Category Archives: Hardware

Stuff

Seeing more

iPad, Photographs

Moving to strength

It’s never a bad idea to look at more photographs. I get ideas and enjoyment and education in equal measure and the iPad is just one more handy viewing tool, and a very capable one.

Publishers of magazines are proving their usual slow selves in getting with it and some still don’t understand that only a fool will pay $5 an eIssue when an annual paper subscription can be had for 20% of the cost but patience is called for. After all, the magazine publishing business has never been inundated with grey matter, and things take time. I may love trees, but I’m not that dumb.

The Zinio app for the iPad is a work in progress but I have found the maker responsive to problem reports and the app keeps moving to strength. Their magazine inventory grows daily and includes lots of European and Asian content. It’s never bad to broaden one’s views.

Here are my current subscriptions, all geared to good photography with the exception of Macworld, which is focused on great software and lousy hardware which they love without exception (can you say ‘conflict of interest’?):

National Geographic speaks for itself, containing some of the best photography on the planet (any decade now expect them to release all their back issues for the iPad) and if you have never seen Arizona Highways you are in for a landscape photography treat. US Vogue seems unaware of the iPad’s existence (duh!), Harper’s Bazaar seems to think that subscription pricing is not called for (double duh!) and Vanity Fair, which really should know better, is in the same camp. Rolling Stone gets it and contains great photography not to mention the only credible investigative reporting in the US (can you say recent exposés of the evil that is Goldman Sucks and a dumb-as-a-brick US Army general?). It’s where Annie Leibovitz got her start and she seems to have done OK.

Check Zinio out – it’s worth it.

Tips for the Daguerrean

iPad, Photography

From Stanza.

I count no fewer than four book readers on my iPad:

  • Apple’s iBooks – best UI, lousy title selection
  • Amazon’s Kindle – improving UI, huge title selection
  • Border’s – a work in progress, but promising a large selection
  • Stanza – the nerd’s choice, with easy access to 30,000 books on Project Gutenberg among many others

I was noodling through Stanza on my iPad (also runs on a Mac) and came across this intriguing 1849 book on the Daguerrotype process:

And some details:

Seems to me that advice is as pertinent today as it was in 1849. Maybe more so. And you are unlikely to find such elegant writing in any modern tome on electronic this and digital that, whose authors’ written skills generally stop at “click the mouse”.

So if you want to discover your inner Daguerrean, download the free app and book and give it a shot!

By the way, I’m using the gorgeous Georgia font in the above illustrations – Stanza has a large selection of fonts and colors, more than any other reader.

Just avoid holding it that way

Hall of Shame, Hardware

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

David Pogue, technology maven at the New York Times, is in what can only be called Desperate Back-Track Mode over the iPhone hold-it-wrong-and-it-dies design debacle. The poor schnuck failed to realize that his perfectly performing “free-for-as-long-as-you-want-it-David” iPhone4 tester was likely a carefully pre-screened model not some of the shelf POS you and I buy. Fair enough. Would you risk any old specimen assembled by one of a long line of suicidal Foxconn workers when your reviewer has an audience of millions?

Pogue backtracks, while still stepping in it.

So how should we hold it, Mr. Jobs?

Ummm …. you mean not this way as in the video at Apple.com? Better check it out quick before they change it.

Or this:

Or even this:

Hand on the antenna seam, every time.

Yeah. Sure. I know. It’s an isolated occurrence.


An isolated occurrence.

Maybe a spot of the Old Bard is called for:

I know BS when I smell it and this one reeks to high heaven.

Disclosure: No AAPL position. You think I’m stoopid?

Why I cancelled my iPhone 4 order

Hall of Shame, Hardware

A deeply flawed device.

I was hoping about now to be regaling readers with my experiences with the much improved 5 megapixel camera in the new iPhone, available today for those lucky enough to get a reservation:

Well, that is not going to happen.

Just about the time young Winston and I were getting ready to ride our bikes to the Apple Store, what comes across the wires but this story?

A moment later and I watch this shocking video.

So we do three things:

  • Cancel the trip
  • Cancel the order
  • Sell all my AAPL stock

Subsequent stories are confirming the issue is not isolated yet not universal. Mossberg of the WSJ made a vague reference to the signal strength bars fading occasionally, but made light of it – he’s not especially objective about AAPL so cannot be trusted.

It seems to me that there are three possible causes:

  • Sporadic manufacturing errors dictating a limited recall – an embarassment for Apple
  • Egregious design error requiring a total recall – a big ‘no confidence’ vote in the stock
  • Software glitch fixed with a new online upgrade – an irritation

None of these is good for a stock approaching nosebleed territory, no matter how attractive the fundamentals.

I have no idea which applies, but as my 3G iPhone is the only phone I use, and as I have no landline, it’s nonsensical to contemplate an upgrade at this juncture.

I’ll let others complete the discovery process and continue to enjoy my obsolete 3G iPhone in the meanwhile.

Talk of dodging a bullet! My advice to any prospective iPhone4 buyer is simple. Wait. Let someone else do the bleeding for you.

Note on older iPhones: You get the same effect, but less so, with older iPhones. My 3G shows 5 bars of signal lying on my desk, dropping to 2 or 3 once in the hand, after some 30 seconds. I can reliably replicate this behavior and it’s the same with iPhone OS 3.1.3 or iOS 4.0 – I tried both. After trying iOS 4.0 on my 3G iPhone I reverted to 3.1.3 – 4.0 adds little to a 3G iPhone (folders and a useless digital zoom for the camera) and unless you are really comfortable with use of Terminal and entering cryptic, high risk commands, think twice before upgrading to 4.0. My downgrade went well, but I know what I am doing – it’s anything but plug-and-play.

The loss in indicated signal strength seems absolutely related to hand contact with the rear and sides of the iPhone. When I place my 3G iPhone in its auxiliary clip-on battery pack, which doubles its battery life, thickness and weight, I lose no bars, so it very much sounds like an electrostatic design fault to me.

Be sure to check Comments for my analysis of the reason this poorly designed iPhone 4 is to be avoided until the hardware issue is fixed. Apple’s advisory today as to how to hold the iPhone is akin to the government telling you how to bend over before increasing your taxes. Unconscionable. Another Hall of Shame entry for the fruit company,

I figure the costs at $4.20/share – 3mm handsets recalled @ $300 + $600mm in legal fees + triple damages at $2.7bn = $4.2bn for 1bn shares. However, the reputational damage and lost sales make this sum insignificant by comparison. The Android crowd must be partying.

Disclosure: Sold all my AAPL position just before writing this.

PDF camera manuals on the iPad

Hardware, iPad

A great use for the device.

It’s debatable which is more obscure – the US tax laws and regulations (appropriately known as the Internal Revenue Code) or the printed manual for the Panasonic G1 camera, a piece of hardware I like to think I know and definitely know I love. Try to find anything in that manual’s execrable printed booklet which comes in the box, 168 pages of poorly organized materials with a genuinely worthless index, and you will redefine the meaning of frustration.

Well, GoodReader and the iPad to the rescue.

Simply download a PDF of the manual from Panasonic then upload it to the iPad – I have done this for my Canon 5D and both Panasonics I own – the LX1 and the G1. Handy for those occasions when you forget how some rarely used setting works in the myriad of screens, dials and buttons which typifes modern gear. The 5D and LX1 come in at 5-6mB each but, for reasons only know to the twit who assembled the like-length one for the G1, that one comes in at a whopping 50.7mB! To compress this file before uploading it to the precious free space on your iPad, if you are using Snow Leopard on your Mac, download and install Apple’s Compress PDF Workflow utility to restore the PDF Compress option in the Print dialog which pops up when you load a PDF using Preview (not Adobe Reader) and hit Print – for some reason this option went missing from Snow Leopard.

Here’s the files sizes after and before – duh!:

I’ll leave it to you to figure out which one to upload to your iPad. The smaller one shows no quality deterioration and a keyword search is many times faster.

The beauty of the GoodReader app is that it has a search function, far more powerful than the miserable table of contents provided by camera makers.

Here’s the title page of the 5D’s manual:

The Canon 5D’s 180 page manual on the iPad, viewed in GoodReader.

Goodness knows why Canon decided to label this ‘Copy’ – it’s not like it’s a Leonardo, after all, but whatever. The vertical scroll bar at left permits you to zip through the manual in GoodReader whereas the magnifying glass at the base permits word search.

Here’s a page search result in the G1’s manual where I searched for the word ‘Multiple’, highlighted in blue:

A keyword search in the G1’s manual.

Here are all three manuals uploaded to GoodReader on my iPad. I keep them in a separate sub-folder to clean up the clutter:

Not, you understand, that I would ever forget how my camera works ….

A moment’s thought suggests the infinite number of uses this could be put to – machine repair manuals for field technicians, heart transplant manuals for doctors, legal tracts for scumbag lawyers, and so on. Heck, I may even keep my tax returns on mine when I want some really depressing reading.