Apple have tightened up their dead pixel policy

Well that was a colossal waste of time.

I’ve been a bit sad in the last couple of days that I would have to hand in my shiny new iPhone over a couple of dead pixels, but the Optus employee encouraged me over the phone to bring it in as soon as possible. Google didn’t turn up any real information about Apple’s iPhone DP policy so I just assumed it was good.

Deciding to keep my data safe, last night I used the erase all data option (turns out this is a secure wipe taking two hours) and headed into the store this morning. After I pointed out my problem, the lady behind the counter took the phone out back - only to return mumbling something about how I would get a refurbished phone, not a brand new one and then put me on the phone to the Optus service centre.

After 15 minutes on hold (still standing in the store, mind you) it was finally revealed that the Apple policy is phones with an “acceptable” number of dead pixels will not be fixed under warranty, you have to pay for it. And the guy on the phone was fairly sure 2 is an acceptable number. Needless to say I ain’t paying what could be an expensive repair bill for 2 pixels.

Apparently they had another call this morning about the same issue, so hopefully it’s a serious enough flaw that more pixels die and I can actually get it fixed (that’s a pretty strange wish to have, I admit, but Apple are being bastards about this).

As annoying as dead pixels are, I can understand why 2 doesn’t qualify; I really just wish Optus had their story straight from the start. As I said in my last post, I wasn’t even going to bother until the second pixel died. Two in a week indicates a potentially serious issue, and I had already been told there was no problems getting it replaced. The staff in store even said it would be fine and were as surprised as I was when I told them the news.

Oh well, the restore worked (although it took forever despite not syncing any music). So technically all I lost was half a day and a few of the flash memory’s write cycles. It could’ve been worse.

 

It’s not all fun and games

After a week of use, there are plenty of good things about the iPhone 3G but they are covered in who knows how many places. And the downsides I’ve seen in various reviews don’t mention my little issues with it, so that’s what I want to cover.

I’ll start with the only one that I think they’ll fix - the application upgrade process. I upgraded my first app tonight through the on-phone store application, and instead of actually upgrading it deleted the old one. This meant that it was at the end of my app list as if it were a fresh install, and I had to move it back to where I wanted it on my screen. I can see this becoming annoying as I add more applications.

Anyway if you’re considering an iPhone or iPod touch, there a couple of niggly little things to keep in mind with the iPod functions. As far as I can tell the iPod interface hasn’t changed with the v2.0 software; I guess these things don’t matter as much for the average listener. However, as someone who has used regular iPods for almost 4 years they make listening to long tracks (ie podcasts) more of a hassle than the clickwheel iPods.

The first, and most obvious, is seeking. The extremely accurate wheel motion has been dumped for a seek bar - it’s not even the full width in portrait mode, and it doesn’t exist in the landscape / coverflow view. Using it to seek requires a steady hand and plenty of luck, on a decent length show I find the smallest twitch still seeks 30 seconds at a time.

The hidden seek option - seeking via holding down the next or previous button - is bizarre. After a three second wait for slow tappers, it simply alters the speed of the speech; it takes another few seconds before it switches up to proper seek. This one catches me out all the time, I have muscle memory for the exact length of time to hold for a 5 or 10 second seek and I now need to relearn the time required as well as get used to a confusing garble when seek begins.

The other silly restriction on the iPod interface is a complete Inability to view podcast shownotes. Considering that it was specifically added to the iPod firmwares when Apple decided to get behind podcasting, this is a very strange omission. All you can view is the lyrics, and only one of the podcasts I listen to bothers to make use of that field. Why not allow shownotes to be viewed via the same interface?

And finally, the ringtones. This has been well documented since they were released for iPhone v1, but the ringtones are a rip off. The good news is that if you’re like me and use MP3 for everything, creating a ringtone is an easy two step process:

• Use Garageband to create a small loop from the mp3 (click the circular arrow button in with the playback controls)
• Drag the resulting AAC into MakeiPhoneRingtone

Oh and the big kicker for me is that my phone has developed two dead pixels already. With stock probably out for a while I was hesitant to get a single pixel replaced under warranty, but the second appeared last night and now I just want it over and done with as soon as possible. I haven’t quite made it an irreplaceable part of my life, so I need to hand it over before that happens

Ah well, hopefully by the time a replacement arrives my invisibleSHIELD will have shipped. At least I won’t be worrying about scratches while I don’t have the phone!

 

iPhone adventures

I now have a shiny white iPhone

I’m enjoying it quite a bit, aside from a fear of scratching it. I wanted to post about my experience buying one, on a day where it sold out world wide I got extremely lucky.

I had already decided to go with the Optus $39/month plan. About the same price as my existing plan, with 500mb of data per month; AJ convinced me that I didn’t even need the 700mb I had originally planned for. As I mentioned in my last post, with 9gb of music and plenty of podcasts I needed a 16gb model and had since decided on a white one to hide fingerprints on the back.

What I hadn’t decided was if I would get one on launch day or not.

So I woke up at 6am, intending to head to one of the 7am launch openings. However, it was really fricken cold and having skipped the pre-order I figured that my chances of actually getting one were so low that it wasn’t worth freezing my arse off.

In spite of that, once I was at work I called a nearby Optus store to see if they had any. They didn’t answer the phones all morning, but at 11am I got through - and they had two white ones left! How’s that for luck!

After I explained that I wanted a contract and could be there in 15 minutes, a phone was set aside for me and I took an early lunch. I still can’t believe they were willing to hold one, it’s not like they would have had any problems selling it.

It wasn’t completely smooth of course - the activation process was already overloaded by midday Australian time, so I went back to work phoneless. Having now heard about the problems around the world I think the Optus employees did a very good job to activate the phones they did - the big store in Brisbane apparently sold so many phones that later purchases wouldn’t be activated until the next morning. As it was, I made it back to my store at 4:45pm just as they were starting my activation and it took 45 minutes before I had the phone in my hands.

I did, however, walk out without paying a cent. I love Optus post-paid plans

The only other glitch in the whole process was that in the activation rush my 2G to 3G sim upgrade hadn’t actually been processed, but I went back to the store today and it was all fixed in about 5 minutes.

The battery life seems ok so far, particularly considering the playing-with-new-toy factor. I have always synced my iPod nightly to update the podcasts so I don’t mind if the iPhone needs charging every night

Speaking of which, I have no idea what I’m going to do with my old 60g iPod. I hadn’t planned to replace it this soon, which is a bad sign - I totally fell for the launch day hype. Oh well.

I do find it amusing though, that it’s been barely more than two years since I bought the old iPod. I usually make my technology last far longer than the stereotypical two year upgrade cycle (my old phone is from 2001), but I’ve been breaking my own rules recently. Even more amusing is my comments at the time about the then-rumored video iPod. I can still see a few of those issues in the phone, but the video iPod interface has turned out to be quite nice (mostly, I’ll blog about that later).

 

Australia’s iPhone plans are bad, but not horrible

I’ve been thinking long and hard about the iPhone, but I wasn’t getting my hopes up because I knew the data plans would suck in Australia. There have been a lot of complaints floating around that the iPhone 3G is expensive, and plan prices outside of the US are utterly crap. Well, as I suspected, you can add Australia’s iPhone plans to that list.

The first out was Telstra - it looks like they’re following the US model of data packs attached to your mobile plans. I won’t bother listing the phone or voice prices, because their data prices are fracking outrageous.

A couple of days ago, Optus joined in with their announcement. A little bit better, but notice a trend here? No unlimited data, just like the home internet plans in this country. Optus give you unlimited data for the first month if you sign up in August, but I can see that leading to a mountain of customer complaints when the September bills skyrocket.

So here’s my comparison. According to gizmodo, the cheapest iPhone TCO is $1975. At the current exchange rate that’s $2050. There are a wide range of TCO options on Optus, but the plan I’m considering is the $59/month regular Optus plan (not the cap plan, look further down) because it has the best balance of data vs price. The 24-month TCO to is $1464 (or $1584 for 16gb).

There are arguments that can be made both ways on if this is a good deal or not. Let’s look at the differences.

• No up front cost on the Australian plan. This is actually pretty normal for phone deals over here, and is nice. On a 24 month contract, the handset repayments only total $168 on the 16gb phone!
• Australian plans bundle voice and SMS together. However, text costs 25c a pop.
• 450 minutes on the American plan, if you send zero texts and use the right plan bonus the $60 Australian plan will come out to around 100-150 minutes at 2 calls a day (we pay a 25c flagfall just for the privilege of calling someone).
• 700mb Data. WTF?

I can’t find anywhere that gives a good indication of average monthly data usage on an iPhone, but it seems to me that an iPhone without an unlimited data plan isn’t much better than an iPod touch.

The one good point in all this is the “relatively” low 35c per MB data overcharge. To any normal person this is expensive, but most Australian providers (including Optus on prepaid) charge you 2.2c per kilobyte, so this is an amazing deal by comparison.

We still have the third iPhone provider, Vodafone, to announce their prices - but considering it will cost me $55 if I cancel the Optus contract I’m on, it would have to be an outstanding deal to tempt me.

I think that either way, I’m almost certainly going to cave and get a 16gb. I have less than 9gb of music and only add ~250mb a month; even with the 3gb of podcasts I have queued up there would still be plenty of headroom. In theory my data requirements dictate I should wait for an eventual 32gb model announcement, but waiting for hardware updates only leads to pain and frustration (WTB mac mini update!)

 

Subversive government seems to be the in thing these days

It looks like the doomsday predictions from a couple of weeks ago were true - Britain pushed the Lisbon treaty through, it took a rich old guy suing them saying it’s illegal without a referendum to stop it (and even that will probably only last a week).

It’s not just Europe though, apparently Americans are putting all kinds of things into their housing bills these days. Seriously, it should be illegal for politicians to sneak something into a Bill that has nothing to do with the main topic of the Bill.

It’s no wonder the governments in power are so unpopular (we all know about Bush, but Brown has his problems too). As the internet becomes more pervasive, so does all the information people dig up.

 

Apple vs Microsoft OS behaviours

I mentioned when I first switched that I’ve been a closet Apple fanboy for years, I was just waiting for a good enough excuse to buy a mac. All that time I was never able to put a finger on why I enjoyed macs so much, but after four months full time I think I’ve worked it out.

I still use XP on my windows box regularly for games, but last week had to boot up the Vista partition. As I tried for countless minutes to achieve something useful while the system had a mild heart attack doing whatever it is that Vista does, I finally realised what was wrong.

The difference between Apple and Microsoft is that when you’re using an Apple OS, the user comes first. No ifs, no buts, if the user wants something it uses all the available resources to serve that request. Everything feels snappy even in low memory environments (and even on a phone!). Applications, particularly Apple applications, are designed to be secondary and subservient to the user.

Microsoft on the other hand make operating systems where it, along with the applications, rule. You can only guide them. Vista, and to a lesser extent XP, cares only about itself. Sure it might put on a pretty face and try to make you feel like you’re in control, but under the hood it doesn’t care one iota what you want. It’s so busy trying to anticipate and pre-cache your next action, index your documents, swap out that application you just minimised even though you might need it in 2 minutes, and countless other background tasks, that the user winds up with a sluggish experience and a frustrating lack of control over the system.

Having used windows for over 10 years, I can look back and see that this “system > user” philosophy has always been hiding under the surface. You just never really notice unless you’re looking for it or the OS requirements jump higher than the average computer power at the time. Microsoft have really painted themselves into a corner with all of the enterprise requirements and backwards compatibility weighing them down.

Apple, on the other hand, have years of user-centric development behind them. Even though they’re starting to pander to enterprise customers, if the iPhone 2.0 demos are anything to go by the addition of enterprise features in 10.6 won’t compromise the end user experience.

Maybe Microsoft will pull something out of their hat, but it’s going to take even more to make me switch back now that my eyes are open.

 

Finding myself some office software

I’ve held out for a while, but last month reached the point where I need some kind of word processor & spreadsheet software. I use MS Office at work, but have always considered it too expensive for use at home as I don’t need much.

On my Windows box, I had been forcing myself to use Open Office. It worked, but that was about all; I hate the interface, it doesn’t hold a candle to MS Office. It was actually one of the first things I tried when I started using this Mac - and it was an utter mess, barely even able to load.

Office for Mac 2008 didn’t fare much better. I’ve had some exposure to it from the mac users at work, and what I’ve seen is not only yet another Microsoft interface that I would have to puzzle my way around, the memory it used on a decent machine indicated it would absolutely kill this poor little 512mb laptop.

The A$650 price, and reviews like this one from MacInTouch (particularly the memory usage section), sealed that deal.

I decided to put up with nothing, but that didn’t last long. When the need hit last month, a few searches lead me to iWork 08. I’d never looked into it beyond the initial reviews, but thankfully it has a 30 day trial.

I’m now hooked

It has taken me a few weeks, but my needs at home are so basic that I’ve quickly adapted to the iWork interface. The only thing that gave me grief is border styling in Numbers, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.

It’s a different and far more basic approach to Office application design, but one that focuses on making document creation easy rather than cramming itself full of features. Fairly typical of Apple software, really

The biggest win, in my eyes, is the memory usage. I still haven’t lost the amazement of running Safari, iTunes and Mail at the same time on 512mb ram without any noticable system lag. Apple have taken the same philosophy with their Office apps, and I couldn’t be happier.

The only time it starts lagging is when I leave Safari + Mail open and run both Pages and Numbers with large documents. Even so, it wasn’t until I upgraded to 2gb ram that my Windows box was happy with that much running.

I just… I’m sold. All this for around 15% of the cost of MS Office.

 

Europeans found their voice

The European public has proved they are a dangerous force to be reckoned with. After a very successful education campaign, the Lisbon Treaty is dead.

EU leaders in Brussels and governments across the union, particularly Germany and France, were stunned by the Irish verdict, which amounted to a huge vote of no confidence in the way the EU is run.

Amusingly the guardian is reporting that some parts of the EU are still trying to find a loophole:

Everything suggested that Europe’s key leaders were urgently conferring on a scheme to steamroller their blueprint through despite the Irish rejection, a course likely to trigger protest from Eurosceptics and deepen Europe’s democratic legitimacy problems.

Sounds like they already have pretty serious democratic legitimacy problems if they’re still trying to push through a document that is so obviously unpopular with the citizens they represent. It can’t be a very good idea with their next election only a year away.

On the plus side, I’m no longer worried about sounding crazy in my post a few days ago. Enough of the Irish thought we were right to vote no

 

That’s enough essays for a while

I think 3 huge posts in the space of a week is enough. It’s not that I had them built up from a month of silence, I’ve just had a lot to say about topics that came up recently

And just because I don’t want to make a new post about it, some fun news.

I noticed as I wrote my Awaken post last night that the MacHeist front page had changed to “coming soon”, and this morning I woke up to two new software keys sitting in my inbox! It turns out that the fantastic MacHeist bundle I picked up in April has been re-released with three new apps, and because it’s the same price they managed to extend the deal for existing bundle purchasers. The new apps make it even more of a steal:

• VectorDesigner (woot I don’t own any OSX graphic tools)
• TextExpander (read about this on DaringFireball, didn’t want to pay full price)
• SoundStudio (if it gets unlocked)

The bundle is packed full of useful stuff, particularly for new OS X users. I haven’t tried the new apps yet but out of the others I use them all except for:

• The games (they’re old and obviously released into the bundle as advertising, Enigmo was one of the games ported to iPhone for the WWDC 08 keynote)
• iClip (it’s sluggish on 512mb ram)
• DEVONthink (I’ve been looking for an excuse to use it though)

So by the time I buy a new mac, I’ll be using every app except the games. Even if you’re not a new mac user, for my money there are some very handy tools (CoverSutra, Awaken, XSlimmer, WriteRoom) that don’t have any good free equivalent and would cost more than the $50 bundle price just by themselves. VictorDesigner and SoundStudio are both worth more than the bundle price alone, so if you can make use of either one it becomes a no-brainer.

And to top it all off $12 of your money will go to charity. Pick it up now to help guarantee SoundStudio for everyone

 

A crash course in MythTV backend setup

I’ve had a MythTV box running for quite a few years now, but there’s always new things to learn, right?

My flatmate’s TV is in for repairs so we haven’t been using the box in the last few days, with a big NRL game on tonight it was supposed to be recording. I became concerned when the drive light wasn’t flashing as we ate dinner, a quick check of the web interface set my alarm bells ringing. Nothing was recording, and in fact nothing had been recording for nearly 2 days.

The time of failure co-incided with a machine lockup while we were trying to watch TV over the network (it’s saved as MPG so this is easy to do). With no TV screen I hadn’t verified that MythTV was working after the reboot, only that the SMB shares were alive. Visions of dead hard drives floated into my head as much frantic searching and diagnosis ensued

The problem turned out to be very subtle, this explanation may get a bit technical but I couldn’t find any references to it on google so hopefully this post will be useful to someone else.

I only have one machine, but the log clearly said “Running as a slave backend“. Therein lies the problem, the Master server thought it was a Slave backend and sat there trying to connect to nothing. This means no scheduled recordings either because scheduling is all handled by the Master server

MythTV is amazingly flexible. It handles multiple backend recording machines, each with multiple capture cards, as well as multiple frontends. Unfortunately a very flexible system easily leads to a lot of configuration complexity, a fact I know all to well from my time in ELJ support.

After browsing around various forms and mailing lists for nearly half an hour I ended up in the Configuring MythTV docs. If you scroll down to the general section, you’ll see some confusing paragraphs:

If you will be deploying multiple backends, or if your backend is on one system and you’re running the frontend on another machine then do not use the “127.0.0.1″ IP address.

NOTE: If you modify the 127.0.0.1 address and use a “real” IP address, you must use real IP addresses in both fields, otherwise your frontend machines will generate “Unexpected response to MYTH_PROTO_VERSION” errors.

To understand that, you have to understand that everything in MythTV land is controlled by a single MySQL server. Both the Backend and Frontend sofware connect to the database, read config settings for their hostname (they’re designed to netboot on diskless machines) and then read the global Master Server IP to connect to.

I don’t know why this option exists, but one of those per-host config settings is a Backend Server IP.

And suddenly it hit me.

A week ago, I downloaded MythFrontend for OS X. This poor little iBook is too slow to actually watch TV, but before I discovered that it was the first time I had run a remote frontend so I had to change a few things to make it work. One of those was the Master Server IP.

Since this had been set to 127.0.0.1, the frontend couldn’t connect to the Master Server so I changed it to the Master Server’s network IP. The frontend worked, everything else seemed fine, so I thought nothing of it. Until the Server rebooted.

It turns out that when the Backend loads up, it compares Backend Server IP it has been assigned to the Master Server IP. If they match it loads as the Master; otherwise it becomes a slave. Apparently, it doesn’t bother to figure out that the Master Server IP is the same machine as the 127.0.0.1 it has been told it owns. Isn’t this option redundant? Can’t the Backend just check if it owns the Master Server IP when it already listens on all interfaces?

So long story short, if you mess with the MasterServerIP in your database make sure you also update the BackendServerIP listed in the settings for your Master Server’s hostname. ugh.

On the plus side, I think half an hour to fix a problem this subtle in configuration settings that I had no clue existed is a new record for me