Yeraze's Domain 3.0

I’ve wanted a Kindle for a while now, but after this I’m not so sure.
But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for [...]

I have a weird issue with the WiFi on my MacBook.  At home I use an Airport Extreme 802.11N Network (5Ghz N-Only, not the newer dual-band model) with WPA2 enabled that I connect to and use with Time Machine. Works great.  If you’re looking for an access point and don’t mind the premium price, I [...]

With eager anticipation, I watched the WWDC keynote (well, kinda, I watched the Gizmodo livestream) hoping for news of iPhone OS3 and Snow Leopard.  Unfortunately, I was disappointed all around.
OS3
Well, OS3 will be publicly available next week (Wednesday).  Unfortunately, I’ll be out of town next week so I’m stuck either waiting until I return or [...]

A while back I bought a new Dell Laserprinter and the Dell 3300 Wireless Print Server.  I configured it flawlessly to talk to my  Linksys WRT54G with WAP enabled, and life was good.  My wife’s been using it nonstop, we mainly got it for the speed since she’s one of those people that likes to [...]

GizModo has an amazing writeup on several of the iPhone’s Twitter Apps, giving pros and cons for each one. I’m a Twitterfon using, after having tried several of the others and seeing the exact same problems they describe.  Great article for iPhone+Twitter users.

The Quicklist
• Best Overall: Tweetie
• Best Paid: Tweetie
• Best Free: Twitterfon
• Most Powerful: [...]

Just saw this on ValleyWag, talking about the technological hurdles that Obama’s team is discovering in the White House.
One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could [...]

This weekend I stopped by the Apple store and was pleasantly surprised to find the Griffin Clarifi case in stock.  The Clarifi case is a simple slide-in hardshell case with a Macro Lens for improved close-up photos.  I take alot of photos of text, business cards, and receipts (mostly for use with EverNote) so I’ve been watching it for a while.  After picking one up and trying it out, I’m happy to report it works better than I ever expected.  See below two photos of a receipt, taken inside a darkly lit restaurant: (Click to enlarge)

Without Clarifi	With Clarifi

 It’s pretty easy to see the improvement.  While the iPhone + the Clarifi case will no longer fit inside my belt-pouch, I think it’s worth the extra pocket-weight to have the Clarifi available.  Hopefully, it’ll significantly improve EverNote’s Text-Recognition features. [tag:clarifi][tag:case][tag:iphone]

Update: After a week of using it, I can say definitively it makes a HUGE improvement in Evernote’s OCR abilities.

I’m surprised I had never heard of this before, but I today heard about a tiny little gadget named the "YubiKey".  It’s a small USB Dongle from a company called Yubico that emulates a USB Keyboard.  It’s primary function is to function as a hardware authentication token, similar to an RSA key or SecureID card.  However, since it emulates a keyboard, it’s compatible with a wide variety of tools.  For example:

• Turn off the randomization and input a static password, and then you can use it with any Username/Password application.   The IS Department of Boca Raton uses this with TrueCrypt to securely encrypt data. ( US E-government uses YubiKey for secure file storage )
• Use their supplied OpenID server to make the YubiKey your authentication means for any OpenID enabled website
• They offer a good API to allow developers to integrate it.  The latest beta of PasswordSafe supports it ( Latest PasswordSafe Betas )

It seems pretty neat, especially if it gets wider support.  The YubiKey is only about $15 a pop (cheaper in bulk), and can be corporately branded to let them be used by companies (Imagine VPN authentication tokens). 

Unfortunately, I see a few problems with it:

1. It’s a USB device, which means how do you authenticate with an OpenID service from a mobile device? (Like my iPhone)
2. How do you use it in restricted environments?  (If I plug an unknown USB device into my computer at work, I’m gonna wind up in a heap of trouble).
3. To use the OpenID support, you have to use their OpenID service.  That’s not a huge deal since my OpenID logins are connected to here (www.yeraze.com) and I could simply change my supplier (YAY OpenID!), but I’ld kinda prefer to keep it with MyOpenID if possible.

All that said, it still shows alot of promise.  Small enough to go on a keychain, cheap enough to be mass-market, and powerful enough to be used in a wide variety of situations.  It’s something I definatley plan to dig into deeper. [tag:hardware][tag:security][tag:yubikey]

At home I have ComCast Digital Cable with Internet.  I’ve had it for about 4 years now, and after some initial problems it’s been pretty good.  Because of the digital cable, I have a Pace Set-Top box that’s connected to my TV, that’s in charge of changing channels and such.  It’s from Time-Warner, but Comcast apparently supports it and it’s worked just fine.  Until last week.

While I was gone to VisWeek last week, Comcast pushed out new Firmware to the set-top boxes.  I didn’t find out about it until I got back, and I have to admit: it’s terrible.  Let me break down what’s wrong with it:

1. They didn’t save any of my settings (specifically the "Favorite" channels). 
2. The new interface is easily 3x-5x slower than before.  Hit the "Guide" button and prepare to wait approx 5s for it to appear. Changing channels easily takes 2-3seconds where it used to be instant.
3. Because the interface is so slow, it’s hard to actually select a channel from the guide because you constantly "overshoot".
4. The new Guide doesn’t seem to properly cache data.  Routinely throughout the day it will freeze with "Please wait.. Retrieving new data".
5. You can’t flip through favorites with the Guide up.  Hitting the Favorite button will close the guide and switch to the next Favorite channel.
6. The new show descriptions lead off with the Actors, not the textual description.. Making the description pretty much useless in Guide view.
7. In guide view, you can no longer view by Theme or Show title, only time.  After some digging, I found out that you can.. They call it "Changing Search Order".
8. In guide view, they actually show the 5min "filler" shows on channels like Disney.  I’m sorry, but knowing that "H" comes on in 20 minutes isn’t helpful.
9. The power-button no longer does Reboot

And many more.. It’s a complete disaster of a User Interface.  Why did they do it?  Presumably because they’ve now consolidated all of their On-Demand channels into a single channel (Channel 1), and they now force you to navigate another nightmare of poorly-named Menus to find shows.  I was a big fan of BBC America On-Demand, and it took me a good 5 minutes to find out where they hid that in the new menus.

I post this in hopes of finding other kindred spirits that feel this firmware is a huge step BACKWARDS in usability and functionality, and maybe together we can get some attention on the matter.  If you similarly feel jaded by this, comment here! [tag:comcast][tag:settop][tag:firmware]

So, with my iPhone I drank of the Mac koolaid, and it was yummy.  So, after many years of swearing I would never own a Mac, I now own a Black Macbook.

Why the sudden change?  Well, it wasn’t really sudden.  I’ve become increasingly frustrated with windows over the last 4 or 5 years.  It seems no matter what you do, a windows machine just becomes unreliable after 6 months or so.  Bluescreens, slowdowns, and general instability plagues it.  Is it the Hardware? Is it the Software?  Honestly, it’s probably a mix of the two. 

I’ve tried to run Linux laptops and desktops occasionally, but could never get them to integrate into my usual workflow very well.  Linux is very customizable, but takes alot of time to get "just right", and stuff that’s trivial on Windows & Mac (example: WPA2 on WiFi) can be a real pain on Linux.  A Mac gives me the Usability of a Windows Machine with the Power of a Linux machine.

So, I bought it Friday and spent the weekend configuring it.  Then I took it to the HPC Users Forum in Tucson, AZ this week to "field test" it.  So far, I’m ecstatic.  I haven’t had a single crash since I bought it.  I’ve got Time Machine making hourly backups via WiFi to an external 500Gb drive, I’ve got all my utilities working (and some new ones), and the whole thing simply "flows" in a way I’ve never seen from a Windows Machine.  So far I’ve installed:

• NeoOffice (OpenOffice for Mac)
• FireFox3
• AdiumX
• Twitteriffic
• Miro
• QuickSilver
• PeerGuardian
• EverNote
• Growl

That covers my bases for basic work.  I’m currently playing with getting a working MAMP stack (I’ve installed it, just need to configure it & setup a host environment). 

So far, I’ve only had 2 complaints:

1. Lockheed Martin’s Travel Expense Reporting System – it’s a Java app that works over the web.  It simply does not work with a Mac.  I’ve talked to several other Mac Users and it’s the same story: Use Parallels or Sun’s hypervisor. 
2. WiFi at work – The Guest WiFi at work uses WPA2 authentication, and for some reason the Mac will not switch cleanly from that to home (I use WPA2 at home as well).  It connects but always gets a Self-Assigned IP.  A simple reboot fixes it, but shouldn’t be necessary.

So I’m a Mac Convert.  Expect to see alot more Mac-centric posts here in the future.

[tag:mac][tag:software][tag:hardware]