A lot has been said about the iPhone’s ability to locate the user; the new 3G iPhone actually uses GPS to do this, while the original iPhone just uses triangulation from cell-phone towers to figure out where you are.

The triangulation method should work reasonably well for most purposes (i.e. ‘what town am I in?’ at the very least), but my experience lately has been that this isn’t the case.

The other day, I hit the Locate button and got this result. Click on the picture for a bigger version:

Where I was standing, the terrain is such that there’s no signal at all from the south and west. Where I was standing, the elevation is 700 feet, and the mountains are about 2300 feet. You can see the problem (if you squint) in this view looking roughly south. Click for a bigger version:

There’s also a low ridge between the airport (where I was standing) and the town of Front Royal itself. It’s not enough to really notice, but it’s enough to block cell phone signals. My guess is that the phone could get only one signal, and that this was from a cell site on or near Mouth Weather, which is just NE of the identified (wrong) location. All the system could tell was that I was somewhere on a line roughly 210 degrees from that tower.

The lesson: cell-phone triangulation location information can be ridiculously inaccurate when in areas with interesting terrain and poor coverage. More importantly and less obviously, the locator system appears to be unable to reliably determine when this is the case.

Since the 2.0 firmware upgrade, it’s taking my first-gen iPhone 35 to 40 minutes to sync — with nearly all of the time taken up with iTunes performing a backup of the phone.

Here’s the process, speeded up 2400%:

The time it takes suggests that the system is backing up all the data on the phone, including movies, music, etc. — which is nuts, because after you restore an iPhone backup, you still need to separately sync all the music etc. you want on there.

It’s also nuts because the backup directory on the Mac contains 114.5 MB, which shouldn’t take anything like that long to transfer. I know the USB connection is working properly (and not falling back to a slower speed) because the transfer of media files takes place at the same speed as always.

That 114.5 MB is made up of 2,815 files, though, which could be part of the problem. If the files originate on the iPhone (rather than being split out of the stream on the Mac side), opening all those files and sending them individually could definitely account for some of the time. But 35 minutes? I doubt it.

Not everyone has this problem — Nicole doesn’t have it, and a few times my phone has synced without a lengthy backup process first — so it’s got to be something with my configuration of the phone, which means that there must be a workaround. I haven’t been able to isolate the cause myself, though, and of course there hasn’t been a peep out of Apple despite many complaints.

iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone!!!11 Presumably we’ll see a new iPhone tomorrow, and not a moment too soon. I have an iPhone, and I’m happier with it than I’ve been with any phone I’ve had in the past (though probably less happy, all together, than I was with my IM-capable Blackberry pager circa 1997), but it has always had some serious deficiencies that I’d like to see corrected. They’re nearly all software things.

Here’s my personal wish list:

1. More buttons. The iPhone is very elegant and sleek and so forth; but it really needs about two more physical buttons. The slide-the-thing-on-the-screen thing to unlock it is very zippy, but it’s difficult to do with one hand; and the fact that the UI navigation is structured almost entirely as a tree means that you’ve got to keep returning to the main menu to do things. It would be nice to have a couple physical buttons that could be programmed for quick access to certain functions, and that could be used in some combination as an unlock sequence.

I doubt we’ll see this.

2. Better-differentiated icons. I use this thing every day, right? Many times. And I still find myself searching for the calendar icon, or the clock icon, or whatever. All the icons are the same shape, which makes them harder to tell apart without actively looking at every one of them.

3. Non-SMS IM capability. The iPhone has a great interface for SMS, ripped right from iChat on the Mac. But SMSes are slow, and they’re ruinously expensive. SMSes are charged by the message, not the byte, but a couple weeks ago I saw an analysis that concluded that SMS data costs £374.49 — about $750 — per megabyte, or about 3.3 US cents to send:

To send this post, to this point, would cost about $1.37. And in many cases it would actually cost more like $2.74, because both the sender and the recipient pay. This is nuts.

Proper IM capability would require something on the other end, not just something on the phone, though: mobile phones go in and out of coverage, and keeping the radio going all the time to keep a normal network connection alive would kill the batteries in short order. It’s a solved problem, though, and it needs to be solved on the iPhone. This is the kind of thing that should come with the iPhone (IM networks are more valuable the more people are on them), but even if it doesn’t I’m sure we’ll see something from a third-party developer pretty quickly.

4. Video recording. Criminey, it’s not that hard. I don’t want to make feature films with the thing, but once in a while you come across something that you can’t really record with a still photo. Most lesser phones already do this.

5. Video conferencing. The original AT&T Picturephone was a failure, and everyone thought that this was because it cost a fortune and didn’t work very well. Then, early videoconferencing was a failure aside from some specific applications, and everyone thought that this was a failure because it cost a small fortune and required a lot of fiddling to get it to work well. Now, video conferencing is cheap and fairly easy, and people still by and large don’t do it, and the thought is that this is because people don’t like being seen on the screen when they’re talking to someone.

I’m set up to do video conferencing pretty well here at Tino Manor, but I don’t do it all that often because I find that the video does not add much to the whole experience. If I’m talking to someone on the phone, or, better yet, if I’m IMing with them, I can do other things at the same time. When I’m on camera, 100% of my attention has to be devoted to what’s going on there. Once in a while, this might be useful; usually, it’s not.

Video conferencing on a mobile phone, on the other hand, is pretty intriguing. The appeal here isn’t that someone would be able to see me while we’re talking, but that they’d be able to see what’s around me. It’s less video conferencing and more the ability to transmit live video from wherever I happen to be. I think that that would find a lot of takers. And once you have the video recording capability, you get it for free (so to speak) if you have bandwidth enough to fit the video in.

6. Call recording. And sound recording generally. Presumably, you can’t record calls with the iPhone — or with most phones — because doing so is illegal in some places without the consent of both parties. This is ridiculous, but that shouldn’t be too surprising. But: it’s got a microphone; it’s got memory. Why can’t I record ambient sounds, i.e. use it as a memo recorder? No idea. This is another thing that you get essentially for free.

7. Voice-mail archiving. Voice-mail messages on the iPhone are stored as .amr files in the filesystem. If you have a jailbroken phone, you can copy them right off there and play the files with Quicktime Player. Why the hell does iTunes not suck all the VMs off the phone every time you sync it? There doesn’t seem to be any official way to get the messages off there. This is nuts.

8. Memory card slot. Another thing that I don’t think we’re getting. My iPhone has 8 GB of storage, which is the most you could get when I bought it. I’m constantly running up against that limit, because I’ve got a lot of Podcasts on there, and music, and video, and pictures.

Right now, Amazon sells an 8GB SDHC card for $32. There probably isn’t room for an full-sized SD card in the iPhone, but there’s room for an electrically-identical micro-SD card that would allow me to double the capacity of the thing. iPods don’t have expandable storage because there’s a wide range of iPods available: if you need a lot of storage, you can always get a 160 GB model. This isn’t the case with the iPhone, which will probably top out at 32 GB on Monday.

I don’t really need to carry all that much data around with me; the problem is that I don’t want to have to decide which small subset of data I want to carry around. I have no real need for more than 8 GB of data in my pocket (is that a gigabyte in your pocket, or are… ahh, forget it), but I want to invest as nearly as possible zero time in setting up playlists, rules, etc., etc. to fit things into the iPhone.

I suppose the best way to put it is that I want enough headroom to not have to think about this.

9. Better iPod interface. At its introduction, Steve Jobs touted the iPhone as ‘the best iPod we’ve ever made’. This it is not. Say you’re playing a track from a playlist, and you want to hear other songs from that artist, or that album. You can’t jump right to these things; you have to back yourself out to the Album or Artist listing, and then drill back down. There’s no reason for this.

Worse, say you’re listening to a 30-podcast and you want to skip the minute or two of useless front matter and theme music that a lot of people stick on the front of such things. Good luck: the iPhone’s track position slider doesn’t do this very well (the resolution is too low, limited perhaps by the size of your finger). Fast-forwarding by continually pressing on the FF/track-advance button is risky, because if the iPhone thinks that you’ve let go for an instant, it interprets the next instant as a new touch on the button, and advances you to the next track.

It would be nice to see an iPod-style scroll wheel on the screen for things like this, or a more reliable way to immediately speed up the playback of the current track — such as is currently available in Quicktime Player.

10. A better web browser. Mobile Safari is really the first phone-browser worth criticizing, but it still stinks. It’s slow, it purges pages from its memory too readily, it has no way to open links in a new window (which is important because the fact that it’s slow and doesn’t cache well means that there’s a big cost to hitting that ‘back’ button), and it doesn’t do Flash.

Now, I hate Flash. I loathe it. The world would be far better off without it. But you go to war with the web you have, and the simple truth is that there are a lot of people out there who persist in developing their corporate websites with Flash. If you want to find, say, the nearest Burger King, or the ingredients of a Whopper, or anything else along those lines with an iPhone, you are out of luck: the BK website is implemented entirely in Flash. And it’s not the only one.

People have complained about the lack of Flash support from the beginning. The iPhone is, at its heart, a very feeble and ill-equipped computer, and bad Flash movies will sometimes give my old MacBook Pro fits, so I can understand why Apple decided to not support Flash. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter: there are too many idiots out there producing websites that are entirely dependent on Flash to just write it off.

11. Better predictive text. The iPhone keyboard is a marvelous thing. When writing an e-mail, I can just stab away at that thing and usually compose a perfect, typo-free message thanks to the iPhone’s text-prediction and -correction software. The problem is that there’s no way to explicitly add words and phrases to the iPhone’s dictionary.

When I type ‘tino@t’ the next letters are always ‘inotopia.com’. One hundred percent of the time. But as soon as I enter the @, the iPhone recognizes that this is not an ordinary word and it stops attempting to correct what I’m typing. When this happens, you immediately learn just how much of the iPhone keyboard’s usability — like 90% — is due to the software.

There are a whole bunch of things like this that I find myself correcting over and over and over but that the iPhone does not learn. WordPerfect had the idea of user dictionaries in the 1980s; the iPhone should have them now.

12. Password storage. I understand why Apple has the iPhone set to not store passwords; if the thing is stolen, you don’t want the thief to be able to access your bank account. But the nature of the touch-screen keyboard, and the dependence on software correction, means that typing in gibberish or semi-gibberish passwords is very painful. I’m not sure what the best solution for this is, but there needs to be one.

13. Sleep times. I charge my phone up next to my bed, so if someone decides to call me at 6:30 in the morning I don’t have to race downstairs. I assume that anyone calling me at 6:30 a.m. has some kind of emergency on their hands, and needs my help. They had better have.

This means that the last thing I have to do every day is go into the iPhone’s settings app and turn off the ‘new mail’ noise. I filter spam before it makes it to the iPhone, but I’ll still typically get a couple messages overnight. I do not want the phone to attempt to alert me to the existence of these messages while I’m sleeping. There’s no way to tell the iPhone to automatically turn off certain kinds of alerts between (say) 11:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m.

14. Volume. When I’m not sleeping, the iPhone has to be louder. I take care to put my iPhone in its sleeve-case upside-down, so the tiny speaker is facing out; I then take care to put the whole thing in my pocket so that the speaker is facing up. I have constructed my own ringtone that’s very distinctive and as loud as I can get it. Hearing tests indicate that there’s nothing wrong with my ears. I still miss the ring about 1/3 of the time, and only know the phone is ringing because of the (weak) vibration. If the vibration gets turned off (which happens inadvertently sometimes because I’m constantly screwing with those settings, see #13 above), I typically miss about half of my calls.

15. Bluetooth improvements. Or maybe not Bluetooth, since the iPhone has 802.11 wireless networking. The basic point is that I should not have to plug the phone in to my computer to sync my address book, calendar, etc. Movies and music involve moving a lot of data and can reasonably be a plug-in-only kind of thing; phone-related microdata can easily be updated on a schedule whenever I’m in range.

There is some informed speculation that Apple will be revamping their .Mac service to make it less .Bad, and that the new iPhone may be capable of syncing events, contacts, etc. over the network from anywhere this way. That would be nice.

16. A better camera. The iPhone camera stinks. It doesn’t stink worse than most cell-phone cameras stink, and in certain circumstances it is possible to take a decent picture with the thing.

But even in this reduced and enhanced-by-iPhoto version, the contrast range is lousy, there’s a green cast, and everything looks like it’s photographed through a layer of gauze. The light sensitivity is also terrible, which is a real problem when trying to e.g. take pictures of friends in bars.

Maybe there is a hard limit to the quality of photo one can get out of such a small camera; certainly the optics are going to have to be optimized for size rather than quality. I don’t know much about camera design. One thing that I know would help would be to offer one or both of the volume buttons as a shutter trip when the phone is in camera mode. As it is, you have to press and release a button on the screen to take a picture, which is a real problem. You’ve got to hold the phone facing your subject and then press on the side opposite the lens. There’s a reason that no actual cameras are designed this way; doing this means that you can’t hold the phone solidly, and that you tend to pivot the thing right at the moment of taking the picture. Some of the gauze-filter effect is probably due to this UI-induced tendency to move the camera at the moment of exposure.

I haven’t said anything here about GPS, which a lot of people are eagerly anticipating. I’m not sure that it would be all that useful. GPS tends to use a lot of battery juice, and it takes a while for the receiver to get an initial fix. It doesn’t work if you don’t have a decent view of the sky.

The iPhone’s current where-am-i feature currently gets my location to somewhere within a circle with a radius of about a mile. It would do better if I were not in the boonies right now.

This seems like it’s generally enough, unless you are somewhere where there are no street signs. If you’re somewhere where there are no street signs, you’re probably in the woods or in the air or on the water and should be using a real GPS anyway. Where I most need a GPS in my phone is when I’m in the mall, or at Home Depot, and not only would it not work in either of those places, until the malls, Home Depots, grocery stores, etc. get hooked up with Google to deliver micro-map overlays of their floor plans it wouldn’t be useful anyhow.

Or at least the Washington Post does. Or at least today’s Washington Post. In a story about how Hispanics mostly voted for Hillary, and not Obama, yesterday, the Post has a quote from one Cecilia Muñoz, from the National Council of La Raza:

Text-encodings are the bane of my life, so I have a tiny bit of sympathy for whoever produces this thing. Only a very tiny bit, though, because after all I am paying for this (or would be if I were not in the free-trial period, anyway).

The problem arises from the fact that the modern digital computer, and the Internet, and E-Mail and most of this stuff are all American inventions. A lot of people in the U.S. speak Spanish these days, but in the computer-science departments where they design this kind of thing, everyone speaks English. And English is almost unique among European languages in that it does not use diacritic marks.

In a way, this is unfortunate, because there are a a lot of sounds in English that do not map well to the Latin alphabet. But that’s the way it is, and it’s made life easier for printers for hundreds of years. You can express the entire universe of thought in English with just fifty-two characters:

Continental Europe is not as efficient, and thus they require all of those, and also:

as well as many others. When computers capable of dealing with text were first built, the cost of things was such that they didn’t even use lowercase letters. If your character set is limited to 26 characters and a few punctuation symbols, you can fit a single character into five bits — which is important when every bit of memory costs a few bucks.

For a long time, the most common encoding for text was called ASCII. ASCII is an 8-bit character set, which means that eight bits of memory are used to store every character. Some of these are:

and so on. Lowercase letters are the same, except the second bit is 1 instead of 0:

So pressing the shift key on an old terminal or teletype just caused that second bit to be set to 1. To convert an ASCII string from uppercase to lowercase or vice-versa you don’t have to worry about what the characters actually are; you just have to set the second bit appropriately. This is particularly important when you are doing a search. To the computer, the strings ‘TiNoToPiA’ and ‘Tinotopia’ are entirely different. To do a search that’ll find either one, you just look for that string of bits, while ignoring the state of the second bit of every character. Thus the computer, which is just a collection of electricity, can see that ‘B’ and ‘b’ represent the same thing as easily as you can.

You’ll also note that because A comes before B, and because Z comes before a, you can sort a list by the binary values (which is fast), and get an alphabetized list with all the capitalized stuff on top. Most computers these days go to great lengths to ignore capitalization when sorting, like this view from the Mac Finder:

The very same thing viewed in the terminal shows the clever idea from 1963 still at work inside the modern computer:

Classically, ASCII only used seven bits. In the character examples above, you will note that the first bit is always 0, because these characters all fit into seven-bit ASCII. If you’re reading this on a computer, and you’re using a standard American keyboard, look down at it. Every character printed on the top of all of the 47 keys in the main part of the keyboard fits into seven-bit ASCII. Since each key can generate two characters depending on whether the shift key is pressed or not, that’s 94 characters.

The space bar generates another character, and all of the letter keys and a few others ([, ], ^, _, ?, and @) can generate another ASCII character as well: these are called control characters, most of which are not visible to you. You can see a Tab character, but you can’t see a ‘End of Transmission’ or ‘Bell’. The ‘Bell’ character (^G) used to make a bell on the terminal ring whenever it was ‘displayed’ (these days, in most situations, it’ll make the computer beep).

Anyway, all of this fits into 7 bits, which can store 2⁷, or 128, possible values. This is all you need to express things in English.

Obviously, this will cause problems if you are trying to write in Spanish, or French, or German, or any of a whole bunch of other languages that require diacritics. Most European languages are written with the Latin alphabet, but all of them but English (and, with the exception of a few umlauts on imported words, Dutch) require diacritics.

Missing diacritics can in some cases completely alter the meaning of a word. In French, for instance, pâté means, well, pâté, as in pâté de foie gras. Pâte, on the other hand — without the acute accent on the e — is pronounced differently (’pot’, more or less), and means ‘pasta’ or ‘dough’.

So diacritics are important. In comes ISO-8859-1 to the rescue. This is another character set, but the first 128 characters are exactly the same as ASCII. In ISO-8859-1, the first bit — 0 for all ASCII characters — is 1, which means that the number of possible values is doubled. The additional 128 characters are used for things like all those vowels with their jaunty continental hats, the ß the Germans use for ss in now bafflingly specific situations, the ¿ used in Spanish to warn you that a question is coming so you’d better pay attention, etc., etc.

Among these characters is the humble ñ, which has the binary value 1110001 — 241 in decimal. ‘¿’ is 191, so there’s no possibility that there’s a conflict there.

To avoid as much breakage as possible, most (all?) modern text-encoding schemes take ISO-8859-1 (which, remember, incorporates the old ASCII) as their first 255 characters. So if you take an ASCII string, or an ISO-8859-1 string, and you just bash it into any other encoding, the same shapes should be displayed.

So I conclude (possibly erroneously) that I’m seeing a ¿ not because there’s a 10111111 in the Kindle Washington Post somewhere, but because there’s a 1110001 (ñ), but that the Kindle Washington Post is either saying ‘Hello, I’m a 7-bit ASCII string’, or because the Post is saying ‘Hello, I’m not telling what text-encoding I use’ and the Kindle is defaulting to 7-bit ASCII for some unfathomable reason.

Further, if I’m correct, the Kindle uses ¿ to indicate an unknown character, which is another bad idea because of course ¿ is a perfectly valid character. There’s a character just for saying ‘I can’t display this character’, and it’s this: � — U+FFFD, the Unicode Replacement Character. Or you might see this: 󠄀 — that’s actually ‘Variation Selector 17′, but I’m pretty sure that it’ll be displayed as ‘I can’t display this character’ on pretty much anything.

So: text-encoding gremlins 0, Kindle Washington Post: 0.

Or, The Washington Post sucks on the Kindle. At least this morning’s version. Amazon offers a two-week free trial of newspaper subscriptions on the Kindle, so this morning I poked and prodded, and wound up with the Post on there. And it’s terrible.

I don’t know why I’m surprised. I’ve been complaining for years that online newspapers suck because they almost totally fail to take advantage of one of the newspapers’ best skills — selling stories by placement. And I’ve been pointing out that the Kindle is good for one thing only — reading single, long pieces of text. And still I’m shocked at how bad the Kindle version of the Post is.

This morning’s paper Washington Post has eight different sizes of headline on the front page. The front page of the Post’s website right now has three.

The Kindle version has one headline size.

What’s more, the Post’s liberal use of label heads means that a lot of the Kindle headlines are almost totally useless. A label head is a headline that is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a complete sentence. In traditional newspaper headlines, you leave out articles, forms of be, etc., etc. and wind up with something that’s extremely pithy but that still tells the story that it sits atop. ‘Elvis Dead’ would be a good example, or, to use an example from this morning’s Post, ‘Bush’s Budget Projects Deficits’.

Label heads, on the other hand, are just that: labels. They don’t tell a story, and they don’t have even an implied, invisible verb. From this morning’s Post, we get:

• Two Races, One Big Day
• A Rich Market For Russian Icons
• In China, Pulled by Opposing Tides

Those last two are iffy: you could say that they mean ‘[There Is] A Rich Market For Russian Icons’ and ‘[People] In China [are] Pulled by Opposing Tides’, but both of those would be terrible headlines.

The Post uses two-deck headlines a lot, though: a label head on top and a quite prolix (for a headline) thing underneath, usually set in italics. Whoever they have writing headlines at the Post is doing a pretty good job — not as good as at the New York Times, which generally has excellent headlines, but pretty good nevertheless — but those headlines can’t be repurposed for other media without being rewritten completely.

For the Kindle version, of course, they don’t rewrite them. Except for a very few stories from the front page, they don’t include the subheads. Here’s the front of the Washington Post as seen on the Kindle:

Here’s the same thing as seen on paper. Click on any of these pictures for a bigger version:

I’ve gone to the trouble of photographing the entire A section of today’s Post (Virginia Boonies Edition), and the whole of the Kindle article list for the same section. There are a number of outright differences — stories which are present in one version that are totally missing from the other. Some of this might be explained by the fact that the version of the Post that you get out here in the hinterland is put to bed at about 10 p.m. the night before.

(more…)

They’re both stupid in the casual sense of being ‘wack’ or ‘retarded’ etc., and they’re stupid in that they are not smart.

Here’s the interface for telling iTunes which videos I want copied to my iPhone:

There are always 357 x 88 (or 31,416) pixels available for the list of movies, regardless of how big the screen is. There are well over a million pixels available there that iTunes will not use. If the current single-column list would just extend downward, I could see 40 titles at once in that space. As it is: I see four.

Jimmy Gutterman writes:

Radar’s Nat Torkington has a smart take on this. (He’s away on vacation, so I’ll quote him.) “Success breeds risk of failure,” he writes. “Some alpha geeks are turning away from Macs. Not all, but some. The reasons they cite are quite reasonable: It has surprisingly flaky hardware, many Genius bars are impossible to use because the wait lists are a day long now, and the base apps aren’t perfect by a long shot.”

I’ve read a lot about how Apple hardware — particularly Apple hardware from early in the production run — is ‘flaky’ but to be honest I’ve never seen this myself. The semi-usable Apple hardware in my possession right now — that is, leaving out Newtons, anything with a 680×0 processor, etc., all works just fine, despite most of it having been bought on the first day it was available. The products and their problems, if any:

1. day-one 17-inch Powerbook G4. Original power brick frayed at connector but still working. Dented from being dropped by TSA. Otherwise: no problems.
2. day-one Mac Mini. No problems.
3. day-one 15-inch MacBook Pro #1. Original power brick frayed at connector but still working. Original battery replaced by Apple as part of recall. Otherwise: no problems.
4. day-one 15-inch MacBook Pro #2. Original power brick frayed at connector end, stopped working, replaced under warranty by Apple. Hard drive stopped working after computer was dropped onto marble floor. Keyboard stopped working after coffee was spilled into it. Disk & keyboard replaced by Tino. Corner dented from drop. Nicole is hard on computers. Otherwise: no problem.
5. MacBook Pro backup battery: stopped taking a charge at about 8 months of age. Replaced under warranty by Apple.
6. Mac Mini #2: no problems.
7. Mac Pro: no problems.
8. Apple 30″ display: no problems.
9. Apple iSight #1: no problems. Image quality kind of sucks, but that’s a design problem.
10. Apple iSight #2: ditto.
11. Apple TV: no problems.
12. 2nd-generation iPod: disk died. Bought new one. Intended to replace disk but never did.
13. 3rd-generation iPod: no problems.
14. iPod Video: no problems.
15. 1st-generation iPod Nano: died several times, replaced under warranty. I think the thing was getting wet. After long enough, it died while not under warranty. So: dead.
16. 2nd-generation iPod Nano: working fine.
17. day-one iPhone #1: no problems. Headphones suck. Fact that you can’t use regular headphones with it because of the stupid recessed jack sucks. iPod interface is too tree- rather than matrix-oriented, which sucks.
18. day-one iPhone #2: ditto, except the iPod interface thing doesn’t bother Nicole as much as it bothers me.
19. Airport Express: no problems.
20. Airport Extreme: works fine: in fact better than any other wireless access point I’ve ever used. It’s annoying that it needs to reboot to implement any change.
21. Apple wireless keyboard #1: full of hair and crumbs because of shortsighted design.
22. Apple wireless keyboard #2: ditto
23. Wireless mighty mouse #1: fine
24. Wireless mighty mouse #2: scroll ball action now too unpredictable to use without frustration, right-click function doesn’t work predictably.

From this, I can conclude that Apple needs to work on their laptop power connectors, and that the first-generation MagSafe connectors weren’t up to snuff. Also, the first-generation iPod Nano was prone to damage from getting wet; the Mighty Mouse’s scroll ball can’t be cleaned effectively; and the Mighty Mouse’s virtual second button is too clever by half. Also also: don’t drop thing containing hard drives. Also also also: the iPhone iPod app needs work which it probably won’t get.

Does this constitute ‘flaky hardware’? I don’t think so. It’s hard to compare this to the non-Apple computers I’ve had, because nearly all of those I built myself, and not always from the very best parts available.

Before we went in the Mac direction Nicole and I used Toshiba Porteges; these were pretty expensive, certainly on a par with what Apple charges for laptops. And they were in and out of the shop so often that we seriously considered dropping another $2000 on a spare just for when one of our primary laptops was being repaired. They were so bad that we wouldn’t have used them at all if it hadn’t been for the fact that there was an independent repair shop nearby that stocked parts for the things, and was inclined to conclude that nearly anything was covered by the extended warranty.

I never read anything about Porteges being flaky, though, and I think that this was because you can’t buy a Portege in a retail store. Or you couldn’t when we were using them, anyway. Toshiba sold them only through their ‘business’ channel, which effectively meant you had to mail-order them. Cheaper, beefier Toshiba computers were sold at CompUSA. Porteges were sold to the corporate market; the assumption was that an IT department would buy them by the crate and pass them out to employees.

Apple products, though, are overwhelmingly purchased and maintained individually by the people who use them. When a PC laptop goes bad, there’s probably about a 50% chance that the entire solution to this is going to be to call the corporate IT department, who will come swap the thing out for a new one. When an Apple laptop goes bad, there’s probably a better than 90% chance that the person sitting at the keyboard will be entirely in charge of solving the problem.

So I don’t think that there’s a ‘flaky hardware’ problem, though Apple may have a perception issue to manage.

What were the other complaints? “Many Genius bars are impossible to use because the wait lists are a day long now” and “the base apps aren’t perfect by a long shot”.

The Genius Bars definitely seem to be too crowded, but you can make an appointment from home up to 24 hours in advance — so I’m not sure how this makes them ‘impossible to use’. You know whose Genius Bars are really impossible to use? Everyone else’s, because they don’t do this. Instead you spend hours on the phone to Bangalore, listening to someone read from a script. Apple FTW.

And ‘the base apps aren’t perfect’. I’m not sure what this means, but I suppose it must mean that iCal, Mail, Safari, and the Finder, at least, are imperfect. I’ll agree here: they’re definitely not perfect. What I don’t understand is how this is some kind of disadvantage — an impediment to Apple continuing to ‘get away with it’ where ‘it’ is presumably something along the lines of ‘pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes’. It might be a problem if there were some competition that did provide ‘perfect’ ‘base apps’. When the comparison is between Mail and Outlook Express, though (or even Mail and Thunderbird), Mail looks pretty good. There’s nothing really wrong with Outlook Express, but there’s even less wrong with Mail. Et cetera.

This has all been about the specific assertions, but remember that those were just offered as explanation for the main point: that ‘alpha geeks’ are ‘turning away from Macs’. Which is even sillier. And turning to what, pray tell? Linux? Windows? Presumably the ones who are upset with the inability to elbow their way in at the Genius Bar are turning to Linux because appointments at the Linux Store are so much easier to get. And the alpha geeks who are dissatisfied with Apple’s ‘base apps’ are moving to Windows — because on Windows, everything runs like a top.

WTF? I mean: WTF?! I’m calling bullshit on the whole thing, because it just doesn’t make sense.

An Alpha Geek might ‘move away from Macs’ because, as of today, there are only three Mac laptops available, and all of them are too big and heavy and lack serial ports. An Alpha Geek might decide that Apple’s proprietary systems bother him philosophically. An Alpha Geek might need drivers for some exotic piece of hardware, and it’s easier to switch to either Linux or Windows than to write his own for OS X. These are valid criticisms that can be made of Apple and Apple’s products. But saying that the problem is that the Genius Bar is too crowded, or that Address Book isn’t up to snuff, is ridiculous.

I don’t keep a dictionary by my side as I read things, nor do I know anyone who does. I have no idea who Levenger et al. are selling these ‘reader’s totes’ to, with room for a dictionary and a magnifying glass and so on: morons, presumably.

With the Kindle, though, and the ability to look up words just by pushing a button, I find myself doing it a lot more often. Last night, for instance, I came across the word uxoriousness. Now, I know that uxor means wife — my knowledge of Latin and French is why I don’t need a dictionary — but just because you know the root doesn’t mean that you are familiar with all the connotations in English. Wifeousness? The context — this was in Martin Amis’ The Information — was that ‘uxoriousness’ was being held up by one of the characters as a virtue.

The dictionary has uxorious as ‘excessively fond of or submissive to a wife’. So his consideration that being ‘excessively’ fond of his wife is a virtue is an important clue to the nature of his character. Kindle dictionary FTW!

So. Great. It would be nice to just be able to press Alt-L while on a line to look up the words rather than having to navigate through another menu, but as my finger is on the scroll wheel anyway, what the heck.

However, the dictionary that comes with the Kindle is, like many dictionaries, sorely lacking. I cannot think of any specific examples at the moment, but about half of the words I’ve attempted to look up haven’t been there. I have a large vocabulary, and so the words I’m going to attempt to look up are going to tend to all be fairly obscure or archaic ones; but then you’d think that in assembling a dictionary for such a purpose, you’d take that into account. You wouldn’t include a definition for dog, for instance, or cat, using that space instead for the kinds of words that people who spend $400 on a reading device are more likely to be unfamiliar with.

Ay, there’s the rub: the dictionary wasn’t compiled for this purpose. It’s just a regular dictionary, with its composition not taking into account its intended use or audience.

It would be nice to see a dictionary for the Kindle — you can add your own, which the system will use when doing these lookups — that combined a standard dictionary-for-the-educated, the Urban Dictionary, a sci-fi dictionary, a Gazetteer, etc., etc., etc.

To the best of my knowledge, though, all these e-book dictionaries are just regular dictionaries with only the format, and not the content, adapted.

A few points have been brought up in the comments to my previous post which make me realize that I left a few things out.

DRM’d Books

First, I need to point out that I’m not too worried about Amazon’s DRM’d Kindle books; DRM is a pointless exercise, for reasons that Cory Doctorow explains here. In short, he says:

Say I sell you an encrypted DVD: the encryption on the DVD is supposed to stop you (the DVD’s owner) from copying it. In order to do that, it tries to stop you from decrypting the DVD.

Except it has to let you decrypt the DVD some of the time. If you can’t decrypt the DVD, you can’t watch it. If you can’t watch it, you won’t buy it. So your DVD player is entrusted with the keys necessary to decrypt the DVD, and the film’s creator must trust that your DVD player is so well-designed that no one will ever be able to work out the key.

This is a fool’s errand. Because the DVD player has the key, it’s always possible that it can be extracted by academics, hardened hackers — or just kids who are in it for the glory.

The argument in greater detail is available here.

I expect the Kindle DRM to be broken within six weeks, at the longest, but I think I will wait until then before spending any serious money on their locked-up books. It’s not that I have something in mind that would be specifically thwarted by DRM; it’s just that the whole notion makes me uneasy. DRM ties my data — data that I am properly licensed to use — to a specific device or piece of software. When that device or piece of software fails, I effectively lose my license to use the data: and that’s nuts.

And DRM is artificially restrictive, too. The goal is to keep me from being able to redistribute the data to someone else, which is, I suppose, fine.

Note that my assessment that this is ‘fine’ is based in large part on the fact that Amazon is willing to sell this data at about a 60% discount over what they charge for the same data on paper. This is quite different from, say, the iTunes Music Store approach, where DRM’d Pixies albums actually cost $0.02 more than you’ll pay Amazon for the same data, uncompressed and un-DRM’d, on physical CDs.

It’s also based on the fact that the author and publisher need to be paid for their work, and that this isn’t going to happen if everyone redistributes the stuff for free. The argument you often see for music — that artists should make money by playing concerts rather than by selling records (which is how most recording artists make money now anyway) — doesn’t hold water in the case of books.

But there are all kinds of things I want to to do data that doesn’t involve ripping off the author or artist but that I still can’t do in a DRM regime.

For instance, I don’t have a DVD player hooked up to my TV. This is mainly because DVDs are annoying; not only do you have to keep track of the things, and make sure they don’t get scratched, and sit through the insulting copyright threats, and then screw around with their badly-designed menus using badly-designed remote controls, but also because, for reasons I’m not sure about, the average useful life of a DVD player around here is about nine months. This has been true both of cheap and expensive DVD players; so I’m done with ‘em.

I have an Apple TV hooked up to my TV, so when I get a DVD I rip it and watch it on there. Some DVDs and DVD sets are particularly hard to use as directed, and a pain in the ass to rip, so I just download them. In particular here, I’m thinking about the Monty Python box set and the recent Simpsons DVDs; they have multiple titles per disc, and particularly annoying and time-wasting menus. I own these DVDs, but I never watch them because even after paying for them it’s easier to download the content separately because this way I can watch them the way I want to watch them.

So how does this relate to machine-readable books?

Last night I read the Kindle-store sample of Steve Martin’s autobiography, and I was struck by just how clearly his voice came through in the text, and how the same voice was readily apparent in his movie scripts. With enough Steve-Martin source material and futzing around with Perl, this voice could probably be quantified and I could build a Steve Martin robot. Or at least a Steve Martin detector. That sounds silly, but it would be interesting to build such a thing and run scripts through it, seeing whether it could differentiate between bits that were written by Martin himself and bits that were reworked by lesser writers.

That would be kind of neat, and entirely within my legal rights. Neither Steve Martin nor his publishers lose any money if I build a Steve Martin detector; I’m just not allowed to redistribute the book myself. But DRM makes this use — a use that makes Martin’s book more valuable to me — impossible or at least more difficult than it needs to be.

I realize that most people are not quite like me, though, and have neither the resources, skills, time, or inclination to build a Steve Martin detector. And I couldn’t easily do textual analysis on the non-DRM’d paper book, either.

Amazon sells the DRM’d versions of books at a substantial discount. In practice I think that Amazon is subsidizing these sales, but it seems to make a good bargain. Amazon and the publishers have lower costs because they do not have to manufacture, warehouse, and move around anything physical; but they have higher costs in that relatively few people will copy and redistribute physical books.

I, on the other hand, have greater benefit from the purchase because I can get the book delivered instantly, and I don’t have to have sto