P.S. A Column On Things

Apple IOS 6 and Podcasting

I avoided upgrading to IOS6 on my iPhone for a long time because I didn't see anything I wanted and was afraid it would mess me up. I also didn't want Apple's brain-dead map ap as my default, and I didn't want to lose the You-tube player ap. Then, at school, they installed Apple TV, but I couldn't project from my phone. I thought it might be the IOS, so I upgraded. Turns out you need a iPhone 4S to project  and I have a 4. So, I did not get the one feature I wanted. And instead, it messed me up, in the ways I expected, and a couple of new ones.

The first time I opened iTunes on my phone, all my podcasts were missing from my playlists. This was extremely frustrating, because I could still see them in iTunes on my desktop. I spent hours trying to work it out, then more hours searching the Internet before a solution. Talk about badly posted and hard to search for! I can only hope the words I have thrown around this solution will help save others from my time and frustration.

IOS 6 automatically moves all your podcasts into a podcast ap that does not have playlists. BUT, to fix this problem, all you have to do is delete the podcast ap, and all your podcasts fly back into your iTune playlists. Sure, I admit that podcast handling in iTunes is terrible. But not being able to organize your podcasts into playlists is much worse.

Credit where credit is due, however, Apple did add a feature I have been waiting for literally since the first day I played a podcast on my iPhone. There was always a "10 seconds back" button to allow you to repeat something you just heard (or more likely, didn't quite hear). I yearned for a 10 seconds forward button, to speed past discussions in which I wasn't interested. The button appeared in IOS 6, and what a joy it has been. Sure, the time slider was always there, but while it is great for a 3 minute song, it is very difficult to operate in a 30 or 60 minute podcast, especially if you are on the elliptical machine or the stationary bike.

One great feature does not make up for one appalling and badly documents foul-up, however. Overall: IOS 6, continue to avoid it if you can.

Verizon's McAdam pretends US leads in broadband: Fun with Statistics

The moment I saw the headline, How the US Got Broadband Right, I assumed it was written by someone from the Heritage Foundation or some other right-wing think tank. I underestimated capitalism's hypocrisy reserves, which is always a mistake.  In fact, it was written by (or under the name of, in any case) Verizon president Lowell McAdam. He's certainly got no skin in the game, huh? Doesn't matter to him how the FCC comes down on Internet issues. In any case, I immediately began monitoring the Internet for an intelligent, expert response that would, I was sure, point out the numerous statistical manipulations he used to disguise the fact that, as Harry Shearer likes to say "We're not number one."

I was not disappointed. An advocacy group for Open Internet called Public Knowledge (with Internet pioneer Brewster Kahle on the board and former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt as a director emeritus), quickly posted this deconstruction of just one of the clever almost-lies, distortions and half-truths which the New York Times allowed this huckster to palm off on America's thinking class. It is depressing to me that intelligent people will now mistake our last place status among the world's Internet users as first place. And hey, don't forget McAdam's public plan to abandon copper everywhere, including rural areas. In my distant suburb of Orinda (20 miles from SF), our landline server is AT&T (which also wants to get out of the landline business). There is, basically, no cell service at my home because of our town's NIMBY planning process. Oops! Oh well, I guess McAdams wants me and several million other people to move somewhere with more cellphone service, or take VOIP from the cable company, whether I like it or not.

Here's hoping that the new FCC chairman stands up for the people, and isn't a dupe who will spout McAdams' garbage and carry his water.

In the meantime, I will keep hoping for a point-by-point rebuttal, and will share the link if/when I find it. In the meantime, if you'd like to bring your blood to a boil, check out this analysis. Of course, my protests, and yours, and pointless and hopeless. Money talks and civilians bend over and grease up. I can afford whatever expensive alternative I will soon need. Can you? Can your grandmother?

Making an MP3 File into a "Podcast" on your Iphone

I place a lot of spoken-word MP3 files on my iPhone manually. It has been extremely frustrating to me that such files have no "30-second backup," and lose track of where you were if you switch to another file. These deficits have been a source of nearly endless frustration. So, this week I got off my dead keister and Googled the question. Turns out the solution is quite simple: simply tell the iPhone that the MP3 file IS a podcast.

CAUTION: For reasons I will explain later, don't do this until you have come up with a naming convention for your MP3 files. Trust me on this.

These instructions are for the Windows version of Itunes. If you have a Mac, YMMV.

1. Select the file you want, in either the music folder on your iphone, or in the playlist. You may select multiple files; this still works.
2. Hit ctrl-i (on a mac, I think the key combination is apple-i).
3. Click on the "options" tab
4. Under "Media Kind," select "podcast"
5. Click the "remember playback position" check box

That is almost there is to it. The special sauce, my intellectual contribution to this subject, comes from the fact that, once I had reset all these files, they no longer appeared in the Music folder on the iPhone. They also didn't suddenly appear in the Podcast folder.  I stitched together information from several sites to come up with a way of managing the songs.

Experienced users realize that if you delete an MP3 file  from a playlist, it is still on the phone, just not in the playlist. For songs and podcasts loaded the normal way, you can got to the folder "Music" or "Podcasts" on your iPhone. When you delete a file in one of those folders, it is really gone.

"Fake" podcasts appear in neither folder. How do you find them? How do you delete them? Well, you can delete them by selecting a file in a playlist, then hitting shift-delete (the key combo is different on a mac; I don't know what it is). Remember, if you just hit "delete," you delete the file from the playlist but NOT your iPhone.

What if you thoughtlessly delete, rather than shift delete? Like Charlie on the MTA, is your file destined to ride forever neath the streets of Boston? Well, no. You can still see every file on your iPhone if you create a Smart Playlist:

1. on the edit menu, select New Smart Playlist
2. Set a rule that none of your files will meet, like "artist is x"
3. The new smart playlist will now show every file on your iPhone, podcasts, music and "podcasts."

Here's a tip learned from painful experience: hand-loaded MP3 files are much easier to manage if you adopt a naming convention. All of mine start with an _ (underscore) character followed by the date (20120805--be sure to use the zeroes if you want alpha order to be equal to date order). Thus, a file I recorded last week would be "_20120815 programname."

It is not often I can make a contribution to the world's store of knowledge, but in this case, I feel I have synthesized and clarified a half-dozen articles. On the other hand, I may be the only person in the world whose iPhone is half loaded with hand-managed MP3 files.

Windows 7 Sucks

Let me be clear about this. My wonderful new Dell Portable, a gift from my daughters, is, well, wonderful. They took pity on me and my technology (as they do from time to time) and decided that my slow, small, decade-old portable was no longer sufficient, especially since I am going out of town more these days. They wanted me to get a Macbook, but I stoutly resisted. There are still a few Windows aps to which I am addicted . Besides, I have to keep at least one PC in the house for the websites I use to support my wife's psychotherapy practice which require (REQUIRE!) Internet Explorer (they aren't fooled by Firefox's spoof mode either), not to mention the applications my school district runs, which also require IE. The temptation to wipe the portable down to the metal and install XP was significant, but I figured I'd be dragged screaming and kicking into the future. I do mean screaming and kicking.

My first experience with the fact that

Windows 7 Sucks

came when I was installing the cable modem for a friend. Comcast insists that you run an install Wizard application that Windows 7 refused to run. I tried it. It won't run, even in "Run as Administrator" mode, which was readily available to me. If you don't run the ap, Comcast will not activate your modem. After two hours, I desperately pushed the button on the Comcast website for "technician" mode. Turns out there weren't any questions I couldn't answer. But when I was done, Comcast insisted on yet another ap that Windows 7 stoutly refused to run, no matter how far down I set the security mode. Again, fortunately, the friend had an XP machine. Thank God!

Windows 7 Sucks

Not since we went from DOS to Windows back in 1991 have I seen a Microsoft operating system that broke more aps than 7, even in so-called "compatibility" mode. One of my favorite word games, E-Words, simply will not work in 7. The software company is long gone, so there won't be an upgrade. None of the other (free or paid) word games I can find does it for me like E-Words did. There's another ap gone; if Microsoft keeps breaking them, there won't be any reason for me NOT to convert to a Macbook.

Did I mention that Windows 7 sucks?

And the file system! Don't get me started on the file system. The default is an absolute refusal to let you anywhere near the Documents and Settings directory. And you're told, even if you're the administrator, that you can't chance the permissions. After a LENGTHY Google search, I found that you need to change the OWNERSHIP of the directory, under the advanced button. How messed up is that? In trying to be more like a Macintosh, Microsoft has succeeded in creating a nearly unusable operating system. As Steve Ballmer used to say, BOGU (you can look it up).

Windows 7 and HP Laserjet 3015 printer and Networking (Network)

Here is something important. I have a 12-year-old, no longer supported by HP Laserjet 3015. It's a beautiful printer. Never given me a lick of trouble. If I hooked it directly to my new Dell, Windows 7 recognized it and installed it automatically. I spent three hours trying to install it as a network printer. All was futility. I could see it on the network, but I couldn't connect to it, no matter how much software I installed. I checked several dozen websites using various search terms. The last one I tried finally worked (isn't that always the case?).

The advice was simple, clear and brilliant. I am putting the link here in case you are having trouble (difficulty) creating a network connection between Windows 7 and an HP Laserjet 3015. That is, you cannot set up the 3015 as a network printer [that ought to be clear to all the search engines]. The only solution that works is Win7 Pro x64 bit HP LaserJet 3015 driver problem.

I am putting that link here, in my column, as a separate item, with a descriptive headline, in the hopes of boosting the Google rank of the helpful link above, since the solution it describes actually works. So, if you Google here looking for a solution, go have a look, and you're welcome.

Technobriefs Returns (Briefly)

Erstwhile techno-briefer Craig Reynolds notes that both Sony and Microsoft introduced new game controllers using motion tracking at the E3 game industry trade show in Los Angeles. The Sony device was demonstrated by two of Craig's co-workers, Rick Marks and Anton Mikhailov:
New Sony Motion Controller! (E3 2009)
Behold the motion-sensitive controller wars

Three from NYT Bits:
Google Is Top Tracker of Surfers in Study
The Obama Administration’s Silence on Privacy
Plugging In $40 Computers

Technobriefs

by Craig Reynolds

Prez tech: apparently the First BlackBerry stays: The BlackBerry accord of 2009. While there seems to be a party-line divide over what constitutes modern technology: Obama Staff Arrives to White House Stuck in Dark Ages of Technology and White House Already Well Wired, Bush Staffers Say (hmm "...Windows XP, BlackBerrys, Outlook..."  I don't use any of those but XP dates from 2001, BlackBerrys from 1999 and Outlook has been around since MS-DOS, how do these suggest IT modernity?) Also: Word Cloud Analysis of Obama's Inaugural Speech Compared to Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Lincoln's.

Belkin's web 2.0 payola: Belkin damages brand by paying for favorable reviews: LA company apologizes for paid online reviews, Belkin fake reviews case raises broad questions about peer ratings and Belkin Employee Sheds Light On Belkin's Supposedly Dirty Practices.

OS v. OS: Why I can't get enough of Windows 7 and Windows 7 vs. Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Apple ups the ante.

Technobits: I had a nice visit to UC Santa Cruz and spoke in their CITRIS Distinguished Lecture Series on: Crowds and Emergent Teamwork --- Payment Processor Breach May Be Largest Ever --- Michael Arrington's Minimalist Web Tablet Prototyped, Fulfills (Most) Promises --- What's with Google's new mini icon? --- Twittering idiot hoist by own petard: Be Careful What You Post.

Technobriefs

by Craig Reynolds

Astrophysics, stranger than fiction: OK, the wave/particle duality is odd, quantum mechanics is weird, spooky action at a distance is well, spooky. But those are all minor league odd compared to this: Our world may be a giant hologram. (Warning: read it soon, New Scientist articles disappear behind a pay-per-view wall quickly). Noise picked up by an instrument built to detect gravitational waves may doom the experiment because the universe itself does not have sufficient resolution since it is merely a hologram! Not what they were looking for, but a helluva discovery if true. Recent string theories suggest the apparently 3 dimensional universe actually has 7, 10, 11, or 26 dimensions. If Craig Hogan's theory is correct, the universe has only 2 dimensions. Welcome to Flatland!

Google: an attempt to estimate the power required to perform a Google search lead to consternation and controversy: How Google searches lead to our destruction, 'Carbon cost' of Google revealed, Measuring your Google search's carbon footprint, while Google Argues Its Searches Are Environmentally Friendly and Google emits rebuttal to carbon claims. Also, a response to last July's Is Google Making Us Stupid? article in The Atlantic (which as I recall ends up answering its title with "no, not really"): How Google Is Making Us Smarter.

Technobits: Apple Allows 3rd Party Web Browsers into App Store --- A Breakthrough in Imaging - Seeing a Virus in Three Dimensions --- Search the web for any song in the world.

Technobriefs

by Craig Reynolds

The Crime of Reason: I attended a great talk by Stanford Professor Robert B. Laughlin, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics, on the subject of his new book The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind. Prof. Laughlin laments the loss of public domain knowledge as more and more critical information is sequestered as a threat to security and commerce. If you research or innovate, you are increasingly seen as a thief or a terrorist. Watch the video, listen to a radio interview or read the book, its an important perspective on our world.

Music: rationality belatedly comes to the music industry's approach to online commerce: The RIAA's About-Face on Lawsuits and Apple Drops Anticopying Measures in iTunes. A book about that long journey: When Labels Fought the Digital, and the Digital Won on Steve Knopper's Appetite for Self-Destruction.

Tech in the real world: applications in civil emergencies: Google search finds missing child and Police Study Way to Jam Cellphones in an Attack. On the MOBVIS system: Hyperlinking the Real World. A virtual world as microcosm: Sony's Home juggles free speech, hate speech. Diversification for a new world: Andy Grove urges Intel to build car batteries. The Submarine cables that tie continents together: The Internet's Undersea World.

Finding commerce in odd places: Firms Make a Killing on i-Phone Apps, YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money and Seeking Profit in the Need for a Bathroom Break.

Technobits: Obama considers linking Defense Dept. with NASA --- Blu-ray Format Struggles With Uncertain Prospects (previously in PSACOT: September, November) --- Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books --- in case you are worried you are following consumer tech trends obsessively enough: 2009: Products I Can’t Live Without --- Scientists discover true love --- Fun with speed cameras, teen-style.

Technobriefs

by Craig Reynolds

Just random technobits this week: Math Gains Reported for U.S. Students --- What the Search Engines Have Found Out About All of Us --- Intel Cites Advance in Using Silicon in Data Products; Claim Is Challenged --- Labels Open to Collective Licensing on Campus --- Verizon 4G Next year: A Pipe Dream? --- Top 10 Things You Forgot Gmail Can Do --- Cold Sore Virus Linked To Alzheimer's Disease: New Treatment, Or Even Vaccine Possible --- Proof That Meteors Could Have Sparked Life on Earth --- Critical Report on Health of Zoo Elephants Is Debated --- 3D desktop revealed in Apple patent filing --- Wikipedia Censorship Sparks Free Speech Debate (no mention of the (similarly NSFW) 1969 Blind Faith album cover) --- Sweeping Changes Coming With Smart Dust --- work on a biomimetic device, inspired by the razor clam, that might eventually become a self-adjusting boat anchor: Dig this: RoboClam - MIT News Office --- now I can easily translate My hovercraft is full of eels into several languages at the same time: Nice Translator - The fast, easy to use online translator.