2ndfriday

[2ndfriday]

Resetting my Garmin nüvi 3597

Even though I have moved into a vehicle which has a built in GPS, I still find having my Garmin useful. And since its in good working order and has lifetime map updates, no reason to not continue using it!

However, on the last few rounds of updates, it kept telling me that it didn’t have enough room to update my full map. I checked the space and sure enough it did not have much space, so I scoured the forums to figure out what I could clean-up on my nüvi to get the space back to do updates. I also threw in a spare micro-SD card I had. Unfortunately it was only 2 GB, so not near enough room to help out (and apparently the device can’t span file systems with the map data).

I tried various user resets, and clearing what little data I had in /map to begin with. No joy.

Finally on a reset of user data, I decided to play around with from of the other settings exposed on the reset screen. That finally allowed me to load the nuvi and the full file systems including files hidden from view.

It turns out what was taking up space on my device had nothing to do with Garmin or maps. The problem was what happened when it had been connected previously on my MacBook.

Turns out OSX it all its assumptions decided to pull all the hidden “._<crap>” folders all over the place and specifically in the Garmin folder itself. So the ._spotlight, ._trash, etc... were the ones hogging space. Once I cleared all those out and restarted, I had loads of space back, more than enough to update my maps.

System Reset

There are a number of posts, videos, and articles out there about how to reset the user data on a Garmin. A lot are wrong or incomplete. There are two methods you can do. The first is the method you want to do if you want a simple user data reset, or more importantly to get into the settings so you can really see the file system and data on your nüvi.

Method 1

Start up your nüvi.

Go to the map screen and touch the speedometer display.

When that screen comes up, touch and hold the compass direction.

This will put you into a ‘developer’ settings mode.

The first option listed is to clear user data, you can do that if you want to reset your user data.

Going further to expose all the data on your nüvi, follow these steps;

Scroll down and select “MTP Settings”

Change those settings from “Auto Detect” to “Mass Storage”

Navigate back and select “RWFS Settings” (this is for Read, Write, File System).

Change that to Show All.

Exit out of your settings and plug the nüvi back into your computer.

From here you can see all of the data on your  nüvi  and clean it up. Of course make sure you’ve backed up your device before doing anything.

Method 2

This method won’t get you to the settings to display all the files , but it will reset your user data. This method one person reported needing to do before following the above method would work on a unit he purchased second hand.

First, turn off your nüvi, not just standby mode. Then boot your device keeping your thumb in the bottom right corner on the device screen. Don’t let up. It will boot up into a system mode where it will eventually (it takes a while!!!) ask you if you want to erase all user data. Answer yes or no and reboot.

From here you should be able to get into the settings with Method 1, to do anything else you want.

Happy Travels!

[2ndfriday]

2nd Friday Issue #3, 2017

As always lately, it seems getting something out the door for me for this is a bit of a challenge.

Windows 10 — Its about time!

I discovered this feature while I was updating some settings around my taskbar in Windows 10. You can now make PowerShell the default instead of just a command prompt!

Microsoft has been adding and expanding PowerShell for years, but even I still default to command prompt for a lot of things. Not so much out of need as out of habit.

Window 95 Startup Sound

Microsoft has been around for 42 years this Month (April). Hard to believe in thinking about it being that long. One of the things that popped up was bout the Windows 95 Startup sound (http://mentalfloss.com/article/50824/creating-windows-95-startup-sound). It is an iconic sound. What I didn’t know previously is who created the sound. Brian Eno, is a 6-time Grammy award winning composer who created the sound. Unless you listen to a lot of “Ambient” music (and know who the artists are that compose that music) you’ve probably never heard of him before. I know I hadn’t.

Bonus, he composed the sound on a Mac. And according to an interview with him had never used a PC before. You can check out this video (All Windows Startup And Shutdown Sounds.wmv) or this one (All Windows Sounds | Windows 1.0 — Windows 10) if you want to roll through all the Windows startup sounds.

[2ndfriday]

2nd Friday Issue #2 2017

Food, Glorious Food! There are two new things I’ve tried over the past few weeks, and I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without doing them sooner. Both of these require a little prep and then a “set it and forget it” method.

First up, making my own beef jerky. We’ve had a food dehydrator for some time. And have used it for making banana chips, apple chips, ‘sun’ dried tomatoes, and drying herbs from our garden.

What I hadn’t done until this past weekend was make my own jerky. Turns out this is extremely easy to do. Basically you can take a cut a meat, trim off fat (reduces spoilage), slice it thin and then marinate it before placing it onto the dehydrator for a few hours (for me 5 hours did the trick).

For me I started basically with a simple Worchester and Soy marinade, keeping it simple to start before going for more creative flavors. It came out great — and I didn’t worry about a great cut of meat.

The other method I discovered is for making caramelized onions. We use them for all kinds of dishes that we make. I’ve made them on the stove top with my cast iron. Whether small or large batch, to do it right just takes time to get there. I’ve found a great new way to cheat. It takes longer time overall, but requires gobs less work on your part.

They key is using your slow cooker (in my case it’s a combo slow cooker, pressure cooker, but I use the slow cooker low setting). Slice the onions, season and oil the same way you normally would. Instead of putting them on the stove, put them in the slow cooker and let them go on low for a few hours. The recipes I had seen online talked about having to do it for 10 hours. For me, it took only 5 hours to do get them to a state I liked. If you want, towards the end, the last hour or so remove the lid to help reduce some of the liquid.

I’ll need to do this again to dialed in on the time. For me, my slow/pressure cooker has a ‘brown’ function which I used (accidentally) when prepping this the first time. And it likely gave my onions a bit of a head start. Overall, you just put them in and walk away, checking on them every few hours.

This is the way I’m going to do onions for the rest of my life. Two methods I just can’t believe I haven’t tried already! OneNote vs. Evernote For business use, I’ve been a OneNote user for years. It is my go-to note taking for use in my business life. For personal electronic note taking, I’ve used various solutions over the years — starting with Lotus Notes Organizer, a great personal organizer for its time! I have even played with early incarnations of tablets an e-ink, such as the NEC Windows Tablet. The NEC device was a good idea, but was just ahead of what technology could deliver at the time in terms of experience.

Part of my issue with pen devices for notetaking is that my handwriting is just downright atrocious. Whether electronic or on paper, having to take notes by hand — and being readable by me or anyone else in the future — is a challenge. The keyboard is very much my friend! [And as always, credit to my mother for having me take a keyboarding class in high school so I can type with some speed and efficiency.]

Note: While there may be many non-Microsoft centric organizations in the world, for me Windows as the corporate desktop device — tablet or laptop — has always been the case and will be that way for the foreseeable future. That being the case, there really isn’t any other tool for my corporate use besides OneNote for note taking electronically. So the focus here is personal use and not meant to be an exhaustive review of electronic notebook tools in the market place.

Personally I’ve been using Evernote for a few years now. That product has been the right price (free!) with the right level of convenience (web clipper to grab articles and available on all my devices). And it has been pretty solid for my personal use. There are features I like about both tools, and features in both which annoy me.

With my use of my Windows Surface, I opted to get an Office 365 subscription last year. Mainly for the storage, but also for access to Office features, Groove and other features, in party tying into Xbox also. Recently I figured I would give OneNote more of a try for personal use (the main driver was I finally got my Surface fixed and was back to using that full-time).

Rather than start from scratch, I used the import tool from Microsoft which allowed me to import my years of notes from Evernote right into OneNote. That worked really well and pulled in all the data seamlessly. You even have a few options on how to import.

After the import, one thing became apparent. In Evernote I was more ‘notebook’ organized and had way more notebooks. In OneNote I tend to be more ‘section’ than notebook focused, so having so many notebooks is a bit different — and I don’t know that I like that.

With the number of notebooks in OneNote to get them on your machine you have to open each one, until you do it is not there and not synced. Whereas in Evernote they are all there and available. I’ve also seen some instability in OneNote, I think might be due to the number of notebooks. I’ll have to do more testing with the application to confirm.

From a formatting perspective, OneNote has always done a bit better than Evernote with straight copy and paste from a web page. Though with the WebClipper add-in for Evernote, it helps to really overcome that issue. Formatting in Evernote has always been one item that has bugged me. I don’t do a lot of formatting, since this is for notes and not published documents. But Evernote is overall weaker, especially in its table controls.

Evernote has better control or use of additional metadata, like #tags and the ability to see and edit metadata like modified date and time, or source URL. OneNote does not really make use of tags at all (other than on import as a provision for a way to import your data). And getting to that data is OneNote is a lot harder.

One area which Evernote handles better is sorting of notes by modified and created date. While I like how it keeps notes at the top based on edit date, I have had to do some work when wanting to have notes put in chronological order by created date. It would be nice if Evernote supported the ability to pick either created or modified and not just assume modified. Mainly for notebooks — like a journal — which are typically handled chronologically. But in OneNote, it’s a bit harder to manage and order notes that way (especially if you wanted to go and put pages in that are older).

Overall I think I’ll probably stay moving forward with OneNote and may ditch Evernote, but it will take some more time and burn in to see where I stand. I haven’t had a chance to test the web clipping actions for OneNote and I think any tool like this take some time to really kick the tires.

OneDrive and Dropbox make it easier to manage data organization which is shared, but Google Drive doesn’t. I work on our local PTA organization and they leverage Google Drive for document sharing. Overall, hot mess would be an understatement for collaboration on that data.

While moving to bundle more services into file storage there needs to be an improvement in controls provided by these services around shared or collaborative information.

Two key areas these services should improve are improved data control and integration across services. For improved data control, there needs to be more granular controls and notification on when data is changed and what people can change. Overall for collaboration you need versioning and also the ability to limit who can delete data. This is especially important when you have people who are not very technical that are leveraging a service which is backed by corporate enterprise support services.

The other area of improvement is in integration across these services. Dropbox, Box, Google, Microsoft, Amazon has my data strewn throughout them in different ways. There is no way for me to manage my data centrally to know where and how this is all stored. Even if I settled on one service for all my data, I still need to interact with groups who may chose to use different services for collaboration.

I am technical, and I find it hard to manage and get to my data across services. Those who aren’t as technical struggle even more — and are more apt to make mistakes like deleting a lot of data, not realizing the impact of their actions. If these providers plan to grow their consumer, company based business they need to move forward more quickly to the level of service corporate enterprises have had for some time. A wishl ist feature for me would be to have a client on my computer which provides access to these online file services as more of a “mapped drive” so that I could see and interact with the data like a file system, but not actually replicate it down to my computer, unless I want to have that data offline. I have access to more data through these services then I have space for on my computer. But they all function in the same way, replicate the data down to your computer. Converged Services One of things which brought me back to trying OneNote for personal use was changes to a number of different cloud based services. Evernote has dialed back its free services considerably, limiting the number of devices you have use at any one time. Dropbox and other services have slowly folded features into its premium services away from its free tiers. Bigger companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft have followed suit. And they have to, no one can sustain a ‘free’ business model.

The technology landscape is littered with companies that have good or great ideas but an unsustainable business plan.

It may be a way to start and build a base and demand for your idea, but you eventually have to move into some form of charging for your services. I’ve been using various file services for a while (mainly Dropbox, somewhat with Google drive, and more recently OneDrive). I pay for all three services, in varying degrees. I also leverage note taking (Evernote and OneNote), online ‘office’ components — word, excel, etc… (via Google and Microsoft) and time management (Cozi). The main drivers for me is not so much collaboration, but more for making sure my key data is backed up. At least until recently. With some of the collaboration I do is on our EAC (Environmental Advisory Committee) and that has been via email and Dropbox. Its been in place for a number of years, having taken the data provided by the previous chair and moving it there so that everyone on the committee could have access and add to the data. It has worked well, but relied on the assumption of people not doing dumb things. Which has worked well for several years. But these are people who are not technical in nature (at least not with computers). So I’ve had problems a few times where someone deleted something and I had to go in and undelete the files and put them back.

Dropbox keeps deleted data for 30 days. Which seems like a reasonable period of time. But if your organization decides to take off the months of December and January from meeting, you can easily go 30 days without looking at what is stored out there. And Dropbox failed to notify me that data was changed — deleted in this case — wholesale from the shared EAC folder. We’ve now lost several years’ worth of article history. I can get some of the data back through emails and such, but it’s a painful process.

While my data is backed up to a degree, it is also dispersed across multiple services with varying levels of protection and controls. Onetastic — OneNote Add-In As part of my foray into using OneNote for personal use again, I stumbled across this add-in for OneNote. This add-in is likely going to be the thing which pushes me over the edge into full-blown OneNote use personally. I’ve been using it for work and personal use. It works on OneNote 2010 and higher versions. It basically offers macro based ability to add features into OneNote to take all kinds of actions. I don’t know how long this has been available, but so far I am finding it friggin’ awesome.

There are hundreds of macros already built that you can pull down. Or you can write your own. It is easy to inspect any macro to see what it does, so you can take an existing one and build from that and not just from scratch. I’ve used a few such as page sorting, calendar creation, table of contents. One of the other great functions with the add-in is the calendar view. It allows you to pull up a calendar and lists out all the notes based on when they are created. So if you need to look for something from a specific day, it gives you a very easy way to do that.

[2ndfriday]

2nd Friday, Issue #1, 2017

Happy New Year! 

Gear for the Cyclist

Did Santa not get everything on your list? Looking to gear up to be better prepared for getting out on your bike this season? This article from B&H on the Bike Gear they offer is a good start. Two stand outs for me are the Garmin Varia, which beyond the flashing lights leverages radar to warn about cars coming up from behind. The other is the MiniWing Camile bike computer which can take video as well as providing a very clean elegant cycle computer, which of course can sync with your phone. 

Password Managers Part 2

In a previous post I had written about getting on with a different password manager. I got some feedback from a friend Chris, on LastPass. He’s been using it for over a year and a half and it really works for him across all his devices, systems and browsers. It is even linked with Google 2 factor authentication for improved security. 

  I have personally come across Enpass, which I am starting to try out now. I am just getting into it, so I will have more to report later. While it doesn’t have “family” features I would like, it does have the ability to keep the database in sync across whatever cloud service you would like, and it doesn’t require a subscription. The desktop client for it is free, but the mobile device versions are $10 per platform. 

  Pulsepoint

An interesting use of mobile apps and 911 in your area. Our county recently signed up for these services. The application ties into 911 services so that when they get a call for someone in cardiac distress it sends an alert out through the PulsePoint app so that people who are trained and nearby the event get the alert and can respond more quickly than emergency services. It also provides information on nearby AED locations. A very short update this time. Have a great weekend!

[2ndfriday]

2nd Friday, Issue #11 - Winter is coming!

Well, its not coming for a quite a while given HBO’s schedule for GoT, but Happy Holidays!  I’ve managed to get this one out a lot closer to 2nd Friday than last time! 

Books & Comics

’80’s themed science fiction

I have some book recommendations this month. First up is “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline. Published in 2011, it had been on my list to read for a while. There a few books which I pick up that I absolutely cannot put down. This was one of those books. Once I started I was berating myself for not having read it sooner. Its a dystopian science fiction novel, set in the somewhat near future and crosses between the real-world and a virtual universe. It centers around a young protagonist looking to solve a game set forth by the creator of the online universe after his death. For anyone who is a fan of anything ‘80s - movies, TV, D&D, video games - this book is replete with lots of references.

From what I know, Spielberg has the rights to the book and its been in production for a while. Given the sheer volume of reference to TV, music, movies, games, etc… in the book, just clearing getting all the rights to be able to get them in the movie is its own herculean task. I cannot wait to see this come to life in a movie. Since that is likely still far away, i recommend picking this book up in the meantime. 

Chew on this in comics

In the comic realm, I have been reading the series “Chew” for a while. The series just wrapped up in November, and I am waiting for the last TP (trade paperback) to come up to finish the series. 

For those not necessarily into comics, they are published and republished in several ways. First generally in a monthly (or some other timeframe) format as a paper comic. Then after a number of the comic series has been published, they are bundled up in a “TP” or trade paperback from. These will generally be anywhere from 6-12 issues together in a format and either be in soft or hardcover format. The hardcover format being of a more “special” format and include additional features such as alternate covers, story process, character background, etc… After that, a series can be produced in a even bigger collection such as a volume or compendium. And those are either soft or hard cover with special editions and such. This of course offers fans ways to collect more about their favorite comic, but the soft-cover TP’s and compendiums provide new readers an opportunity to catch up or start a series they may not have caught when it was first published. It generally a cheaper way to give a series a good try to decide if its something you want to get into. For me I stumbled upon the series in TP form and have just been reading in that format.

  But back to the “Chew" itself. It centers around Tony Chu, who is a detective with a secret power. He is a cibopathic, meaning whatever he eats gives him physic impressions of whatever he eats. This makes him a great detective, but very weird. The only food he can eat and not get impressions from are beets. Tony’s world gets him pulled into working for the FDA, the most powerful organization in the US following a post-chicken epidemic which sees all chickens banned in the US. It brings him into contact with a host of many other characters good and bad with all kinds of special food-based powers. It is a tremendously fun comic to read. Pick up the first TP and give it a try. 

  The series is being turned into an animated movie, with Steven Yeun, of Walking Dead fame, voicing the character of Tony Chu. Along with David Tennant (Dr. Who) as his partner Mason Savoy, and Felicia Day as his love interest, Amelia. Apparently Tennant in the role was originally for Robin Williams. Back to Business

In business, specifically IT, I recommend reading “Beyond Blame”. The book is not a long read, and presents through a series of stories different concepts, ideas and approaches to root cause analysis, IT operations postmortems, etc… While some of the concepts may seem to some of us  not new, there is something to be learned here.

2017 Reading

The end of the year is a few weeks away. Did you do a reading challenge this year? How are you doing? Do you have any good reads you want to share? Even if you didn’t do it this year, give it a try for next year. Head over to Goodreads and start building your collection for a 2017 Reading Challenge. I am on target to meet my challenge goal of 35 books this year, it’ll be close but I’ll get it in. You can head over to my page on Goodreads to see what I am reading, and what I am adding to my shelves. I am regularly culling from different sources to add books to read to my queue. Every year I participate in a reading challenge and have been working to up the number of books I read each year. 

  There are two keys to being able to read more with a busy work and personal life (and fitting in the gobs of TV that I consume!). First, always have a few books going at a time. I was hesitant to do this at first, thinking I would not be able to manage having a few books going at a time. But it makes it easier to be able to increase the amount that you can read. Which leads to my second key, always have a book on hand. The only way to do that is to have a few books going at a time. 

For me, I mix both physical and electronic books. I still buy a decent number of physical books each year, but year on year I am more selective about what those books are. Early on of course technical books were the first to go and stay digital. I don’t need stacks of those taking up space, especially with the path of how quickly they can become outdated. After that, most books now which don’t have a lot of visual elements I get as eBooks. Getting eBooks in the cloud, along with physical books ensures you can always have a book on hand to read no matter where you are. 

Want to fill your electronic book stocking with material for 2017? Definitely go to Goodreads, but also check out BookBub, HumbleBundle and StoryBundle to get some great deals. 

Amazon vs. Everyone Else

In books at least, I completely avoid buying eBooks from Amazon. This includes their eReaders. We still buy *a lot* of stuff from Amazon, they make a lot of thing very easy to do, and generally at a reasonable price, especially with Prime. However, for eBooks and magazines you are locked in. They don’t make it easy to keep your reading well synced across devices. You have to use their app or devices and everything is in their format. 

I’ve written about Kobo as an alternative to Amazon a while ago. It is still my go-to eReader even with having to plug it into a computer to transfer books. Its a solid reader, works well, great power and water resistant. I leverage Google Books to store all of my books and I make most of my eBook purchases through them. Mainly because it allows me to download epub versions of books that I can load up and take anywhere. I also use other sites like O’Reilly, HumbleBundle, and Google to be able to get DRM free versions of books over Amazon. 

  Google Books also allows you to upload your eBooks (up to 50 MB), and those are then available across all of your devices. Between that and my Kobo, I have a great selection of books on hand. For books larger than 50 MB (generally the more visual books - like travel, Maker’s volumes, comics, etc..) I leverage DropBox to make them available on my devices. 

  While some of what Amazon is putting out for technology is interesting, they are more and more becoming ‘control freaks’ and really pushing down any source of content which is not their own and really driving you to be nothing but Amazon. Which of course from their perspective I understand to a degree. However, from a consumer perspective this isn’t entirely good. Much like looking at only one source for your news, you tend to start to get a very skewed view of the world. 

  Book Bungie

One last item in books. For keeping your physical books book-marked while you read them, Levenger has re-released their book bungee. They had made a version previously which I loved and have a number of them through-out my house and have given as gifts. They had stopped making them a while back and I could not find anything that really worked as well as their bungee. I tried many different ones but that all failed in  form and functionality. I am very glad to see them brought back. I’ll have more on my holiday list! 

TechnologyR.I.P. Circus Ponies

Circus Ponies were the makers of a popular Notebook app on the Mac. It had been around for a long time and was an application I used heavily before Microsoft OneNote and Evernote and being able to keep everything in the cloud. I recently had to fire it back up to find some notes I thought I had transferred over to Evernote, but had not. I fired the app back up and pulled up several of my old notebooks - it still works great, just missing some of the cloud features that the other apps have adopted. I always liked the interface as it was able to keep a form much more to a physical notebook with its forms and tabs. It had a little bit of fun which Evernote and OneNote don’t have. 

  My Tech Habits

I haven’t been writing about tech as much this past year in part because my tech consumption has leveled off. I keep looking at new tech and trends going on, but overall I not a lot has jumped out as really being something to dive into. In part due to not having as much time, but also because I’ve focused more on honing what I have and using what is already in my technology bag of holding. We’ll see what comes in 2017. 

Getting My Groove Back

I have re-discovered Microsoft Groove. Not the half-assed collaboration tool they bought years ago, but their overhauled music app. Microsoft has been on a pretty good kick with turning out apps for non-windows machines & devices. One of those is Groove its music app. Using OneDrive, since I have 1TB of space up there, i uploaded my entire music collection and now via IOS, Android, PC, Web and Xbox (presenting my music via Xbox was my main driver) for giving it a try. I can play my music collection anywhere. 

  Like other Apps & Services (Google Music, Amazon Music) you can of course subscribe to their music service, but also store your own music in the cloud. I use Amazon, Pandora and Google apps on my devices, but they all seem lacking really have some flexibility and usability for my own music collection. Groove seems to take a jump ahead of them in having a decent way to play and sort through your music across device platforms (web, phone, console) which I really like. Its becoming my goto over my other music apps. 

Holiday Shopping

A few holiday shopping ideas. Geek and Sundry has several lists for the geek, gamer, nerd in your life you may want to check out. One of the items they recommend is from Sabre Forge. They may a large variety of high quality light sabers. Do you need a light saber? No. Do you want one? Absolutely. 

I’ve been doing more (non-video) gaming lately. Pandemic is a great game, along with Unexploded Cow, Cards Against Humanity, to name a few. Over at Broken Token, they make some very nice wooden storage boxes for your games. They have generic boxes you can get for game storage, as well as designs for specific games like Pandemic, which also handle the expansion packs you can get for the game so you can store everything together. Have a great holiday season!

[2ndfriday]

2nd Friday Tech Spotlight, issue #1, volume #6

Password Managers I have been a fan of 1Password for quite a while. It allows me to keep my important information secure, but also share it between my devices and with my spouse. I’ve been using their desktop and mobile app for some time and hadn’t really been looking at updating or getting a new password manager until recently. I started checking out the landscape of password managers. The main reason was I wanted to expand to including my parents, or being able to share a certain group of password with them (or really have them share with me so that it is easier to provide remote tech support!). 

  My current setup was using 2 password files shared via Dropbox. One had our ‘family’ or ‘common’ information shared between my wife and I. The other was the passwords just for me. Mainly just to keep the stuff she doesn’t really care about uncluttered - not that I’m keeping secrets :). 

The ones which I looked at, including 1Password have all gone “cloud” and “subscription” based. The majority of apps have gone that way, precious few good ones have not. I understand why companies are doing that and it only somewhat irks me still. The bigger issue is that across all of these applications - which advertise security of their products - is that you are inevitably tied to their cloud solution and not able to select how or where you want to store your secure information to be accessible across devices. And you have to trust that they don’t have a back door to your stuff. 

1Password is one of few which understood and offered a concept of “family” plan which makes it enticing to sign up for, but I am not sold yet. 

  There was one which I found that allowed you that flexibility, even open source, however it was complex to use and had a horrible interface. Not something that I could get my significant other or family members to use. 

I would be OK with paying a subscription for password management software, but when it comes to security I want to really know that my stuff is encrypted in way even my cloud provider doesn’t know how to get into. Having software whose basis is securing your stuff basically say “oh just trust us, we’ll keep it secure” is terrible. 

  If anyone has any suggestions, let me know!

ProfessionalismThis is something I have been thinking on a lot lately. Its something I was taught when I was going to college. At the time they didn’t brand it as such, but they taught it not just in their business curriculum but in other majors such as nursing. They have since taken on and used professionalism and what they teach around that as a banner for one of the key standouts for the college. 

  I’ve been an engaged alumni and really excited by the growth and change the York College has gone through. Outside of the college what I notice in my professional life, regardless of business, is that there has been an overall decline in professionalism and what that means. Companies strive to ‘do more with less’. What this doesn’t seem to translate to is actually getting a company, and your employees to actually be able to do more with less. I see cutbacks in company employees, moves to outsource and overall decrease costs without being able to provide compensation by getting employees the real solutions they need to be more efficient so they can ‘do more with less’. I am not saying outsourcing is bad. Done well, it can work and help in a company. But in doing so you have to ensure you have a way to maintain key knowledge and historical knowledge within the company. But I am not really talking about those bigger issues with a company. 

What I am talking is professionalism at a personal level. Being a person who doesn’t just do the bare minimum of what is expected, or just only does what is asked. Professionalism to me is pursuing continuing education and knowledge in your immediate area of expertise but also in those areas that your work touches around you. Professionalism is being able to not just do your job, but to also understand that your job has a broader context and purpose and to understand that broader purpose and context. Being able to take what you are doing in your job and being able to look outside of that job and look at it from the perspective of the other professionals you interact with, really looking at what you do from their perspective. 

My job is technical, I work in IT. But the majority of my job is far from technical. It is not simply because I am senior manager handling a team of contracted resources across multiple technologies. The majority of my job is communication. You definitely need people with technical competence to do the work.  However, if all you have is technical people or people who look only at the job they are asked to do, you more often than not will struggle and fail. Most times that failure won’t be big or spectacular, it instead will be more long grinding pain and "death by a thousand cuts". 

At a personal level, professionalism and being able to look outside yourself and the bigger picture to become a better employee, coworker, manager can suffer for a number of reasons. The biggest of course is not having time. If you are understaffed and overworked, it can be very very hard to be able to find the time to pick your head up to pause and look at the bigger picture. Or to be engaged in all the meetings and actually taking time out to understand what your coworkers are talking about when you’ve got so much to get done of your own! 

So what am I asking you to do? Understand that all of the work you have to get done will still be there tomorrow and the day after that, but you need to absolutely carve out time for the bigger picture and being able to look outside of your job. Look at the people/groups/departments you engage with on a regular basis and see how they see you - not you personally - but the “you” of the services and value you provide in your job. Understanding how others see your role, especially those who engage you as a customer (whether its a true outside customer, or within your company) you can begin to understand and relate to them and how you can improve the services that you provide. 

  When you are meeting with other teams or engaged in projects, take the time out to not only listen (not just stop multi-tasking!) and try and understand the perspective of where their questions are coming from and the view they might have. Don’t focus on whether they are asking the right question or that they are not understand what you are trying to tell them. Focus on their view of why they might be asking what they are asking or frustrated with some process or other issue they can’t seem to understand is a road block to doing what they need.

The biggest benefit you can provide, especially as someone technical, is being able to to look at things outside of the technical role of your job to understand the other side. Most of what I do isn’t technical, its being able to understand how to translate the technical to the semi-technical to the non-technical to get everyone on the same page. And the reverse path is the same, taking the non-technical to the semi-technical to the technical. Without being to facilitate that translation on projects and within even your own teams, you will continue to be frustrated and hate the position you are in. 

Its a skill which isn’t easy to pick up, especially for technical people (we by our nature love the technical and thrive in it no matter what the particular ‘technical’ is for us) but it is an essential skill to start working on if you want to be happier and more satisfied in what you do every day. The overworked and understaffed part is not going to go away any time soon. Understand that and figure out your way to be OK with that and start to pick up this skill. 

  In order to have time to start to pick up this skill, it requires some letting go, but it also requires that you pick up some trusted system of time and task management. I personally subscribe to GTD methodology. Pick whatever works for you, but take the time out to truly put that trusted system in place, and start by blocking time on your calendar to think about the bigger picture items. And make that a regular habit in your routine to do. Your work will still be there if you put it off for an hour or two each week. There are few items which are truly critical every week that you can afford to start carving out this time for yourself. 

Qubes I listened to a good podcast from O’Reilly on their security channel about ‘Modern server hardening for the cloud’, some good information on servers and security in the cloud, but what got my attention even more was when they mentioned Qubes. Built from Linux it allows for the best desktop virtualization, isolation and security. It allows you to be able to perform tasks securely side by side. Usually efforts to provide good security to end users ends up with a complicated and hard to understand effort 

The real problem with traffic i’ve posted before on videos from CGP Grey. His latest video is on traffic, why we have it and the solution. Worth a 5 minute watch! 

Kevin Bacon I like Kevin Bacon, not just as an actor, but as someone who ‘gets’ himself and seems to enjoy life all around. He’s down a few comedy bits recently which I thought were pretty funny. He did a spoof commercial spot with James Corden on “Bacon Cologne by Kevin Bacon" 

[2ndfriday]

2nd Friday Tech Spotlight, issue #1, volume #5

Welcome to another  2nd Friday update! I hope everyone is enjoying the summer.

Tech Storage/Travel Cases

There are a lot of different cable/tech storage and travel cases for you to supposedly keep your cables organized  and easy for traveling. I travel a fair bit and have tried a number of cable storage cases for both being able to keep cables, chargers, and such easily reachable or easy to find.

Whether for home use and travel, given my technology bent I have always been frustrated with all of the cases and ultimately unhappy with them. Despite how nice, easy or simple the product pictures present how well they can keep you organized - I have never ever come close to how I use those cases. I’ve never had that magic mix of cables for each each of these solutions seems to be specially designed for in the pictures.

On my current trip, I was not only traveling with my immediate family but my parents as well. Between us we all were traveling with a mobile device and tablet internationally. In addition I travel with a DSLR camera, which includes a spare battery. And of love an additional phone for work. I typically only travel with a laptop now for work, if I am not traveling for work I leave the laptop at home. If I really need to be in front of a computer I have easy and free enough access for what I need at whatever hotel I am staying.

I used to travel more with a laptop for personal travel, but that was mainly because I relied more heavily on a camera and wanted to get stuff uploaded and posted more regularly. With the strength in current mobile technology and broader Wi-Fi connectivity locally, I use my mobile camera for all the ‘as i go’ posting and save the camera picture posting for when I get back from a trip.

Lately I had simply been traveling with a small drawstring sack to keep all my cables, plugs, headphones. So I end up digging through the bag to find the cable I need. For this current trip, I’ve gone with something a bit different. Its an Eagle Creek toiletry bag, from their pack-it system. Eagle creek focus’s a lot on camping and hiking gear. With that focus, being lightweight and durable are keep attributes as you typically are carrying what you need so keeping weight down is key.

This is a simply 3 chamber zipper bag which worked excellent on this trip. I wasn’t digging for the wires i needed, and the case kept all my electronic needs compact in my suitcase. Everything stayed organized throughout the trip.

What I travel with (family edition):

Skross World travel adapter - I’ve written about this before and loved the first generation of this brand, and recently purchased the newest version which is even more compact!

3 dual micro-usb and lighting cables - I have written about before have been a good addition to keep the number of cables down. Note: I have tried both this version and cheaper versions. You absolutely get what you pay for in cables. Spend the few extra dollars to get the better quality cable and you will not be disappointed.

1 micro-usb cable

US plug 4-port USB charger

2 Apple non-lighting USB cables (for my daughter hand-me-down iPhone and tablet)

e-Reader (Kobo)

Dual-port USB car lighter adapter (only if I know i’ll be in a rental car) - Even though most new cars today come with USB ports, they are generally not enough for sharing and they are also not fully prevalent in rental cars. But that is getting better, but we still need this additional adapter.

Canon camera charger, extra camera battery

USB travel battery (1-2)

Fitbit One USB charging cable

A handful of Nite Ize 3-inch cable ties - I believe i have mentioned these before

What I travel with (solo edition):

Either the Skross World travel adapter or the 4-port USB charger if I am traveling international or just in the US.

1 dual micro-usb and lighting cable

1 micro-usb cable

Fitbit One USB charging cable

e-Reader (Kobo)

Dual-port USB car higher adapter (again if I am renting a car)

Canon camera charger, extra camera battery

A handful of Nite Ize 3-inch cable ties.

USB travel battery (1-2)

I’ve had such a good experience with this bag, that i’ve purchased a 2nd one for storing my toiletry items.

For the Skross adapter, i’ve taken the plug-in removable portion with the dual USB from the 1st generation model I have and plugged it into the top of the 2nd generation model so that I can travel with four chargeable USB ports. Given the number of USB devices we use as a family in travel really warrants having 4 USB ports available to keep all devices charged. Using the like this allows me to not need a plugin multi-port USB charger.

Knowing where to go with 3-simple words

Another technologist and world traveler had mentioned this in a passing FB post and it caught my attention. What 3 Words has come up with a way to make the entire world reachable with a 3 word address. It is an absolutely fascinating and ingenious way to locate every spot on the globe without having to know complex strings of numbers, or arcane geographic specific postal address systems.

If you want to find a specific 3-meter square location in the world, you just get its 3-word address with this and you can navigate there. Want to have a meet-up with friends in a specific spot in the Grand Canyon? Or a specific entrance to your favorite sports stadium? Give them the 3 word address. Forget postal codes, addresses, Latitude and Longitude. Just use your 3 word address.

I would hope to see this begin to be incorporated into GPS and other map systems. Of course behind the scenes its using all those strings of numbers but this makes it human usable. Much like using DNS to give friendly domain names in lieu of IP addresses (and now with IPV6 those numbers are even more incomprehensible!) it makes it accessible and usable, but also global.

Landmice

A co-worker showed up to a meeting a while back and had a small car next to his laptop. I jokingly asked him if he always travelled with a model car. It was a mouse that he used. Being a lover of MNI, I went looking for a MINI mouse. In the past all of those types I had seen in the past were corded monstrosities.

I picked up a blue MINI Cooper optical mouse from Landmice. They make a variety of corded and cordless mice as well as corresponding keyboards in some cases. Of course they have a number of high end cars like Lambos, and of course popular cars like Mustang. You will definitely pay a mark-up for them.

I’ve just started using mine. It is well made optical mouse. Takes a AA battery, and has a small USB plug for connecting to your computer. When not in use, there is a nice little storage spot under the car for the USB plug so that you have less chance of losing it.

Follow-up on headphones

From my post last month, I got a follow-up from a former friend and former colleague on these headphones by Decibullz. They are definitely more expensive then the other two that I reviewed, but they use thermoplastic to provide much better firm fit to your ear to keep it in place and comfortable. The feedback from Chris on using these is that they are excellent and after going through trying many pairs of headphones, these are the ones he can stick with.

Here is the YouTube promo video.

The “Triangle” method of storing plastic bags

This is a ‘hack’ or helpful home trick for making storing plastic bags a breeze. While we make use of reusable bags for the majority of our shopping, we still end up with a store of plastic bags. We keep them at home and use them for all kinds of things, emptying out the vacuum, cleaning up from our dogs and other things.

There are a lot of ideas out there about how to store plastic bags and gadgets to go along with it. However this is the best way to manage any volume of plastic bags you have around your home. Here is a good video on how to fold bags this way. It’ll take you a few try to get the pattern down, but once you do you can breeze through doing it for any plastic bag. This keeps the bags down to a small and compact size, allowing for easy storage. With the form its is easy to grab one for use and keep it from being a big mess or clutter to deal with.

Obviously you should keep a re-usable bags handy and use them whenever and wherever you go shopping to cut down on the use of plastic bags. But you’ll still likely have a supply you should keep to re-use them instead of just throwing them out!

SSD Portable Storage

Another friend and colleague let me know about this new SSD from Sandisk. SSD storage is still expensive, especially on a consumer basis. If you want a decent amount of storage either in your laptop or as portable attachable storage you have to spend a good bit of money.

Its billed as a rugged drive, while I am not crazy about the form factor, it comes in a large size at a fairly reasonable price.

[2ndfriday]

2nd Friday Tech Spotlight, issue #1, volume #4

What? I’m actually posting a 2nd Friday update!!! I know its been quite a while. I have a few different things for this month. 

Modeling Enterprise Architecture after the human bodyAn interesting article from Ted Malasaka on O’Reilly about mapping big data architecture to the human body. His focus in this article is how you can think about big data systems and how they can be architected in a distributed but connected way. However, he also covers two other topics in this thoughtful article. 

 First, he provides a good way to explain how enterprise systems work to non-technical business users (or your relatives) and human body (or since I work at an Animal Health company - a cow, pig or horse. 😃 But he also points out several areas where in human health, doctors are looking at the human body as distributed enterprise systems and helping them to better understand how our bodies function and interesting ways to fix our problems (bionic eyes, bypassing nerves to move paralyzed hands).

Bluetooth HeadphonesThings with cords have always bothered me, no area more so than for headphones. Weather exercising, cycling, yard work or just walking the dogs the cords from headphones always seem to get in the way. There of course are a proliferation of options for cutting the cord so you can listen to music or take phone calls hands free. 

A colleague, Peter, and I happened to get new Bluetooth headphones at the same time and we compared notes on what we got. We had the same requirements - no cords, work well, be comfortable to wear, provide a decent battery life and finally stay put during strenuous exercise. 

I opted for the TaoTronics In-Ear Sports Earphones ($36 USD). Peter opted for the higher price-point, Plantronics Backbeat headphones ($79 USD). Were both pretty happy with our respective purchases.  They work well, sound good, and stay on. For the TaoTronics, you get what you pay for. For me they work, but they do get uncomfortable during long periods of wear.  For Bluetooth headphones, there are generally two styles for the in-ear in how the headphones are connected. Either a lose dangly cord (like the TaoTronics) or a stiff, behind the head band, like the Plantroncis. 

 With the cord style with a fair amount of movement the cord is getting ‘stuck’ to one side of my neck, typically the heavier side with the power button and volume control on the cord. This could be lessened if the cord was evenly weighted on both sides. For me the presence of the cord  is enough that the next pair i purchase with be the firmer band style of headphone. 

Medical ID on iPhonei haven’t used an iPhone for a number of years, but my wife does , as do my parents. This is a feature you may not have heard about, but introduced in version 8 of IOS. You can enable a medical ID/emergency contact which is easily accessible from the lock screen of your phone. While security of identity is important, equally important is being able to let people around you, police, emergency responders be informed about medical conditions you may have or whom to contact in an emergency when you may incapacitated and unable to communicate. 

The feature is pretty straight forward to setup and fairly customizable. There are plenty of app solutions, or other documented ‘hacks’ for providing ICE (In Case of Emergency) information, but they are all different, implemented differently and in a lot of cases not elegant or an easy way for people to get the information needed in an emergency. Building this into the native OS level functionality is the better way to go (similar to adopting cellular emergency broadcasts). 

 Hopefully Google adopts something similar in Android. 

Google Forms

Want to be able to create simple forms or surveys for smaller personal use? Check out Google Forms. If you want to do something simple for small events or with friends and family you can give this a try. Larger services like Evite and Survey Monkey are good, but you may be looking for something on a smaller scale.  

I suspect this may have been around for a while, but they just revamped its interface and functionality. 

More Medical TechMy wife brought me these two related stories around people suffering with tremors or parkinson. The first is a med student who created a glove which countered the hand tremors in parkinson patients by up to 80%. The other is a spoon by Liftware which has a built in sensors to stabilize the utensil (which can be a spoon or fork) with tremor disorders. 

This is one of the most common disorders, and as we have a population that is growing older, this type of disorder will become more common. In my own family both of my parents suffer from hand tremors to varying degrees (which means I not dodging that bullet as I get older!). In the case of Liftware they even conducted a small case study to show that their device works. It leveraged the Fahn Tolosa Marin Tremor rating scale which is a system to measure severity of tremors across an individuals entire body.

[2ndfriday]

2nd Friday Tech Spotlight, issue #7, volume #3

Haiku from Big Ass Fans

My wife and I were looking for a fan for our master bedroom to help with air circulation and to keep it cooler. Its a low ceiling room - a converted walk-in attic, so we needed a pretty low profile fan and something that appropriate to the style of our room. And it would be great if it could be integrated with our Nest units to it was smarter about cooling our room. We found that in the Haiku from Big Ass Fans.

The fan itself looks great, well built, nice design. The physical installation of the fan itself was straight forward. Good documentation and parts to get it configured. They took a cue clearly from technology companies and the 'un-boxing' experience. It has an optional light unit you could add on, which we did not opt for as we didn't need any additional lighting in the room. It does come with a remote - but you'll just stick that in a drawer and forget about it. Why use that when you can use an App on your phone! It is expensive as far as fans go, definitely in the upper realm for cost. But it is a technology driven fan with the promise of integration with Nest and being a smarter fan.

With the fan in and working, now was time to hook in the app and get it hooked into the Nest. This is where #BadDesign and #DesignFail started to take hold. Getting the fan connected, and then connected to Nest was a test of patience and frustration. You need to download their app to do anything, no big deal there, I'm ok with that. Here are the cliff notes version of the problems encountered:

I ordered the fan and had an account with them for ordering the fan. This account has nothing to do with the "SenseMe" account you need in order to log into the app to be able to configure the fan. But NOWHERE to they indicate to you that is the problem or that there is a need for separate accounts. #BadUX

I create my SenseMe account and try logging in, oh i need a pin code they send my email. And then it doesn't actually tell you you are logged in, it just sits at the pin screen after you have entered it. You need to exit the app (and kill it) and relaunch the app. #BadDeveloper

In order to connect to the fan you have to disconnect from your wireless and to the fans default wireless, and they provide the password - which is a complex password - but provide no way to copy the password, you have to switch screens on your mobile to your Wifi settings. I ended up needing my computer so I could enter the password while I was looking at it. #BadUX

Oh there is an update for the firmware on the fan - I guess I'll update that - wait what, it will take up to 10 minutes during which time I need to keep my phone up and connected? Ugh. Fine, luckily it didn't take 10 minutes. Hopefully I don't have to do this for every firmware update and now that its on my network and Internet connected it can just update itself like the Nest does. #BadDesign

It has features for turning on automatically when you enter the room, use its temperature sensor to adjust speed, several other features, including having scheduled events and a sleep mode for going to bed and waking up. Moving around the different screens for the controls is a little awkward, some screen leave you in a dead end and you need to back up to get out. Other screens have the menu on the screen for some options, but not all. Some screens like renaming your fan (which I had to do, I can't have a default name for anything) it makes you think you need to rejoin your home network, but you actually don't need to do that.

Overall the interface is very awkward to navigate, you can't configure different modes when another mode is active. Navigation is not intuitive and its hard to know where to go in the app. And while I know its talking to Nest and taking direction based on what Nest tells it, it is a very un-Nest like experience in its interface. The fan works great, and does what we wanted. But overall I would really prefer if more than "Works with Nest" that it was actually integrated into the Nest app so it would appear along side my Nest and my Protects and use the same interface. It would make for a better experience. Or at a minimum Nest should enforce UI and Navigation standards for "Works with Nest" apps alongside the interoperability so there is a more consistent UI experience.

Google Cardboard

A friend turned me onto this. I had no idea it existed. Google Cardboard is basically basically engineering specifications from Google for you to create you own low cost stereoscopic viewer with cardboard, two lenses and your smart phone. You can buy them from a bunch of different manufacturers and the run from $5 on up to whatever you want. They even provide the full specs so you can manufacture your own if you want. I ordered a $10 one from Briztech .

For the cost, its a fun toy to play with. Depending on the type of one you get, the ability to interact with your phone onces its inside the viewer varies. On mine the access to the buttons is not easy given the design of my phone. There are like a dozen different kinds, including a View Master , which for those of us who grew up with as ViewMaster know well.

There are various apps available that work with cardboard and they vary in quality. Overall its a fun toy to play with, and for $10 pretty good value.

No more Oxygen

Last month I detailed getting two different Android mods on my phones/tablets to try them out more fully. Oxygen from OnePlus put out for their phones, and Cyanogenmod, the most popular Android after stock Android from Google. After spending a month with Oxygen, i've ended up wiping and putting Cyanogenmod back onto my OnePlus. Overall it felt like a very 1.0 release, not stable and since I am on the OnePlus phone and not their new OnePlus2 phone, they were not providing an OTA updates (why is a mystery only they can answer). OnePlus's motto is "Never Settle" which is why they wanted to fork away from Cyanogenmod and put their own Android version out. But for me it feels like they have bitten off more than they can handle and should continue to leverage a more established Android version. Based on the forums though, OnePlus2 users even with v2 of Oxygen out for them are not fairing too much better.

Cyanogenmod 12 (bacon) has breathed new life into my first gen Nexus 7, and on my OnePlus it provides a great experience and really smart improvements not only in performance over stock Android but also some really smart and nice enhancements to the UX. Most of which are lacking in Oxygen and of course in stock Android. Its become my go to for Android.

Microsoft Surface Book

I don't think I have ever used "Dead Sexy" to describe a technology that I have looked at. At least not in recent memory. But this new notebook from Microsoft has taken the Surface line to a whole new level. They have clearly stolen a page out of Apple's play book and then kicked it up several more notches. From the video , its a a 2-in-1 which has clearly been thought out in design and execution. I can't wait to get my hands on one and try it out in person. The specs and options put it on par with Macbook and Macbook air and in the same price range (a little bit more expensive). But you have more options to up the memory and add a second GPU so it becomes a real workhorse of a notebook, but you'll pay the price for it ~$2700 USD. Oh, and they make a DOCK for it so you don't have to play the cable connect-un-connect game everytime you want to take it off your desk. Though the dock seems to be rather high priced at $200.

Microsoft has historically had a lot of problems doing hardware (and lets not even mention them trying to do phones!). But they seem to have really hooked into this design. I may just have to upgrade :)

The Lighter Side

James Corden has taken over The Late Late Show. A English comedian and actor. I hadn't watch much of what he was doing on the show until I stumbled upon his Carpool Karaoke series where he uses a celebrity to get a ride to work. His ride with Stevie Wonder was a riot, completely awesome. He's done a number of them, including Rod Stewart and Jennifer Hudson. He has other segments and bits which are funny from the show, but by far Carpool Karaoke is the best idea and execution of them all.

Music

I've been listening to The Struts a lot lately. They are a new band out of England. The lead singer reminds me a lot of a young Freddy Mercury. They have a really good sound. Besides their single, "Could Have Been Me", the entire album is a great listen.

[2ndfriday]

2nd Friday Tech Spotlight, issue #6, volume #3

Summer is over and Fall is on the way.

Nest Protect

I have recently had issues with some of my Nest Protect units in my home. I have a 2nd gen Thermostat, and 3 1st gen Protects installed. Two of the three are wired, and the third is battery powered. The first issue started with my protect in the master bedroom going off on false smoke alarms. It happened once and then started happening multiple times in a day. I followed their troubleshooting instructions for cleaning and making sure it was free of dust or debris. Though try and tell my husky that it was just a false alarm as she bolts as fast as possible outside of the house and to the furthest part of the yard. It provided confirmation that I should not rely on man's best friend to try and help or save us in an emergency since she works to get herself out of the house as quickly as possible and never looks back!

It was clear the unit was defective. It happens with stuff you buy, it is inevitable that you will purchase something which ends up being defective. Typically as long as its not a frequent occurrence and the company has a good policy of handling it, not such a big deal. However, this is something which is supposed to provide safety and security in your home - warn you correctly and not cry wolf when there is danger in your home.

I was able to get that unit replaced, at no cost being within warranty. And customer service was nice and easy to deal with. But recently in the past few weeks, Nest has had some service outages which seemed just annoying to me, but for others as mentioned in this article and this other article in Time, more concerning. And outside of Nest mentioning the service issue on their twitter feed, they've been rather mum on the subject.

And I am not having a problem with another one of my Nest protects which I am waiting for Nest to resolve, again with false alarms. Which is a huge concern when you get an alert and no one is home. Do you call the police or fire department if you can't be sure that you don't just have another false alarm? Or if you can't reach a neighbor to check for you? It is not just not being able to set your thermostat remotely to turn on or off when you are on your way home.

Given they are owned by Google, service disruptions given the infrastructure Google has in place, should be the last thing to ever happen. In my case, I think the 1st gen units have broader issues with false alarms for smoke based on their design. Nest support articles hint at it, but don't call it out directly.

But with the thermostat, smoke detector, Dropcam, and other integrations like Big Ass Fans (my installation of this is close, hopefully by the end of the week!) highlight the flaw in not just Nest but every other similar technology providing security, home automation, or climate control. The only way to access information in a device which is inside your home, you can only access it via the cloud. At least with the thermostat or smoke detector it can still be accessed and controlled with the device itself, but those who use Dropcam are out of luck.

I get creating value add-services, and also looking at steadying revenue streams through monthly service subscriptions for those value add services. However, regardless if i subscribe to those services, when I am at home at a minimum I should be able to access status and control on my devices on my home network. When it comes to offering devices with coordinated safety and security in your home, that is the design which should come first, and not selling a subscription service.

Even before Dropcam was purchased, I never bought one for this reason, it was inaccessible unless it was connected to their service. As highlighted in the Time article, parents are using Dropcam to monitor the safety of their children (I'm not arguing for or against using technology to keep an eye on kids - just that it is one way people are using the technology), having a service outage - and one of the features you tout for your products.

LEGO Experience

Through my daughter, I have re-engaged with my love of LEGO. I've purchased a number of sets like the Simpsons House, Mini Cooper, Frozen, beyond just the basic general box sets they offer. My latest two acquisitions were the Star Wars Death Star and the set of the Big Bang Theory. You can head over to my Instagram page to see how I progressed with a number of those builds. LEGOs have come a long way since I played with them as kid and the expansion and ties ins to all things that I love makes me love them even more.

I enjoy spending time with my daughter putting these sets together. She likes helping - though her first comment when she saw all of the characters from the set was "Where is Phineas and Ferb?", since her current understanding of Star Wars comes from the Phineas and Ferb Star Wars cross over (which is outstanding by the way!). Of all the sets, I haven't had any issues, until the Death Star. From all of the other sets (2 Mini's, Simpons House, Big Bang, Frozen and others - several thousand pieces on their own). In all of those, I had one missing piece from the MIni Cooper set. The Death Start itself clocks in at over 3,500 bricks. Its a lot of bricks. This was the first set where besides just their normal numbered bags of the pieces, the box came with 4 sub-boxes in which were separated all the bags for the build and the instructions wasn't a booklet, but rather a spiral bound tomb

I had been eying up the Death Star for quite a while, so I was very excited when I finally got it. As I progressed through it, early on, I encountered a missing piece - preventing me from finishing one component - but not preventing me from continuing with the build. But as I progressed, I ran into more and more pieces - which would keep me from going forward - seemed to hit a run of missing pieces. Luckily from other sets I was able to substitute missing pieces.

LEGO provides a great (and free) service where you can request missing parts from any set you have purchased. I had used it before on the one piece I needed in another set. They make part look up pretty easy to do on the site and to request. It takes time to get the pieces though. I had requested the first piece I was missing right away figuring it was an anomaly. But as I hit the part where there were many pieces missing I just used the part sheet to keep a tally of missing pieces.

The other issue I ran into was the print quality of the instructions - it seemed lower resolution than normal. And when you are dealing with shades of gray (light gray, dark gray and black) to differentiate in building, print quality is important. A lot of the pages it was hard to tell which was black and which were dark gray. On top of there being misprints where some sections were presented 2x or pages just missing all together.

All tolled I had about 20 pieces missing from the set. In perspective that is well under a 1% error rate for 3,500+ piece set. But, given the cost of LEGO in general, but these larger sets especially, it was quite disappointing. Especially tied to the print quality of the instructions. Hopefully this set is an anomaly in what LEGO creates.

Android Upgrades and Options

OnePlus recently splintered off from using Cyanogenmod to its own implementation of Android, Oxygen. I've been pretty happy with Cyanogenmod over stock Android, but I wanted to give Oxygen a try top see what they have done. So I opted to play with TWRP boot loader and load Cyanogen onto some of my other devices and get Oxygen put onto my OnePlus. All of my devices (HTC One, Nexus 7/10, and OnePlus) are all not SIM locked, so I didn't have to worry about that. There are a lot of other releases of Android out there, a few like Paranoid seem interesting and I've mentioned them before.

While my phones are not SIM locked (which is its own unholy and arcane process, thank you phone companies!), you still need to unlock the boot loader in order to put another put loader like TWRP or Clockwork on in order to load something other than stock Android (or whatever your handset or tablet manufacturer bastardized and put on your device). Depending on your device, this can either be trivial or outright impossible. Regardless of the path you need to take with unlocking your boot loader, you will need a computer to accomplish the task.

You will need ADB tools and/or fastboot depending on how complicated the process to unlock the bootloader. There are various guides and instructions out there for every device, Google your's and you will likely find someone posted for it, even down to the specific model in some cases. Luckily the OnePlus was a decent design like the Nexus devices, so unlocking those bootloaders is not too complicated. Basically using fastboot to unlock the device in recovery mode, push your bootloader of choice (TWRP, Clockwork, or something else) and rebooting.

The biggest issue I had was getting to the right path for ADB in the Android SDK.Linux based systems love their arcane pathing. Big note: doing this will wipe whatever you've got installed on your device, so make sure you back everything up before proceeding. All my data I care about it backed up via one or more sync services, so I don't really have much concern with data wipe (other than losing progress on any games which don't sync progress to the cloud in some fashion).

One of the reasons for trying different builds of Android is that on my older devices 5.x brought them to an almost unusable state. Even applying some of the tricks like formatting the cache brought it up to only marginally better performance.

Pushing Oxygen onto my OnePlus was pretty easy using TWRP (which is a great bootloader, it has a lot of features and is pretty easy to use, though the interface itself isn't so pretty - but geeks writing bootloaders pretty or elegant isn't typically in their toolbox). And the initial setup of Oxygen was quick and very Cyanogen like, which is what it is based off of. Using that over the past few weeks, its not a bad try for them out of the gate. It is lacking some features which I liked in Cyanogen, and it occasionally wigs out for no reason but it is pretty good. I know earlier releases were pretty unstable and lacking based on the forum posts.

Moving onto the Nexus 7, I grabbed the latest stable Cyanogen 12 image from their site and pushed that onto my phone. It went on just as easy (but did take some time load since it is on older 1st gen hardware, but using it with Cyanogen its much faster, almost as fast as when it was running Android 4. The first thing I ran into is that the Google apps and services - most importantly the Play store aren't loaded with Cyanogen, you need to download and push that as a seperate package with TWRP to get that on there. All due to a licensing restriction with Google they can't just package it into their builds, at least with Cyanogen - why Oxygen is different I don't understand.

Now onto the HTC One. HTC supports unlocking its bootloader, which is great in comparison to other manufacturers. They have a full developer site to support development on their products. The process is a bit more complicated, you have to fastboot into the phone, get an unlock code from the phone, paste it into the HTC developer site and they will provide you with a binary you then need to push before issuing the OEM unlock command. A bit more complicated, but doable, right?

What is supposed to happen after you perform those steps is that the phone is supposed to prompt you on the phone with a dialog that says that you basically agree you absolve them of all sins now and forever because you are choosing to unlock your bootloader. Check the box and agree. Except that didn't happen. As usual, I assume the issue is me at first. But after multiple retries and some digging across forums, it so happens I am on firmware version 1.54 which happens to have a bug in which that screen won't appear, and because of that, you can't unlock the phone. So where can I get the fix? Easy, I need their RUU - ROM Updater Utility. But they don't release them publically and each RUU is specific to device and region. Well that should be easy, the phone is a popular model in the US, someone should have posted it somewhere - there is even a list of RUU's maintained on several of the Android forums. Is there a US one somewhere? Nope, not for my HTC One at least.

So I was stuck putting stock Android back on the device for now. I am running several different flavors of Android, though not as many as I would like to get a comparison of features and functionality. Cyanogen still holds as the best implementation and most mature and feature rich without bogging down your device. Oxygen OS the jury is still out, it remains to be seen if OnePlus will continue to provide proper support and updates via OTA for their original phone now that they have started to release the OnePlus 2. Hopefully if they want to really live up to "Never Settle" mantra they won't follow the suit of most device manufacturers where support and updates for a device disappear after a year or two (at best).

It can be a little daunting and a bit of up front work, give another Android version a try on your device. Its worth the effort to explore.

Despite so many years of growth in technology, technology companies still struggle with usability. Windows 10 and RHEL 7 seem to finally be getting to a point of making upgrading in place an actual option, but we are still going down the same long path of making updates to any device a disjointed and poorly implemented process. Doing things like this should be easier and more seemless. But it requires software companies to actually take the time and effort to focus in on this.

[2ndfriday]

2nd Friday Tech Spotlight issue #5, volume #3

Keeping it short and sweet to two topics today.

Surface & Windows 10

I've had my Surface Pro 3 for almost a year now, and thought it would be good to revisit where I am at on the Surface. In the time since I have gotten my surface, Microsoft has introduce a new, smaller Surface and rolled out Windows 10. Overall, I am still really pleased with my Surface. I use it mostly docked (>60%), the rest of the time is spent equally un-docked and in tablet mode. Its easy for me to un-dock and just take around the house to use wherever I need. A small part of the time when I docked, I do use multiple monitors on it. Fairly infrequently, not due to any technical reason, more that for personal use, I don't need multiple monitors. If I was using the Surface as my work laptop (and I would love too!), then I would use multiple monitors more heavily.

What I am a fan of;

* The ability to mix touch and keyboard is still my absolutely favorite feature - more computers needs to implement touch (but when they do, it needs to be integrated into the design like the surface - I've used touch systems before, but when its done as an 'after thought' or add-on feature, the experience is less then optimal and leads to frustration). Frequently I've found myself on other systems reaching up to touch the screen to acknowledge a dialog or try and move something around like a map and gone "D'OH!" because I can't do that. 

* Snapping the screen to manage windows; this has been around since Windows 7 and I use this all the time, in both single and multiple window scenarios. With Windows 10 you can now snap to a quadrant and not just to the side. This is an awesome tweak on this feature and really allows you to work well when you need to manage having multiple windows up and visible. 

* Windows 10 (so far!); The new OS has introduced some streamlined feature changes, specifically around notifications and a smarter, and cleaner experience with switching between tablet and windows mode. Switching was not clear or intuitive and you need to do that until all apps become re-designed for touch (though I don't know that some apps will ever be right for that experience). But Windows 10 has really addressed most of those little annoyances making it a better overall experience.

Onto some of the things which I am not a fan of,

The touch pad mouse; it might be because  am left handed, but this is not specific to the Surface, but I am not a fan of mouse touch pads. I find they tend to get in my way by misinterpreting my actions, especially while typing. I think this is more prevalent on the Surface compared to my work laptop because of the flatness of the keyboard, making the touch pad even closer to your fingers naturally as you are typing. And there is not enough control options to modify how the touch pad works for me to tune it. On my laptop I have more options to correct this mis-behavior. Thought I am still not a fan. 

The dearth of good apps in the Windows Store; I would have expected this to improve, but it really hasn't. Yes there is a ton of games, but there is a big lack of applications which have been truly designed to take advantage of the metro interface and touch design. This is not entirely Microsoft's fault, application vendors need to take the time and effort to provide an updated app and design which takes advantage of what Windows 8/10 offer and really make their application shine on these devices. 

Not integrating non-Touch/tablet Windows apps in the store; seriously, they should include regular apps in the store to make it easier to find software, it doesn't make sense for me to look for one style of apps in the store and then have to rely on trolling the Internet for finding other types of windows applications. 

Disk space; I purchased the 256 GB version of the Surface Pro, I would likely have gone back and purchased the largest size available, even though the cost was a bit high for my liking. Given the growth in services like Dropbox, I am storing a lot of data (photos, documents, music, books, etc...) in these services to allow that information to be more easily shared within my family and to be accessible across many different devices and from the Internet. Based on the way these apps work, you have a copy of the data fully on your local system, so you quickly run out of space if you sync all folders. I've moved onto using a USB drive attached to keep that data in order to have enough room. Of course if I am not docked that data is not easily available to me, or I have to lug a USB drive around.  

This could be addressed by services like Dropbox and Google Drive moving to offering the ability "map" a drive like you do a Windows file share, make a drive where the data is still served from the Internet and instead leverages intelligent caching to keep the data your likely to need from those services cached to make it better local experience without chewing up all your disk space. This is something like what is available in enterprise corporate environments, but has yet to make its way to a consumer market.  

An alternative solution to this would be leveraging home network devices which can hang USB drives off of and sync those to the cloud to keep the data local available anywhere on your network. Those are coming up and something I will be looking into.

I am still indifferent about the use of the pen; I just don't use it. I know they taught it in the commercials for highlighting, drawing and annotating. But I just don't do those things. Probably a large part is due to the fact that personally my handwriting is horrible. I mean really bad. My natural inclination is to go to a keyboard whenever it is available, especially if I want to have something legibly written at the end. Maybe if my handwriting didn't suck I would use it more. I may have to sit down and make a concerted effort to use it and see if there is something I am missing.

The Windows 10 experience for me is overall a positive experience so far. I've been using it about a month. The upgrade experience was smooth. I know others on non-Surface devices have had some issues, but the in-place upgrade on the Surface was great. It was upgraded like when you upgrade your mobile device to a new OS (i.e. IOS, Android). And really that is the way ALL software upgrades should be.

The new version of IE is nice, but it has some stability issues. It may be fast (i personally haven't noticed any real speed in performance), but it tends to lock up and there are some sites which just don't like the browser and I have to thunk out to Chrome for those sites. I think they need to work out some bugs.

One thing I really don't like about the new version of IE (I don't care that they've given it a new name, it still IE) is that they've dumbed down the ability to make changes to your bookmarks, how applications respond or launch from IE and some other configuration. There is a loss of control and also not as intuitive as it used to be (and I don't consider learned behavior as intuitive - things in Windows 10 just are not where you would naturally think they would be from a configuration perspective).

Despite that, I think Windows 10 is a good solid positive step forward. They need to make some changes and open some more control, but I like it. Putting it next to OSX, makes OSX seem even more long in the tooth and outdated.

Jumping into e-Ink (finally!) - Kobo

Since getting my hammock, and the fact I had a week we would be spending at the beach, I decided I wanted to get an actual e-Ink device. Mobile and tablet devices are just unusable in sunlight. Some do better than others, but you can't sit out on a beach or your back deck on a sunny day and read.  So I went looking at the current crop of e-Ink tablets. I knew from experience with my Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and the Amazon Fire HD along with my mobile devices, I knew which form factor worked for me for reading.

Form factor is really a personal preference. It depends on how you personally use your device, interact with it, prefer to hold it etc... and the type of activities you do with it. But when focused on reading, I know that I personally like the 7" range of devices. It to me is a balance between weight and amount of text on a screen. devices smaller than that, like my mobile phone, are OK for me in short bursts of reading (e.g. blog posts, news articles) but longer form reading is just not comfortable.

For graphic content - graphic novels, comic books, etc... - nothing smaller than a 10" color tablet will do. Its the only way I feel to get the same interaction (or nearly the same)  as you do with the physical comic book or graphic novel. You start to lose detail on a screen at a smaller size.

I knew I wanted e-Ink and the form factor, so I went looking. Specifically I went looking for non-Amazon e-Ink device alternatives. I know what Amazon offers and I really don't like their lock in and lack of portability of content. I also like supporting businesses which are competitors, because competition is healthy. Don't get me wrong we use Amazon heavily, but in terms of their own devices, I believe they've gotten short sighted with features due to the lock in they create and have started to lose their way with them. I think they need to stop introducing new devices and take some time to focus on beefing up the features and functionality of their current devices.

But onto the search, outside of Amazon, there are not a lot of *good* e-Ink devices. Most of them sacrifice performance, battery life or screen quality in order to meet the Amazon price point. My search led me to Kobo. I specifically liked the Aura H2O. Not only did it have good reviews, decent battery life and e-Ink quality, but it was water proof. It met my need for form factor, so after checking out a number of different reviews and comparisons, I settled on getting it. While a bit high - you may not want to spend $179 on an e-Ink reader. They have other models at the $99 price point which are competitive with Amazon.

The only real gap is that they do not offer whisper sync (cell) technology to connect and pull down books from a store. You need to be connected via Wi-fi, or if you are transferring books that you don't buy from the Kobo book store, connected via computer. I buy a lot of ebooks outside of Amazon, so Kobo actually gives me a good option for getting those ebooks onto their device.

I've been using the device now for about two months, and I really like it. It works well, good form factor, awesome battery life, and its fairly easy to get books onto the device from your computer. You can just transfer files to it like a hard drive and Kobo will seem them. The common format is epub. If you have books which are DRM protected, you need to use Adobe digital editions software (free from Adobe) to be able to transfer DRM protected books to the Kobo, but it works without issue. I don't like the disconnected step of having to use that software for DRM protected books, but that is not Kobo's fault, that is the fault of DRM.

The Kobo devices include integration with Pocket, along with access to their bookstore on the device. Content matches what you can get in either the Kindle bookstore or Google play. And the price points are largely the same. In doing some spot comparisons of sales and special offers it amazing how something on sale in on bookstore is matched on the same day by the other bookstores.

I have historically used Instapaper to grab articles for later reading from the web, so I wasn't keen to switch to pocket. I would like to see Kobo offer more integration to other services, but Pocket works almost as easily as Instapaper and its great having that content accessible on my Kobo. You have access to reading stats (for those that like to geek out on that), which are just stats based on what you read on that device, so if you read across multiple devices you wont' get the full picture. And there are beta features like web browsing (Its like trying to surf the web now using a terminal screen on a VAX/VMS system - you can do it, but why?), solitaire, sketchpad and others that they are introducing, so there is active development.

Overall, I enjoy using the device to read and is my goto device now for reading non-graphical content. I can pick it up at anytime and know I will have battery life in it to just start reading. With wifi capability and its USB I can't get any amount of content on their. Paging, navigation and annotation are intuitive and its fairly responsive. I would have been OK paying $200 with a little bit more CPU. And with the waterproof feature, I am not too concerned about getting it wet (though I am not about to drop it into a bucket of water any time soon).

I was reluctant to getting Yet-Another-Device, but I think this is a worthy addition to my collection.

Have a good weekend!

[2ndfriday]

2nd Friday Tech Spotlight, issue #4 ,volume #4

Happy Summer!

Books

Two book recommendations. First, a fun read "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson. It was recommended by my friend Tim. This is a near future story which takes place in a virtual world and on-line. Its a great story involving computer viruses that can infect people, ancient religion and world plots. Its a story which originally started out as a graphic novel idea, but for whatever reason never made it out other than a novel. The world it is set in would make a great movie and graphic novel. I would love to see both. I've read other works by Neal and this one makes me want to read more of his work. Despite being written in 1992, the technology aspect still holds up. While there are some aspects of the on-line universe which are Matrix like there is really very little similarity.

The book is being worked on as a movie (at least last heard in 2012 anyway) and hopefully it makes it way to the big screen eventually.

The other book is "HTML5 For Web Designers". For those who work in and around Web technology but are not actively doing web development from day to day this is a good background on HTML and its progress, splintering and the disparity on standards and browser support. It also provides a concise overview to the key aspects of HTML5 and its support. A good easy read to get you up to speed in HTML. And of course via O'Reilly its DRM free and available in a variety of formats.

eReading

I've been working on reading more. I'm using the Good Reads book challenge to motivate myself and keep track of what I want to read. I've been using this for few years to keep track of my family's book library and what I read. They have slowly be adding features and integrations over time and its a pretty solid site and decent mobile application. I've gotten some good give aways from the site, but mainly use it to track my reading.

I've been using a variety of ways to read books electronically. I still prefer physical for graphic novels and comics - a device just can't provide the same features. With more reading of ebooks across the Kindle App, Google Books, or just plain PDF formats. Kindle app (or device) seems to be the defacto standard, it has a number of dumb and frustrating limitations. Probably due to their dominance in this area has led them to really not drive to improve functionality and consistency across devices. Google Books has fewer features, but it is way more consistent across devices and handles being able to read your documents and DRM free ebooks more easily across devices. I've started to defer to that more and more.

Kindle doesn't provide some features on the app or online and limits them to the kindle devices. Outside of emailing ebooks to specific device accounts you can't access those books centrally across devices and apps. And the sprawl of the Amazon.com site buries a lot of features and makes it very hard to manage content. Not being able to read magazine subscriptions online is a annoying. Unfortunately Google does a bad job of promoting its features and publishers for magazine and books don't seem to be enough of a force to go against the Amazon juggernaut to make any changes.  

Smaller publishers like O'Reilly and IDW have moved towards providing more cross platform and DRM free reading, and where possible I make the choice to seek those publishers out and support them over Amazon, even when they may be a bit more expensive. While I like to get things more cheaply, I also think some healthy real competition is a good driver for keeping up innovation and progress.

Fitness Tech

I've finally gotten a Fitbit . My wife has been using it for a while. She had lost hers and ended up with two as replacements, so I took one and started using it. I've looked at different fitness trackers before and had always eschewed them to focus rather on getting fit and not just getting yet-another-piece-of-technology. I was wrong. This little device in conjunction with some other fitness apps is helping me stay focused and have some results in getting fit and healthy.

For as many fitness devices there are, there are probably double the number of fitness applications. Depending on your fitness preference - running, cycling, yoga, etc... lots of different makers are trying to get in, either by creating their own devices and apps, or buying their way in like Under Armour did in acquiring the "My Fitness..." group of products. I am not going to try and cover all of them (it would take months!), but i'll provide my perspective and the applications which I have centered on.

At this point there really is no one application that you can use to manage tracking your health and fitness easily and across multiple devices. And the ability to integrate your particular fitness devices varies wildly application to application. Integration between applications and devices is increasing, however there are no standards that device and application manufacturers have in common and all expose information (if they expose it at all) between applications differently. So integration between an app and device has to go device by device.  Having a standard in this area would help things, but unfortunately vendors are going to continue to put some walls up to try and keep users on their platforms.

The closest thing to a common standard is ANT+. hopefully adoption and standardization will continue to grow.

What I use:

Fitbit - basic model, there are some newer ones, but I like the clip because i can reposition easily and keep it out of the way. I practice martial arts, so having a wrist tracking device gets in the way.

My Fitness Pal - Part of the Under Armour family of apps, its what I use to track my nutrition and as the best centralization of communicating my fitness data between applications.

Map My Ride - There is a Map My X for just about everything. I use this one for tracking my bike rides. I've looked at others before, but one has the best balance of features for me for the price.

Lose It - I actually don't know why I still use this, but i've been using it to basically track my weight. I had previously used it to track my food, but have since moved on to using My Fitness Pal. I think i use it to still track my weight out of habit.

For all of these apps I use the free version. I don't currently pay for any subscriptions. With the features across these applications, I don't need or want the advanced features a subscription provides for any of them. I'm not that obsessive about nutrient or fitness details. I prefer to focus on a few key metrics to track my health.

My Fitness Pal is the central connection for my information. Wiring up these applications to talk to each other is not always intuitive, and across the My X series of apps, despite being owned by Under Armour, has very inconsistent interfaces on the web and in the apps. Here's what is talking to what:

Fitbit - feeds and is fed by My Fitness Pal. I was able to connect Fitbit via the My Fitness website, though I had to go into the My Fitness Pal  app to tell it to actually track steps from Fitbit.

My Fitness Pal - I enter all my nutrition here. The app is pretty easy to do this with and it has a pretty extensive database of foods to make it easy to track what you eat. It gets steps from Fitbit, and it gets my exercises from Map My Ride. There are a lot of options for tracking common foods, making meals, quick add, etc.. via the app or website.

Map My Ride - this is where I log all my exercise (despite it being "ride" it covers any exercise). This talks to My Fitness Pal which feeds that data in to Fitbit as well. But to get it connected, I had to go through the Map My Run website, because it was the only place where the settings were at to be able to connect to My Fitness Pal. Obviously Under Armour has a good bit of work to do in unifying the interfaces across their applications.

This provides a good daily summary screen of where I am at for the day in terms of exercise and food. Both on the web and in the app. I use this daily for an "at a glance" of where I am at.

I use all three to get a different picture of where I am at and tracking my goals. My main metric being weight which I way daily, followed by calories in vs. out and finally by the amount of exercise I am getting weekly. The apps and their web counterparts provide different views into each of those areas and I use them all to keep an overall idea of how I am doing long term on my goals.

Microsoft Health Vault - Not a fitness app, but one I started using to try and get a unified view of my health. Before that I was trying Google Health, but they discontinued that service a while ago. This has been a very manual effort to this point, as health care providers have been slow to adopt making it easy to get and port your data, though that is changing. I've connected my Fitbit and my main health care provider to it, so now get information put directly into here to see a more complete picture of my health. Health care providers are even worse then fitness vendors at providing integration or standardization so we still have a long way to go for you to be able to easily take ownership of your health history and make the most of it.

Prior to getting the Fitbit, I had only been tracking my exercise and my weight and had been plateaued not able to get my weight down. Since I have gone back to also tracking my food intake and counting steps (stupid badges and competition is an amazingly good motivator!) I am back on track to losing weight. I was already doing better on getting into shape, but had not been losing weight. Managing nutrition and portion sizes has more impact on losing weight than exercise does, which is well known.

Microsoft has started its own belated foray into fitness and fitness apps. And it has a very "1.0" feel about it. They may be late to the game but it will be interesting to watch to see if they can ramp up to become a presence in this area. 

If you have a good app or apps you use for your own health and exercise, let me know.

Web

Following on the HTML5 book recomendation, There are two sites to check out for further details on HTML5. First is https://html5test.com/, which gives a good summary of what HTML5 features different browsers support so you can know which features you may or may not want to target. The other is the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) site. They are the driver behind HTML5 and will get you the most information in depth on HTML5.

Thats all for this issue. Have a good weekend!

[2ndfriday]

2nd Friday Tech Spotlight, issue #3 ,volume #3

So i've taken a 2 month hiatus from publishing an issue, partly due to being very busy the past two months.

Apple's failed game console

Back in the 1990's, Apple tried its hand at game consoles, something I vaguely recall. How To Geek has some more information on their effort. It was in Apple fashion ahead of its time and of course had an Apple price tag to match. Ultimately only about 42,000 of the units ended up with consumers. I wonder if any are still operating today?

Hot Sauce to go!

Ever been out at a restaurant or picnicking somewhere wishing you had some hot sauce handy to add to your meal? Well worry no more. A company called Siracha 2 Go has got your covered. They produce small travel size bottles with caribiner clips in the style of the iconic Siracha bottles. The bottles come empty, so you can put whatever you want in them, and they sell them in multi-packs so you can get one for yourself and a bunch as gifts for your friends.

What does my site cost?

A lot of us in the US who have unlimited or near unlimited data plans, especially under corporate accounts may not realize that is not something that is a feature for a lot of the world.  The "What does my site cost?" allows you to test your site to understand in terms of $ what it costs to download your website onto their mobile device.  You should of course design your sites to be friendly no matter the browser or device users are visiting from and design the pages to be light weight and intelligent about what content is presented, this provides a different perspective on what the cost could be for users you are trying to reach.

Android

Google has released a number of updates for Android - Lollipop - and since that they have delivered a few point releases. Unfortunately not everything is candy and sweetness with this release. Users (myself included) on older gen Nexus devices (or any older device for that matter) end up in the penalty box for performance with this update.  The whole device bogs down and is almost unusably slow.

Even with updates, its still slow. One fix which seems to work is to boot your device into 'recovery' mode (how to do this varies depending your device) and format the cache. I've performed this on both of my stock Nexus tablets and it has helped considerably. Though not as spry as previous versions they are usable. 

I have seen this on IOS where each subsequent release becomes a worse and worse option for older devices - to the point where you just don't continue to update because the penalty becomes too high.  

Google and Apple (yeah, like Apple ever listens) should take into consideration that a lot of people do not run out to get the latest device - especially when existing devices are physically in good condition, but become unusable bricks with all the new features and functions laid onto the OS even though they can't use them. 

I have older iPhone 3GSs which my daughter uses and work really well. We haven't upgraded the OS because it would make it unusable.  There should be an easy ability for users to upgrade 

Android Mods

There are a number of mods that you can move to from the stock Android release from Google. Depending on your phone carrier, you likely don't have stock Android on your phone anyway.  Techradar has a good article with a run down on the top 6 mods for Android.

Cyanogen is probably the most popular of them all. I am running this on my OnePlus phone and have recently updated to CM12 on the phone and I am really impressed by it.  It comes with a host of new features on top of Lollipop. First the performance is as good from CM11. It also comes with some additional profiles and modes to give you better control over performance and battery life. The "power save" function really does help to pair down the drain of all those apps on your phone and extend the life of your battery. Of course the opposite end if the "performance" mode you can switch into to crank the most power out of your device as possible.

There are a number of interface tweaks as well, especially on the lock screen. Unfortunately with those tweaks (and this is more Lollipop than Cyanogen IMHO) I've had to stop using Microsoft's Next lock screen app, despite how useful it has been to me.  Overall though, I am pleased with all of the updates they have rolled out. (And I would hope some of the features of the Next application can get incorporated to Android by default or in a mod.)

The other item from Cyanogen which is interesting is their Beta Installer, which is designed to automate the process of upgrading your device from whatever Android OS you are running to Cyanogen. Unfortunately my devices I want to perform this on are not supported yet, but in concept playing around with it, it is what installers should be - i get that the uber geek crowd is in love with pulling out Linux and being able to walk through a hundred steps to compile and deploy a crafted OS to their precious, but why? Technology should be getting easier not more cryptic.

Food

Finally, in the realm of food I learned from the daily menu published by our cafeteria the origin of the French Dip. It is an American staple of comfort food which I grew up with. Yet I never knew where it originated from.  It originated in the early 1900's on the West Coast in Los Angeles. Two restaurants claim it as their invention, though I think that Phillipe's (Phillipe the Original) probably has the stronger claim to fame, well at least better marketing.

There are several versions of the story, but all involve customers either asking or getting a sandwich dipped or soaked in the jus of the meat. Leading to the invention of the sandwich. The side of jus which is typically served with the French Dip today was an add-on many years later after the original sandwich was invented.

Happy Spring!

[2ndfriday]

2nd Friday Tech Spotlight: volume 3, issue #2

Happy February!

Windows 2003 EOL

For those who don't know, Windows 2003 (and 2003 R2) are end of life this year. Run As Radio recently had a podcast covering it with Eric Mills from Microsoft. Surprisingly there are still around 24 million servers running 2003, about half of which are on physical servers.

Technology Radio

Leading from that, there are a number of resources out there for keeping up with various technology platforms or advancements (beyond the coverage "launch" days for things like "the next Apple product" or Windows 10).

For the Microsoft technology stack, I mentioned one above, but there are a few other depending on what you want to keep up on.

Run As Radio

DotNet Rocks!

Scott Hanselman

General technology or science:

Science Friday (OK probably not job related, but we like science.)

Leo Laporte

Engage

Lifehacker

These are not resources for in depth learning but they are good for keeping up or being introduced to technologies that you may not know about, or if you do, features and functionality you may not have known about.

Improve your Office Skills!

Scott Hanselman has released a series of videos which  are less than 15 minutes in length (mostly) and basically go hardcore into using various features - I mean really using correctly and exploiting the power of Word to your benefit. A worthwhile video series that you should check out. Its not a lot of time investment for improving how you use Word.

Cookie Season

Its that time of year for Girl Scout Cookies. They've introduced some new varieties, dietary specific options and even some non-cookie options. We all have our favorites that we like, and I think most have a great affinity and reason why the cookie we like is better than the rest.

Regardless of what cookie you like, as an adult you like to enjoy plowing through a box of your favorite with an adult beverage or two. Here are two options for  pairing beer or pairing wine with your girl scout cookie experience.

And following along with everyone else, yes, there is a Cookie Finder App - just in case you don't have Girl Scouts pounding on your door or trip over them in front of one of countless store fronts, or have co-workers pushing them on your for their kid. And they are even offering online sales options , which from what I can gather work like Amazon store fronts so that the more tech savvy girl scouts can hawk the cookies online with either having them shipped to your door or delivered by a girl scout.

The Museum of the Future is Here

The Atlantic published an article earlier this year covering the Cooper Hewitt Museum , which is part of the Smithsonian and how they have taken a serious look at how to reinterpret a museum and how people interact with the museum when they are there and  after they leave. It is an interesting read and take on technology, design and interaction.

Security Princess

Being a father with a young girl at home, I have become more focused on looking for and finding positive female role models in science and technology and other areas. It was great to see this  article on Parisa Tabriz , Google's "Security Princess".

Android

Microsoft released the Next Lock Screen app on Android a while ago.  It is a project from Microsoft Garage , which seems to be a free for all think tank of Microsoft employees creating some interesting projects.  I have played with one of their other projects, "Voice Commander" on XBox One.

I had originally tried the Next Lock Screen a while back and was underwhelmed. I tried it again after getting my new OnePlus phone. What the application provides is a different lock screen on your Android phone, with a number of useful features. While not bypassing your security, it provides quicker access to information and applications directly from your lock screen. 

You can also have the lock screen change (easily) to different "modes". Each mode provides a customized set of apps so you can switch to different groups of applications depending on whether you are on the go, at work or at home. Give it a try.

Toys for big kids

A friend recommended the Syma S107 R/C Helicopter which he got for Christmas. There a  lot of this type of little helicopter out there, and quality varies significantly. This is one which is fun and easy to use.

Have a good weekend!

[2ndfriday]

Going Corporate email on Android

So you’ve decided you want to move to Android from IOS. But you want to be able to access corporate email and calendaring on the go. Unlike IOS where you are tied into the native mail and calendar clients, you have some more options. There are other options out there if you want an alternative.

It seems that Touchdown is the defacto corporate client for support of corporate email (Exchange - Activesync). I think popular opinion is that visually its a hideous client and not that great to use. And unless you tune down its checking, its a bit of a power drain. So I went looking for alternative on Android. What I was looking for is client that was closer to the native functionality of Google Mail and Calendar. Also one which allowed me to dial in the frequency of checking and what it downloaded. For the clients which included syncing contacts, I opted to not sync that, since I have a bad taste from the last time I tried that with another program that hosed up my contacts and it took me weeks to unravel.

Here is the roundup:

Google Email - What? I thought Google didn’t support it, which is why we had to use an alternative client? Its from Google and its free. You can add in your account and get functionality with email and calendar just like Gmail. Sync is handled the way sync is handled in Android for Google services. It functions similarly to Gmail and Calendar. ($Free)

Nine - Includes calendaring. conversations can be done as text “bubbles”, closer to Google mail. can also do contacts. Native google calendar app. Not as many tuning options as Aquamail, but pretty good. Trial expires after 12 days. ($9.99)

Aquamail - Only handles email, but it has a options for configuration. ($4.95)

Boxer - Interface is very close to Google. However its is hard to see the difference between read and unread emails, unlike the Google interface or Nine or Aqua. I tested this with Gmail, and not Exchange because its a locked function until you purchase. ($9.99 to $19.99 or more)

Cloudmagic - Nice look, simple, but only includes email, not calendar or contacts

Like Touchdown: These clients look like or similar to TouchDown so I didn’t test them because that was what I was trying to move away from.

Remoba 

Exchange ExMail Pro ($6.95)

Mailwise

OWA - Microsoft released Outlook Web Access client for Android. For not it supports Office 365 and other clients, but not Exchange Activesync. They plan later on to release support for Exchange Activesync later, but for now it does not support it. ($Free)

There were other clients that came up, but these are the ones that seemed best bets and most polished.

Recommendation: Nine - this is my favorite of the applications. Overall it has a good balance of functionality and keeping a native integration with Google services. It does not have as many knobs to turn for tuning, but it has most of the key ones for peak, off-peak checking. And for $9.99, a fair price.

Runner up: Google Email. Probably the closest to ‘native’ Android functionality, and of course the price is right - free.

Both apps offer email, calendar and contacts at a minimum.

[2ndfriday]

LEGO

I, through my daughter have rediscovered LEGOs. Also in part from a few gifts from my wife, like the Mini Cooper and the Calendar (putting that together every month to change it gives me some zen time during long meetings :)). My daughter and I spent a lot of the holiday side-by-side building with LEGOs. It is a great way to disconnect, relax and unwind. My daughter is a constant reminder that play is an important part of life. 

  With or without kids, take some time to enjoy life and play with some LEGOs!

[2ndfriday]

I recently had to mount a new TV for my parents, so I picked up an articulating wall mount from Cheetah. For the price point of $30 (and mounts run through a huge price range depending on what you want), I wasn't expecting too much. It seems the mid-range of where most mount systems run. 

I wasn't expecting much from it, but I ended up being extremely impressed with the product and the company. So much so, I just bought another one for myself for another TV I had to mount. 

The mount itself provided for a compact design, several options to cover a range of TVs you need to mount. It was easy to mount to a wall and provided a selection of options depending on your wall type. Additionally mounting it to the TV was pretty easy. One of the things that I liked was the solid design without being overly heavy. It also came with an HDMI cable, as well as a keychain light. A small thing, but the overall quality of the product, thoughtful design and what it included for the price was a great value.

  Besides the articulating mount, they have other styles depending on your TV mount needs. I highly recommend their products.