Technical advances in the scientific field serve a dire need first and then those totems of communication and facilitation trickle down to the mainstream. The Deaf popularized pagers first, followed by the Hearing community in everyday business, then there was the move to SMS in cellphones and today, the new trend is video conferencing in your iPhone or iPad. The image below shows the first TTY — teletypewriter — that the Deaf used to communicate with each other in end-to-end conversations.
As you may know, Boles Blogs is now a combination of 14 other blogs that used to make up the Boles Blogs Network. Everything is simpler, and more “findable” now that we’re all under the same mindset, and that’s a good and grand thing. We’re also now on the WordPress.com “Business” platform, and that bundling of valuable resources all in one place is one of the fine benefits of being hosted on WordPress.
One of the chits of the Business platform is having free and unfettered access to any and all “Premium” WordPress.com themes. We are currently using the keen and very clean premium “Elemin” theme you can see in the screenshot below. I’m viewing the page in the Chrome browser for Mac:
Google Drive is one of the loves of my online life. I store all my local files in my Google Drive Folder and that Google Drive Folder gets synced between here and the — out there — remote Google Drive. I do all my writing and publishing via Google Drive. I can find pretty much anything I want just by typing in a few keywords in Google Drive and I’m instantly presented with what I need. Life is good that way!
However, I just discovered a permissions problem when it comes to using a local instance of Google Drive and a remote, third-party, website publisher, and I’ll share with you now what I learned, and how I fixed it.
The horrible new 3D map App in Apple iOS 6 is still getting a lot of negative play weeks after the operating system update. While my experience isn’t as horrible as some, I can still report some tremendous disparity in the disappointing mapping results. For example, let’s take a look at a slice of my Jersey City neighborhood.
Yesterday, I spent my morning stuck in a Verizon store — not trying to order the new iPhone 5 — but rather trying to achieve one simple task: Swapping out the old SIM cards on my two iPad 2(s) and not getting very far, even though I had already done my web research and wasted an hour on the phone with Verizon customer support telling me the only way to add the iPads to my new “Share Everything Plan” was to replace the SIM cards because a “pre-pay” SIM card is hardcoded in the Verizon system as a standalone device and the only way to add an iPad to a shared data plan is to replace the pre-pay SIM card with a “post-pay” SIM card.
Easy, right?
Not so fast!
I confess I am obsessed with trying to figure out why Verizon LTE is so sucky on our two brand-new iPads. Yesterday, we were at the dentist’s office in Jersey City and I asked Janna to pull out her iPad to see what kind of service levels we were getting. Our dentist is one block away from our home where I was getting two Verizon LTE bars and 1.7Mbps down and 1.47Mpbs up. At the dentist’s office, the iPad was screaming at 25.94Mbps down and 10.35Mbps up with four bars of Verizon LTE active! Amazing! An outrage!
I had high hopes for Verizon and their LTE network when I first unboxed my new iPad. I knew the LTE spec could be as high as 20Mbps down and 10Mbps up — but I’d settle for half of those numbers. I’d read reports that people were getting LTE speeds in NYC of 10Mbps down and 6Mbps up and I’d love to be able to live that fast on the web.
Unfortunately, my initial tests in Jersey City were lousy, and yesterday, I did some informal LTE testing around Bryant Park in New York City. You’d think at 6th Avenue and 40th Street you’d have a saturating LTE signal from Verizon. Here are the results of my first, dismal, test: Two Verizon LTE bars and 1.7Mbps down and 1.47Mpbs up. Ugh. That’s miserable 3G territory!
Today was a busy and glorious day. Our new iPads arrived three days early from China and we enjoyed setting them up via iCloud and experiencing our first, if limited, tastes of LTE on Verizon. In Jersey City, LTE comes and goes in our apartment. Sometimes it flickers to life. Other times, we’re stuck on 3G with no way to understand the why or wherefore of being pressed off the LTE network. Here’s a quickie screenshot I was able to grab of my iPad on LTE with two service bars active. 5.67 Mbps down and 0.19 Mbps up.
Last week, I was intrigued to read about the new “Mastered for iTunes” albums that are now appearing in the online store:
Enhanced Audio on iTunes: This week, Apple quietly introduced a new section of its iTunes store called Mastered for iTunes, with albums whose sound has been adjusted by engineers “for higher fidelity sound on your computer, stereo and all Apple devices.” Mastering, the fine tuning at the end of the recording process, has long been tailored to specific audio formats, and Apple’s changes come after years of complaints by musicians, including Neil Young, that sound quality suffers from the compression used by digital services to reduce a file’s size.
UPDATE: February 24, 2012
I was using Internet Explorer via OnLive last night and the speed was so fast I decided to see if I could get quantification for download and upload speeds for the Plus service. I couldn’t get my old favorite, Speakeasy, to load on OnLive, but I was able to get Speedtest.net to work and here are the results: An astonishing 88.05Mbps down and a fantastical 70.72Mbps up. Now that’s some fast internet! NYU slowly turns green…
Today, I just shelled out my first $5.00USD monthly fee for OnLive Desktop Plus for my iPad 2. I decided to go the money route for OnLive Desktop Plus to get priority access because the free version is incredibly slow and monotonous. I also wanted to see just how fast the Internet Explorer 9 interface was on the iPad going through the OnLive Desktop Plus backend.
The iconic Björk released a new album — Biophilia — for the iPad and it is a magical experience to interact with her music with your ears and fingers and eyes. This is how music is meant to be experienced. You can touch the tones. You can manipulate rhythm and melody — and everything still remains innately Björk – but your unique involvement in changing the music through experimentation cannot be denied:
For Biophilia, she’d originally envisioned a musical house — like a museum, she’s said — wherein people could roam from room to room, with each interactive space designated to a different song. Later, she envisioned an IMAX film experience with visionary filmmaker Michel Gondry. When both of those ideas fell through, Björk commissioned an iPad app with which users can manipulate her music with various games, remix it and further understand the scientific and musical principles behind each song. It’s a lot like her idea for the musical house, but in a digital environment. It’s also just the kind of bonkers vision that Björk would be drawn to, and if it all works, it ought to be ingenious and tons of fun.
I’ve had my fill of Apple customer support and AppleCare and Takedown Threats from Apple, but part of the residual tide from reporting on those uncomfortable experiences is the private feedback I get from our readers.
This has been a wild week with Apple threatening me with takedown notices and Tech Crunch riding to the rescue and then reflecting on what it means to be a blog publisher and dealing with threats from Apple Fanbois and lessons in legality from anonymous amateur Copyright commenters.
One lesson I learned this week, is that if you contact Tech Crunch for feedback and advice — as I did when I wrote asking if they’d ever seen a Takedown Notice like the one Apple sent me — you better make sure you tell your story first, or Tech Crunch will beat you to the publication punch — and that’s precisely what happened to me, and I couldn’t be happier about it! Here’s why:
Tech Crunch’s John Biggs took my inquiry and ran with it and published the Apple threat letter and I was amazed by the power of that simple article. Bigg’s story currently has 44 comments, 192 Facebook Likes, 609 Tweets, 153 LinkedIn Shares and 41 Google+ mentions. However, those numbers only begin to tell the story of the real Tech Crunch muscle in the marketplace.
EDITORIAL NOTE: February 2, 2012 — My, there’s an Apple Chill in the air this morning! I posted the this update to my original article and, as I did there, I have done here: Removed any and all Apple quotations…
UPDATE: February 2, 2012 — 24 hours have come and gone since Apple gave me 24 hours to remove this entire article from publication.
Apple Supervisor James finally called me back this morning to confirm the Takedown Notice was real – bad grammar and all – and that it came from Apple. He asked me if Apple did anything to me for not taking down the article and I told him, “No.” So far, all my Apple IDs and developer access and iTunes Match and such were still active.
Then James then told me I could risk doing nothing with this article and see what happens next, or I could just remove the quoted responses from AppleCare support in this article and that should be enough.
When I told him removing the quotes would not put me in compliance with the Takedown Notice because Apple demanded the removal of the entire article, James said I could wait and see if the Apple legal department contacted me again or not and then decide what to do.
He said Apple “didn’t want me to feel more threatened than you already are.”
I asked him to send me an email confirming that removing the quoted email would legally satisfy Apple’s Takedown Notice, and he said he’d check on that and get back to me.
In the meantime, and in the spirit of Apple Fellowship – and, more importantly, of not wanting to deal with this all day every day any longer — I have removed the Apple email responses from this article. If you want to read the full text of the Takedown Notice — you can still read it on Tech Crunch — at least until Apple forces them to take it down.
SOPA and PIPA certainly stung – but there’s nothing quite like having Apple directly slap you in the face.
I was having such a good day today. Then Apple threatened me in a nasty email and the next thing I know, my world is exploding on Tech Crunch:
