The Blog of Brad
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Back To School 2010
Aug 27th
Near the end of every school year I imagine what I could’ve done better during the year to be organized and do as good as I can. However, as summer is two long months, those ideals are typically long since forgotten when it comes time to actually get back to school. This year is an exception: I wrote down what I wanted to do different this year.
I’ll forgo the typical “make good and regular work habits” and “integrate technology into my learning experience” spiel, instead I’m almost more interested in the low-tech solutions. For starters, coil-bound notebooks are becoming more and more interesting. Coil-bound notebooks are inexpensive, have many hundred pages, are slightly smaller than standard US letter size (which could make indexing easier), and are chronological. That last fact alone is invaluable. School is taught in a chronological manor — a topic is introduced, built upon, review, built higher, then tested on; only ever in that order. Looseleaf in a standard binder is subject to rearrangement, loss, or other inconveniences that impact negatively on school life. This year I will be integrating coil-bound notebooks deeply into my note organization.
Minimalism. I’ve been steadily awakening to the beauty of minimalism in life. This year my backpack (ordered from Dell, arrived today) is much smaller than any other backpack I’ve had since I was 12, only able to hold a 15″ laptop (*cough* or iPad *cough*) and a 2″ binder (or 2 2″ binders). There are few extra pouches which I would normally preach as ways to hold your Purell or 3M lint roller, but those will have to find another home. The backpack as a whole looks prim and tidy. Additionally as opposed to my previous organization scheme which involved a separate pencil case, I’ll be solely using a binder-insert (2 ring, fabric, has zippers and pouches for pens) for all my writing instrument storage. 2x minimalism.
The last and possibly most exam-beneficial technique I’ll be using this year is a (MediaWiki) Wiki. Last year I dabbled with a Wiki for storing biology notes, but couldn’t find a solid use-case for it in other courses (as it started too late to get the meat of my general science course). For clarification, I did use it in Art to archive links to famous art pieces and tidbits for the final project; and I used it in English to carry written assignments back and forth between school and home. As this wiki will be accessible by everyone, this is also a benefit. Just before first semester exams last year I had some fifteen people add value to the Wiki — whether by adding notes, links, annotations, or editing text. The Wiki itself was accessed more than 450 times before the first semester exams, and then another approximately 450 people before the second semester exams. Given there were only about 200 people in Biology 11 during the whole year, I call that a success.
Building a New House: Part 1 – Ethernet
Aug 11th
If you follow me on Twitter ( @bradarsenault ) you may have noticed that I have posted photos nearly everyday about a new house. The house is almost done and the move-in date is next week; the final (occupancy permit) inspection was last week.
The house has been underway for the past 4.5 months and the contractors and crew have been awesome to work with and haven’t made any major mistakes, and they’re eager to correct the mistakes that have been made. It has been an interesting experience — having to decide where a door should be, what height a window should be, where light switches should be, all without living in the home. This is an awesome lesson in good user interface design (you think it sucks when an app’s UI sucks, imagine the UI you live in everyday sucking.) There were some goals that I’ve set aside, as I manage the connectivity in the house (that would be five computers, a handful — two at the moment — laptops, media playback devices — XBox, etc — with higher-bandwidth requirements, and an array of routers and switches to provide some segmentation). My 5 goals for this project were:
- Wire everything that isn’t mostly mobile.
- Gigabit is a plus.
- Central location for all network equipment that isn’t in a living space.
- DIY — the electricians made it very clear they have nothing to do with data networking. Also DIY is more cost effective.
- Unobtrusive & durable. Outlets are better looking and more reliable long-term than simply run wire.
I think those goals were met. On July 20 I ran tests and labeled each of the outlets in the utility closet with the room they run to, and confirmed each run (Cat5e, as that’s all electricians would allow me to use, because of building code) is working.
- There are 7 runs (outside of the closet): one in each bedroom; one in the media room, den, great room, and kitchen. Works great for all of the wired components of the network.
- Gigabit is possible with Cat5e and the outlets I used. The to-be-implemented network equipment will dictate this. Currently I’m using my legacy dual Linksys WRT54G routers; one running Tomato router, the other running stock firmware to provide most compatible wireless – Tomato has given me trouble with wireless before; the second router is connect to the first using a standard ethernet cable from a LAN port to a LAN port.
- All of the networking equipment will sit on a shelf in the utility closet.
- The electricians ran the wire from the closet to each room in a specified location. I terminated the ethernet myself. I spent ~<$400 @ Home Depot for the tools and materials (1 impact punch down tool for $69, 1 termination coaster @ $2, 14 Cat5e modules @ $5.33 each, 3 single module face plates @ $3 each, 4 dual-module face plates @ $3.50 each, 1 three-module face plate @ $3.50, 4 dual keystone port wall mounts @ $4.95, 100ft of bulk Cat5e cable @ $25, Cat5e crimping tool & terminatoins @ $32.95, 50 Cat5e terminations @ $12.95). This is a fraction of the cost this would have cost in 1995! **fwiw — when wiring the ethernet terminations, I used the ‘B’ wiring guides. In my research I concluded this is a more modern wiring standard, however both should work with modern hardware.
- The faceplates look nice and clean. Unlike phone jacks, ethernet has to be wired (at least in residential settings) using a module and faceplate. The modules snap into holes in the faceplates to allow a myriad of combinations of connections including phone, coax, ethernet, RCA audio, HDMI, and more. The module size is standardized.
Tests
As I’ve never terminated Ethernet before (without a professional near-by), it was certainly a gamble that any of this would work. At the risk of shorting a Dell laptop and a WRT54G router, I used these for testing. Unlike a $110+ professional test kit, this would provide real-world results in that not only are the pairs tested for electrical connectivity, but also the two terminations as a whole working (interference). Every termination works, as do all of the ethernet cables I’ve crimped/made so far. I’ve performed gigabit tests by linking two computers directly (by using a crossover cable between their ports in the utility closet) and it works (I didn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t, but testing is better than not testing.)
Right now I’m writing/finalizing these blog posts using my wired ethernet to access the internet. There is some pride knowing that I made this, and it works. As we’re all moved in I have a lot more to write about, including my new office space, the time of day electrical power meter (coming soon, not yet installed), and the global connectivity issue.
The iPhone Tragedy … err Resolution
Jul 5th
I have been in an Apple Store exactly twice in my life. Once on September 9, 2006 when I bought a black 5th-gen iPod and video-out cable in Florida, and once yesterday in the Maine Mall in Portland, ME. As you have have read if you follow me on Twitter, I’ve been in the land of “soda” and faintly-colored money for a couple days so far; you also know that my iPhone screen broke on May 26.
My iPhone, although the screen was smashed, continued to work (power on, make calls, etc…) and would be a good backup phone to have for the future. So I should replace the screen; there were two options — do it myself (iFixit kit for $65) or have Apple do it. Given that I was in Maine, just minutes from an Apple Store, tt seems logical that should the screen be replaced by an Apple Genius. I went online and booked a 4:10PM appointment with a Genius.
At the store I checked in with an Apple employee and my name appeared on the Genius bar screen as #3 in line. At exactly 4:10 an employee led me to the bar and I explained my problem to the genius and he asked to look at the phone — he said he wanted to look at my SIM card, and I (embarrassed) said that I had, since the iPhone broke, bought a Nexus One and the SIM wasn’t in the iPhone. He popped the iPhone SIM card tray open and did a serial model lookup and said my phone warranty expired “yesterday” so… happy 1 year, iPhone 
… and although the warranty wouldn’t have mattered, it would be $199 to replace the screen and would take 5 minutes. That’s a bit steep.
He further examined the phone and found a crack in the case that I had lived with and ignored for the better part of the year I owned the phone, and said that the device could be replaced for free under an Apple recall issued for the 3G and 3GS with a cracked back panel. He explained that Apple has recognized they were using a defective plastic for the backing of the phone and would replace any phone that developed any cracking. Stellar. I got a replacement phone, fresh, new, sweet. I punched in my old password and deleted the contents of the phone, and it was placed in a box under the counter and out came a fresh iPhone. He took my Rogers SIM card and popped it in the iPhone to which it wouldn’t activate. Fail. I figured this would be an issues as iPhones are locked to their home carrier (AT&T in the US, Rogers, Telus, or Bell in Canada, etc…) He suggested it would activate when I got to a Canadian IP address.
Good news: I got back to the hotel, and even under the bad (filtered) WiFi at a Hilton, was able to activate (plug phone in, iTunes opens, phone says “iPhone Activated”) and successfully connected to the AT&T network (did not connect to a data network as data roaming was disabled) — even as far as showing “AT&T” next to the bars, instead of the “ROGERS” I’m used to seeing. I hoped this phone works when I get home (fwiw — in the Settings > About page, “Rogers 5.0″ is displayed as the carrier, and my phone number is displayed as “My number”). This is a great experience. I powered the phone on at the boarder and it automatically connected to AT&T, however I was able to select “ROGERS” from the carriers list in the Settings.app. The phone now works perfectly, although I’m faced with the tough decision to chose between the Nexus One and the iPhone.
The iPhone Tragedy; to New Beginnings
Jun 12th
Ryan Currie broke my iPhone. jfc #fb
Something terrible happened at 3:22 PM on May 25. Something that I had feared more than anything for ten months. My iPhone broke. I was walking in the hall way and got bumped and my phone flew out of my hand, hit the ground face down, and the screen was shattered (see pic below, may disturb some people). My heart was shattered. Thus I began the journey of selecting the next best suitor as I knew the next iPhone was coming (everyone knows there’s an iPhone hardware refresh in June).
I immediately called Rogers and told them my phone was broken and I needed to replace it. I had read before that Rogers, in an attempt to bolster ahead of the other two providers, had launched a device replacement program, called “Rogers handset protection guarantee” which would replace your handset for a subsidized price (using a refurbished unit) so long as you have a minimum of 12 months remaining on your contract (if you have less than 12 months the contract is extended to 12 months). Awesome; had I been with any other carrier I’d be in for a whole lot more money!
So I enquired about getting a replacement and the surprisingly helpful CSR told me that there were three handsets available to me — the iPhone 3G (not 3GS) would be $549 ($50 off retail), a Blackberry Curve 8900 would be $299, a Blackberry Bold 9000 would be $329, and the LG Eve (an Android device) would be $0. Honestly none of those options sounded reasonable;
- the LG Eve is an Android handset but is a previous generation device, running stock 1.5 (with no knowledge of updates to or past 1.6), using a resistive touch screen, has a poor QWERTY keyboard, and is plagued by bugs (according to reviews).
- the Blackberry Curve 8900 seemed at first like a compromise Blackberry, but actually out specs the Bold in a few places, notably the camera and physical size/weight, but would mean bye-bye GMail push, well-made apps, touch keyboard, and dignity (I’ve knocked the Blackberry in a lot of places). Regardless, this was choice number 1.
- The Blackberry Bold 9000 was my first choice but I gave myself a minimum of three days to think it over. The first problem was that it’s a previous generation device with poor battery (according to reviews). I’d also heard that Blackberry OS 6 wasn’t going to the Bold 9000 (only the Bold 2/9700). Also the camera was mediocre, etc…
So with my initial decision made, I decided to call Rogers to order a Blackberry. I was just saying “yes” to completing to order when I brought up that I would need to switch my data plan over to a Blackberry data plan. If I had been any other consumer this wouldn’t be a problem — Rogers charges the same rate for Blackberry data and smartphone data ($25 for 500MB, $30 for 1GB, …) but I got my iPhone in July during a promotion to get a 6GB data plan for $30 which was a battle to get back then. At the same time, Rogers had a promotion for Blackberrys where if you inquired, you could get 6GB of Blackberry data for $30. The switch wouldn’t change any pricing. But Rogers didn’t know of that or wouldn’t allow me to do that.
My next venture was to perform a trick I’d heard of, called APN3CON, where the CSR has to type APN3CON into the SOC section and it makes your data plan function on a regular smartphone/internet stick and on Blackberrys. Awesome. I talked to Rogers and the CSR downright said I was crazy and making up lies. He thought it was a prank and verbally attacked me for it, constantly saying “who told you this?” Further more I emailed Rogers to confirm that APN3CON works. They said it does and gave me strict instructions as to how to get it on my account, but by this time I was fed up and my mind changed — Blackberry may have awesome relevance in business, but the way the interface works, and the age of the platform, and the build quality all told me that this was not the phone for me. I’d moved on to bigger and better things.
Now, almost seven hundred words later I get to my decision, the Nexus One. The Nexus One has been supported by Rogers in Canada — of course it would work with 2G unsupported using the T-Mobile version, but however I don’t have 3G where I live or within 100KM of where I live (screw you Rogers), it would be nice to have it eventually.
I ordered my Nexus One with an inscription on June 2nd at 5PM, costing $556.16 US dollars ($581 Canadian, currency converted through Mastercard at price of purchase). The phone was delivered on June 7, and on delivery from DHL, a fee of $78 local sales tax including a $7 brokerage fee was paid. All said and done, the phone cost ~$660. Not so bad, considering that the iPhone 3GS retails for $699 before taxes.
I’ve now had the Nexus for a full school week, and there have been a lot of good reactions to the phone, a lot asking whether I prefer this to my iPhone. That’s an interesting question, because the 3GS is a different generation of phone — back in the ~500MHz, medium-density screen generation, not the high-resolution, 1GHz, 500MB memory generation of the Nexus One, Evo, and iPhone 4. I’m happy with my decision; I’ve found that my generally poor Rogers reception has been immensely improved with the Nexus, even though both have antennas in the lower quarter of the phone (where one’s hand would more often than not cover it) and the Nexus has a metal case.
Switching to Android wasn’t at all difficult — at first I noticed all of the facets of the OS that Apple had gotten right that had yet to be polished, most notable the camera interface doesn’t rotate with the phone (the iPhone will rotate for 3 sides of the phone), the Android browser is far slower than Safari, the home screen icons do nothing to move as you drag other icons, and the phone does require more than one physical button to operate! It took a lot of time to pickup how the other buttons (the resistive buttons for back, context-menu, home, and search) would become useful. Also the trackball. That is a lot of ugly in the world of Apple, but has proven useful sometimes, and I now usually use it as a clicker for long-presses to paste text single-handed. That’s another difference; the iPhone may have been late to copy/paste but has done text selection (placing the cursor in a text field even) really well, with the floating magnifying glass. On the other hand, the N1 requires that you tap-and-guess, and use the trackball for greater accuracy. The Android (as of 2.1) doesn’t allow you to select any non-editable text.
As per apps, there may be a lot fewer Android apps, but they all seems snappy and very competitive with iPhone apps, albeit there are fewer drop dead gorgeous apps. For example Tweetie… or “Twitter for iPhone” is a beautiful app that I loved from day one on my iPhone. Twitter for Android is a powerful, versatile app, which looks good, behaves well, and feels Android-native, but it doesn’t have to fluidity of Tweetie.
I mentioned the Android browser is slower… and I meant it. The iPhone browser isn’t so hot on EDGE compared to Opera Mini (for obvious reasons) and certainly can’t compete with WiFi, but the Android browser is even slower. Even after the page has loaded, the browser keeps loading for many minutes, and the load priority isn’t straightforward — the iPhone always loaded text, layout, then images whereas Android seems to load and render in a top-down fashion. Opera Mini for Android seems promising though, and like on the iPhone, I’ll more than likely use that most of the time.
I was a pretty cocky iPhone user — I always mocked Blackberry for it’s antiquity, Windows Mobile for it’s downright outmoded-ness, and Android for it’s battery life, memory usage, and crashing. In the days I’ve had the N1, I’ve yet to have a system crash, application crash, or even an application go unresponsive. Holding the home button provides a 6-way application switcher for the last used applications, most of which snap back to life just how they were left, whether they stayed running or not. In fact, the Rogers My Account app, which yes, on EDGE takes seemingly forever to load, will even continue to load in the background. There are tons of pleasant surprises like that in this OS, that I never really thought about on the iPhone.
There are some areas where I hope to see some future polish thought, for example, when Twitter times out (I am on a shoddy EDGE connection) I get a message like “Tweet cannot be posted at this time.” followed by a Java-style error message including something along the lines of something.socketConnection.timeOut(). Most users would have no idea what that means, and would probably question someone like me as to whether something was wrong with their phone. A simple “Posting tweet timed out” would be adequate.
Over the coming weeks I’ll have some posts on good Android apps and life with this new fangled thing. For once it will be nice seeing the iPhone from the other side of the court. Here’s to new beginnings to all those who are encouraging Apple to innovate; choose Android.
Bookmarklets I Frequently Use
Apr 16th
The iPhone Safari browser is amazingly limited — no “find in page” function, no extensions, and no other search providers available (either Google or Yahoo). However the iPhone’s been gifted an amazing rendering engine and Javascript library, which is why I recommend the following Javascript bookmarklets.
If you aren’t sure how a bookmark differs from a bookmarklet, take a look at Wikipedia, or read my simple explaination: a bookmarklet is a saved line of Javascript code which provides some functionality and has all of the capabilities of Javascript on the currently displayed page, including navigating to a new page and modifying the page itself. A bookmarklet is activated when you open the bookmark (click it). On the iPhone there’s only one native way to get bookmarklets onto the phone — by bookmarking them on Safari on your computer then syncing them to Safari on the iPhone (done through iPhone). There are some bookmarklet providers which provide helper install pages to get around this limitation.
The iPhone bookmarklet installer bookmarklet: Found at joemaller.com/___
When activated this bookmarklet will add text to the beginning of each link found on the page so that you can bookmark it (see the site for more information).
The 1Password bookmarklets:
If you have an iPhone and the 1Password you can use the “lookup in 1Password” bookmarklet which automatically open 1Password with the current page address and allows you to copy your password. Immediately after copying some text you’re returned to Safari where you can input it. 1Passsword can be synced in app over WiFi to the Mac OS X version of 1Password.
OR
If you don’t have the 1Password iPhone app and have the desktop version you can make a self-contained bookmarklet which does the same thing in browser. New passwords are synced to this by the 1Password app on OS X. (learn more about option # 2 at the 1Password site)
Delicious – (see this page for instructions)
This just navigates you to an iPhone friendly way to bookmark using Delicious, pretty simple, very useful.
Find in Page – (Javascript to bookmark)
This open a Javascript prompt where you enter a phrase (case-independent) to find in the page; matches are counted and highlighted in yellow and bold.
Open Links in new Window – (Javascript to bookmark)
When activated this changes all links on the current page to spawn a new tab to view them.
Dictionary – (Javascript to bookmark)
This open a prompt to enter a word and redirects you to a definition of the word.
Wikipedia – (Javascript to bookmark)
This opens a prompt where you enter a Wikipedia query.
Mobilize This! – (Javascript to bookmark)
This bookmarklet open the currently open (or loading) page to be opened using the Google mobilizer service (shows only plain text, much quicker to load).
Read It Later – log in to your Read It Later account to find these bookmarklets
This adds the current page (or current loading page) to your Read It Late queue.
