Category: Computers, Internet & Technology

Little Lies the Internet Told Me

Tim Wu with interesting commentary at The New Yorker: Elements. He begins:

“Everyone knows about the big Internet scams: the e-mails advertising diet pills, the proposed Nigerian bank transfers. But we tend to overlook the milder forms of truth-stretching that have come to shape online living, and it’s hard not to. They’re often perpetuated by big and reputable companies, like Apple, Seamless, and Amazon.”

Help Stop SOPA/PIPA

“You may have heard people talking/blogging/twittering about SOPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act. The recent SOPA-related boycott of GoDaddy was all over the news, with many people expressing their outrage over the possibilities of SOPA, but when I ask people about SOPA and its sister bill in the Senate, PIPA (Protect IP Act), many don’t really know what the bills propose, or what we stand to lose. If you are not freaked out by SOPA/PIPA, please: for the next four minutes, instead of checking Facebook statuses, seeing who mentioned you on Twitter, or watching the latest episode of Sherlock*, watch this video (by Fight for the Future).”

WordPress

Seriously.

Be careful however, that you do nothing to stop SOPAPILLA. Yummy.

Cute

When something happens

… like today at Virginia Tech. #virginiatech

Twitter is absolutely incredible.

Who Needs a New Thermostat?

I might. David Pogue describes it, including this:

RADICAL CHANGE 1 The look. The Nest is gorgeous. It’s round. Its screen is slightly domed glass; its barrel has a mirror finish that reflects your wall. Its color screen glows orange when it’s heating, blue when it’s cooling; it turns on when you approach it, and discreetly goes dark when nobody’s nearby.

Sweating over attractiveness makes sense; after all, this is an object you mount on your wall at eye level. A thermostat should be one of the most beautiful items on your wall, not the ugliest.

RADICAL CHANGE 2 The Nest has Wi-Fi, so it’s online. It can download software updates. You can program it on a Web site.

You can also use a free iPhone or Android app, from anywhere you happen to be, to see the current temperature and change it — to warm up the house before you arrive, for example. . . .

You, Me and Four More

One of the most talked-about articles Tuesday is the revelation that there are not six degrees degrees of separation between any two people, but 4.74 degrees. John Markoff and Somini Sengupta, reporters for The New York Times, write that the original “six degrees” finding, published in 1967 by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, was drawn from 296 volunteers who were asked to send a message by postcard, through friends and then friends of friends, to a specific person in a Boston suburb.

The new research used a slightly bigger cohort: 721 million Facebook users, more than one-tenth of the world’s population.

The researchers also found that in the United States, where more than half of people over 13 are on Facebook, it was just 4.37.

Daily Report: Bits Blog

‘It just works’

No it doesn’t Steve, wherever you may be.

Caveat lector. This is posted as therapy for me. You probably don’t want to read it.

What doesn’t work is the Apple ID. It has caused me more frustration in the past month than you can imagine — and while I am occasionally obtuse, I remain, like Yogi Bear, smarter than the average.

Here, as concisely as I can explain it, is what has happened.

I began eight years ago with one Apple ID (October 31, 2003, to purchase Peter Malick’s album New York City featuring Norah Jones). Through 500+ iTunes tracks, a few movies, and a few hundred apps I continued to use this ID, let’s call it NMK. (This is not the actual ID.) All my Apple devices (two iMacs, a MacBook Pro, my first two iPhones, an iPad, two iPods and two Apple TVs) are registered with this Apple ID.

In 2008 I purchased MobileMe, Apple’s email/syncing/online storage service. MobileMe required that my Apple ID have an email suffix (@mac.com or @me.com, they are interchangeable). Unbeknownst to me, that turned my Apple ID into two Apple IDs. Let’s call the second one NMK @mac.com (but that is not actually it).

Which was OK. I didn’t even know except every once in a while I would sign into email with my first, the store ID (NMK) and get rejected, or sign into the store with my email ID (NMK with the @mac.com) and get rejected. I, alas, never gave it much thought, just changed the ID thinking the sign-in requirements were different, not that I was dealing with two different IDs. After all the unique ID part was the same for both! The password was the same for both! The credit card was the same for both!

Until iOS 5 and iCloud last month.

I had a helluva time getting it to work until I finally realized I had two different Apple IDs — and it took me two frustrating days to realize that. Ultimately I learned to sign up to the store with the first and to iCloud with the second. Everything seemed to work, though my OCD caused me to twitch. [I bought an iPhone 4S last month. I see now that I registered it to the second account, unlike every other Apple device I own.]

Then this week, iTunesMatch became available — for $24.99 a year it matches your iTunes library in the cloud so that all of your music is available to all of your devices. Very nice. (It does seem to work reasonably well.)

I subscribed to iTunesMatch Monday without thinking about which ID I was using. And I used the second, the iCloud ID. The one where I have only one device. The one where I own no iTunes music or movies. The one where I cannot update my apps. The one I don’t use with my Apple TVs for Home Sharing.

So, this week, by telephone or email, I have dealt with four different Apple customer service reps to correct my mistake. As Apple claims to be unable to merge Apple IDs (WTF?) or to transfer purchases between IDs, I suggested they refund my iTunesMatch subscription and let me start over with the correct Apple ID. A little while ago this is what I was told:

“With that in mind, I consulted two supervisory agents to seek assistance and a possible refund. Ken, I am truly sorry, both have let me know that because of the nature of iTunesMatch, we do not have the option to provide a refund. If I could make this right I certainly would.”

Apple’s solution is to log in and out of the two IDs depending on whether I want to update purchases or listen to the music in the cloud. “[Y]ou can manually manage your devices and content and enjoy purchases from both accounts.

Manually manage! Manually!? WTF?

(This is even stupider than it sounds. When I sign into the store to buy or update an app for example, all of the iTunesMatch data disappears. And, as I have thousands of tracks, it takes considerable time to reload it on any of my exclusively Apple devices.)

So, it doesn’t just work then, does it?

The Shift to Twitter

“Still using the Wall Street Journal as an example, let’s have look at Walt Mossberg’s presence. (He is the Journal’s world-famous tech writer.) On Facebook, his page got 874 “Likes”. On the WSJ Social application, where Mossberg appears as an editor, he got 252 readers as the app has been able to collect a total “23K Readers”

“Not very compelling.

“But, on Twitter, Walt has 264,000 followers.”

The Discreet Shift to Twitter

Line of the day

“[O]ver the last 3 years, China added more internet users than exist in the United States today.”

Monday Note

The Tweaker

Malcolm Gladwell takes a different look at Steve Jobs.

Reading Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’

I am continuing to read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs on devices Jobs created, an iPad and an iPhone. I’m up to the cancer and the iPhone.

It is an exceptional well-written book, telling a fascinating story about a unique and important individual — and an extraordinarily eccentric one. If you have any interest whatsoever about the man or his technology, I assure you this book will be enjoyable. It’s a read where I keep looking to see how much is left, not because I want it to end, because I fear it will. It’s that good.

If you’re looking for a review, I recommend Review: Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’.

Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin: An American Life is equally superb. I have a copy of his Einstein: His Life and Universe but have never read it. I will soon.

‘I finally cracked it.’

The big story on the internets today is from the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson to be released tomorrow. In it Isaacson has Jobs saying he finally devised a TV interface to make it simple with no more DVRs and cable boxes.

So I started thinking, how unlike Jobs, the ultimate marketer, to give away his last “one more thing.”

And then I thought some more.

The ultimate marketer indeed. How much speculation and anticipation will there be waiting for Apple to release this product?

A lot.

And it has already begun.

RIP, Steve, your work here is done.

Best line of the day

“That makes the [iPod] older than Facebook, YouTube, Crocs, Vibram FiveFingers, and the Motorola RAZR, to name a few brands and devices that have penetrated general culture over the last decade.”

Ars Technica

iPod Birth Announcement

CUPERTINO, Calif., Oct. 23— Apple Computer introduced a portable music player today and declared that the new gadget, called the iPod, was so much easier to use that it would broaden a nascent market in the way the Macintosh once helped make the personal computer accessible to a more general audience.

But while industry analysts said the device appeared to be as consumer friendly as the company said it was, they also pointed to its relatively limited potential audience, around seven million owners of the latest Macintosh computers. Apple said it had not yet decided whether to introduce a version of the music player for computers with the Windows operating system, which is used by more than 90 percent of personal computer users.

“It’s a nice feature for Macintosh users,” said P. J. McNealy, a senior analyst for Gartner G2, an e-commerce research group. “But to the rest of the Windows world, it doesn’t make any difference.”

Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, disputed the concern that the market was limited, and said the company might have trouble meeting holiday demand. He predicted that the improvement in technology he said the iPod represented would inspire consumers to buy Macintosh computers so they could use an iPod.

Introduces What It Calls an Easier to Use Portable Music Player – NYTimes.com

Ten years ago today. Industry analysts were wrong.

Siri

Yesterday I mentioned that if only Siri knew massage.

Maybe it could happen. She can get you a beer.

http://vimeo.com/redpepper/beeri

Idle thought

How come talking to a computer seems so awkward? For some reason my voice becomes more stilted than the computer voice. Do I think a machine is stupid?

Anyway, I dictated this blog post. Scintillating, isn’t it?

4S First Impressions

Yes, I am an early adopter. Computers, gadgets and such are my hobby, so I didn’t give too much thought to the fact that this was my third iPhone in 38 months. And that I actually was quite happy with my iPhone 4.

But, hey, life is short. So I got a 4S yesterday at the Apple Store (reserved it the night before online). That place was like Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve (well, smaller and the people were better dressed), but crazy busy — at noon on Tuesday.

The 4S is exactly the same size as the 4, so for once all your existing (that is, iPhone 4) stuff will fit. Most of the griping two weeks ago about the fact that it wasn’t an iPhone 5 (and therefore “different”) probably came from the after-market vendors — makers of cases and such.

I have only taken one photo so far, but all of the reviews say the camera is terrific, even for video. As good as any $200 camera (but as an add-on in a phone!).

The antenna problem is fixed. You can use the 4S naked. The phone I mean.

It’s faster than the 4. Apps open more quickly.

(But they’re the same old apps.)

Except, of course, for Siri, the voice-activated personal assistant. To my mind this technology is as significant, perhaps more significant than the introduction of the mouse or the touch screen. Human beings could talk long before they could write and eons longer than before they could type. This is the beginning of the end of typing.

Just to experiment.

Me: “Pizza”
Siri: “I found 19 pizza restaurants…13 of them are fairly close to you:” [listed with reviews and distance].

Me: “Directions to Donna’s house”
Siri: “Which Donna? Donna [Surname] or Donna [Surname]?
Me. “[Surname]”
Siri: “Here are the directions to Donna [Surname’s] House” [with distance and map].

Me: “Population of Albuquerque”
Siri: Statistics (via Wolfram Alpha) of population of city, metro area, nearby suburbs, and a graph of change over 100 years.

Last night I was able to text and send emails completely by voice. Blogging will be next.

How soon before Siri is available on my computers? (Of course it already is in other forms, but Apple will make it a must-have.)

There are all kinds of problems in the world, none of which Siri or iPhones will solve. The device is just a tool (and in many ways just a toy). But what a tool! What a toy!

I would give up my iPad without much fuss. I would kill you if you tried to take my phone.

True dat

“Unfortunately, as iCloud is [Apple’s] fourth online service iteration, trying to upgrade can be confusing at best, slam-your-head-against-a-wall-in-frustration at worst.”

Macworld

Cute

Shit That Siri Says

Siri is the iPhone 4S voice-activated assistant. Quite a sense of humor.

Shit That Siri Says