Technology
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As I was flying on a very delayed flight today, I tried to send an iMessage to my father on the ground, who was waiting to pick me up at the airport. Ordinarily, I have been able to send iMessages from my iPad or iPhone. Today, however, I am using my MacBook Pro, and the beta version of Messages for Mac OS doesn’t seem to connect to the service. Actually, it won’t connect to any of my messaging accounts, such as AIM, GoogleTalk, or other Jabber accounts.
I wonder if Gogo, the inflight WiFi provider, has blocked certain ports that Messages uses. If I remember correctly, most inflight WiFi services block VOIP apps to keep people from yapping away on their computers. (Actually, I don’t know why they do that, but if I were an inflight sysadmin, that’s the main reason I’d block any VOIP ports.)
As a workaround, I sent an email.
Update
Back on the ground. Messages still doesn’t work. Neither does FaceTime for Mac. When I try to add the Chat function to any of my accounts in Lion’s Mail, Contacts, Calendar preference panel, I get the ominous “An Unknown Error Occurred” message.
It turns out that I just needed to restart my computer.
iMessage does work on Gogo so you can text message iOS users from your Mac or iDevice as you fly through the sky.
Mobile payment service LevelUp offers bonuses for every spending “milestone” your reach. After spending $8.71 at “Restaurant X,” they emailed me with this message:
I spent about $50 at a different place, let’s call it “Comedy Club Y,” putting me well over the $50 milestone. But instead of a $5 credit, it was only a $2 credit for using LevelUp at a place for the first time (“Comedy Club Y”). However, I received a new enticement:
…and after going back to “Comedy Club Y,” this…
How much do I have to spend to get a credit?
Thanks so much for reaching out! While you are definitely correct that are certain businesses you will earn $5 after spending $50, this set of constructs is not the same for every business you will visit on LevelUp. At some you will earn $20 after spending $200, earn $3 after spending $25, etc. It all depends! The onboarding incentive also changes, so while you may have $1 waiting for you at one business the first time you pay there, you could have $7 waiting for you elsewhere. Does that help?
Tiers are confusing! It’s why consumers can’t understand airfares and cable/satellite bills. Nuance is fine for the law and academic scholarship, but it’s not for a consumer product.
We have Verizon FiOS in Long Island City, and in April 2012, our connection significantly worsened on the upstream.
In March, our Verizon FiOS broadband had significantly improved, not in terms of upload and download speed, but the latency and packet loss had improved dramatically. I had posited that Verizon technicians had done some work to improve our connection. I was very happy.
The monthly SamKnows report arrived today, and it looks like it reverted back to a pretty poor connection. SamKnows performs hourly tests for download, upload, latency, and packet loss. In April, our download speed remained robust at a little over the advertised 25 Mbps rate. However, around April 18th, the upload speed plunged to about 7 Mbps, less than a third of the advertised 25 Mbps rate.
At the same time, the packet loss climbed dramatically suggesting that there was a compromised connection on the upstream causing this problem. This is unacceptable. The reason I came to Verizon was for the robust upstream. I upload a lot of files, as is the joy of being a media scholar and shutterbug, and I need a zippy symmetrical connection.
If anyone in the neighborhood finds this and wants to report their results, please share in the comments.
While the New York Post received Mayor Bloomberg’s nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, it was another story that sent a few chills down my spine. Will Hulu be tied to a pay TV subscription?
the move by Hulu toward the new model — called authentication because viewers would have to log in with their cable or satellite TV account number — was behind the move last week by Providence Equity Partners to cash out of Hulu after five years, these sources said.
The major networks founded Hulu to prevent everyone from circumventing revenue-producing way of watching television. The move has been great. It has been a formidable way to get TV shows, and I have been a subscriber of Hulu Plus since the service launched. The appeal has always been that I can watch the television shows I want to watch and when I want to watch them.
This move could threaten the a-la-carte model that Hulu provides in favoring of bundling a package of channels that I’m never going to watch. While the Post article indicates that Providence Equity Partners is behind this strategy, I question that thinking for two reasons.
- the fact that one of the owners of Hulu is Comcast, the biggest and least favorite cable MSO in the United States, and a deal like this really help retains its customers; and…
- Hulu was up for sale last year, but then the sale was pulled due to its “unique and compelling strategic value”.
Free Press has launched an online petition to save Hulu from its possible fate as some “TV Everywhere” service that will only inflate cable bills.
(Via TV News Check.)
My iPhone 4 developed bright white spots on the display over the last few months. These spots are the same as those described in an Apple Support Communities post. As the original poster describes, the spots were especially visible when the phone displayed a white background. I had learned to live with the occasional imperfection as the spots had developed over a time. However, the spots appeared to become bigger in recent days.
I’ve had the phone since “Launch Day” in June 2010, but I am still covered by AppleCare so I took it to my local Apple Store. A Genius inspected it and, without hesitating, offered to replace the phone. He said that the display was the problem and since there is no way to simply repair the screen, he would have to replace it.
If you are still covered by the one-year manufacturer’s warranty or by AppleCare, take the phone to your local Apple Store. Chances are good that they will replace your phone or at the very least repair it. Of course, your mileage may vary.
Forrester Blogs:
As much as Samsung and others have promoted “Smart TVs,” the reality is that consumers with tablets think their tablets are even smarter, and at least some of the time prefer to watch the content from their small device on the big screen.
If I’m going to watch something alone, I’ve been choosing the iPad apps, especially Hulu Plus, over the TV. Call me a miser, but I’m trying to save electricity!
My Mac at NYU-TV still runs Snow Leopard so I can’t run Mac OS Mail, partly because it doesn’t support iCloud but also because the user interface is so different from Lion’s Mail application, which I use on my own computers, that it was simply unusable for me. For the last few months, I was using Thunderbird. That worked fine until I rearranged some of my IMAP folders, and Thunderbird didn’t respond well to that change: I wasn’t able to delete any message from my iCloud email account.
I began to look for an alternative, even if I had to pay for one. I prefer to use an application to read email because I need a unified inbox, and reading mail on the web doesn’t allow me to do that.
Enter Sparrow. I read a lot about this app in recent weeks, especially the iPhone version and its inability to push alerts, which I actually consider an advantage since it will keep me from checking email incessantly. The desktop version, which has a lot of the same features, seemed intriguing enough for me to buy it from the Mac App Store.
The app caters to Gmail users, which I never was until I added Google Apps for my professional domain, and I appreciate some of those features. It is really easy to either archive or deleting a message. The Delete key archives the message, and Command-Delete moves it to the Trash. It is also easy to reply to a message. There’s a quick reply function that makes it really easy to reply to messages. My favorite feature is the send and archive. As the name indicates, it allows you to reply to message and, with one keystroke (Command-D), your message and the original message is archived and out of your inbox. You can also add cute features like having your friend’s Facebook profile photo appear next to his/her message.
There are however a couple of serious flaws disrupting my email workflow. For example, I like seeing my messages listed with the oldest messages at the top. I think that’s a remnant from my days of reading email with Pine, which listed the messages in chronological order. (Did I mention I’m old?) There’s no way of customizing this in Sparrow like you can in Thunderbird or Mac OS Mail. For some reason, this doesn’t bother me in the iOS client for instance, but it does on a desktop app. The other challenge is that when I archive, delete, or file a message, it navigates to an older message not to a newer one. I like reading email in chronologic order, and Sparrow doesn’t allow me to do that. Sadly, it was this drawback that made me ultimately abandon Sparrow on my home machines and return to Lion’s Mail.
Because Lion’s Mail is part of the Mac operating system, it integrates really well with the other apps, such as adding events or contacts from a message. No third-party app can do that.
I really enjoyed using Sparrow for a few days. You read email with it, and that’s it. I love that. It makes it really easy to deal with individual messages, such as reading, replying, forward, archiving, deleting, or filing, but it is not conducive to my workflow when my inbox explodes. I realized this when, after teaching a four-hour class last week, my inbox swelled to over forty messages. I like having as close to a zero-message inbox as possible, and I found myself fighting Sparrow more than conquering my email. Every time I processed a message, I kept going to an older message instead of taking me to a newer one. I couldn’t retrain my brain to read email in reverse.
With Sparrow, I couldn’t tame my messages efficiently. Part of this might be due to the Gmail mentality for email. Gmail lets you manage your email by just letting it sit there in a capacious inbox. If you want to find something, just search. I can’t work like that, and I can’t work with Sparrow…at least not now.
Today marks the 20th anniversary of BBEdit.
Unless you’re a veteran Mac enthusiast or a developer of one kind or another, chances are good that you’ve never used it. However, it remains one of the best software applications I’ve ever used. If Microsoft Word is bloatware for the laser printer era, then BBEdit became and remains the best, most efficient tool for the web: from code to content.
When I was in college, one of my first tech jobs was working at UCSB Extension. Although my job was desktop support, I ended up fixing a lot of web pages. It was 1996, and the World Wide Web was the place to be. My boss at the time was a young, bespectacled go-getter named Matt Groener. Probably half of what I know about computing came from him. (And given how much computing has changed since 1996, it really shows how much he taught me.)
As I was learning HTML in 1995, I had used SimpleText to edit my HTML documents. Why not? It saved plain text files, and it came free with my Mac. Almost immediately after seeing my working with SimpleText, Matt introduced me to BBEdit for composing web pages. Using it was an absolute revelation. It color coded syntax so it was easy to distinguish between text and markup. It indented text properly, which was key to nesting markup, such as lists and subheadings. It had the best search and replace I can ever imagine, and it even made Grep seem a little less scary.
The absolute best feature of BBEdit was “Save to FTP Server.” More than a dozen years before the era of the cloud, BBEdit actually allowed you to directly edit your HTML file from the server. Before this feature, my process was cumbersome and consisted of at least nine steps to make a simple change:
- Edit file
- Save file on your local disk
- Open FTP client
- Upload file to the correct place on the server
- Confirm to replace your file
- Wait for upload to finish
- Open web browser
- Refresh web browser page
- Is there a typo? Then repeat the process all over again.
BBEdit eliminated all this. Saving an HTML file to a web server was as easy as saving it to your hard disk. It didn’t matter if the web server was in a closet a few yards away or part of a server farm on different continent.
Since then, I have probably used BBEdit for some purpose at least once a week. I’ve written loads of HTML and CSS, edited PHP and Javascript, and batch edited loads of class rosters and countless text files exported from Excel. And naturally, I wrote this blog post using BBEdit (in Markdown).
Thanks and many happy returns.
(Via MacWorld and Mother Jones.)
F-Secure posted step-by-step instructions to locate and remove the Mac Flashback trojan with a few Terminal commands. I did so, and my machine came was clean.
There can be as many as a half-million Macs infected by this Trojan, then the sense of urgency seems justified.
(Via Daring Fireball.)
Since the beginning of the new year, I upgraded our broadband from a copper wire service, specifically Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner, to a fiber optic connection from Verizon. Immediately, we more than doubled the downstream throughput: from an average 11 Mbps to more than 25 Mbps. The biggest difference, however, came in the upstream. Whereas our upstream was about 500 kbps with the copper wire cable, it is now about 25 Mbps with fiber optic. Theoretically, I can now upload files at about 50 times the speed. None of this, however, should come as a surprise. Not only is fiber more capacious than copper wire, the Verizon 25/25 service is also more expensive than Road Runner’s 10/0.5 service.
Independently, we also signed up for SamKnows broadband monitoring, which is how the FCC is measuring the nation’s broadband capabilities. Each month, SamKnows sends a summary of our broadband connection.
Here is our downstream…
…and our upstream.
As you can see, the connection is pretty stable. It is consistently around the advertised 25 Mbps, which is good. Uploading and downloading files always seems zippy, and when we stream video, it always looks very sharp. I never notice any buffering delays or any sudden pixelation in the picture.
However, two other very important metrics have been off. Our latency and our packet loss, which should be low, have been inordinately high.
Even with good throughput, latency can slow down broadband by delaying the connection with a remote host. Similarly, packet loss can cause errors that will result in either a “dropped” connection or requiring redundant, duplicate connection.
As you can see, it looks like those two metrics have dropped significantly around March 24. I wonder if there was an equipment upgrade on that date that might have improved the “fidelity” of our broadband connection.
From a purely observational perspective, I haven’t noticed any improvements in our connection. In fact, I thought our connection had been getting slower over the last week, but, of course, these kinds of observations can be deceiving.
(Via SamKnows.)
