GeekApproach

The past couple of weeks or so I’ve been hunting for some sort of mobile hotspot device or at least a reliable connection while I’m out and about in the world.  Most of the time I seek the shelter and relatively tasty supply of caffeine offered at a coffee shop (with power to boot), but as I continue to remain unemployed I’ve found myself wanting to be out in a park somewhere and still get some stuff done.  Or, getting out of the city for the weekend and heading to the Pacific to hang out.

A big problem for me was cost: Every major wireless player offers a variant of a USB stick, or a MiFi device but they all require a new contract and ironically a “phone number” for that device because they’re all phone companies.  I was attracted to Clear’s devices because of their cheapness and a device that was meant to specifically get “Apple” devices on-line, the iSpot.  I’ll not here that I am a shareholder in Clear (CLWR) but I’m casual and while I want them to succeed, I’m not tethered so to speak to their devices.

The iSpot is an Apple-like MiFi spot designed to only let devices that match known MAC addresses of iPads, iPhones, and whatever “i” thing Apple will launch next.

Clear's iSpot Device

Because these devices would sap less of the network than others, Clear offers their plans at a fantastic discout: $25/month to month and a $99 device fee.  Within days of its launch back in August some intrepid hackers figured out how to open it up and remove the MAC address restriction, disable OTA (over-the-air) updates, and enable USB tethering.  While I’m technically using Apple devices anyway, the MacBook Pro is not inclusive in the default MAC address settings: this is purely an iOS device device.

My largest problem is that out here in Ocean Shores, Clear does not offer 4G coverage.  Sprint, Clear’s partner offers 3G coverage but once-upon-a-time I owned a Sprint USB stick that didn’t work so great out here.  Also, when I went to pick one up in W.Seattle they were sold out and backordered for a few days.

In the end I went back to the simplest option: tethering my iPhone over ATT for an extra $15 a month.  Surprisingly, ATT has updated coverage over here and it’s not as bad as I would’ve thought– I pulled down 2 megs, .75 up at a relative ping of about 348 ms.

iPhone in Tether Mode

I’m not thrilled about losing my unlimited data plan in order to gain tethering but I gotta say this is fairly fast and useful for doing what I should be doing out here: checking the news, email, and letting Xcode fetch new defs out of the Apple respository.

The only thing to decide now is whether or not I really want to be spending my time away from the city and home online somewhere.  It has advantages but I’ll have to watch it.

The iSpot is an Apple-like MiFi spot designed to only let devices that match known MAC addresses of iPads, iPhones, and whatever “i” thing Apple will launch next.

After spending some time with my mother on the phone last night involving audio CD formats and why or why iTunes won’t import them, I’ve decided to do a brief write-up on the now ancient CD audio format.

I first knew this format as “Red Book” audio format. It’s a spec dually held by Philips and Sony and was released in 1980. It calls for the following:

• 2 channels of LPCM (or PCM) audio, 16-bit signed values samples at 44100 Hz.
• A maximum capacity of 74 minutes of audio (later expanded to 80 minutes)
• Maximum number of tracks is 99
• The audio data is in a 2,352 byte block

Wikipedia tells me the format is apparently still licensable for $5000 from Philips which is kind of shocking to me considering how old the format is. Why isn’t this open-sourced yet? I can only assume the logo that Philips lets you license is also part of that 5k. Anyway, at its simplest CD-DA or Compact Disc Digital Audio is stereo audio at 44.1 Khz. When you pop it in a traditional CD player the device reads the information at 1x (about 150 Kib/second) , decodes the LPCM audio and streams it to your speakers.

The CD-DA logo, imprinted upon many a CD.

I recall playing a brand-new CD-ROM based game that I had as a kid with our new Sound Blaster 8-bit audio card. This game loaded data off of the CD-ROM at 2x (making this horrible seeking noise), and then played Red Book audio from the audio portion of the image, thus freeing the CPU to continue rendering the game loop and not having to worry about decoding that audio on its own. This was also my first exposure to IRQ’s (Interrupt Requests) and how you could tell the processor that you wanted to deal with a specific hardware entity, in this case the decoding engine on the sound card. I though it was awesome.

Back in the mid-90′s I was starting to share media with friends across the Internet. With broadband having almost zero penetration at the time I was stuck using a 56k modem and a phone line to get out to the world. Some of you will recall that few people were ever able to get up to the so-called 56,000 bits of data that our modem’s were supposed to bleep merrily down the phone line so often I was reduced to an even slower mode–44k most of the time. On the web I found guys who were trading effectively CD quality audio via encoded files called MP3′s. Developed by the Fraunhofer Institute, MP3 went on to become a standard format for easily encoding and transporting audio–it sounds decent enough, files went from bulky 60 meg .WAV files to 3.5 meg MP3′s. It was great and it transformed the industry. CD burners became cheap and fast enough to put in home computers, media became widely available using a dye sandwiched in between two layers of plastic. Almost overnight we started using these devices more and more and seeking new and higher resolution audio formats for our media.

One of those was the Super Audio CD (SACD).  SACD was also developed by Sony and Philips and offered almost 8 GB of storage on a single disc and a higher audio fidelity for those who had new SACD playback devices. The format never took off and really the only remnant I have of it is a John Williams soundtrack CD from 1999.

Another extension known as CD-Text buried Artist, title and other relevant information in the 5 kb storage area know as a lead-in on a CD-DA disc. This does not adhere to the Red Book standard, but most newer playback devices (car stereos for example) can read this data and output it in some way to the user.  Apparently its rare to find the old Philips CD-DA logo on discs any more since rarely do the adhere to the standard. Not having bought a CD in years I don’t know about that but it stands to reason.

I think at a later date I’ll delve into some of the stranger formats I’ve used included hybridized discs.

iOS4 is out today and I gotta say I’m having a bit of a love/hate relationship here. First off, I lost my damn contacts. I didn’t actually lose them but when I went to use my smartphone in a smart manner it didn’t really work. I ended up having to do a hard-sync to a more out of date version of my cloud version of Google Contacts. Talk about frustrating…and to my knowledge this issue still isn’t solved. I also had some wonkiness in the Clock app of all things– titlebar flashed green as if I was in a call and it kinda got the timer numbers all screwy there. I did a hard reboot and all is good now…I think.

But on to the OS pack– it’s very fast on my 3GS. I like the new draw animations, and the addition of Folders for droppings Apps is great. Even the spellcheck is a nice addition because I’m tired of typing the word “ducking” all the time. Use your imagination.

Here’s my last gripe: Freaking multi-tasking. Apple, why would I want to leave the Settings app up, or Messaging? How about the damn Clock app? Why don’t you have a whitelist or at least a preference setting that would allow me to specify a “Never multitask” or “Always quit (for real)”?? I can only assume there’s an iOS4.1 update around the corner.

I noticed this release contains the same serial as the 4.0 GM Seed that we developers had access to. I had it loaded, but maybe I’ve got some glitches because of that…oh well.

More as it develops…

I spent the weekend doing a bit of searching around the web on alternative OS’s. Now that my little Hackintosh has been superceded by my mighty MacBook Pro, the poor thing sits unused in my home office just colleting dust. It was never a mighty machine, an Atom-based N450 in the Dell Mini 9 shell. The keyboard is cramped; function keys are mapped funny, and it wasn’t terribly large. At 9 inches everything was just a little bit different and frustrating to use on it. Bonus points were its 16-gig SSD that Dell later stopped offering as an option, an SD card reader, and it’s price: $299 on a one day sale.

I spent some time digging into two OS’s, with somewhat of the same aims: MeeGo and JoliCloud. I should mention that I installed both only in the USB key scenario, not actually loading a full installation.

Jolicloud promised to be the OS with the most initial satistfaction for me. It supports the vast majority of “netbook” systems already out there, and aside from needing to jury-rig my Wireless the first time worked quite well. The entire system promises a bevy of new, recommended, and lightweight cloud-based apps to help you get everything done.

Jolicloud App Directory

The staples are there: Chrome, Gmail, VLC, Twitter, and other social networking toolsets. Generally it was was snappy, colorful and seemed well designed. It fit well with my small 9″ screen.

MeeGo also promised a cloud-based experience. The UI interface reminds me a bit of TweetDeck’s– things are running in a 3-column layout and are mostly very easy to read.

Meego Desktop

Apps are launched from category buckets and that’s how your “installed” programs are organized and sought out. I ran MeeGo in the same USB-boot key method as Jolicloud, but drivers for my device weren’t readily apparent. Video and audio worked; WLAN did not. Apparently I’m not alone in this. My entire trial was based upon being in a hard LAN environment which may have tainted my final review of the OS. What’s really promising about MeeGo is the variety of devices it wants to run on: mainly in-car devices, and connected TV embedded OS opportunities. They’ve got some substantial backing from Nokia (which I can only assume means there’s a Tablet-like device somewhere in the wings), and today Acer announced they will have MeeGo running on their future devices as well.

That seems to be a substantial alliance going against Google’s Chrome OS– I’m not sure what the ramifications of that are yet because the Chrome OS still isn’t out. I’m going to keep scouting for alternative OS’s, but for right now I think I’ll wipe the ol MacOS and load up Jolicloud for a bit. If I hate it, I can always continue my tour.

My girlfriend tonight wanted to take photos of a newborn in the next few days and was asking about a remote capture solution. I recalled that Canon had an open spec and since she owns a high-end DSLR, a 20D I figured it would be intact. I found the EOS driving software online but it’s a pain in the ass– it requires you to have the original EOS software installed or to have the original install CD’s at your disposal. Having neither, as this is a new MBP I did a bit of research and found someone who had managed to hack the updater (which is really just the installer in disguise).

It’s really quite simple. Rip the “UpdateInstaller” package out of the mounted installer pack. Right-click, “Explore Package Contents”. Browse through Contents->Resources->SDI-bundle. Explore Package Contents again. Lastly, delete “update.plist”. Voila!

And once we were in it was indeed very simple to remote control the 2OD through the Mac. Why did that have to be so arduous?

I’ve now had my MBP for one week of semi-active use. My primary machine at work has been a 4-year old Dell 17″ Insipron loaded with Windows7 x 64. Over the past week I’ve found a lot to love about my new Mac, notwithstanding the abiliity to actually run the iPhone Simulator in a resolution that actually fits it on the screen. I’ve loaded Parallels 5 and it’s really taken care of the necessary evil of running PC apps on my Mac. It’s seamless, reasonably fast (once the VM is running in my session) and it totally took the Win7 install perfectly.

I’ve also loaded some of the Pro Apps, lamely Logic. I’d like to spend a bit more time with it but I just haven’t had the time. I’ve cheked out some of the tutorials over at macprovideo.com, but I haven’t purchased anything yet. Some big changes are coming in my career that should allow me the time to do some of those things. For now I’m settling for ramping back up in the iPhone SDK (OS4 baby!) and following along with the StanfordU classes. Now that I’ve got a legit machine hopefully I’ll be submitting something to the App Store soon.

I do occasionally scout the forums on MacRumors but like any good forum out there it is really hit or miss. Aside from the grandstanding of folks who’ve apparently tirelessly been waiting for an Apple MBP update who now believe they were “screwed” and will be waiting for the next revision, it tends to be ground zero for some of the new Apple technologies coming soon.

One of those technologies is Intel’s Light Peak tech. In short it replaces a copper wire based bus system internally with one made of fiber-optic conduit. I’ve read some reports that suggest Apple originally came to Intel with the need/want to reduce the physical size of the cable bundles inside its machines.

Light Peak Connector

Unfortunately the tech isn’t ready for primetime, yet. Engadget ran a story yesterday that reported that Intel is claiming it’ll probably be ready for primetime late this year or early next year. One of the things they’re still working on is providing power to these ports in addition to data. That means augmenting those fiber bundles with some copper to carry electrons back and forth (bummer) with those photons.

Light Peak coexisting with USB3

Back to MacRumors for a second: There’s a little kerfluffle there about waiting for this technology to supplant USB3.0. I don’t think that’s going to happen: From what I understand the end-use ports can still be ferried information via LightPeak’s project 10 GB/s throughput. The end user will still be able to use whatever ports they’d like but internally manufacturers could use cables with a lot less bulk and connect them to an insanely speedy bus.

Personally I’m excited to see this tech out in the mainstream. Let’s hope Intel continues getting their act together.

I took the plunge after Apple finally updated their (300 day old!) MacBook Pro line. I’m excited on many levels: this is the first laptop I’ve ever bought for myself first off. I’ve always had access to desktops that I built myself or with my dad as a kid. My most recent machine is the 4-core i7 from last year with HT, 8 processors showing up in Win7. Its been my beast but I haven’t had a whole lot to use it for. I packed it with an insane (at the time) amount of RAM, and a high-end video card to play games with. To my astonishment I ended up playing games from yester-year via Steam; Unreal Tournament, Descent 3 or games that didn’t require a whole lot of graphics complexity. Soon after my attention began to shift.

In March I picked up a Dell Mini 9 on a one-day sale for super-cheap. I’d become interested in iPhone AppDev and needed a machine at home to do it on. The Mini9 became the perfect Hackintosh for me to learn, love and eventually decide I wanted to try this for real. Everything was good until the pre-release SDK of the iPad which ran in a simulator that was larger than my entire display. So, I began waiting for Apple to refresh their line. In early January I made some predictions about what chips would actually be used. Let’s take a look shall we?

Most of the geeks I know and around the web seem to think that the Arrandale chips are destined to be in the next MBP’s. Based on what I’ve seen so far of package sizing, I’m projecting the following:
17? MacBook Pro Core i7-620M (2.66 Ghz -> 3.33 Ghz Burst) @ 35 watts in the rPGA pack
15? MacBook Pro Core i5-520M/540M (2.4/2.53 Ghz -> 2.93/3.06 Ghz Burst) @ 35 watts in the rPGA pack
13? MacBook Pro Core i3-350M (2.26 Ghz No Burst) @ 35 watts in the rPGA pack

I was definitely right about the 17″ and 15″s and power consumption requirements. The 13″ sadly did not see an upgrade, but I’m surmising that’s due to the high power consumption with the i3 chips and maybe even no real reason to go further. I also have this hunch that we’ll see the end of the 13″ MBP; it should have remained just a standard MacBook.

So back to my config:

2.66GHz Intel Core i7
4GB 1066MHZ DDR3 SDRM – 2X2GB
500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400
SuperDrive 8X DL
MBP 17″ HR Glossy WS Display

I figure once I get Logic Pro installed I’ll be using an eSATA card on the EC slot and dumping my media there. I’m really excited; I can’t wait to see this thing on Wednesday!

Apple is in the middle of a press event right now detailing some of the major features of the next iPhone OS release, due out in Summer 2010. I’ve read that there will be a Developer Preview released today.

My only problem currently is that I’m still awaiting a MacBook Pro refresh (due in January mind you) that would allow me to migrate to Snow Leopard which is the only thing the current SDK supports (sadly). One of the larger requested features, Multitasking is now available and it looks very sweet. They’ve demonstrated the audio library so Pandora can finally exist in the background as you run other apps, and Skype(!!) maintaining a background status while you’re using the phone for other things.

It’s really exciting but I definitely need some new development hardware if I’m going to take advantage of any of this cool stuff. More later.

Seems to be quite a few Arrandale reviews popping up around the ‘Net– most reviewers got their hands on the Arrandale Core i5-6XX units it seems. Early results are really promising; same power usage as the Core 2 Duo and insane gains in calculations per second. Just…nutty.

It’s almost a guarantee that Apple will announce new MacBook Pro’s at the end of the month. Most of the geeks I know and around the web seem to think that the Arrandale chips are destined to be in the next MBP’s. Based on what I’ve seen so far of package sizing, I’m projecting the following:

I’m basing this on two theories: First, that Apple isn’t going to want to change their architecture around too much. I’m betting every MBP motherboard will support rPGA pin arrangement to make things easier. Considering there’s only one rPGA processor listed coming out this month in that pack, I’m assuming they’ll go the same way with the 15″ and 13″. Secondly, there are some lower powered (25 watts) processors that would be suitable for inclusion in a revised MacBook Air. My only problem with this theory is that the integrated IGP units that are now on the same die as the main processor apparently suck. Like, majorly suck. They get remotely close to the last gen’s Nvidia 9440GM chipset but apparently don’t exceed it. Not good news. No one wants to buy a “new” machine that has weaker graphics than the last one.

CES is nearly upon us, with the Ballmer keynote kicking off tomorrow night at 6:30 PM PST. I’ll post my predictions of the coming show this year tomorrow before everything kicks off. The Net is abuzz with all kind of gadgets coming out this year…anyone see the hovering drone thing on Engadget?