Tag: tech (Page 4 of 7)

Taking A Flying Leap

April 19, 2012 / DB

After a couple of days of preparation, today I begin my latest technology experiment: can I survive with just an iPad?

I’m often struck by the silliness of me switching back-and-forth betwen the iPad and the MacBook Air throughout the day. I always held on to the Air, though, because it seemed necessary for longer writing and for work assignments. After reading a couple articles, though, and doing some more research on my own, I decided to make a few purchases and see if I really could put the Air away.

The first purchase was a Zaggfolio iPad keyboard case. The biggest issue for me with the iPad is the keyboard. I can do some simple typing with it. But if I want speed, accuracy, and the ability to type for extended periods, I needed a real keyboard. While there are a number of iPad keyboards out there, this one consistently gets the best reviews.

I also added a few apps to help recreate what I do on the Air. Numbers for spreadsheets, which are essential for me when I’m attempting to do stats quickly for football and basketball. Textexpander Touch to help with bulk text I need to repeat often. Blogsy as an iOS MarsEdit replacement. I’m sure I’ll add a few more as the experiment continues.

There are a few things that I will not do on the iPad. I will not edit photos. That will still be done on the Air. Same with downloading and managing music. The Air will be running in the office, connected to a monitor, mostly as a print server and for the girls’ computer needs. But I will not constantly be picking it up to bash out a blog post or return a lengthy email. And while I’m not covering any sports right now, I will do some test runs to see if I can still do all the things I need to do once I am in the field again.

So that’s my new project. I’ll report back in a week or so to update you on my progress.

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Who Owns Your Data

March 14, 2012 / DB

Following up on last week’s link to the Atlantic article about on-line advertising, a few thoughts about Internet privacy in general.

As we spend more-and-more time online, more-and-more people are airing concerns about what happens to the bread crumbs of data we leave in our wake. It seems like every week or so brings a new ‘scandal’ regarding how some online services provider handles user data.

Some people believe that no personal information of any kind should be logged and archived when they visit a website. Others believe that the exchange of demographic information for content is a vital part of the (mostly) free Internet.

I tend to agree with that second view, but I do wish we had more control over our online data records. I use some tools to help limit how much information I’m leaving behind, although I know there is no fool-proof method to do so. And the content providers are almost always going to be a step ahead of even the most technologically adept users. So even when we think we’re masking our Internet travels, the fact is we’re still being tracked in some manner.

I have, though, distanced myself a bit from two major online services recently. I used to run all my email through Gmail, since it is so great at archiving mass amounts of messages without gobbling up hard drive space. But, each time there was another story about how Google was using the information they get from our data, my enthusiasm for the service waned.

I don’t recall what the final straw was, but over a year ago I stopped routing any of my email through Google and kept it on domain space I owned. Plus, to get my personal domains to work with Gmail, there were always some workarounds that had to be navigated. It wasn’t just a matter of privacy, but also of convenience, that caused me to stop having Gmail manage all my messages.

Facebook is the other service I’ve turned away from. I still have an account, and I log in every now-and-then to read through updates. But lately I’ve been getting most of my Facebook news from my wife. I don’t believe I’ve posted an update since the holidays. I may still upload a picture from time-to-time, but I’ve moved back to sharing information either here on my blog or directly via email. I believe it was the revelation that Facebook was tracking user activity even after they had logged out of their account that pushed me away from them. Despite their assurances that nothing nefarious was being done with that data, that was a few notches too many down the creepy scale for me.

Which is a shame, as Facebook has become such an important tool to connect with others. Even for people I talk to frequently, Facebook is a great way to see pictures of their travels and families, news of careers and activities, and a thousand other tidbits that keep us ever-so-gently in touch.

I don’t think either Google or Facebook are evil. I haven’t deleted my Facebook account and still use some Google services, notably the Chrome browser. But I am uncomfortable with how their use of our data seems to be constantly expanding. Many have pointed this out, but it’s useful to remember that you are not Google or Facebook’s customers: advertisers are their customers. You, and your data, are their product.

It is important to understand that you are giving something up when you use these services. There is a cost, even if you’re not paying an annual fee. In order to maximize the return for their advertisers, Google, Facebook, etc. are always going to seek more information about you. When you realize that, and monitor changes to their terms of service, you can make an informed decision about if and when they’ve gone too far for your comfort.

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App Review: Kingdom Rush

February 24, 2012 / DB

I don’t spend a lot of time playing games on my iPad or iPhone. I’ll buy a handful each year and maybe get really interested in a couple of them. It’s rare that a game captures my imagination for more than a couple days.

But for the last three weeks, I’ve been loving Armor Games’ Kingdom Rush. I bought it despite several Internet warnings that it was hopelessly addictive. I can report, after three weeks or nearly constant play, that is absolutely true. If you buy this game, you will get hooked.

What’s so great about it? At first glance, it’s just another Tower Defense game; i.e. you face waves of attackers that you must arrange defensive forces against. Kingdom Rush comes with the twist of being set in a medieval/fantasy environment. It’s basically a D&D spin on classic TD games. You fight off orcs, goblins, trolls, gargoyles, spiders, and other assorted magical creatures.

Your defenses are a combination of infantry, artillery, magicians, and archers. Using your initial budget, you set up your defenses, summon the attackers, and start earning more gold to buy additional structures and upgrade your original ones. As long as you keep killing the attacking forces, you keep earning exciting new ways to destroy them.

It’s a pretty basic concept and, honestly, I never understood why this type of game is so addictive. And then I played Kingdom Rush. There’s something about those rolling waves of attackers, those brief moments of rest, and the ability to see your weak points and correct them during the game that sucks you in. Also, you get a bit of a rush from dropping a Rain of Fire spell on a swarm of attacking monsters. Just when you think you have it set up the way you want, a zombie slips through, you die, and you think, “OK, one more game.” Two hours later you’re still doing that.

That’s been me for the past three weeks.

There is also the clever combination of strategy and tactics, neither particularly heavy, that makes the game difficult to ‘solve’. The game gets tougher as your skills improve. It never gets boring because there is always something new popping up. There are 12 basic levels that can be played at two different difficulty settings. Solve those and two bonus levels pop up. In addition, there are a pair of one-off scenarios at each level.

Put it all together and there are weeks of fun packed into this game. Oh, and the 99 cent price tag makes it a terrific bargain.

Thus, I highly recommend Kingdom Rush. But be warned: once you start playing, you may find it difficult to stop.

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Something New And Apple News

February 21, 2012 / DB

You may recall that I took a crack at running a separate blog dedicated to my musings on Apple and technology. Like many of my Internet dreams,¹ it seemed like a great idea but in practice wasn’t such a huge success. Turns out it’s hard to write every day about the same subject, especially when there are about 1000 people out there doing the exact same thing. I admire those who can find something to focus their writing each day. And I’ll let them do it.

So I shut the Mac Daddy site down awhile back.

That doesn’t mean I don’t still have the urge to write about Apple-related stuff. And just because I only have a personal blog doesn’t mean I can’t share those thoughts here, right?

Thus, coming soon will be the first of my occasional reviews of iOS apps. I’ve been obsessed by a fun little game over the past couple weeks. So keep an eye out for that in the next day or so.

But, while I have your attention, a few thoughts on the surprise announcement last week of the next iteration of the Macintosh operating system, Mountain Lion.

Like many people, when the news first broke Thursday morning, I thought it was some kind of joke. After all, when Apple wants to surprise the world, they have a big event. They don’t talk to a select group of journalists and writers and let word trickle out. But, as they said, they’re doing things differently now.

After reading a number of the insider scoops, I’m left with a single impression: the operating system wars really are over, at least on the desktop. Apple, Microsoft, Intel, and the PC manufacturing community are far more interested in what’s happening in the portable device space. Desktop/laptop computers are still important and won’t disappear any time soon. But OS X and Windows are so advanced and the payoff for pushing them further is so little that all sides will scale things back dramatically there.

What makes that apparent to me is Apple’s announcement that they will now be doing annual updates to OS X, as they’ve done with iOS since its introduction. No more massive rewrites. No more starting from scratch. No more 18-24 month cycles that bring dramatic changes to the core OS. Every year they’re going to tweak some things, upgrade the security features another notch, refine some of the differences between OS X and iOS, and ship an update.

Along with the end of the massive update, we will also never again see a $129 price tag on the update. At least from Apple. The last two updates have both been in the $20 range. I expect that to remain the case. As iPhones and iPads have become the biggest components of Apple’s business, gone is the need to turn desktop OS upgrades into money makers. It’s better to keep the growing installed base on the latest iteration for a modest upgrade fee than try to goose revenues every couple of years with a major release.

And while it’s obvious Apple² is pushing their desktop and mobile operating systems closer together, I think this is a clear sign that while they may share more common elements over time, they will always remain distinct. The annual updates will keep the desktop side of the business as fresh as the mobile side, from a software standpoint, and make the overall experience even more similar. But running the same apps on your MacBook Air and your iPad is not happening any time soon.

Finally, you can’t help but look at this announcement and how it was handled and speculate on the changes in the company since Steve Jobs’ death. Maybe he signed off on this and it’s been in the works for a year or more. But it’s a very good sign for the Tim Cook era at how the company is moving forward. Execution is always the hardest part of any business plan, but so far it looks like Apple will not miss a beat in the new era.

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See also my brief Indiana Pacers blog and the occasional ‘anonymous writer’ blog I’ve started over the years, often just to test out different blogging platforms. ↩
And Microsoft with Windows 8 and Metro ↩

State Of The Blog

January 26, 2012 / DB

Greetings fellow citizens. I am here to talk about the State of the Blog. I can report that the State of the Blog is changed. Read on for the news.

It’s been a whole five months or something, thus it was time to implement some changes to Ye Olde Blog. I’ve bored you in the past (if you’ve chosen to read through such posts) explaining why I changed this or that. I shan’t do that again.

Basically I changed elements because I had the time and ability and, as usual, minor fiddling turned into a bigger project. The only changes you should notice are (hopefully) better overall performance of the site. The platform I used for the past year or so (Tumblr) had some issues and was occasionally slow to load, or didn’t load at all. That shouldn’t happen anymore.

I’ll admit the funny thing about my tinkering over the past year or so is the looks I’ve settled on each time have been quite similar. I guess I should get the message and quit messing around with it, huh?

The only area of controversy with the new design is that I’ve basically started from scratch with the posts. I wasn’t satisfied with how importing old posts worked. Thus, I decided to have no formal archive of posts before this month. If you dig around enough on the new setup, you will eventually find links to some of my old posts.

I felt bad about this at first, as eight-and-a-half years of archives is a lot to leave behind.¹ But then I ran across this line, which made me feel better:

Old writing is like an old girlfriend: the memory is better than the reality

Indeed.

As always, thanks for reading.

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Worth noting not everything I’ve written in my blogging career has been archived. But a good chunk of the 2003-2011 work is sitting on two other sites. ↩

Why iPhones Are Made In China

January 25, 2012 / DB

This is a terrific article on several levels. It examines some of the inside story of the development of the iPhone. It points out fundamental demographic advantages that China has over the U.S. And it gets into the potential moral delimma Apple, and other successful US technology companies, has when balancing profitability, share owner value, and the needs of the American worker.

Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.
Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.
In China, it took 15 days.

Sounds Of The Game

May 24, 2011 / DB

Piggy-backing a bit on my post about cloud-based music systems last week, my baseball post for this week will focus on the changing broadcast technology of the game.

I first became a baseball fan in 1978. But I really went head-over-heels for the game in 1980, when we moved to Kansas City. Suddenly I could listen to every single Royals game. Every week or so a couple road games were on TV. When I opened the paper each morning (and afternoon!), the lead story was about George Brett’s hitting streak and his flirtation with .400, the Royals’ lead in the AL West, and if this was the year they could finally slay the Yankees dragon in the playoffs.

It was a pretty great time to be a Royals fan.

My other early memories of baseball involve my visits to my grandparents’ homes in central Kansas. Out there, the house radio was pretty much always tuned to the local station, which just happened to be a Royals affiliate. My mom’s parents weren’t big sports fans, so often when the Royals would come on, they turned the radio off and I retreated to my room to listen. My dad’s parents, however, were big fans. There were always at least two radios tuned to the game in their home. There was the main radio in the kitchen/eating area, which was on approximately 23 hours a day. And Grandpa always carried his own radio around with him while he was working in the yard or on projects around the house. When he took his afternoon nap, he would place the radio on the coffee table and turn it just loud enough so he could hear Denny Matthews and Fred White while he dozed. I loved walking through their house on Sunday afternoons, never being out of earshot of the game.

I think most baseball fans my age, and older, have similar memories about baseball on the radio.

The rise of ubiquitous, high-speed Internet access has made the entire country like my Grandparents’ home. For the third straight summer, I have the fantastic MLB iPhone app. This year I purchased the MLB.TV package as well. Between them, I am never out of earshot of the Royals.

Each time I’m lying in bed with my two-year-old trying to get her to sleep, sitting in the driveway monitoring the girls playing, or doing something else with a game streaming through my iPhone, I’m amazed at the magic of modern technology. No longer am I restricted by the range of AM radio signals or broadcast territories or the Royals sucking and never being on national TV. I can live 500 miles away from Kansas City (or more) and still hear the game just as if I lived in the KC suburbs and was sitting on my back deck, drinking a beer while the girls played on their swing set. I can sit anywhere in my house and watch the live broadcast of the game on my TV or on my computer, as if I was plugged into a KC-area cable provider. And going on vacation does not mean losing contact with your team for a week.

Thirty years ago, you would have relied on morning box scores to follow your favorite team. Twenty years ago you could catch highlights on Sportscenter or CNN. Ten years ago you could follow text play-by-play of games on Yahoo! or stare at the ESPN ticker all night.

Today, thanks to broadband pipes, 3G networks, and incredibly powerful handheld devices, we can control what game we watch and when and where we watch it. For those of us who grew up listening to baseball on the radio, having the audio option is especially sweet.

Once upon a time, being a fan of an out-of-market team was a difficult and tenuous thing. It was easy to lose touch with the teams of your youth when careers and family took you to other parts of the country. But thanks to MLB’s embrace of technology, it can feel like you never left home. At least while the game is on.

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The Cloud

May 19, 2011 / DB

In recent weeks both Amazon and Google have launched cloud music services. Persistent rumors have it that Apple will follow suit sometime soon. Throw in a wide-range of independent streaming services and we may be on the verge of the next digital music revolution: the age of cloud storage, high speed broadband access, and the ability to stream our music wherever we want it.

I’ve been a loyal iTunes user for almost seven years. It made sense to me. I acquired music, placed it in a convenient storage location, and accessed it as needed. It was basically how I had been listening to music my entire life, just using hard drives and digital files instead of physical media and stereos.

I was suspicious of streaming services for a variety of reasons. I believed in the “I want to own my music” argument. When I buy or download something, I want to control my access to it. I don’t want to be dependent on an Internet connection to listen. And I didn’t want to invest in an industry that seemed to change every six months or so. If I selected a service and it went out of business, I would have to begin building my library from scratch again.

For the past couple months I’ve been using the Rdio service. I still download a ton of music each week and listen to it through iTunes, but I’ve been spending more and more time in Rdio. Why the change?

For starters, it feels like the streaming services are more mature than they were five years ago. There are fewer holes in their collections, new music generally pops up on Tuesdays when it should, and with media-friendly mobile devices I’m no longer tied to the desktop to access the service. Rdio, and most of the other streaming services, have put together user friendly interfaces, as well.

I see three big benefits in streaming services. First is the price. For $10 a month, I can access my Rdio account from a computer, my iPhone, our Roku box, or a number of other devices. I imagine I spend in the range of $50 each month on music as it is. Reduce that to $10 and access a lot more music is an easy win. When I need to own a file, I can still go through iTunes or Amazon and add those to my hard drive.

The second is the broadness of access these services provide. In the digital age, I’ve generally read reviews of new albums, noted the tracks that get the highest marks, then scoured the internet for sites that have those songs. Next I would go to iTunes and fill in the holes. It’s been rare that I purchase/listen to an entire album by an artist I wasn’t excited about. But with Rdio, each Tuesday I fill my queue with every new album that interests me and work through them over the following week. I weed out the songs I don’t like, keep the ones I enjoy, and by the weekend I have a nice new collection of brand new songs.

Finally, as we add more and more digital media to our collections, the space requirements increase. As Solid State Drives become more common, that extra space can be precious. And it opens up uses for older computers. As long as you can run a modern browser, you can be rocking a tiny hard drive and still listen to thousands of songs.

The service is not perfect, though. While I can sync music to my iPhone, that music stays on the iPhone. I can’t sync it across to my MacBook Air and then on to my iPod. I don’t run with my iPhone, so there is a disconnect between what I’m listening to on Rdio and the music on my iPod. That’s a minor quibble, but an issue nonetheless. I still download a lot of music I find on blogs and would love a way to keep that stuff in sync with my cloud library. Except for music I sync to my phone, I’m reliant on an internet connection to use Rdio. Outages are less common than they used to be but do still occur. And it’s annoying to have a song freeze for 10 seconds if you lose your wireless signal momentarily. There remains the uncertainty of Rdio’s future. Will I need to shift to another service in six months or a year?

For the most part, I enjoy using Rdio. It’s changing how I listen to music and what I listen to. But it definitely feels like a middle step on the way to something bigger and better.

Most reviewers say that Amazon’s service is a little clunky at this point, but has it’s useful points. Google’s is a mess, but is brand new and should, hopefully, improve. What Apple will do is the big mystery. Rather than just launch, as their two rivals have done, Apple is allegedly working with the record labels to make sure everything is licensed to their satisfaction. A solid integration between your hard drive’s iTunes library and the cloud iTunes library would put Apple ahead of everyone. The most recent rumors make it sound like anything you buy from iTunes, you’ll be able to access and play through the cloud as well. But Apple has traditionally had issues with online services, so I’m not getting too excited about it just yet.

These are the first moments in the next music technology revolution. Five years from now, we may look back on the iTunes decade and laugh, the way we look at 8-tracks, cassette singles, and other antiquated music delivery systems. Regardless of what happens, you know the music industry is praying someone finds a way to make us pay again for music we’ve already paid for many times.

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What Belongs To Us

April 27, 2011 / DB

I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a new blog, not to replace this one but rather in addition to it to give me an outlet for all my technology geekery. If that happens, I’ll let you all know. I wrote something this morning that would have fit such a blog perfectly. But, in the absence of it, below I shall share with you my thoughts on the latest “scandal” to plague the fine Americans at Apple, Inc.

A couple friends asked me, rather mockingly I might add, how I felt about the revelation last week that the iPhone is apparently cacheing information on your location and storing it both on the phone and in your regular backups. While there was no evidence that the information was being sent to Apple, or anyone else for that matter, plenty of people either freaked out or used this as a chance to mess with Fanboys like me, hoping to shake our confidence.

I was not terribly concerned.

Maybe I’m naive, but I figure if you have any electronic device that is capable of showing your location, that information is stored somewhere and can be accessed by people with the right knowledge. That the iPhone, every Android phone, and apparently Windows 7 phones (in a different manner) track and store this information was not a surprise to me. In fact, it made perfect sense for many reasons. ¹

I understand how some people are creeped out by this. But if this is a problem for you, you probably should never own or use a cell phone. As soon as you connect to the network, which happens the moment you power on an activated phone, your location is revealed. If you stay awake at night worrying about Big Business and/or Big Government tracking your movements, you might want to pull the plug on every part of your digital life. They know what we watch on TV, what we download, the websites we access, and so on. At least they can quickly grab all that information if they want it. It also means no more Gmail, since Google scans every email you send and receive to optimize the ads they send your way. No more Facebook or Twitter, which can record where you are when you post. No more networked games, Amazon Wish Lists, iTunes accounts, PayPal accounts and on and on.

I wondered if all the people throwing a fit about this realized how much information about their lives they had already shared on their own. Or, as Mike Lee put it on Twitter:

“So busy bitching about iPhone location logs I forgot to check in on Foursquare.”

Exactly!

We willingly give up so much information that it seems odd to get upset about something like this. But it is easier to think that Apple or Google or Microsoft or the government is taking something from us than think of all the things we are willingly giving away.

We live in the age of socialized information. Everything is shared by default and opting out has become a routine activity performed each time we decide the cool, new social networking platform isn’t so cool anymore. It is important to monitor how and when information about you is shared. When outside agents are genuinely taking advantage of our personal data, we must demand that they respect our privacy. But we must also recognize that the price for taking part in our techno-social culture is that we must cede some access to our information. It’s a fine line, and one that must be monitored constantly.

Apple responded this morning with a lengthy release that should put most fears to rest. The shut down of the Sony PlayStation Network last week because of an attack that compromised user data is a reminder that we should be more concerned with how companies are securing our data than what data they are collecting in the first place.

Data could be used as a diagnostic aid, a convenience device to speed various phone functions, or simply be some code used in testing of the OS that was now useless.
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People…They’re The Worst

April 12, 2011 / DB

It seems like once a week I’m linking to Joe Posnanski’s blog. Believe me, I’m tempted to do so more often. In fact, I’m surprised that someone hasn’t already set up a blog where all they do is use Joe’s posts as a jumping-off point for their own writing.

His latest effort, at its surface a commentary on what happened to reporter Tara Sullivan at the Master’s but evolves into a discussion on Internet commentary, is typically brilliant. Go read it. It’s great.

This line stuck out for me:

I almost never read the comments below stories anywhere else because they can depress me to the point where I don’t want to leave the house.

This is true for me as well. It’s not that I don’t enjoy a good debate or want to get a sense of how readers feel about a story/post. It’s that it is rare when a comment thread doesn’t devolve into a pointless shouting match. It doesn’t matter what the subject matter is – politics, celebrity, sports, comparing smart phones, how to brew coffee, the best breed of dog to buy – sooner or later someone will take offense to another’s opinion, and from there it’s on.

It shouldn’t bug me. I feel like I’m smart enough to understand that many comments are bullshit, people just looking to get a rise out of others. Others are not based in reality and not worth getting upset over. But I can’t help it. I tend to react to things I feel strongly about emotionally and before I know it, I’m shaking my head, can feel my blood pressure rising, and the argument gets stuck in my head the rest of the day.

Because of this I’ve almost completely removed political websites from my regular reading. It doesn’t matter whether a site/post fits my point-of-view or opposes it. I have a hard time dealing with the pure hate that seems to be a required part of political discourse these days. When it comes to sports, music, etc., I just follow Joe’s lead and skip the comments.

I don’t have a problem with people arguing their perspective vociferously. That’s the cornerstone of our society. I do have a problem with all the hatred and intolerance of others that we feel obligated to infuse our arguments with. It is possible to argue opposing viewpoints robustly without questioning your opponent’s intelligence, patriotism, morality, parenting, etc.

For me, it’s easier to ignore comments completely than attempt to wade through them in hopes of finding some nuggets of honest, open debate.