Category: Internet & Technology

A Mac User and His New iMac – Month Two

I kind of fell off the posting wagon with this series of Mac updates, so this one has notes that date back to January/February. Still, I wanted to share them. 🙂

  • I had a two week break from using my iMac over the Christmas holidays, and I honestly missed it. Not in a “throw my Windows laptop against the wall because I want to be using OS X” kind of way, but using the actual hardware – the amazing screen, the huge trackpad, the fast performance – the reasons why I still very much enjoy using desktop computers and could never be 100% laptop-only.
  • I ran into a strange issue: I’d installed a trial version of an app called LilyView – it’s a stripped down, fast photo viewer that allows me to use the keyboard arrow keys to move through images in a folder. Something, inexplicably, the OS X Preview tool does not do. I liked the tool, so I bought it from the Apple App store. I ended up with two copies installed – neither one indicated it was the trial version. So I deleted both, re-installed the commercial one from the App store. It would be nice if there was some sort of app intelligence here.
  • Setting global preferences inside an app is kind of crazy, but apparently that’s what you need to do to change email clients. I found the setting in Mail where you specify which email client to use for mailto links, I changed it to Outlook 2016, I verify the change, I exit Mail, I click on a mailto link in Chrome, and Mail opens up instead of Outlook! I’m baffled. So I did some more research, and when I tried it again maybe 30 minutes later, it all worked. WHAT? It’s worked fine since making this change.
  • OS X is really inferior with what details it offers on Get Info. From Windows, I’m used to seeing pertinent information about media files. Resolution, audio bit rate, video bit rate, EXIF data for images, meta tags for music, etc. In Finder, I have the Preview pane turned on, and I see duration, sample rate, and bits per sample (weird terms Apple is using), but they’re all blank. Maybe it’s a network share limitation? Not sure why; data is data. In order to examine the metadata on my MP3 files I had to use my Windows 10 laptop to access it, then MediaMonkey to change it.
  • And speaking of Get Info, I selected a bunch of files, then Get Info, and was immediately assaulted by the Get Info window for each and every file. Yikes! How do you select a group of files and get info about them, say the total size?
  • I connected my HTC One to the USB hub and it wouldn’t show up as a device. The phone knew it was connected to a computer – I had various options for file transfer, charge-only, etc. – but despite various modes I put the phone in I never saw it in Finder. Not sure what magic pixie dust I need here to have it show up as a storage device…hmm. Looks like I needed to install Android File Transfer. I’m genuinely surprised by that!

Continue reading A Mac User and His New iMac – Month Two

DVDs: Resolution of the Past

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The native resolution of a DVD (720×480) on the screen of a 5K iMac (5120×2880) is just plain funny. Even Blu-rays seem a bit puny in comparison to the insane number of pixels on this display. I was working with some photos recently and images from a smartphone, or cropped, look equally tiny. Especially from a lower-resolution front-facing camera. Viewing the world though a display this high-resolution distorts my perception of what “sufficient solution” even means…Apple really outdid themselves with this display, but sometimes I’ll check what something looks like on my “low res” 1080p laptop screen to get reality check. And to think that as of January 2016, 51% of users are viewing the web through 1366 x 768 or lower resolution screens. Whoa.

MobileViews Podcast: A Trip Down Mobile-Memory Lane

In early February, I was a guest on the MobileViews podcast with my old friends Todd Ogasawara and Jon Westfall. The photo above is of the first time I met Todd, back in September 1999 (he’s the one in the back peeking out). From left to right, we have Chris De Herrera, Craig Peacock, myself, Todd, and Frank McPherson. This photo was taken 17 years ago – that makes me feel pretty old!

At any rate, listen to the podcast to hear us talk about the history of Microsoft’s efforts in the mobile space (Windows CE, Pocket PC, Windows Phone, etc.), my tech blogging experience running Thoughts Media (and the site that started it all, Pocket PC Thoughts), a bit about my OS X experiences, my long and tormented journey with Apple products, and other assorted tech topics. Oh, and I also talk about the future of HTC, the stock market, and…drunk three year old children!?! 😉

“Too Many Minds”: How Consumer Electronics Companies Create Consumer Confusion

This is a re-publishing (with very slight updates) of an article I wrote for Digital Home Thoughts back in 2008. It’s just as true today as it was eight years ago.

There’s a scene in The Last Samurai where Tom Cruise’s character is learning the art of Japanese sword-fighting, and after getting soundly smacked around by his opponent for several minutes, one of the samurai says to him “Too many minds”. The idea is that he’s focusing on his opponent, his own stance, his sword, and the people watching – and that many “minds” is making him a less effective warrior. When I look at the digital camera industry (and many other consumer electronics categories, such as Synology’s insane product chaos) and the proliferation of same-brand point and shoot cameras, it’s hard not to see the similarities. Rapid release cycles – usually unwarranted in terms of actual improvement in features – coupled with out-of-control model proliferation and confusing model names leads to a “too many minds” scenario – and it’s usually the consumer the ends up losing out. Continue reading “Too Many Minds”: How Consumer Electronics Companies Create Consumer Confusion

A Mac User and His New iMac – Week Three

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted the last update in this series, but I’ve continued to make notes – let’s call it a “Mac Diary” – and I wanted to share my ongoing journey. Note the title change – I no longer feel like a Windows user sitting in front of a Mac, I feel like a Mac user now. My 2008 self might choke my 2016 self for writing that, but such is life. I think Jeff Bezos would be proud. 😉

I still have my Windows 10 laptop, and I still really like using Windows 10, but I can truly say I’m cross-platform now. Quad-platform I suppose, as I use Android phones and tablets, Windows computers, iOS tablets, and an OS X computer. I still have so much to learn about OS X, but I’m getting there. Onward with the explorations! Continue reading A Mac User and His New iMac – Week Three

When Technology Ship Dates Conflict With Your Vacation Dates

We all know that buying technology is about timing: the worst time to buy a piece of technology is right when the new version is about to come out. You’ll paralyze yourself if you keep waiting for the “next big thing” of course, but with products that refresh on a yearly cycle, unless the previous generation is being sold at significant cost savings, you want to get the new version to be one step further away from obsolescence. Sometimes though, the cycle of technology does not sync up with the cycle of our lives when it’s time to buy.

Case in point: off and on since 2002, I’ve been going to Mexico for vacation with my family (my ninth trip is happening next month). It’s a Dunn tradition, and given it’s usually the only vacation I take all year, I look forward to it with great anticipation. On January 23rd, 2012, I purchased a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS3 for my March Mexico vacation that year. A newer version of the Panasonic camera, the TS4, was announced on January 31st. I can’t recall if, four years ago, I knew that was coming or not, but I can tell you why I didn’t return it: many camera vendors announce in January but don’t start shipping until late March or early April. The first verified purchase review on Amazon was April 3rd 2012, but I couldn’t wait that long.

Continue reading When Technology Ship Dates Conflict With Your Vacation Dates

OS X Isn’t Immune to Apps Behaving Badly

UPDATE: I wanted to clarify that 1password is most definitely not a “bad app”, in this case it’s just an “app behaving badly”.

No matter what OS you’re using, a bad app will give you a headache. Based on my experience so far, OS X seems no better than Windows at dealing with apps that lose their minds. For the most part I’d say apps on OS X are quite stable – it took several weeks of using the computer daily before I saw apps start to misbehave. Two instances in particular stand out…

Continue reading OS X Isn’t Immune to Apps Behaving Badly

The Zolt Universal Laptop Charger: Is This The Ultimate Mobile Charger?

At AT&T I don’t travel for work as much as I used to for HTC, but when I do I usually bring my personal laptop with me – and that means two different power supplies. I use a Rocketfish universal charger for my HP work laptop (a rather chunky and heavy machine) and the Dell charger for my XPS 13. The Dell charger is small, but the Rocketfish charger is your typical brick. It has a USB port for charging though, which is a big improvement over your typical charger. Together, carrying the two chargers is a hassle, especially since I fly carry-on 95% of the time. I usually put both chargers in a carrying case inside my carry-on luggage.

In my quest for a new, lightweight universal charger I backed the FinSix Dart on Kickstarter back in April of 2014. After waiting 19 months (!?!), I gave up waiting and requested a refund. Props to FinSix for giving out refunds – many Kickstarter campaigns do not.

I then ordered a Zolt: it seemed better in every way. Getting it was a bit of a fiasco – they didn’t indicate there would be a wait on getting it, so I was expecting to receive it shortly after the November 19th launch date. The neglected to communicate that’s when pre-orders would start shipping. It was almost five weeks later, a day after I left to spend two weeks in Calgary that they informed me they were shipping the Zolt. I think it’s pretty foolish to surprise ship a product right at the holidays when so many people travel, but I give credit to their customer service team: they were able to re-direct the shipment and ship it out the day I got back. There was a bit of a delay, but I finally received it. I’ve had a couple of days now and here are my thoughts so far. Continue reading The Zolt Universal Laptop Charger: Is This The Ultimate Mobile Charger?

Getting Cut on the Bleeding Edge: the Samsung 950 PRO NMVe M.2 SSD & the Dell XPS 13

One of the unfortunate side-effects of not being a “full time tech geek” any longer is that I’m not quite up to speed on certain aspects of technology.  Back when I was a full-time tech writer, I spent every waking minute reading about tech, reviewing tech, testing tech…you get the idea. Since joining the corporate world I still use tech of course, but my immersion is in very specific slices of it; since joining AT&T I know far more about WordPress than I did two years ago for instance.

When I ordered my Dell XPS 13 (early 2015 edition) in May of this year, I purposefully bought it with a 256 GB drive knowing I’d be upgrading to 512 GB within a few months. Dell charged a huge premium for the 512 GB drive (like all OEMs do). I’d been reading about forthcoming NVMe drives since 2014, promising great performance gains because they finally broke away from the legacy AHCI standard. We’re talking over 2x less latency, much deeper queue depth, etc. So with great anticipation I pre-ordered the Samsung 950 PRO, one of the first commercially-available NMVe M.2 drives.

Continue reading Getting Cut on the Bleeding Edge: the Samsung 950 PRO NMVe M.2 SSD & the Dell XPS 13

A Windows User and His New iMac – Day Fourteen

After this post I’ll be switching to a weekly format as my explorations wind down (or become less public at any rate).

  • Airdrop is really interesting. On my iPad I turned it on, then on the iMac I searched for Airdrop in Spotlight. The first result was the Extensions panel as part of System Preferences, which didn’t help. Then I remembered that Airdrop was on the left Favourites panel in Finder. Sure enough, there was my iPad, and it was ridiculously easy to transfer a few JPEGs and MP4 files. So fast, and so, so much better than what I have to do on my Windows machine with a cable and iTunes. This is a very tangible example of how Apple’s ecosystem works better the more Apple stuff you have. They could of course enable iTunes to act as a Airdrop bridge on Windows, but they won’t.

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  • I transferred a .MTS file (a type of video file) over to the iPad, and got this interesting prompt (above) saying I needed an app from the app store to open it, or I could put the file in iCloud. I selected the app option, and I’ve been staring at the app store loading for over a minute. I don’t think it worked. Interestingly, my iMac said that my iPad “declined my request.” I tried again twice more, and the “Get App” button never worked. Looks like I’ll just use Handbrake to transcode to MP4 to go this route. It would be slick if Apple did a transcode to supported formats when you did the Airdrop…

Continue reading A Windows User and His New iMac – Day Fourteen