Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Book Review: The Useful Book

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Netgalley recently allowed me access to Sharon and David Bowers’ The Useful Book (Workman Publishing, $20) to see what I made of it.

For someone who holds DIY and “making” close to her heart, it’s a fun but imperfect find, featuring over a hundred practical how-to “skills” that you might not have picked up from traditional sources like Home Economics class or Wood Shop.

The book consists of two sections, one focusing on home skills, the latter on handyman ones. The page layout is easy to follow with sensible columns, lots of art, and simple step-by-step instructions. You can dive into a random page and grab some how-to without having to read from cover-to-cover.

I see this more as a gift book suitable for a coffee table than a much-loved reference. I found the coverage to be entertaining even when I disagreed with some of the suggested approaches or found them missing important details.

I warn you that some of the topics may seem a little underwhelming (“How to boil water” and “How to care for your (sewing) needles” spring to mind). The practical applications (“Superstitious folk wisdom advises that, to protect a child from evil spirits during sleep, a key must be slipped under his or her pillow”) may not exactly fit my corner of the DIY community.

For example, my physicist husband points out that there’s absolutely no reason to stick with cold water for boiled water (#1, “How to Boil Water”), as dissolved mineral danger is hyped up in his opinion. He adds that the reason you want to cover your pot is to prevent heat from escaping, and make your water boil faster, more than losing water content through steam.

I learned that I could have drained my tofu (#47, “How to Cook with Tofu”) — a step I have never taken and am unlikely to adopt even now, but was happy to learn about. (I use my hand to provide top-down pressure as I slice tofu sideways first before doing rows and columns.)

We like bright lights in our workspaces and are unlikely to swap them out for cost-saving lower wattage units (#177 “How to Slash Your Electricity Bill”)

This isn’t to say there isn’t good advice on-hand, like sanding rough spots when patching a wall but I do wish that they’d offered advice like checking the inside of a bike tire as well as looking at the outside for possible reasons why it went flat, a critical tip in goathead country.

If you’re looking for a nice housewarming gift for a new couple, this title could suit the bill. If you’re looking for a deeply geeky read, this probably isn’t going to be your cup of tea.

Amazon Kindle Fire, the $35 “Education” edition

It was hard to miss the $35 Kindle Fire deal on Friday. Deep discounts extended across nearly all the Amazon Kindle product line but I limited myself to purchasing two units, augmenting the 2011-vintage unit we already had on-hand.

Our new tablets arrived yesterday and they are definitely a step up in quality from the original line. They’re faster, the UI is cleaner, the features more extensive with built-in cameras and microphone. The units are not so different in weight but they feel better made and more consumer ready.

The new Fires are also more obviously and in-your-face a marketing arm of Amazon and less general purpose tablets. That is hardly surprising for a $35 (shipped!) purchase but it’s one that as a parent you have to be really cautious with. I quickly enabled parental controls (something I’ve never done on our iPads) and disabled insta-purchases.

One of the two Kindles is replacing a first generation iPad mini, which was lovingly purchased as “gently refurbished” before being dropped from a height of about three feet to its death, approximately five seconds (give or take a week) after its arrival. That mini replaced a 1st gen iPad, which since the mini’s untimely demise, has been back in service — gasping and wheezing and doing its best to keep up. The Kindle is no iPad mini but it has a role in our lives to fill.

Speaking as a parent, having a $35 alternate is a very good thing. I don’t really care that it doesn’t run all the same apps (or even very many of the good apps). It connects to the net, does email and web, allows child to do most school related tasks. It is acceptable.

We’ll see how the school transition goes. I suspect teachers will applaud the built-in book reading and condemn the onboard videos. (There’s also a music app but really who wants to spend time setting that up?) At the very least, this new tablet will probably work better and more reliably than the 1st generation iPad that’s currently being hauled to and from school every day. Fingers crossed.

As for the second Kindle Fire, well, that’s going to younger brother who is currently trying to keep his Chromebook working. The 2012 Samsung Chromebook although initially appealing turned out to be one of the worst pieces of hardware we ever bought

His all-Chromebook school agrees. They’re transitioning next year away from these cheaply made, unreliable pieces of…hardware…probably to iPads if they can get a deal/grant/whatever through the school district.

Every parent was required to purchase Chromebook insurance. We’ve paid twice for replacements, and this doesn’t count the 2012 Chromebook we personally bought out of pocket and liked so much for the first few months until it started to fail and fail and fail and fail.

Compare this to our 2011 Kindle Fire which other than a loose charging port is still working well and our 2010 iPad, which we’re abandoning only because it weighs about as much as a baby elephant and it cannot run new operating systems.

Amazon isn’t pushing Kindle into the classroom the way Apple makes that connection. It’s a commerce machine not a expression of learning and expression. I may have to use side-loading to get classroom-specific Android software onto the boy’s new Kindle Fire. Last night, I got the technique down, just in case.

For $70 total shipped between the two tablets, it’s an experiment I’m happier to make than usual. Wish us luck. I know there will be more roadbumps than if we went the iPad route.

Updates from a post-laptop world: Nulaxy keyboard adapter review

Ever since my daughter stole my laptop, I’ve been trying to make do with my iPad when on the go.

I own an Apple bluetooth keyboard but I hate the chicklets. So I bought this Nulaxy keyboard adapter from Amazon. For $25, I thought it would be a great “bring your own keyboard” alternative. Attach a keyboard, and it converts it to bluetooth for use with tablets.

It arrived yesterday, and this morning I finally got a chance to kick the tires so to speak. Unfortunately, I don’t have good news to report.

The lid of the battery compartment doesn’t stay on and won’t click into place. Any minor vibration on the table with it in use causes the lid and one or two of the batteries to pop out. Not good.

Even taped shut, it’s a disappointment. Unlike most people, I actually have drawers of keyboards around to test. So I grabbed four of them, ranging from low end to high, low-power to mid-power, plugged them into the Nulaxy, and attempted to sync.

I was unable to get a single keyboard to connect to my iPad.

I guess it’s time to process a return at Amazon.

I just bought a subscription to Cloak VPN

It’s that time of year. All my services subscriptions are either ready to renew or it’s about time I review what I’m paying for year-round. I currently have three especially problematic services:

VPN (hard to connect to, iffy service, interference with Google),
Offsite backup (Java engine that completely destroys my Mac and creates a wind tunnel — I’ll probably be switching to Backblaze soon), and
An Internet provider whose service degrades if more than three people look at my site at once (I’ve heard good things about Digital Ocean, if you have alternate recs I’d love to hear them).

I’ve been with all three current providers for years and years. As of today, I’ve now managed to ditch at least one of them. Today, I threw my credit card at Cloak VPN. I’ve been testing the service for the last week and I’m hooked.

It’s a very Apple-aware iOS-designed provider. (I haven’t used the OS X component because my daughter, as you might have read here, has appropriated my laptop so I’m currently laptopless.) Most importantly, the service just works. When I connect to an untrusted WiFi network, the VPN service automatically switches on. When I’m home to my recognized WiFi, it switches off. Cell service is automatically trusted as a default setting.

In my daily life, I’m surrounded by attwifi and xfinitywifi hotspots. Now, my iPad knows that it can automatically connect to these and switch on my VPN cloak. Yesterday, as I was sitting at the car shop, I suddenly noticed that my iPhone was getting unusually good response speeds. Turns out that it had connected to a recognized big-name hotspot provider and sure enough, cloak was already there and protecting me.

This morning, Cloak got my money.

Service plans start from $2.99/month for 5GB bandwidth but if you consume a lot of data, for example with a laptop or at home, there’s an unlimited plan at $9.99/month or $99.99/year. The plans extend to an unlimited number of devices but they are one-person each. The company politely requests you don’t buy a single plan for an entire family, company, or dorm.

Review: em notes for Dropbox

I continue to struggle with “work on the go”. Daughter has taken my laptop (although that itself was not an ideal solution), leaving me with just an iPad and keyboard to work with away from the house.

When your brain and fingers are absolutely wired for Emacs editing, it’s a frustrating experience to have to work on the iPad, with all its touching. As a touch-typist, any time I have to move my hands away from the keyboard, it feels like I have failed.

After some searching around App Store, I eventually downloaded a few Emacs-style editors. Of these, em notes (about five bucks) offered the best solution. It links with your Dropbox account and enables you to edit text in an application folder there, ensuring you can load and work on documents and have them available as well in the “real world”, aka anywhere you’re not working on an iPad.

The app by Daisuke Kawamura is not entirely ported to English. Expect to find a few non-localized menu items and help write-ups. Despite that, and despite its Engineer-looking bare-bones design, it represents the best I could find for now although I hold out hope for better.

The fonts are adjustable, it integrates well with the system pasteboard, and you can disable the alternating blue and white lined background which caused me irrational anger. The key bindings are settable to either True Emacs or Mac-style, which is a really nice touch.

I could not get rid of the carriage return symbols which continue to haunt and irritate me and the app doesn’t respond to Command-N to create new files. Argh.

There’s a cool little feature for renaming files that I discovered by accident, by the way. Just tap the name on the navigation bar and it transforms into a name editor. Nice.

If only, the app could export a keyboard for other apps that supported Emacs key entry as well, it would come close to ideal. As it stands em notes isn’t pretty or perfect but I’m glad I forked over the money for it.

A few unrelated points:

While I’m writing about keyboard entry, I’d like to point out how frustrating keyboard-based iOS spotlight is. You can hop into it using Command-Space, just like on a Mac, but it’s slow as anything and if you’re trained to follow that launch with the text you’re searching for, 99% of the time, it will type into the currently active program instead of Spotlight because, yes, Spotlight launch really is that slow.

Once in Spotlight, there’s no way to navigate search results by the keyboard, so you have to reach around and touch the screen to pick the item you’re hunting for. So annoying.

As I was testing text entry today, I realized how far away I keep my monitors. The relatively small size of the iPad normally doesn’t bother me because I interact with it much nearer than I would with a proper monitor.

Using a stand and keyboard made it almost unusable for my eyesight because the iPad was pushed back so far. I think this is one of my major issues with laptops in general too. I tried setting up the iPad to my left to get it closer but it just gave me a sore neck.

Review: Crayola Color Studio HD+ and Crayola Light Marker

Print Job

Middle child and I were at the dollar store earlier this week. It’s fall break and we were feeling antsy and rich, with dollars in our pockets and hours to kill. So we picked up one each of Crayola’s Color Studio HD+ and Light Marker products for a cool buck each (originally priced at $29.99 and co-branded with Griffin).

After returning home and putting these technologies to the test, we quickly figured out why they had been discounted down to a buck each.

They kind of suck.

The Light Marker app (free) uses your iPad’s onboard camera to look at a colored flashlight, letting your little artistic prodigy draw pictures from a foot or two away from the canvas. I’m not joking here. The child waves the flashlight in a dim or dark room, and with luck, manages to “draw” images to the screen.

It’s a terrible user experience and a terrible app.

However, it’s not nearly as bad as the unusable Crayola ColorStudio HD+ with stylus. This “stylus”, believe it or not, works by emitting a high pitched irritating pulsing beep, which the iPad tracks and triangulates to figure out where the “stylus” is on-screen. It also has a hideous color-changing light-show on the side of the “stylus”.

You have to push really hard to get the iPad to recognize the interaction. My daughter is way better at this than I am, and she drew the magnificent inspired art work at the top of the post.

Both apps are shortly going to be trashed.

As for the products, the Light Marker stylus is of moderate use in that it is, in fact, a flashlight, so can be used as a flashlight. The HD “stylus” will be in the trash shortly as it gave me a headache during use and its only good feature seems to be that it…no…never mind. It doesn’t have a good feature.

However, hidden within the packaging of the Light Marker is a damned fine iPad stand that we *loved*. Well worth that $1, this collapsable stand has rubberized footers, a solid build, and can not only be used with the intended iPad, but also pretty much every iDevice and Kindle we could throw at it — regardless of width and case. It folds down to almost nothing but is strong enough to throw into a backpack or purse.

I’m probably going to go back and buy a few more Light Marker packages because this stand is awesome.

To summarize: both products are crap, not worth $1, let alone $30. Given the ubiquity of $1 tablet styluses at the dollar store, it’s not as if they couldn’t have just packaged a decent toddler-appropriate stylus. This is a perfect example of people trying to be too clever and not at all practical when putting together a product.

However, if you have a Dollar Tree near you, head on over and buy some of these stands. I loved ’em.

Update: Compared to my beloved Two-Hands stands, this is nothing to write home about. Not nearly as stable, won’t move with the device when you pick it up, can’t adjust the angle with exact precision etc. BUT unlike the Two Hands, this cheapy stand can handle Kindle (Two Hands ends are too thin), thick cases (same problem), phones and ipod touches. I’ve been using this all afternoon for plopping testing devices into. If you’re looking for the ultimate iPad stand, stick with the Two Hands. For throwing testing devices onto, this is great.

Review: Ghost Note

Ghost Note ($9.99, try before you buy) offers a really clever OS X utility. It evaluates the context of your current work state, whether you’re in a web browser, or selecting a file in the Finder, or editing a document in Photoshop, and it enables you to add comments to the context of your work.

For example, the screenshot at this top of this write-up shows a note that only appears when I’m working on new posts. That means I can keep a running log that’s specific to my task, and it’s always ready and available when I’m working in that context.

It’s rare to find a utility that’s both novel and so well thought out.

I had a few qualms in usage, primarily tied to the thinness of the fonts (mostly due to my weak eyes) but on the whole, I really liked the concept and the implementation. You can change the background of the note for better contrast. I went with yellow over black in the end.

Be aware that you need to install scripts to support some of the context inference. These are added to your Documents folder as Apple Scripts and are mostly harmless. However, context-sensing is incomplete and you may need to add and customize those scripts if your tasks extend beyond those already supported.

The app offers you a one-week trial period. I encourage you to kick its wheels. Nice find!

Life with 6-Plus

As we head into Summer, I’ve had a good long haul with my 6-Plus. I think I’ve had enough hands-on time with it to summarize how I like it. In a word? Meh. This is not one of Apple’s more outstanding products.

It’s not big enough to be used as a tablet so I end up hauling my iPad with my everywhere. It’s too big to be used comfortably as a phone so I keep longing for a smaller handset. In fact, I’d have done much better at this point getting a phone from any provider with voice dialing and an iPad or iPad mini with cellular data.

That’s not to say that there isn’t much to love on the 6 plus. It’s just that you have to look to find it. It’s like hauling around a well-intentioned bumbling moose with you. No matter how nice the moose, it’s still a moose.

Review: Lingon 3

I’ve been doing a lot of Swift scripting over the past few days and I badly wanted to set some of my scripts up to to run every day and alert me via the notification center.

Swift? Easy. Notification center alert? Done and dusted. Scheduling? Ugh. Cron? Launch daemon? Yuck.

Read On…

Review: Developing for the Apple Watch

Jeff Kelley’s new book is short. How short? Under a hundred pages short. That’s because it’s part of Pragmatic Programmer’s new Pragmatic exPress series. Developing for the Apple Watch ($11 Ebook $17 Paper, $27 Combo) offers exactly what it says on the label, a quick, focused take on Watch development.

With only 100 pages to worry about, this is a terrific series for getting information to the market quickly and effectively. I love how Pragmatic is pivoting to handle Apple’s quick-change reality.