Recently in Apple Category

Seems that since Apple started serving ads from their new mobile advertising platform, named 'iAds', there's been a bit of a tizzy, with people mocking them for saying that they are ads that you'll want to see, and how dare they advertise ads in your mobile phone as a "feature".

First of all, I hate ads, I use ad-blockers whenever possible, pointedly don't look at billboards when possible, and so on. I'm also an Apple Fanboy, but I don't think that matters here.

Yes, people are right about ads as a "feature" being stupid and while I'm sure that there are some that will be more interactive and interesting, but I think this will wear off as quickly as those full page flash ads where the webpage would jiggle or crumble or whatever it was that had their 15 minutes a year or two ago.

However, look at it this way:

• It doesn't add any ads to your mobile apps.
  
  This is just an ad network that app developers can use, so chances are if you have an app with no ads in it, that'll stay the same.


• It'll make the current ads less annoying.
  
  Right now if you have ads in your apps and click on them, you get exited out of the app and it opens up the mobile browser to show you the ad. While this has gotten less annoying with the advent of iOS 4 and multi-tasking, so you don't have to "lose" your place in the app when it exits, us older iPhone owners still have that PITA factor if you accidentally mis-click. With iAds, the big deal about them is they stay in-app, so your app doesn't stop running when they play, or give you an interactive whatchamacallit or whatever. So if you click the ad for whatever reason, you just close it and you're still in your app.
  

Of course, that's my guessing as I have yet to see iAds show up in any of my apps. If instead iAds show up in apps that aren't supposed to have ads, and they're forced on users, show up full screen 3 times an hour and use the "we'll interrupt you so you remember to buy our crap" model, I retract everything I said above and will start looking much harder at Android, but I seriously doubt that Apple, a company that prides itself on user experience, will do that sort of a dick move.

I'm not saying that it's a good thing, just that it's really no worse than the current state of ads in mobile apps. I won't comment on the whole "locking google out" thing though, cause no one seems to be talking about that, and I don't know much about anti-compete law (unless I'm bitching about Microsoft of course).

What would be really awesome to have on the iPhone, and I'm sure it's completely doable, as the device is just a little computer, is advanced incoming phone call management, like Google Voice. For example, I'd love to be able to set up my phone so that:

• Contacts from my "business" category are either silent or go directly to voicemail from 8-12 and 1-5 Monday to Friday
  
• Contacts from my "family" category ring regardless of ringer mode
  
• Contacts from "family" after 10pm ring twice as long as normal before going to voicemail (to let me wake up and find the phone)
  
• If calling after 11pm and the soucrce is my brother-in-law's #, immediately goes to the whiney "but I have to get up early to go to work" voicemail and he gets an electric shock in the ear...
  

Well, Mr. Buck Stops here was on the ball all right. Less than 2 days after my Apple support debacle FedEx showed up at my doorstep with my new headphones. Yay!

OK, this is going to be long and ranty I think, so I apologize in advance.

About a month ago I bought a set of "premium" apple headphones for use with my iPhone. The default iPhone headset had been the victim of being crushed under my laptop, and the microphone/clicker wasn't clicking properly. I figured why not. Two days ago the clicker and microphone on the new, premium, expensive headphones stopped working. Aside from the fact that this is the same issue as before, I was a bit perturbed. So I call the store that I got them from. First they told me I'd have to go through apple, but when pressed (as in "I bought them a month ago and they're not working, why the hell can't I just bring them back for exchange?!") they said I could bring them back, but they were out of stock. I told them to order them in, but that I would deal with Apple and if they could help me, that'd be fine.

Based on my previous Apple support experience, I figured this would be a quick 5 minute call which would end up in waiting a couple of days for boxes to be delivered to the right places, and all would be fine.

This is where my troubles started.

So for some reason my home built Apple Time Capsule started giving me problems, errors about "operation not permitted" and such, and not backing up. Being that I'm becoming more and more backup conscious lately, I let this go on for a month or two before I finally broke down and tried to find a solution.

I think the issue might have to do with that I created the file to store the backups might have been too small, and maybe my laptop's file on disk have grown too big for it. However, I'd think I would have made as much space available for backups as possible though. Ah well.

So when digging around for a solution to this, and of course I can't find the page or comment right now, I found a guy who had the same problem whose solution was to dump the SMB protocol for sharing the backup file, and who went to AFP (the native Apple File Sharing protocol). He also linked to a nice set of instructions for setting it all up at:

http://www.milkcarton.com/blog/2009/01/24/Getting+Time+Machine+To+Backup+To+A+Network+Volume.aspx

Note that I had to use the hdiutil command (see step #5) create the sparsebundle on the local computer. This was needed because for some reason the Time Machine program still refused to create the backup file initially on the remote server. I couldn't create the 450G backup file that I wanted with the normal Disk Utility.app on the mac because even though it was a growable file (ie: it wasn't creating a 450G file, but a file that can grow to 450G) it wouldn't let me created it on a hard drive without 450G available. Easy enough with the command line though.

End result was re-enabling Time Machine on my mac, pointing it to the new share (had to connect to it with command-k to connect to the appletalk share via afp://<ip address>), and letting it do it's thing. Hopefully this time it'll keep on going for a while longer :) Or at least until I break down and pay the apple tax to get a "real" Time Capsule that is.

The short answer is to look here for the instructions that finally made it all work for me. After a little "mishap" with my addressbook a few days ago (helpfully synced, empty to the net and to my phone, so nowhere had a backup) I finally figured that checking out the much touted "Time Machine" backup software from apple probably would be a good idea.

Course, being that I use my laptop 99% of the time on my lap on the couch, having a external hard drive connected would kinda suck. Also I'm not paying the apple tax to get the Time Capsule hardware when I have a plethora of unused external disks here.

So what I did:

• First step was get one, plug a 500G disk into my linux workstation.
  
• Format it as ext3 and mount it in a safe place
  
  
  
  • Find the disk's UUID
    
  • Put it in /etc/fstab
    
  
  
• Make it a share in Samba
  
• Mount it under leopard and make sure it automounts.
  
• Follow the instructions here to tell Leopard to allow unsupported mounts (the defaults write... command) and test.
  
• In my case it failed, and I got the "backup disk could not be created" error, so I followed the rest of the instructions to create the sparse image and copy it to the samba share.
  
• Test again, correct typeos.
  
• Run the Time Machine config to select the share. Wait for the long 'processing' to finish.
  
• Success!
  
• Run backup.
  

Normally I'm not a huge fanboy, and I try (no, really, I do) not to turn into an Apple Fanboy (or a Linux Fanboy), at least to too extreme an extreme.

However, one thing I noticed a bit ago that I thought I should mention, at least in the "this is where Apple wins" department.... I opened up the iWork '08 spreadsheet program, Numbers and was asked to choose a template. For shits and giggles I selected "Budget" and was presented with this default document:

(Clicky Clicky for a bigger image)

So first of all it's beautifully setup, second of all it's functional, and third, it's well thought out. The sections and definitions make sense, it deals with the standard cases for a normal household budget. Also it allows you to relatively easily figure it out, giving very low barrier to entry by allowing the user to just plug numbers in to match your own particular circumstance. Oh, and this is probably the least colorful and "fun" of the templates that you're presented with.

Does excel have anything like this? I really don't like railing on Microsoft but when you start up excel you get an empty spreadsheet at worst, and a list of boring stock templates (if I remember right, no copy of Excel around here right now).

It's this sort of thing that creates the Apple fanboys, and keeps them. The non-fanboys discount this sort of thing with "blah blah not industry standard software, blah blah too expensive blah blah pay Steve Jobs $200 every year for updates blah blah", but someone (like me) who is not a fanboy and who has the opportunity to experience "the cult of mac"... it blew me away.

Apple somehow was able to make spreadsheets fun. Fun! Spreadsheets!! Me and Firefly sat down and started plugging in our own numbers and watching the graphs go up and down and it was fun! WTF!? It's easy to talk about these things and discount them, but it's really weird when it actually happens.

Fanboy mode off.

So I finally got off the phone with Rogers and have a bit of information that might help my fellow Canadians with navigating the tricky waters that is figuring out WTF Rogers is doing with their plans. I have a feeling that they might not be so much evil as just too big and complex to appear anything but that.

First of all huge thanks to Pat in the customer service office for dealing with me and my stupid questions.

What I learned about the plans

• You don't have to put a iPhone plan on an iPhone, you can put any voice and/or data package onto the iPhone when you purchase it. The only stipulation is that the plan is current, so if you're grandfathered in with a plan that's no longer around, sucks to be you.
• While your voice plan may not be current and therefor not transferable to an iPhone, your addons (ie: the $11 bundle for voicemail/callerID/etc) may be. So if you have a bundle for addons now you may not need to get a new one.
• If you don't get one of the iPhone plans and want voicemail, you can get either normal voicemail or the visual voicemail, you don't need both. If you go for the visual voice mail as an a la carte item it's $8.
• The extras on a voice / data / extras a la carte plan are:
  
• • $6.95 "access fee" (*cough* money grab)
  • $0.50 911 fee
• If you're looking for other discounts, you can pull the "I've been a loyal Rogers customer since the '90s, what can you do for me, look, I'm committing to a 3 year plan with you!" card, they do have flexibility in the plan costs, but not the phone costs (unsurprising as Apple traditionally has given no flexibility in pricing of their hardware). It sounded like it was up to the discretion of the person you were dealing with, and your own payment history, etc. My thanks to Pat who was able to do something for me here without me committing to anything or having anything being contingent on getting a phone.
• Your eligibility for getting an iphone at the $199 or $299 price is if you haven't bought a new phone in the last year.
• The 60GB Data plan can be added on to any "vision" phone, ie: any iPhone or smartphone, but not some random POS normal phone.

Here are some "gotchas"

• If your voice plan is $30 or less they charge an extra $50 for the phone. So if you're going for the 250 minute voice plan for $30 you pay $249 for the 8G iPhone instead of $199. This I call horse-shit.
• If your voice plan is $30 or less they charge an extra $50 for the phone. So if you're going for the 250 minute voice plan for $30 you pay $249 for the 8G iPhone instead of $199. This I call horse-shit also.
  
• Visual voice mail is something that is a double edged sword, and not the kind where one edge is good and one is bad, in this case both are bad....
  • It's a separate charge from the data ($8)
  • It uses data transfer
  • It uses minutes
  • ... so a triple edged sword if you think about it!
• If you go with a higher plan than you need for voice or data you can change it after the fact (and still within your contract), but if you downgrade you may (she wasn't sure of this) pay a $50 downgrade fee. So if you get the 6G data package and find out after a few months you're only using 100mb a month, you can move to a lower data plan, but you pay. Oh, and if you drop a data plan altogether you pay as well. This is unsurprising of course.

• Make sure your new iPhone is working before you leave the store
• Make sure your new iPhone is working before you leave the store
  
• Pat reiterated several times (to make sure I got it through my thick skull) that if you buy your phone (at a rogers store of course) and the salesguy screws up somehow while activating it and bricks it, and you leave the store, it's now your responsibility and you get to take it to apple to send it away to fix it, or whatever. However it's bricked and you're still in the store and find this out, they can just put it aside and get a new one for you. If you leave the store and find out after that it's not working, "sucks to be you".

What I forgot to ask about was things like

• Is there a cap in data overages?
• How is the 3G coverage in the Valley?
• How can I tell how much data you're using as the month goes on?
• Does the plan I was looking at have texting in it as well (d'oh! talked about this but forgot to find out about it on the last plan we talked about!)

Even with all my conversation I still couldn't find on the website where they had the details of some of the plans that I was looking at, so if you are really wanting something specific, it's probably best to call in. Oh, and when you do, be nice, they are finding out about this stuff after we are it seems (though they know the inner details of the non-iPhone plans way better). iPhone in Canada has some info too.

Hopefully this'll help someone out there figure this stuff out, it at least got some of my questions answered. Now at least if/when I get one I can go to the guy and say I want plan X, with options Y, Z and Q, here's the SKU for it, and hopefully speed things up.

Conclusion: 8.5/10

I got into work today, plugged in my MacBook Pro to power, USB keyboard/mouse, network cable, and secondary display.... wait a minute, second display is still in power saving mode, that's odd.

OK, reboot. Nothing. Unplug, replug. Nothing. Troubleshoot by checking to see if the monitor works with another computer (it does), if the computer can output to a different DVI monitor (it could), and if a different DVI-to-VGA dongle worked (it didn't).

Bleah. I guess this is why $work got the AppleCare plan for me though, so I called up the number....

First of all, up to the part when you get on hold was great. There was none of the horrible voice-recognition systems that I've learned to despise and there were only three buttons to hit to get to where I wanted to be (1 for english, 1 for support, and 3 for laptops). However, once I got into the queue and waited for the five or so minutes they predicted the wait time would be, it rang, then I got nothing. After waiting for a couple of minutes with no hold music and no voice on the other end, I rang up and redialed.

The second time through I found that you could hit the number options before the full set of options has completed, bonus points for that. This time after the five minutes listening to elevator music I did actually get to talk to a real person (Stacy, who didn't sound like she was a call center in Bangladesh or some similar place).

Other than a bit of confusion as I had switched out the monitor that wasn't working for another monitor that also wasn't working (she thought that I meant that the old monitor worked and the new one didn't), and some standard troubleshooting which I had already done, then a couple of minutes more on hold while she consulted co-workers, she got me to do the vulcan neck pinch reboot (command-option power on then hold down P and R while standing on one leg at sunset of a full moon while the eclipse is in the northern hemisphere) to reset the PRAM. Voila, problem solved.

Pros

• Got the problem fixed (most important thing)
  
• Speaker had english as a first language
  
• Only 3 buttons to get to wait on hold
  
• Can hit buttons before voice finishes speaking
  
• No voice recognition software
  

• Was disconnected / frozen randomly on first call
  
• Wait time of 5 minutes each time (though these days that's still pretty low
  
• Sucks that the problem happened in the first place!
  

All in all a pretty good experience