There is a catch, of course:  for some books, and many humans, the iPhone isn’t the best reading platform.   Books about software development and tools are generally most useful when you are working hands-on at your computer.  Switching from the iPhone to the PC is rather awkward, and copying and pasting code fragments from the iPhone to your computer is pretty much impossible.  (Stanza, unlike Kindle, does support copy and paste of text by way of their annotation feature, but getting that copied text onto your computer is a byzantine  procedure).

Fortunately, O’Reilly chose to package their e-books using the open ePub standard, without ePub’s optional DRM (Digital Rights Management) encryption.  This means that it’s relatively easy to extract the ePub document from the iPhone app, at which point you can read it on whichever platform you choose.  The number of software and hardware e-readers that support ePub is rapidly expanding (with one notable holdout), and it is widely expected that ePub will eventually replace today’s myriad incompatible formats.

The following method for extracting the ePub document from one of O’Reilly’s iPhone apps is based on an article on the excellent TeleRead site.  The packaging of the apps has changed a little since that article was written, so a couple of extra steps are required.  I use a Windows PC, but I’m sure a similar approach would work on a Mac since the only software tool required is one that can read and write .zip files.

1. Locate the iPhone app file.  The easiest way to do this is to right-click on the app in iTunes, then select “Open in Windows Explorer”.  The example I’m working with is the wonderful Coding4Fun book (which costs $32 when bought as an eBook right now), and its app file is named Code4Fun 1.0.ipa.  Copy the .ipa file to another folder so that you won’t confuse iTunes with the following steps.
2. Extract the contents of the .ipa file.  Despite the extension, this is a zip-compressed file.  Most zip extraction tools (like 7-Zip in the following screenshot) are quite happy to take a whack at opening the file without knowing what an .ipa is, but if necessary you can rename the file to Code4Fun.zip first.
   

   A zip in app's clothing
3. The contents of the app should consist of a couple of files and a folder named “Payload”.  If you open Payload you’ll find another folder named Code4Fun.app. Another level down is a folder named “book”, as shown in the following screenshot.  (Incidentally, the parent folder of “book” also contains a file named default.pub.  This is actually a bonus ePub book: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.  I don’t think you can get at this book from within the Code4Fun iPhone app – it presumably is there as part of the Stanza packaging).
   

   In the book, is a book
4. Select the contents of the “book” folder (2 folders and a file) and add them to a new .zip file, as shown below.
   

   A ePub in zip's clothing
5. That .zip file is actually your ePub document, so rename it to something more suitable like Code4Fun.pub.  At this point you should be able to open the .pub file in Adobe Digital Editions, or MobiPocket Reader, or Stanza Reader.  (Mobipocket and Stanza are generally used on mobile devices, such as Blackberry or Windows Mobile smartphones, but both offer a  desktop reader).  My own preference is to keep things simple and flexible by using the browser-based Bookwork reader.

Enjoy, but please, please don’t pass along the .pub file to your friends (or, worse, a Torrent site).  O’Reilly is doing us a great favour by selling these ebooks at such a low price and supporting the open ePub standard.

I’m pretty sure that O’Reilly is OK with you extracting the .pub file for your own use — it was an article on an O’Reilly site where I first came across this procedure.  Other companies would have you believe that DRM-encrusted proprietary standards are the only way to prevent the unwashed masses from pirating ebooks.   Please don’t help them to prove their point.

It was hard to give up all of the Firefox plug-ins that I had grown accustomed to, especially XMarks and, ironically, the Google Toolbar.  However, I love the fact that Chrome opens in seconds and uses about 1/3 the RAM of Firefox.  I’ve yet to come across any web pages that Chrome can’t render, and it has never crashed.  I like the concept: a relatively thin, fast and stable platform for web content.

However, having decided to commit to Chrome as my browser I was surprised to find Chrome wouldn’t accept me!  When I tried to set Chrome as my default browser, I saw the following: no “Default Browser” button.

OK. Now what?

This doesn’t seem to be a widespread problem.  I found a reference to a long-fixed incompatibility with Vista (one of the smart things about Chrome is is automatically updates to the latest version), and a suggestion to run Chrome as an administrator if the Default Browser button wasn’t displayed.   However, I am an administrator, and I run XP.   Freaky.

I still don’t know what the problem is, but I stumbled across a solution.  It seems that the Default Browser button is there somewhere, lurking off screen.  You can’t get to it by clicking, but you can by tabbing.  So:

1. Click the Default search combo so that it has the focus (i.e. it is highlighted in blue, as in the screenshot below).
2. Press Tab.  The focus should move onto the Manage button.
3. Press Tab again.  The focus highlight will seemingly disappear.  It’s actually on the Default Browser button.
4. Press Enter. This will trigger the off-screen button, and you should see the message change to “The default browser is currently Google Chrome”.

Together at last

Talk about playing hard to get!

The problem is that a book of iPhone app recommendations is similar to the “best of the Internet” books that appeared in the 90s – they were out-of-date within a year of their publication.

This book was published just last month (July 2009), but there are many excellent apps that were released after the book was written: Camera Zoom, Ragdoll Blaster, Comixology’s Comics.

Also, the book was written just before the release of the iPhone’s OS 3.0.  The new operating system made some entirely new types of app models possible, such as in-app purchases (the aforementioned Comics app) and augmented reality (Nearest Tube), while rendering some of the book’s picks inoperable (Darkroom) or considerably less valuable (Quickoffice – the first, and last, app to offer custom copy-and-paste support).

Having said all that, anyone wading into the iPhone App Store badly needs a guide of some sort, since the App Store is notoriously difficult to navigate when you are looking for the best rated apps of a specific type.

At present, you have two options: sort through the multitude of web sites that contain app reviews, or read a book like this.  For the time being, the only book like this is this (though I’m sure that will soon change too).

I found this book’s recommendations and reviews of apps I’m familiar with to be fair and accurate. In many cases I had already come across the same apps through other sources, but there were several instances where I switched app loyalties based on the book’s recommendation. The book really shines in the breadth of categories that it covers.  I discovered many apps, and quite a few categories, that I had no idea existed but now use regularly, such as Instapaper and Last.fm.

In addition to soon becoming out-of-date, the book has a couple of other drawbacks that are admittedly unavoidable for this type of publication. At least half of the app categories were ones that I have no interest in and skipped right past, making this a very short read. Also, a lot of the apps are either unavailable in Canada or of no use to people outside the US, but the book’s reviews clearly identify most of these instances.

I should mention that O’Reilly has also established a companion “Best iPhone Apps” web site.  Currently, the site only contains some abbreviated reviews of the same apps covered by the book, but hopefully they will cover new apps in the future.  At this point, the site isn’t an alternative to the book, or even a better alternative to the many other sites that publish iPhone app reviews.

The bottom line: although only a fraction of the apps covered in this book were of interest to me, I ended up using about 10 of those apps, all of them new discoveries for me. I didn’t find any of the book’s recommendations to be outright clunkers. This made the book a worthwhile investment to me. Those who are completely new to iPhone apps, or who love trying new things, will find this book to be particularly valuable.

Together with David Pogue’s iPhone: The Missing Manual, The Best iPhone Apps could be considered “iPhone 101″.  (Grad students can advance to yet another O’Reilly publication, iPhone Hacks, a book which truly lives up to the promise of “Hacks”).

1. 

   Mmmm, forbidden fruit

   Get an iPhone or iPod Touch.  (I suppose you could also try to get an actual Kindle, but that’s a different rumour).   If you’re on a budget then a 1st generation iPod Touch is the least expensive option, and you should be able to find one for about $150 on eBay.   Apple.ca occasionally sells refurbished 1st gens for about $180, and they currently have refurbished 2nd generation iPod Touches for $200.

2. Download and install iTunes as usual.  Sign up using your true Canadian address and credit card – you’ll need to do so to get your iPhone/iPod up and running.
3. Purchase a Mastercard gift card.  These are sold at Shopper’s Drug Mart and, perhaps, other retailers.  The key is that it must be a “Vanilla” brand Mastercard, which apparently does not appear to be a Canadian credit card to iTunes.  Accept no substitutes – the Visa gift card, for example, does not do the trick.
4. Follow the steps on iTunesInCanada to add a 2nd user-ID to iTunes, this time an American one. (Hint – don’t use a Canadian domain like sympatico.ca – Apple probably isn’t that stupid).   It appears that the billing address doesn’t matter, so long as it’s somewhere in America.
5. Log into the iTunes App Store using your new American user-ID.  Take a look around – there’s a lot more than Kindle to be found.  For example, they have a Last.FM client for streaming audio – banned in the Canadian App Store for no apparent reason.  They also have its main competitor, Pandora.  They have all 6 seasons of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which is 6 more than us poor Canadians are offered!  With all of these new entertainment options available, do you still have time to read books?  If not, you can stop here.
6. 

   Mmmmm, forbidden fast food

   Download and install the Kindle app from iTunes.  Surprisingly, considering how difficult Apple makes it to sync your iPhone/iPod to another computer, syncing  to another account is seamless – you won’t lose any of the apps or media currently on your device.

7. Run the Kindle app and use it to create a new Amazon user-ID.  (Note that this is Amazon.com, not .ca, so your Amazon.ca login won’t work).  Again, use a new e-mail address that doesn’t have a Canadian domain, like Gmail or Hotmail.
8. Now here’s the tricky part — things appear to have changed since the iPhonesInCanada article was written.   The Vanilla Mastercard trick no longer works at Amazon – hopefully Apple won’t catch on too!   However, since you won’t get very far without a billing address, go ahead and add your Vanilla Mastercard.  To do so, click on the Your Account link, then “Add A Credit Card”.  Be sure to enter an American billing address – the same one as you’re using on iTunes should work.
9. Logout of Amazon.com.  Then, log back in to Amazon.com using a Canadian user-ID.  If you’ve already bought from Amazon.com in the past, use that user-ID.  Otherwise, you’ll have to create yet another new user-ID, and add your Canadian credit card (not the Vanilla Mastercard) to this one, with your correct Canadian billing address.
10. 

    Loonie Launderer

    While logged in with you Canadian user-ID, buy a Gift Card.  Select the “E-mail a Gift Card” option, and enter the e-mail address of your American Amazon user-ID.

11. You should find that your American e-mail account receives the gift card within minutes.  Log into Amazon.com with your American user-ID, then go to the “Your Account” page. Delete the Vanilla Mastercard from your account (click on “Manage Payment Options”, then the delete button).  Then, from the “My Account” page, click on “Apply a Gift Certificate/Card to Your Account” and enter the code that you received in the e-mail.
12. And you’re done!  Go to any Kindle book’s page (best to experiment with a free one first) and click the “Buy Now with Click Once” link.  It should work, and the next time you run the Kindle app it will automatically download the book to your iPhone/iPod.
13. As you purchase Kindle books you will, of course, need to replenish your Amazon account from time to time, using additional gift certificates.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting you go and do all this.   There are many good reasons why you shouldn’t.

Apple is becoming increasingly aggressive about enforcing the rules of the App Store, so they might close this loophole at any time.  Amazon has been known to make their Kindle books magically disappear when a publisher raises a licensing issue. Perhaps the best reason is that you don’t have to: there are plenty of other e-book retailers, including a home-grown one, who are quite happy to do business with us.

And, after all, it’s just a rumour!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is generally rock-solid, so I was rather startled earlier today when I accidentally hit F11 (thought I was in Visual Studio) and Notepad++ disappeared.   No “save changes” warning, no error message, just “Hasta La Vista”.

It turned out to be a conflict with the HexEditor plug-in.  F12 has the same conflict.  One fix is to remove the HexEditor plug-in, by deleting HexEditor.dll from the Notepad++\plugins folder.  However, since I like the HexEditor and don’t particularly like the F11 “Full Screen” shortcut, I’d prefer to remove the shortcut.

I was entering an override into AutoHotKey (which can kill any shortcut) when it occurred to me that Notepad++ is so complete that it probably supports key bindings.  Sure, enough, it does – with a full GUI editor under Settings->Shortcut Editor, as shown on the right.  Goodbye F11, welcome back HexEditor.

I love this product!