GigaMegaBlog

Shipping included.  Seriously!

I bought one of these to protect my multi-thousand dollar (including data plan) iPhone 3Gs.  The photo pretty accurately reflects the styling (meh), but it doesn’t do justice to the fit.

The phone sits snugly in the case, which sits nicely in my shirt pocket.  The front flap has a hard (presumably plastic) insert that does a decent job of protecting the iPhone’s screen, and there is a hidden magnetic clasp that causes the flap to close tightly with a satisfying thwack.

Yeah, I know, I sound like the ghost of Billy Mays.  But wait, there’s more!  The case has holes for the camera, headphone jack and USB cable.  The flap does a reasonable job of holding the screen upright for watching videos.  Cell phone usage is fine when the iPhone’s sitting in the case – I can hear and be heard without any problems.

Things are little tight when trying to poke at the left and rightmost parts of the virtual keyboard, but otherwise I haven’t been tempted to remove the iPhone from the case.

Eventually I’ll probably give in to my iPhone’s whining about wanting to look cooooool, and buy it one of these sexy Proporta outfits — almost 10 times the price, shipping not included, but they do throw in a teabag.  (Seriously!).  I once stepped on my iPod Touch while it was protected by a similar Proporta case, and it survived without so much as a screen smudge.  But a lesser klutz could probably get by with the $4.38 knockoff.

While you’re at DealExtreme (the geek’s dollar store), you might want to fish out some change to buy their no-name versions of  the iPhone USB charger ($3.04) and cable ($1.77).  I own both and they’re surprisingly well made.  Together, with the case it will be the best ten bucks you ever spent.

Despite its source, the quote just seemed wrong: “Your microwave uses more electricity to power the digital clock for the 23 hours and 55 minutes a day that you’re not using it than the five minutes you do to heat your dinner.”

The source is a column by Jim Harris in the National Post newspaper.  I have a great deal of respect both for Jim Harris, former leader of Canada’s national Green Party, and the National Post.  I’ve never known either to play fast and loose with the numbers to prove a point — indeed the Post regularly exposes scientists who do so in their Junk Science articles.

But a clock based on ultraefficient LED or LCDs burning more power in a day than a food-zapping microwave does in 5 minutes?  That doesn’t sound right.

And it isn’t, for my oven.  Here are the stats for my 12 year old 1000W oven, a Sanyo EM-P540 with an LCD clock.  I measured these stats with the Kill-A-Watt gadget that I’ve mentioned in previous blog entries.

My microwave's power consumption

The power used by my microwave oven when not used is 42% of the power when cooking a meal for 5 minutes. Put another way, my microwave would use 30% less power if I unplugged it when not in use.

I was rather surprised at the wattage reading – it’s a 1000W oven, after all.  However, the user’s guide does confirm that it consumes 1480W to output 1000W.  Apparently this is fairly typical of a microwave oven: this Wikipedia article says that average power efficiency is 64%.

It could be that Jim Harris is referring to a particularly low power oven, or a ridiculously exorbitant clock.  There is no way of knowing, since he doesn’t provide a source for this or any of the other stats that are in his article.

The unfortunate thing is that he didn’t need to massage the numbers, since he has a point.   I would have thought that unplugging my microwave would reduce its daily power consumption by maybe 5%.   Thanks to his article, though, I now know better.

However, by exaggerating the numbers to support his argument, or quoting somebody else’s numbers without identifying them, I think he is less likely to make his case.  He is, after all, not preaching to the converted who already know about these issues — he’s trying to convince skeptics who think that a large part of the environmental movement is hogwash.  The sentence that I quoted at the beginning of this post is certainly not going to help to change their minds.

The main point of Jim Harris’ article, by the way, is that device manufacturers can and should engineer their products to burn less energy when not in use.  He’s absolutely right, and I hope manufacturers, retailers and consumers take note.  When Harris  led the Green Party he used common sense and business acumen to pitch green initiatives to the corporate world, a constructive approach that the Greens now sorely lack.  In his series of columns in the National Post columns he has shown a knack for pointing out needless wasting of our environmental resources that most of us overlook: escalators left running overnight, roofs that are the wrong colour, or microwaves with clocks that hardly anybody needs.

As an environmentalist myself, I just wish that he, and especially the better known and less responsible leaders of the green movement, would stop wasting another valuable resource, their credibility, by publishing unsourced, dubious statistics.

In the last few weeks I’ve gone from someone who thought Twitter was the apex of pointless self-obsession to, well, someone who reads books about Twitter and then writes reviews of them.

While there is definitely more to Twitter than “I’m eating a ham sandwich” posts, it isn’t a complicated piece of software to use, either.  To get up and tweeting, you can get just a) go to Twitter.com, b) select a user-ID and password, and c) fill in the “What are you doing?” box.

Most Twitterers quickly go beyond this to using other Twitter software clients, integrating keywords like “RT” (retweet) and #hashtags into their posts and sampling the rapidly proliferating web sites that extend the Twitterverse in some fashion.

Still, is there really enough to Twitter to merit a book?

The answer is yes, albeit a short book.

Happily, the authors of The Twitter Book have resisted the temptation to pad the book with abstract musing about Twitter.  (One of the authors is Twitterato Supremo Tim O’Reilly — the guy behind the O’Reilly publishing empire — who currently has about 819,500 more Twitter followers than me, the guy behind the GigaMegaBlog publishing empire.)  The book is chock full of tips, suggestions and recommendations, most of which are not at all self-apparent to the average Twitter user.

For example, I had no idea that each Twitter post has its own URL, and only a vague notion of when to use the “via” keyword vs.  “RT” when referring to a tweet.  While a Google search on “Twitter” shows that there is no shortage of web sites that provide add-on features and services, I hadn’t used any of them until I read about the good ones in this book.

Sample page from The Twitter Book iPhone app

The book is well-written and an easy read, and you’ll likely find that it takes just a couple of hours to go cover to cover.  There are only 6 chapters, the last of which is devoted to using Twitter for business use.  Casual Twitter users should not be put off by that, however, since the other 5 chapters don’t have a “business book” tone.

I read the ebook version,  as an iPhone app.  The big advantage of this format, as of July 2009 at least, is the low price – just 5 bucks.  The big disadvantage, of course, is that you’re reading it on a 2 x 3″ screen.  Personally, I’m quite used to ebooks and don’t find this to be a drawback at all, but if you’ve never tried reading an ebook on an iPhone I’d advise you to download the free Stanza app first.  The Twitter Book, like all of O’Reilly’s iPhone ebooks, uses the same engine as Stanza with the same wide range of settings.

Another relatively low-cost option for the Twitter Book is O’Reilly’s Safari web site.  If you’re a frequent reader of tech books then Safari gives you a great bang for the buck – I can’t seem to help gushing about it.

The one area where I found the iPhone app format to be a constraint is graphics.  The books makes extensive use of screenshots to show examples of effective tweets, and the text in some of the graphics is a little too fuzzy to make out. As shown in the screenshot above, the graphics are reasonably large when in a landscape format.  If the above screenshot (which is at its full iPhone resolution) is readable then you should be fine, but otherwise this app offers no way to zoom in on a graphic. Correction 7/29: Silly me – I pinched and poked at the graphics without realizing that you can zoom in on them.  If you hold your finger down on a graphic, the app switches to a special view, shown below, that supports the usual iPhone zoom controls.

Zoomed screenshot

All things considered, The Twitter Book is a very worthwhile read, even for casual Twitterers.  If you’ve been tweeting for awhile and scoff at the idea of a whole book being devoted To Twitter, then you are exactly the type of person to benefit the most by reading it.

Grrr, what is the deal with PDFs and copying to the clipboard?

We all routinely copy and paste information from one document to another, right? Even the hipster non-readers on the iPhone design team have grudgingly conceded this point.  PDFs are still the most common document format out there, having survived for 16 years in the tech world remarkably unchanged.  Practically every gadget on the planet can display them, and an increasing number of them can generate PDF files too.   PDF documents are reasonably small, cross platform and, as of July 2008, a freely open standard.

So why is copying information out of PDFs so cumbersome?  If I didn’t know better (and I don’t), I’d wonder if there is some kind of evil conspiracy amongst copyright attorneys, software makers and the Knights Templar to safeguard their contents from the clipboards of the masses.

As far as I know the only piece of software that can fully handle copy and paste from PDFs is the ridiculously expensive full version of Adobe Acrobat.  Otherwise, copy support for PDFs ranges from the minimal (Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader, for example) to the absent (almost all smartphones, including the iPhone).

(Incidentally, one of the least mentioned improvements in the iPhone 3GS is that it the faster CPU has made it a top notch PDF reader.  Using the highly recommended GoodReader app I can load a graphics-laden PDF magazine and scroll and zoom through it with no lags or crashes.  Given that no other pocket-sized device supports copy and paste from PDFs either, the iPhone is now my PDF reader of choice).

I read a lot of technical stuff, almost all of which is released in PDF documents.  Like any self respecting geek, when I see something worth noting I don’t retype it, I don’t (shudder) write it down, I copy it.

It’s bad enough that PDF readers which support copy and paste insist on throwing line breaks willy-nilly into the text.   They make a real mess of it when it comes to tables, though. Each cell of the table gets copied as a separate line, resulting in a fugly mishmash of text that in no way resembles the original table.   Wasn’t one of the original ideas of the PDF that the document’s original format gets preserved across software platforms?

When Google Docs introduced a PDF reader I thought this problem had finally been cracked.  Copy and paste support for web pages has long ago been perfected, and tables copied the web into Word and any other HTML-aware word processor are automatically formatted as tables.  And Google is famously opposed to evil alliances with such as the Knights Templar.  Right?  Wrong!  Line breaks and tables have the exact same copy and paste problem as in other PDF readers.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the only salvation comes from the world’s most reviled document format: Microsoft Word.  Say what you will about fat, proprietary, insecure Word documents — there are, at least, clipboard friendly.

It seems that the creativity that should have been poured into PDF readers has, instead, been focused on support for Microsoft Word.  There is a staggering number of Word readers and converters to be found on the Web, most of them free and some of them very, very good.

My current method of choice is a web site named PDF To Word.  It does just this one thing, but it does it very well – it’s fast and its accurate.  It has replicated into Word pretty much every PDF document I’ve thrown at — the number of pages is the same, the page headers and footers are the same, and — hallelujah! — the tables are the same.

There are a few downsides with the PDF to Word approach – it often doesn’t exactly match the font type and size, resulting in odd looking formatting in things like columnar text or artsy magazine-style layouts.  Also, the size of Word documents is generally much larger than the source PDF file — a document with illustrations might triple in size.  This obviously makes large Word documents an impractical alternative to PDFs on memory-constrained devices like smartphones.

It’s nice to see Microsoft innovating again with Office 2010, but what I really, really wish they would provide is  a Web-based, clipboard-friendly PDF reader.  Of course, they won’t.  I blame the Knights Templar.

A couple of months ago, my iPod Touch began to intermittently drop its connection to my PC during synchronization.  The iTunes synchronization progress bar would stop moving and, after a minute or so, iTunes would report that the device was disconnected.  Usually, the iPod would be unable connect again until after I rebooted the PC.

The elusive iPhone connection screen

Since the iPod would sync without problems to my notebook, and since the PC was running the Windows 7 64-bit RC, I figured the problem was just a bug in the pre-release software and would be fixed in time by a new driver or the final version of Windows 7.

When I added a new iPhone 3GS to the family, I wasn’t surprised to see the same problem occurring with it.  It was definitely being caused by something at the PC end.

However, a couple of weeks ago things got much worse.  After a dropped connection during synchronization one morning, and the customary PC reboot, neither my iPhone or iPod would connect at all.  After plugging the USB cable in, the iPhone or iPod would continually flash the synchronization screen on and off, with the plaintively making the “USB connection” beep until I took pity and pulled the USB plug.

I figured that the device driver had somehow been corrupted and, since it is difficult to uninstall a USB driver when the device isn’t connected, I tried plugging the iPhone into a USB port on the back of the PC.  That connection lasted about 30 seconds before dropping again, and would thereafter result in the same connect/disconnect cycle as the front USB port.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, the fact that the behaviour was somewhat different on a 2nd USB port was a clue to what was wrong.

I tried the usual common sense approaches to resolving an iPhone or iPod synchronization problem:

1. Uninstalled the iPhone and iPod drivers from the Device Manager.  (For instructions on how to do this for a USB device you can no longer connect, see this article on the excellent How-To Geek site).
2. Uninstalled iTunes.  (In all versions of Windows you can get to the uninstall program by running a Control Panel applet.  On Windows XP it’s “Add or Remove Programs” — in Windows 7, the applet is named just “Programs”.)
3. Uninstalled “Apple Mobile Device Support”, from the same Control Panel applet.
4. At this point I tried connecting the iPhone.  This should have caused the driver to be  automatically reinstalled and, hopefully, would fix the problem.  The PC tried to reinstall the driver, but since the USB connection immediately dropped, all I got was an “Device driver not successfully installed error” for the “MTP USB Device”.  Yikes, not a good sign.
   

   Uh oh, that can't be good!
5. I reinstalled iTunes which, given the result of the previous step, predictably didn’t solve anything.
6. I tried updating the PC BIOS, in case a chipset bug was at fault.  A longshot, and that it didn’t solve anything.

Googling the above “MTP USB Device” didn’t uncover any iPhone-specific issues (it turns out that this “Mobile Transport Protocol” driver is used for almost any multimedia device).

Googling the broader problem of dropped iPhone connections uncovered a lot of people who had this problem with using a USB hub.  Plugging their iPhone directly into a USB port on the PC fixed the problem for them, since the hub wasn’t able to provide the 5 volts of charge required by the iPhone (the iPod Touch has a similar power requirement).

In my case, I already was plugging the devices directly into the PC.  But what if the PC’s USB port was not providing the 5V that it should?

I happened to have a powered USB hub – that is, a hub with a power cable.  These are intended for use when connecting multiple power-hungry USB devices at the same time.

Sure enough, when connected to the same PC through a powered USB hub, both the iPhone and iPod Touch  synchronized successfully.  That was a week ago, and everything has been rock solid since then.

Powered hub (be sure to plug in the power cord!)

The USB hub that I’m using is an inexpensive 4-port hub from a company named Tripp-Lite — I’m pretty sure that any powered USB hub would have worked just as well.  To be clear, though, the trick is to use a USB hub that has its own power cord — the more common (and less expensive) hubs are powered through the PC’s USB port, and those don’t generally work well with the  iPhone and iPod Touch.

Of course, this doesn’t solve the underlying problem — why are this PC’s USB ports supplying less than 5V?  The ports are provided some power — enough to satisfy a memory stick or mouse.  A quick scan of the motherboard and power supply didn’t uncover any obvious problems, so I’ll have to leave that mystery to another day.  Since the case (Antec 300), motherboard (Gigabyte GF8200A) and power supply (an ePower 550W unit) are all quite new and of reasonable quality, I’m guessing that I’m not the only one who might have this problem.

If you’re having problems with dropped iPhone or iPod Touch connections, give a powered USB hub a try.