Home phones and cell phones

Yet another underground wire failure on the phone line to the barn
made me look into a better solution for a phone line out there. My
barn is 600+ feet away from the house and there are lots of walls in
between. When we moved in there was a phone line buried going to the
barn which worked for a while. After a few years it shorted out. They
used basic inside phone cord to run it through some pipes in the
ground. When we split the electric service I had some real phone line
buried and that worked for 5 years but now its shorting out again. I
can go try to chase it down but its buried and i'm not digging up my
property again.

I researched the latest DECT 6.0 cordless phones but they still dont
have super range of the nature i'm looking for. Ultimately I decided
to add another cell phone to my wife's cell plan. I got a contractor
type phone (water/weather proof) for free and increased the bill by
$10/month and now we have a barn phone that works everywhere we could
need it and no range issues.

So now that I have 3 cell phones (myself, wife and barn) and a kid
soon to have her own, what am I paying $45/month for a home phone for?
I looked into that, and here are a few reasons:

1) 911 service - cell phone 911 calls don't pinpoint you or get quite
the same response time that home phones do.
2) Everyone knows our home number which is also considered our
business phone number. Its also easy to remember (yes we could port it
somewhere else)
3) If we take our cells away from the house and something happens are
we going to trust that the people left have a cell phone? There's now
one in the barn but perhaps not the house
4) Who knows how much that kid will talk on the phone once she
discovers it?

For now i'm keeping it although it seems kind of silly.

Google/SaaS

Recently I had the opportunity for some business related reasons as well as for some personal related reasons to try to collaborate on some word processing and spreadsheet documents. I figured this was a good opportunity to try the whole Software as a Service (SaaS) model and started using the Google Docs. 

I found the word processor easy to use but with Safari it had some odd behaviors at times in rendering the page and some basic copy/paste operations. Generally it worked and I liked the auto-save and accessible anywhere model. As you'd expect the word processor is severely stripped down from a MS Word or Apple Pages but for basic documents its ok. 

For the spreadsheet I was surprised at how well it worked given the more advanced problems you run into with rows and columns, formula and spreadsheet tabs. To do things like graphing you need to get plug-ins and I didn't have a good experience with that. I was was just looking to do a basic line graph over time and it was a real pain. But again for basic spreadsheet functions it worked well and again I could get at  it anywhere.

Along the way I also found a nice hack in that if you import a protected Excel spreadsheet into Google Docs it essentially unprotects it for you and you can re-export as Excel. I think Microsoft should rename that "Protect from idiots" since there are so many ways to remove spreadsheet protection.

 

After I had some content I tried to collaborate with others and thats where SaaS failed for me. I ran into a number of issues:

1) Just accessing the document as I sent the share invite seemed to be a problem for ALL of the people I tried to share with. The interface is simple, pick a document, choose share and then enter an email address or addresses. People get an invite with a link etc. Clinking the link lets them see the document (in the case of spreadsheets at least not all of the document) but they can't edit. 

2) To edit/collaborate they need a google account. Despite what Google thinks, not everyone has (or wants) a google account. I can understand why they needed to link the docs in somewhere but this is asking people to create a new identity etc and adds a barrier to them using it.

3) For those that got past the two above there were problems with the interface oddities, understanding the new applications and as we tried to collaborate we found the tools weak in the areas of comments, suggested changes, side by side versions etc. Ultimately we gave up. 

So to me the current SaaS offering from google with Google Docs is appropriate for single user document editing when you need access anywhere and assuming you have a google ID and are willing to learn new tools. If you need to collaborate i'd look elsewhere. 

With the personal need I fell back to the tried and true method of email Excel spreadsheets around. For the business related need i'm currently using DropBox. More to come on that experience.

Quicken

I've mentioned in the past how Intuit has been pathetically slow to update Quicken for the Mac. Intuit still has yet to introduce an Intel native version of the Quicken for the Mac. The last time I bought Quicken was the 2005 version because I refused to buy an application that didn't run natively on the machines I bought after that.

Anyway, recently Quicken Online went the free route along the lines of Mint.com and a few others. I've been interested in the Software as a Service (SaaS) model for a while and decided to give it a try. Generally I don't need to reconcile all my accounts but want to know whats going on and be able to see where my money is going. I want to do that in one place. Some of my banks offer the "one stop to see all your finances" but their products are inferior to Quicken Online and Mint. 

I've been using Quicken Online for a few weeks now and have moved away from the desktop version. While the desktop version has more flexible reporting and has the ability to reconcile I find I can still keep on top of my finances without that. One drawback to these online services is if your data can't be downloaded from the source you can't see it. That means you can't do Net Worth type stuff including your house, cars etc as there's no way to enter it.

This brings me to Mint.com. By all i've heard its supposed to be better than Quicken Online which you'd expect from an up-and-coming Web 2.0 type company with a new business model. I attempted to use it by creating an account and linking in my checking account. I bank with RBS Citizens bank, a bank with a large US East Coast presence, and found  out that Mint doesn't support them. Unlike other product models, for these kinds of services they either support your banks, credit cards etc, or they don't. When they don't its not a matter of whether you link them or not, you just can't use their service. Black and white. Mint could have the best management tools out there but since they don't support my bank there's no chance I can use them until they do.

Evernote

A friend introduced me to Evernote a while back and while I think its a cool app, I just can't get into yet another program that wants to own my data. The one cool feature it has is the ability to recognize (OCR) text within images and it can do this with some pretty lousy images. Its not enough value to me to move away from a tried and true files approach. The synchronization ability can be done for files (dropbox etc). 

Now if it was just a content management application referencing my files then i'd have the best of both worlds. But then it still would have little value to me and I wouldn't pay. Perhaps they need to find a different approach to bringing their OCR technology to market?

iCal reminders

Apple really hasn't thought out the iCal reminder system. They
encourage you to use MobileMe to sync your macs but when you do the
alarms get sync'd too. Thats fine if they just pop up a reminder. But
if you have them send out emails or txt messages it means you get
duplicate reminders from all the systems that are sync'd. You also get
late/out of sync ones if, for example, one of your sync'd macs is a
notebook thats been asleep through the event and just woke up and
found out it was overdue to remind you.

Seems like they need to move the notification mechanism to the
MobileMe cloud and do it from a central location.

Back to my Mac & SSH

I've mentioned in the past that I only have 1 port open to the outside
world for remote access to my home computer. Its for SSH traffic and
isn't over the standard SSH port and requires a SSL certificate. Given
that, how do I do the "Back to my Mac thing"?

From the client you're accessing the machine from:

1) You need the SSL cert
2) Create a SSH tunnel for the "back to my mac" remote desktop:
sudo ssh -p <some port> <dns name of host machine> -l <host user
name> -L 8888:127.0.0.1:5900
3) Now in Safari open up this URL:
vnc://127.0.0.1:8888

Sure its not as simple as "Back to my mac" but then again i'm not
asking for the world of Unix and Mac hackers to attack port 5900
looking for VNC like security flaws.

Free AT&T Wifi Access for iPhone

Its great they're finally doing this but the to say "accessing AT&T Wifi hotspots is easy" is a joke:

Activate Wi-Fi from the settings icon on your iPhone.

Select "attwifi" from the list of available networks.

Enter your 10-digit mobile number and check the box to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy. Tap "continue."

You will receive a text message from AT&T with a secure link to the AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot. You will not be charged for the text message.

Open the text message and tap on the link for 24-hour access to the AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot.

They have to come up with an easier way for me to roam around AT&T Wifi spots or its just not worth the bother. Same goes for Panera, its too much work, i'll just use Edge/3G before I go through all the click throughs etc. Those may be fine on a laptop but on a phone its a real pain.

Labels

For those faithful 5 followers of my blog out there, i've labelled my
previous entries to make finding things easier. Blogger really should
show an index of the labels so you can jump to them quickly.

1Password & Syncing

I've mentioned before that I love 1Password for password management on my Macs and iPhone. Until they added iPhone support I had a reliable password manager that kept all my macs up to date and my passwords were everywhere. When they added iPhone support they ran into a nasty bug with permissions which caused a lot of pain. Their solution was to move away from Apples sync services and keychain approach to their own file format. In the process they lost the real ability to do synchronization of passwords between machines. Their recommended solution is to move your new 1Password keychain to a network drive shared between the machines, either a real network drive (same network) or a virtual one like iDisk, DropBox, etc. This "solution" leaves a lot to be desired. The shared storage approach either requires money (iDisk) (plus its notoriously crappy) or is a freebie with caveats that it could disappear at any moment (DropBox). While nobody really has sync working well, Apples sync services are generally workable. 

So the solution for me? There are a few options:

1) Give up on iPhone sync - no passwords on the road and I cant remember generated stuff, not an option

2) Give up on multiple computer sync - I have a computer I use for work and one for home, not an option

3) Use one of their sync methods - iDisk stinks. Dropbox could work but it can come and go, its another application, I dont need to store my stuff online, the space is limited etc.

4) Sync some other way.

So, i've mentioned before that I use rsync/ssh to keep things up to date on the files side and now that apps like 1Password are recommending a similar approach, off we go again, here's whats working for me with no new apps:

in my crontab file (crontab -e) I have (among other things :p):

#

# 1Password Sync

#

30      12      *       *       1,2,3,4,5       export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=`echo /tmp/launch*/Listen*`;rsync -avS -e "ssh -p <a port> -i /Users/Rob/.ssh/ssh_key " /Users/Rob/Library/Application\ Support/1Password/1Password.agilekeychain/ Rob@example.com:"/Users/Rob/Library/Application Support/1Password/1Password.agilekeychain/" 2>&1 | mail -s "Backup: Sync 1Password from MacBookAir to Home Desktop" rob+cron@example.com

40      12      *       *       1,2,3,4,5       export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=`echo /tmp/launch*/Listen*`;rsync -avS -e "ssh -p <a port> -i /Users/Rob/.ssh/ssh_key Rob@example.com:"/Users/Rob/Library/Application\ Support/1Password/1Password.agilekeychain/" /Users/Rob/Library/Application\ Support/1Password/1Password.agilekeychain/ 2>&1 | mail -s "Backup: Sync 1Password from Home Desktop to MacBookAir" rob+cron@example.com

This syncs first from my mobile machine, then back from my desktop. 

A few comments:

1) I dont use --delete which may be an issue if I ever want to delete Passwords but thats not something I do often in this case. The shared drive approach solves this problem but has the other issues mentioned above.

2) The whole export/SOCK thing is so it can use my saved ssh password for "/Users/Rob/.ssh/ssh_key" from my OSX keychain when it ssh's into the remote machine as a cron job. As mentioned before I use a not-well-known ssh port, and then no username/password just a ssh key.

Killer iPhone App

I don't recommend many iPhone Apps but this one is a killer and its free (for now)

http://www.avatron.com/

Goodbye memory sticks.

Anyway, other ones I use all the time (all are free which is no accident):

* 1Password- Password manager. A great compliment to the Mac desktop version, they do have a permissions sync issue they're working on though.

* NetNewsWire - RSS Reader. Another great Mac complimenting app. Great way to keep on top of interesting stuff at airports, in traffic, Dunkin Donuts lines :) etc.

* Shazam - Figures out what song is playing and tells you the name/artist. Works great and keeps a list.

* Movies (or Showtimes) - Both are decent for looking up local (based on GPS) movie times etc.

* WeightTrack - Odd that its linked to OKC etc but its a way to keep a log of my weight (non)loss. 

Thats it. I have 5 screens of apps installed but none make the cut of normal use. 

One killer built in tool I use is go to google maps, type in a search term (like Dunkin Donuts) and watch all the pins appear on your map. Touch one and say "Directions to here" and load up on the Caffeine!

Google cross platform?

Is the web giant really OS neutral? Take for example long term app Picasa. To this day its still windows only. And now the new browser, Chrome. A windows only launch initially. Is this because there is such a large Windows market/user base? Or because they have no good cheap/free solutions? Perhaps both. With iPhoto and Safari on the mac do we really need or care what Google has to offer for the mac? So google slowly edges out Windows but tries to compete with better made, long established apps for the Mac. Should be an interesting battle. 

Fly Clear

Recently one of the enrollment laptops was stolen from the Clear guys (essentially a fast pass for airport security lines). They got it back and now have the genuis idea to encrypt data on these laptops as "an extra security measure." How could such a group NOT have encryption in the first place? Its dead easy on Windows and OSX and for any situation with physical access to the machine by others you should be encrypting your data. Its amazing how naive companies still are in security matters.

Online Photo sites

I have a lot of digital pictures (17,297 as of today). I like to share a lot of them with family but there's no clear winner in free photo sharing sites. I was a huge fan of Tabblo but after it got bought by HP i'm not sure how things will work out long term and it seems most development has stopped over there (and Safari crashes at times now during their file upload piece). Flickr has serious limits on the free version. They claim no space limits but since they limit photostreams to the most recent 200 pictures they may as well have a very low storage limit on the free version. Picasa Web albums gives you up to 1GB of storage but has a lot less functionality. Kodak Gallery has some nice features and no limits but has a very dated interface and dog slow Ofoto Express software to upload pictures. Apple's Web Galleries are not as diverse in sharing, have a decent space limit of 20GB that comes with all the other semi-functional MobileMe stuff, but the lack of sharing options/permissions makes them near useless.

Like I said, no clear choice.

Cayman

Finally got around to putting my Cayman pictures online from earlier this year

TripIt info into iPhone 2.0

My solution for this problem was to subscribe to the feed in the Mac's iCal app, then export it as a .ics file, then import it as a new calendar. That converts the dynamic feed into a static calendar. You'll have to do that every time you update your TripIt trips but at least you now have your trips on the road with you and have all the nice 2.0 push stuff going on.

iPhone 3G woes

Some issues that bothered me recently with my new iPhone 3G:

1) Doesnt fit in the old iPhone dock. I have a couple, one that I had before the bluetooth earbud and one I got for the earbud. Some time with a knife shaving some plastic after some online inspiration solved that problem. I'm now using my old docks with no additional cost. I'm no handy man but a sharp knife and some repetitive motion and you're in business. Be careful!

2) My iPhone 3G will not charge on my Acura Music Link. This is yet another blow to a poor solution. It never let me really choose what was playing or see any status on my huge NAV screen, but if I selected a book tape and paused it then plugged it in it would play and charge and do nice things like pause when I shut off the car or got a call etc. Now I lost one more feature, charging. Seems that others on the net have experienced the same. After some reading it appears many of these connections used in the car used the Firewire charging pins in the doc connector and that was dropped in iPhone 3G thus breaking many accessories. Seems like there are some possible solutions for the charging issue that allow doc connector pass through to the radio while adding charging capabilities. If the car people would just add aux inputs on the dash or in the console this wouldnt be so big a problem.

In researching #2 above I found I could actually get screen control back on the iPhone by adding a female dock connector to 3.5mm plug adapter. That fixed some of the brokenness of music link. I'm still looking for a good charging solution. 

Lost & Recovered iPhone notes

Somewhere along the way I lost the Notes on my iPhone when I moved from my old iPhone to my new one. After some research I found iTunes saves your iPhone backups at:

/Users/<user>/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync/Backup 

In that location I had 3 backups, I found one before I got the new iPhone 3G and made a copy of the directory to work on.

Then I found a tool on the net that converts these binary plist files into the normal file format. The tool crashed on me and the fix was just commenting out the "sys.exit(2)" around line 33. After that was complete I had a series of normal .plist files and some .sqlite files. 

Running the tool created a new directory, "MobileSyncExport"

Under there you will see Library/Notes/notes.db

Using a sqllite browser you can browse that database file. Go to the "note_bodies" table and there are all your full notes from the iPhone backed up.

I then copied these into Notes in Apple mail which sync to MobileMe and appear in the MobileMe Notes IMAP folder. Not exactly the same place they were on the other iPhone but at least they're restored and back in my pocket.

Apple, when will you be sync'ing iPhone notes? Allowing me to create a note from an email body? Doing anything useful with them?

As a side note, if you want to make an app that saves call history, sms history or other things you could easily watch/extract all that from these databases. Combine that with TimeMachine and you have a not-so-secret paper trail of SMS messages, call logs etc... 

Winmail.dat

Anyone who's had a mac for a while will probably have received a "winmail.dat" attachment in their email. While there are free tools like TNEF's enough its a bit painful to use. There are commerical plug ins for Apple mail but they cost money. Another interesting point is neither of these apps worked under Leopard for me. Since all my mail goes through google, I went to the gmail interface and found a mail item with a winmail.dat attachment and sure enough gmail handles these the correct way and shows me the attachments. If Google's gmail can do it why can't Apple fix this in mail?

Anyway the free and easy fix if you pipe your mail through gmail and get a winmail.dat attachment is go to the gmail interface and get the attachments that way.

iPhone 2.0/Calendar update

A friend at work showed me that you can indeed have both both Exchange and MobileMe enabled for push at the same time and the phone will do the right thing. The thing you can't do is have push Exchange calendar but do a manual sync of your other calendars. Its all push or nothing for each type. That helped with me avoiding double entries for the Exchange calendar, but since you can't push subscriptions i've lost my TripIt calendar feed :(

Anyone with any bright ideas how to fix that one?

MobileMe

Probably one of the best examples of how not to roll out a new service.

Other than the horrible stability/connection issues, there are some big gaps in usage. To me the largest which is well documented on the net is that you can't do the push updates of subscribed calendars. I have a few subscribed calendars, some I can live without like US Holidays but the one I can't live without is my TripIt calendar feed that tells me where I am and when. I love TripIt to manage my travel and they've cut me off.

The fix? For now go back to normal wired sync of calendars.

Oh, and another atrocity? I can't sync Exchange (Work) calendars at the same time as Personal ones.

I hope someone is listening.