Tralfaz

Category: Tech

  • Wild Sighting: Microsoft Surface

    I spied it gingerly. It was a couple seat away from me in the waiting area at the Southwest gate in the SanJose Airport. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but I finally figured it out.

    It was the first Microsoft “Surface” tablet that I had ever seen that wasn’t part of a store display. Someone was actually using it.  Not sure if it was the RT version, or the PRO version, but that seems of little import. He was using it for what almost all ipad or android tabled owners use it for, watching videos, and browsing the web.

    Rumors had it that Microsoft had almost $1B in unsold inventory. Not surprising since they were late to the market, and they priced it closer to the iPad price point than the Android price point. Now they have announced the Surface 2. I wonder how long after launch of that it will be before I see on in the wild…

    It is somewhat of a shame, as I played with one at a store, and I liked the metro interface. But it is most assuredly doomed.

  • IT upgrade or is it really a downgrade…

    Last friday night we had one of those upgrade events. Supposedly to improve our broadband connection, and improve the experience of using both the internet and the internal network.

    I have to say it is a resounding failure. Sending 750 MB of data to a server in Colorado Springs (intranetwork), has taken 45 minutes, and is still only 75% complete. It used to be faster.

    Guess I will have to submit a helpdesk ticket. (FWIW, it would be faster to drive home, VPN in, and transfer this data from my home network connection).

  • Music: iRadio FTW(?)

    In the past I have pitted Spotify against Google All Access, and while the Google offering was slightly cheaper, it had enough warts to drop it into second place. At that time, I mentioned that I looked forward to Apple’s offering, and would revisit when it was officially launched.

    iTunes has long supported internet radio stations, but they were all third party, and of quite varied quality and availability. At first, I thought this was the offering of Apple, and I was disappointed (until I found the Live365 feeds at least).

    With the launch of iTunes 11.1, and iOS 7, Apple has put out its own radio service. I have been using it pretty extensively since last Thursday (before I even updated my iPhone), and I am quite impressed.

    There is no doubt that Apple has an amazing selection of music in their grasp. But could they do a good job defining stations and genres to tailor the music. I should add that I am not a demographic for top 40, or much of the pop/country/hip hop music. I am a guitar player, so my tastes tend to classic rock, blues based rock, some folk, and generous helpings of heavy metal.

    One of the first “predefined” station is a “Beatles” station. ITMS has the Beatles, and Spotify doesn’t. I fired it up and enjoyed several hours of mid – late 60’s pop-ish, and deep cuts/covers and related tunes. Awesome.

    I dove into creating my own stations. They have genres that make sense. In the “Metal” category, they have british, classic metal, progressive, and the harder stuff. All these sub genre’s are great.

    In the blues, I have electric blues (Stevie Ray Vaughn, Buddy Guy, Gary Moore), and Delta Blues (Robert Johnson, and his ilk). Great stuff.

    The selection, and the mixes have been awesome. I don’t think I have heard the same song twice in probably 20 hours of listening. (One area where Spotify could improve, is that you seem to get in a cycle and the same song can come up 2 times a day.)

    A long time back, I was a Pandora user. I never subscribed to them, because if I wanted to listen to Gary Moore, I didn’t want a radio station based on Gary Moore. So I went to Spotify when it came to the US. But I always liked the Pandora stations. They seemed to have awesome algorithms to select music, and a deep playlist that went on forever. I believe, from what I have heard over the last 5 days, that Apple has come really close to this algorithms.

    The best point? Since I am a iTunes Match customer, the radio is ad free. And free is better than $10 a month.

    Yes, I see my monthly spend to Spotify going poof.

  • Some Evernote Love

    I have been a premium subscriber of Evernote for a few years. At first, I paid to get the larger amount of storage, and to toss them a bone.

    It is the premier cross platform notebook. I have written in the past that Microsoft’s OneNote is a better app, but being Windows only means that I am not going to adopt it.

    At first, the disparity in features between OneNote and Evernote were pretty wide. But with the last few updates, the gap has narrowed greatly, and in some ways, Evernote has surpassed. The ability to toss PDF’s, Gmail messages, and pretty much all documents at it is impressive to say the least. Its apps for the smartphones are also excellent.

    And, as a premium subscriber, it will OCR documents for me in the background, so they become searchable.  Adobe Acrobat does that as well, but it is nice to just send them to Evernote and let it chew on them.

    Lately,  I have been using Evernote for collaboration. I have invited some people to share my “Marketing” notebook, and it has fostered some great idea sharing.

    I am beginning to use it more and more for my daily workflow, and it is improving my productivity. I have no doubt that trent will continue.

    If you are a “free” Evernote user, consider taking the plunge and go premium. You will find a lot more uses for the product and service.

  • Why so much Apple Hate? iOS7 edition

    Being a “geek” I frequent a lot of geek-y websites. One topic that comes up over and over is a raw hatred for all things Apple. Macs, phones, ipods, ipads, you name it, and you would think that Apple, instead of being one of the most loved companies on the planet, is staffed by the Antichrist.

    The thing that really bugs me, is that much of this hate, and virulence is completely offbase and misdirected. Last week, someone said that if you bought a Mac Book Pro with the SSD, you couldn’t change it, as it was soldered to the motherboard. Clearly this basher had no idea what he was talking about. Apple laptops use the mini PCI form factor SSD’s. There are lots of them used in netbooks, and now ultrabooks, but they are standard, they are available, and you can upgrade change them. Fortunately about 10 other people piled on to call him an asshat.

    The same thing about the iPhone. It’s a walled garden ecosystem, and Apple does control the content. They have standards that you must meet to submit and publish, but by and large, it is filled with useful, high quality applications. But the fact that without “jailbreaking” your iphone/ipad you can’t side load (install miscellaneous binaries circumventing the on board controls) applications, and that pisses them off. Of course, the geeks all view this as the antichrist rising. But, if that is your preference, you can jailbreak, and you can load whatever the hell you want.

    About a year ago, I bought an Android device. I wanted to like it, to see if it was as good of an experience to use as my Apple gear. I even bought a Google branded Nexus tablet, so I wouldn’t have a system encrusted with carrier installed crapware. I used it exclusively for several months, I bought many applications, I tried to live with it. In the end, I went back. Yes, I am biased, and I am used to the Apple way, but there were enough annoyances that even having an unencumbered open system couldn’t make me forgive the Android experience.

    Now Apple has retreated from the Skeuomorphic experience, offering a plainer, less lifelike experience, that I associate with Win 8. I did upgrade my iphone, a 4S that is getting long in the tooth, and I was surprised. It took no time to get used to the new stuff, and I think I got lucky by having a dark wallpaper, but it just works.  Of course, I am sure Steve Jobs is spinning wildly in his grave.

    The real surprise, is that it is quite snappy on my 2 year old phone. I was hesitating to update, as the last time at the end of life for a phone, the 3GS, I upgraded to iOS 5 and that made the phone almost unusable.

    And, at the same time, Apple launched their radio service as part of iTunes. You know what? It is AWESOME.  Great selection of genres and sub-genres, great music, and a hugely better quality experience (listening, navigation, and selection of included tracks) than the Google Play all-access service. Heck, it might be too soon to tell, but this might replace my Spotify account.

    Love, love, love the radio.

    As I said, I am biased, I have tried to venture from the vine, but I keep coming back.

  • Really? That’s your advice?

    I have been battling with my HP work laptop for what seems like since the day I joined my company.

    Lately, it has gone through a few system boards, and a handful of tech visits.

    Nothing has been able to fix the latest issue.

    If I hibernate the system and undock it, when I go to spin it back up, about 50% of the time I go straight to a bluescreen.

    If I sleep the system, it goes into zombie mode (it never powers off, the HD spins and continues access, until the battery dies. Only way to recover is to force power off – 5 seconds holding the power button).

    The latest advice? Update the bios (done), re-install the video drivers (done more than twice), and I might have too little disk space left (I have about 180G).

    ARGH, throw this POS away already.

  • Death of a once mighty brand – HP

    From this awful laptop that is a hopeless pile of crap, to the core strength that was once HP, their printers, it is apparent how the mighty have fallen.

    I have posted before on the travails of my lousy laptop. Suffice it to say that it works, but the power management bits are pretty messed up (not sure if it is windows, or the hardware, and frankly at this point, I don’t care.)

    This post is on the HP multifunction printer we have.  In theory, they are great machines. Color, black and white, scan to email, fax, they just work. But there are some glitches that will drive you bonkers.

    By default, they print in duplex. Not too much of a problem, but sometimes you really want to print one-sided. So you end up fixing the settings and printing a second time.

    Where they fail miserably is in the collation. For some reason that I haven’t been able to determine, if you print 8 or more pages, the first two are properly sent to the bottom tray, in the proper orientation. Then all the rest will be sent to the top tray, in backwards order.

    Is it the shitty HP universal print driver? Is it the shitty onboard software/firmware? Or is it gremlins? Our support organization seems to have given up the search for a solution (as I am sure the only real solution will be to push these units off a ship’s deck into the ocean and replacing them with a better device, canon, brother etc)

    So, I am manually collating a 36 page document that has no page numbers, and is backwards in its order.

  • Part II – The Quest to Lower my Monthly Wireless Bill

    Yesterday I was toying with the idea to give up the iphone and possibly go phone-less. Hard to imagine, as i have been a cell user since 1998 or so, but frankly, I rarely use the phone at all anymore.

    Of course going cell free is a crazy idea. 15 years ago you could walk a block and find 4 – 5 pay phones. But the ubiquity of cell phones has pretty much made the old staple payphones obsolete. (and does anybody still use calling cards?  I think 2002 was the last time I had one for work).

    So, I decided to go prowl around the AT&T Wireless site. Perhaps I can go to fewer minutes, since I am using less than 100 minutes a month. Or go to a flip phone and dump the data plan. Alas, there are few options. I could go to a flip phone (and they are surprisingly expensive, and the selections are skimpy) and cut the data plan.  That will save $40 a month.

    But 450 minutes is the smallest plan offered. There is a 200 minute “Senior” plan, but since I am not 65 yet, I can’t go there. Crud. So with feels, I would go from $1200 a year to $600 a year. Not that big of a savings, worth giving up my music player (I would need to buy an iPod again, gasp).

    I could go to a Virgin Mobile PAYGO plan, but I am pretty sure I would lose my current cell number (does anybody know if I can port my number to one of the MVNO’s?)

    Sigh.

  • That existential question – do I need a cell phone?

    Well, my contract is up with AT&T Mobile, and not surprisingly it coincides with an Apple product launch. New iPhones are in the air, and I am due for an upgrade from my 4s.

    But instead of diving in and getting the new 5s, I have been thinking a different way. Do I really need a cell phone?

    Since I haven’t been traveling much I haven’t really used many minutes on my plan.  I currently have over 5000 rollover minutes (which I think is the most that AT&T will let you accrue), so I certainly could trim back my plan to fewer minutes per month. (I think in the last two months I have used about 180 minutes total out of 1800 allocated (900 per month)) I do not get a phone through work, so I can conceivably just not be “available” when I am on the road – an attractive thought indeed.

    Yes, I like having my email, facebook and other apps at my fingertips throughout the day, but do I really need it?

    About 6 months ago, I was looking to reduce monthly outlays, and decided to not make any changes in my wireless communications. Mainly because I rely on the text messaging for my Google gmail two factor authentication. If I go back to standard security, then I no longer “need” a cell phone. (that was the determining factor at the time).

    Or, I could just give up the smartphone, and go with a feature phone. But AT&T has a whopping selection of only 7 models, and 3 are refurbs.

    I even thought of going to an Android phone a while back, and looked at the AT&T store. There is a wide range of quality and “goodness” of those devices. None of them really rocked my world.

    So, now that I can cancel my phone without penalty, I am considering going cell phone free. It might be liberating.

    $1,200 a year extra cash is appealing. But will I regret coughing up my digital leash?

  • PC Repair Theatre

    You might recall my bitching a few weeks ago about my work laptop. I foolishly dropped it and it landed on my iphone charger and broke the screen. That was in May. Mid August they figured pout what I needed to do to order a new panel to replace the broken one.

    The local, on site tech got the panel, but then the backlight didn’t work, so he called the HP support team in.

    Oh boy, what a fun story that is.  The original repair took three days, and went through two logic boards, and a second display. But they got it back together, and handed it to me on Aug 30th.

    Immediately I noticed that the USB ports on the left side were dead. Recommendation, install the drivers. I did. No joy.

    Our local tech was gone for a week on vacation, so I lived with bad USB ports. Not too much of a hardship.

    Today, the HP support person came back out. Didn’t believe that I had installed the drivers and tried that first. No joy. Replaced the system board. No joy. Thought it was the 16G ram in the system, replaced that, no joy, tried a new HD, no joy.

    So, tomorrow she will be back with yet another logic board, and we try again. I am back up on a loaner PC, and I had a very non-productive day.

    I hate windows laptops. I especially hate HP hardware (their printers, once the gold standard, now suck donkey balls, and their PC’s are all the bad things that was Compaq).