC and one for my Mac’s. It seems like a no brainer to me.

    So I am now up with Photoshop. I have wiped off the uhm, non returnable versions of Photoshop that I had, and I am beginning to migrate from Aperture to Lightroom. I have it installed on both my Macs and my work PC. So I am ahead (no, my work PC never had an illicit version of Photoshop. I am not that crazy)

  • Family Tech Support

    A couple of days ago, as I was fading into a jet-lag induced foggy sleep, my wife complained that her laptop (A 13″ MacBook Pro, probably 4 years old) was getting slow on email. I  knew that it had about 1/3 of the disk free (about 90 gigs) so it wasn’t running out of space.

    The next morning came this conversation:

    Wife: “Uh, I need DiskWarrior to see if I can make my laptop better.”

    Me: “Sure, let me get it for you”

    (DiskWarrior is a mac utility that does wonders to fix inconsistent file systems caused by clutter, or entropy over time. It has been a miracle worker in my experience.)

    Wife (sheepishly): “Uh, I dropped my laptop a few days ago…”

    Me: “Again?”

    Result:

    • The 4 year old HD that had been dropped at least three times that I know about is dead as dillinger. All my whiz bang utilities couldn’t bring it back to life.
    • The MacBook Pro is remarkably resilient to clumsy handling. Dented, dinged, it has withstood the punishment my wife gives it.
    • A spare 750G  7200 RPM hard drive is in there, the laptop is up on 10.7, and is running well.

    Fortunately, most of the important documents are on her iMac, and the laptop was really a roving computer.

    Unfortunately, I couldn’t use migration tools as the disk was totally hosed. So it is a fresh start.

  • Google Authentication Shenanigans

    Is it me, or has google been fucking with their gmail authentication today?

    I swear it has kicked me off my webmail 4 or 5 times today. Won’t remember which accounts are logged in.

    At one time it got me stuck in an authentication loop. Over and over, prompting for my password.

    Grrrrr. This has happened before. Hope this gets fixed soon.

  • My online history

    My blogging/online history

    I started blogging late, in 2009. I was stuck in a bad job, that had gotten much worse due to some serious political wrangling by the executive suite.

    At first I just grabbed a wordpress.com site, and made a couple of posts that were really not meant to be read by anybody. Venting about the stupid crap that I saw every day.

    Very quickly, I wanted more. I had been spending time reading some of the major blogs about product managment at the time and wanted to get my own voice out there.

    A friend of mine, a photographer, was interested in improving her online presence, so I dove into hosting.

    the wordpress days

    I had my own domain that I bought back in 1998, and used for my main email. So I used that domain and found a web host.

    My first blog was based on WordPress, and it was easy to setup. I bought a commercial theme, did some simple customization, and I was up. I focused on product management, and a few personal items.

    WordPress served me well, but the ubiquity of the platform, and the spectrum of add ons was fun. I hooked my twitter handle to it, and a lot of other cool things.

    But, that era, WordPress was a common target of hackers. The first time I got hacked, my host helped me clean up. The second time, I got whacked really good. I had to wipe and start from scratch.

    When a few months later I got hit a third time, it was time for a change.

    enter Joomla!

    I had been playing with some of the more industrial strength CMS’s, starting with Drupal. While it was easy to setup, and very well appointed with features, it was a bit beyond what a novice needed. It does power the Economist, so it is a professional strength solution.

    At the start of 2012, I got involved with a local non-profit. A group that rescues retired Greyhounds, they were just getting started, and I got drafted to build their web presence.

    One of the other “communications” people, who would be helping with content creation and maintenance had experience with Joomla! so we decided to go that route. (Unfortunately, she quickly vanished, and I do virtually all the maintenance and content creation) The other option was WordPress, but by then, with the exploits I had to deal with, it wasn’t worth entertaining.

    A crash course in Joomla, creation of a custom theme, and the site went live in June (there was a quick and dirty WordPress site that just tided us over.)

    Joomla was a good intermediary between WordPress which while very flexible, is at its core a blog environment, and Drupal, a heavyweigh. A lot of moving parts, but there was a method to the madness. And, importantly, it had a pretty solid ecosystem of add ons, with mostly professional coders who would support, and take care on security. I was able to get the site up and running, build a front end access system that allowed the adoption people to maintain the “available” dogs list without needing to do any HTML coding.

    When I became comfortable with Joomla, I moved my wordpress site, tralfaz, home of product management to the Joomla platform. It wasn’t a seamless transition, but there were tools available to smoothe the transition.

    Joomla has a good balance between extensibility, flexibility, and performance.

    Hosting goes to hell

    One of the hazards of running your own website, especially if you don’t have a machine in a rack in some data center, is the hosting company you select can turn out to suck.

    I didn’t know who was good or bad at the time in late 2009, but I figured out that the rating sites were pretty rigged. The highly rated hosts surprisngly had lots of people trash talking them.

    I selected Media Temple. They seemed to be very professional, and had a really solid platform. I gave it a try, but quickly converted my trial into a paying service. They were expensive, but they had awesome performance, great flexibility, and support was fast and responsive. A win, win situation.

    When I was setting up the non-profit’s website, they had registered their domains with GoDaddy. I decided to go with GoDaddy’s linux based shared hosting. At $6 a month, it was less than 1/3 the cost of Media Temple. It was far more restrictive, and “idiot proof” than Media Temple. But it worked, and it was easy to setup the site.

    However, GoDaddy is a slimy company. They use every point of contact to try to sell you more useless stuff. More emails, more domains, etc. Every time I log into them I am barraged with their marketing. As a marketer, I understand the desire to use your opportunities to place product and ads.

    But I deal with it for this organization. The things I do for the hounds…

    In September 2013, I got the cheery email from Media Temple announcing that they were purchased by GoDaddy. Ugh. Regardless of the professions of it being a good thing, and that GoDaddy wouldn’t interfere, I knew that I needed to move my web properties.

    VPS, more control, and scary too

    A while before that I had contemplating going to the next level in hosting. Instead of being on a shared linux box with other users, who at times would consume all of the resources, I wanted to go to a VPS. Not quite dedicated hardware, but my own instance of linux, and a guaranteed IO and bandwidth. This was the nudge that put me over the edge.

    I did a bit of searching before I focused in on a new provider. A Small Orange had good reviews, and their site and product offerings were pretty solid I took the plunge, and signed up for a 2 core system with 1.5G ram, and 40 gigs of SSD storage. Getting it setup was trivial, and within 30 minutes I was up and running.

    The truth is I am a bit of a novice in linux. I have used it at various times in the past, but never connected to the world. But the standard configuration of the system offered by A Small Orange was solid and well configured.

    It took a while to move all my properties from Media Temple to A Small Orange, and ensure that they were properly setup, but it went smoothly.

    Coda

    I started as a complete babe in the woods. I knew enough unix CLI to be dangerous, but the awesome support of Media Temple kept me out of trouble.

    I started heavily reliant on the WYSIWYG editors built into WordPress, then Joomla. They worked well, but after editing and re-editing posts, things got pretty hosed. Particulary with the greyhound site, where I was constantly updating the main page.

    Add to that the fact that I would often get articles to post in Microsoft Word format, it was a real chore to import that text, and strip out the stupid shit Microsoft embeds into their files.

    So, I started using a text editor and hand coding a lot of HTML to get things the way I like. This worked well, but it was a chore, particularly for things with lots of formatting.

    Then I discovered markdown. I was unsure of the use of it at first, so while i learnt the basics, I never did anything with it. Then I figured out how to convert to plain HTML, and it has become a godsend.

    Now I do most of my work in markdown, and it is a snap to format, and make the text look just how I want it.

    There are a couple of good markdown editors on the Mac (I am currently using Mou) and an industrial strength one on the PC (markdownpad).

    Summary

    I am currently hosting my sites, my wife’s business site words by barbara, my friend’s photography site, and a few others.

    I still have the original wordpress.com site gander2112 where you are reading this now. My old posterous postings moved over, and this is my personal, for friends and acquaintences blog.

    I have learned a lot in the past 4 years, and I am sure I will learn much more.

  • My history with e-Readers

    I am a gadget person. I have always loved tech, and have often been on the leading edge of trends and an early adopter.

    One category that I dove into head first was the e-Reader trend. I first stumbled across them in 2006, when Sony launched the PRS 500. I didn’t jumped then, but I had my eye on them.

    At the time, I was traveling the better part of 50% of the time. Being a life long reader, and a SciFi junky, I was always hitting the used book stores and carrying 10#’s of book with me on my 2 week international trips. A definite burden.

    Of course, the idea of an electronic book with a large number of books stored on it was a dream.

    The first touchscreen reader, the Sony PRS 700
    The first touchscreen reader, the Sony PRS 700

    When Sony launched their second generation reader with the first “touch screen” reader, I pounced. I bought one of the first PRS 700’s, and loved it. I bought lots of books, and even found a fair number of public domain free books (the Doc Savage series was a good, quick read).

    I probably put 500K miles of traveling with that reader, a constant companion. I probably had 500 books on it at any one time. It allowed me to have a wide selection of titles, including my favorite Science Fiction, some contemporary fiction, some technical references, and some classics. My tastes range widely.

    Then one day in 2010, somebody decided they wanted it more than me. So I found myself without a reader.

    In the interim, Amazon launched the Kindle line of readers, and a pretty wide selection of ebooks. The first Kindles were toy like, and pretty cheesy feeling (I had many friends with them). However all my books were in ePub format (the “standard” ebook format), whereas the Kindle used a proprietary format, based on the common “Mobi” format.

    So I really didn’t consider the Kindle a suitable replacement.

    Off to Best Buy and I went home with the successor to the PRS 700, the PRS 600. Still touch screen, and my library transfered over smoothly. One of the nice things about the Sony readers is that they allow expansion of the onboard storage with the Sony memory stick pro, and SD cards.

    THe PRS 600 was a bit of a disappointment. The eInk display was fine, but the resistive touch screen made it full of glare. It also missed the built in LED light to read after dark, something that I did enjoy on the PRS 700.

    I used the PRS 600 for a long time, until I picked up my iPad in 2011. It was a far better reading experience, and since all my library was ePub, it was trivial to use it.

    It did have one other weakness. The battery sucked. It never gave me the expected lifetime for reading. I probably needed to charge it after 12 hours of reading. And it died early. By the end of the first year, the battery stopped holding a charge.

    Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to find one, online, and it was easy to replace. But like the original battery, its life wasn’t great out of the box. Whether Sony had to compromise on the battery capacity, or whether there was some constant draw, it was a bummer to have the battery expire as quickly as it did.

    Fortunately the arrival of the iPad, it pretty much was relegated to a drawer.

    Enter the tablet for reading

    In 2011, for my birthday, I splurged ang bought an iPad. While it didn’t have an e-ink display, it did have a great display, and I had no trouble reading on it. All my library moved easily, and I had tons of storage space.

    Of course, the iPad lasts for 12 hours of reading easily, so long plane flights are not a problem.

    But the display wasn’t as satisfying as the e-ink display. That and the constant distraction of email notifications, facebook, or even a quick hand of solitaire.

    The iPad still is in my stable, but I have augmented it with a first generation Google Nexus 7 tablet. Excellent display on a 7″ tablet, and good book reader applications. As well, a really good integration with the Google Play store books. I have bought many books from there, so it was really convenient.

    But its battery sucks really bad. I can get about 4 – 5 hours of reading before it shuts itself down. Ok if you can charge it every night, and don’t count on it for a long flight of reading. But that is a pretty big limitation.

    Back to a Reader

    As my travel schedule is going to ramp up this year, I know that I am going to want a reader for my books. I remain a voracious reader when I travel, so it is an easy choice.

    There are still a few options out there. Sony still has a full line. Kobo is a smaller, open option. And naturally the Kindle.

    A lot of players have come and gone. Barnes and Noble’s Nook line, while still available, is becoming a weak player.

    So, I started looking into the Kindle. I still have a huge library of ePubs, but that is less of a detriment than it used to be. The Calibre package makes it child’s play to convert to different formats.

    As I mentioned in my last post, the Amazon store has a great experience, and a large selection of books. And since I have been buying dead tree books from them for 14 years or so, they have a pretty good idea of my tastes.

    I started slowly, with the Kindle app on my Nexus and my iPad. A couple of free books to start with, and I think I can live with their eco system. My Paper White Kindle should arrive any day now. I expect it to have a great display, with a backlight, and a seamless ecosystem.

    Next up: a detailed review of the Kindle Paper White

    Once I get it, I plan on doing a thorough review. I will get it setup, connect it with my Calibre library, and try it in a variety of scenarios.

  • e-Reader – Beginning to Cave

    I am an avid reader. I started in high school, voraciously reading science fiction. I can get through 3 or more Sci Fi novels in a week.

    I used to be a frequent visitor to the used book stores.

    E Readers, FTW!
    E Readers, FTW!

    The advent of eBooks was a godsend. Instead of raiding the used book stores, and carrying 6 or 7 books when I go on business trips, I use a reader.

    My first reader was a Sony. I got it before the launch of the Kindle, so it was the only real choice. I loved that thing. I could carry as many books as I wanted to carry, and always had fresh material.

    A couple years later, my Sony got stolen, and I replaced it. This was probably 2010 or so.

    In the mean time, the Amazon Kindle launched and pretty much took over the market. But I had a pretty large investment in ePub books, and they are not compatible with the Kindle. So the kindle was never a really an option.

    Fast forward to today. My sony has been through 3 batteries, and is feeling its age. I still have a shitload of ePub books (with and without DRM), and I read mostly on one of my tablets. Yes, it isn’t as satisfying as a good e-ink display in bright light, but it is convenient.

    But the tablet is not an ideal platform. The temptation to just drop to email, or do a quick check on Facebook is too great, and interrupts my reading.

    Kindle makes an appearance

    I was browsing Amazon a few weeks ago, and one of their free kindle books was tempting. I had known that there was an app for my iphone/ipad and android tablet. So I grabbed the free book, and the app and started reading. I reall liked it.

    The Kindle ecosystem has some great attributes:

    • The store is very well set up. It is easy to find what you are interested in. Plus, since I have been buying books and media from Amazon for 14 years or more, they know what I like. So their recommendations are on target.
    • The buying process is easy. No, I am not using whispernet, but it is real easy to buy a title and have it sent to one of my devices.
    • The selection on the store is amazing. Amazon truly does have the widest selection, and the prices are good. I mostly bought before from the Sony store, or the Google Play store. Rarely from the Apple itunes store.

    So, I am once again in the market for a dedicated reader. While the tablets are nice, and very servicable, a dedicated reader has some benefits, including the higher resolution e-ink screen, and vastly longer battery life.

    I could go back to Sony, but the quality and features have really degraded. Or rather they haven’t kept up. Kobo is another choice, but again, it is a distant 3rd place.

    Thus, it looks like I will be opening my wallet to buy a kindle. Probably a Paperwhite Wifi unit.

    I can use Calibre to convert my ePub library to kindle format. So I will be able to move over most of my collection seamlessly.

    I have held out against the Kindle for a long time. Early kindles seemed toylike and cheaply built, but it is clear that it has won the e-reader market.