tech
- Basic cell phone operation
- A usable calendar that allows for easy entry and reference. My employer uses an antiquated Lotus Notes system for email and calendar, so I’m not counting on the ability to sync things up.
- It needs to run smoothly. (Duh.)
- It needs to be Windows-based. (No Macs or Linux boxes here.)
- It needs to support the AAC audio format. I’ve got a bunch of .m4c files on my iPod.
- It shouldn’t be a system hog.
Home entertainment setup with a HTPC
I’ll get to a summary post or two about my India trip in upcoming days, but today I’d rather go on about my frustration with my auxiliary home theater PC setup.
Basic review: my main HTPC setup works great. I’m running Windows 7 on a tower with 2.5 TB of HDD and a Windows Media Center remote, and it all works very nicely, including the Netflix plugin for Windows Media Center. No complaints at all.
What’s driving me batty right now is my secondary setup up in my bedroom. For the last couple of years I’ve actually been pretty happy using Plex on my Mac Mini as the setup; it can playback recorded TV across my network from the HTPC, the Netflix plugin worked nicely, and there was even a HDHomeRun plugin so I can watch live TV streaming from my networked tuner.
But a few months ago the Netflix plugin for Plex broke - rather, Netflix updated their API and the plugin developer hasn’t been able to keep up. Which means the only good way to watch Netflix in that room (which the kids want to do nearly every morning) is to open up Netflix in the browser. Not such a good solution. So, I’m trying to figure out another solution that won’t cost me too much.
One option would be a Roku. It has a good Netflix app, a Plex app which in theory will connect right up to my existing Plex Media Server to watch recorded TV, and even has an app for Amazon Streaming Video, which we get with our Prime membership but have never really used. (Bonus!) Downside: HDHomeRun doesn’t work, and you don’t get a basic web browser, which means no watching live TV, and no streaming any other video off the net from more, um, dubious sources.
I know that XMBC is floating around out there with a Mac app, but it’s a pain in the rear to configure and not pretty at all, and I don’t know that it even supports Netflix. So that’s a non-starter.
A better option would be to buy a netbook computer (this 11" Asus model has good reviews) for about $300 and hook it up in place of the Mini. I could get another Windows Media Center remote and just duplicate my main install (save for the big disk drives). That way I know I’d get Netflix, the HDHomeRun tuner would work, all the videos would playback (perhaps even without as much transcoding as I’m doing now), and I’d still have a browser. The downside: it’d cost me $300. Even if I could sell the Mini, I’d still be down a couple hundred bucks. That’s antihistamine money.
The other option that occurs to me is that I could do the same thing with the old Dell laptop that I’m typing this post on. It’s already got Win 7, and with a fresh Windows install it’d be plenty fast enough. The downside is that this is the PC that the kids now use for their computer time, and where we’ve got it setup isn’t conducive to switching it out with the Mini.
Guess I’ll keep thinking. Anybody have any good ideas?
Update: After running through the options with my wife, she says “$300 for the best option? Forget it. For $300 I can get out of bed and open a browser if they want to watch Netflix.” Guess that answers the question.
Some Android / iPhone follow-up
So the same day I published my previous post on ditching my Android, a customer service guy from US Cellular named Tom pinged me on Twitter and asked for my email address so he could respond. I sent it to him, and he responded with a 1000-word treatise trying to address some of my points.
Highlights from his side of the story:
Android OS Updates Samsung actually stopped releasing software updates for all 1st generation Samsung Galaxy S devices. Samsung made the decision that this line of devices would not get an official Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0x or Jelly Bean 4.1x update. … This is much like Apple no longer supporting older hardware be it OSX Lion on an older Macbook or IOS 6 on an older iphone. As the software requirements are greater, older technology is rendered obsolete.
OK, so it’s not US Cellular’s fault, or Google’s fault - it’s Samsung’s fault. Still, his comparison to Apple/iPhone is misguided. As I pointed out in my original post, if I’d bought even the older iPhone (3GS) available back in December 2010, it would still be able to pick up the IOS 6 upgrade later this year. Advantage: iPhone.
Backup
Backing up an Android device is a different story. If you are looking for ways to back up specific application data, then there isn’t much I have found out there to do this…
To be fair, he notes that you can use Google to keep your calendar, contacts, and mail in sync w/ your Google account. But still, otherwise, he concedes the point. Android’s backup solutions all suck, and to do a full apps/settings backup requires you to root your phone and void the warranty.
System Stability This is something that has only been getting better with newer hardware and software. My Galaxy S II for example has never had any issues with freezing up. My wife has the Mesmerize and from time to time will have issues with certain applications causing her phone to freeze. The Galaxy S III is in a ballpark all of its own. The hardware and software is much more advanced then even the Galaxy S II…
At this point it feels like he’s starting to quote from the promotional literature. In short: yeah, your current phone (which we sold you as top-of-the-line 20 months ago) sucks, but trust us, it’s getting better. Oh wow, I feel so much better with that reassurance! Or not.
Phone/Signal/Software issues you’ve had. It’s clear you have had issues with your phone. I do not doubt that at all. How much of this has been caused by rooting and putting different roms on the phone is unknown and can be debatable.
Ha, I knew it’d come back to this. When it comes down to brass tacks, I’ll get blamed for rooting it. But I digress.
I’ve seen the back button issue before. This can be caused by many things, from internal cracks in the digitizer, software related issues, internal hardware malfunctions, or even a screen protector not being put on the phone correctly. Your statement about it only happening in low-signal situations is the first I’ve heard this and will definitely be looking at that more closely.
Oh, great. He’ll look at it more closely. That helps me a lot.
I emailed him back with a short rebuttal, thanking him for his time. Yeah, US Cellular has been great customer service-wise. But I only use Customer Service maybe once a year. I use my phone every day. If I have to pick between one or the other, I’ll go with the phone.
I sent one last email to Tom at the end of last week, with my final summary, and an offer:
I appreciate your desire to keep me as a customer, but at this point I don’t have the time/inclination to continue a debate on the merits of Android/iPhone. I’m sure that Samsung has improved things significantly now with the Galaxy S3; however, I’m not willing right now to spend $300, mess around with a rebate, and commit to another 2 years of service to take a chance on the new Android after my previous experience, especially when I know my alternative (once my contract runs out in December) is to purchase a phone that has uniformly brilliant reviews from friends and family members.
If US Cellular wanted to provide me with an S3 at a much-reduced price, and without requiring me to re-up my contract, I’d be happy to give it a fair evaluation, a review on my blog, and return it if I still decide that I want an iPhone. (I’m not expecting that from USCC, but that’s about what it’d take at this point to get me to consider the S3.)
To this point, I haven’t heard back from Tom. I don’t really expect them to take me up on my offer.
The new iPhone can’t come soon enough.
Why I'm ditching my Android and getting an iPhone
19 months ago I purchased my first smartphone - well, two of them, one for me and one for my wife. At the time, I already owned two iPod Touches and liked them a lot. However, the service package cost on a carrier that had an iPhone (Verizon or AT&T at the time) was significantly higher than what I could get on US Cellular. So, with boundless optimism in my heart, I marched into the US Cellular store and bought a Samsung Mesmerize (aka Samsung Galaxy S). I paid $199 for each phone, along with a 2-year contract.
19 months later I am counting down the days until my contract is up and I can switch to an iPhone. I was amused the other day when US Cellular’s twitter folks pinged me on the topic. It’s clear at least that the US Cellular party line is “the new Android phones are awesome, forget about that iPhone thing”. And gotta love their optimism: “don’t let your experience with the Mesmerize scare you off”. Really? Why not? I spent a bunch of money 19 months ago to buy your top-of-the-line phone, and it’s turned out to be craptastic at best. Why should I not be scared off?
So, in the spirit of a Shawn Blanc or John Siracusa review, here are the reasons I’m dropping my Android phone like a hot potato and moving to the iPhone.
Hardware
Let’s start from the ground floor and work our way up. I’ve actually had less frustrations with the hardware than with the other parts of the device. The build quality is decent, even with a plastic back the phone feels like it’s high quality (though not up to Apple standards). The camera is middling at best, but sufficient.
My main beef with the hardware, though, is a nasty design flaw that causes the Back button to trigger in low-signal situations. So when I’m in a building where the cell signal is low, all of a sudden my phone goes crazy. I can’t keep an app open for long, because some sort of internal interference is triggering the back key. It’s apparently a known problem with the Galaxy S, but completely unacceptable as far as I’m concerned. The phone needs to just work, and in low signal conditions, it doesn’t.
Operating System
I don’t have too many beefs with the Android OS by itself - in fact, if I got a new device with ICS or Jelly Bean on it, I’d probably like it a lot. But because the OS is customized for each device and for each carrier, it takes forever to get a new version of the OS for my phone once it’s released, and then US Cellular started dropping support.
When I bought the phone in December 2010 it was running Android OS 2.2 (aka Froyo). 2.3 (Gingerbread) came out in December 2010 but wasn’t available for my phone until April 2011. Come on, folks, Honeycomb (3.0) was already out by then. And that’s the last update that US Cellular is supporting on the Galaxy S. No Honeycomb. No Ice Cream Sandwich. Certainly no Jelly Bean. So my operating system has been at least one version behind Android’s releases the entire time I’ve owned it, and is now three versions behind.
(Android’s full version history on Wikipedia.)
By comparison, if I’d bought the current iPhone at the time (the iPhone 4, or, heck, even the lower-tier iPhone 3GS), I would’ve had immediate download/upgrade of each new iOS release when it happened, including the upcoming iOS 6. Given that the big stability and feature advances come in the operating systems, always being behind is just unacceptable.
Now yeah, there are custom ROMs. I tried a bunch of them. Their stability was always tenuous at best, and complete crap at worst. In the end, I went back to using the stock US Cellular-provided ROM, though I did then root it. More about that later.
Ecosystem
I have two main gripes with the Android ecosystem - media management and backup. I’ll address both.
Media Management is an issue because it’s a pain in the rear to get music and photos on and off the phone. Sure, there are a few programs designed to help automate that, but they’re mostly a pain in the rear and don’t work well. Now, iTunes is still a flaming pile of poo when it comes to managing content on devices, but it’s still a far cry better than anything that works decently with Android.
And don’t even get me started about backups. The only way to fully backup the Android phone, apps, settings, texts, etc, is to root the phone and then buy a third-party backup program. And rooting the phone automatically voids your warranty. Let me say that again so it’s clear. The only way to fully backup your phone is to first void the warranty. Does that seem insane to anyone else but me?
US Cellular actually realized how much of a nightmare this situation is, or at least would be for them if angry customers suddenly realized their phones had crashed and they’d lost all of their contacts. So, they wrote some craptastic software “My Contacts Backup” that gets bundled with your phone and will backup your contacts to some unknown server somewhere. If you run it. Manually.
Applications
Application support for the Android has actually improved as time has gone on - more and more of the apps I liked on the iPhone have migrated over to Android, albeit in editions that were typically uglier, missing features, and running more unreliably than their iOS counterparts. I’m getting to the point now, though, where new apps that come out won’t run on the phone because I need a newer version of the OS. After only 19 months, my device is going obsolete. Grrrr.
System Stability
I don’t know whether to blame this one on the hardware, the OS, the applications, or some combination of all three, but for most of the time I’ve had it, my phone has locked up to where I had to do the three-button reboot at least once per day. Yep, once per day.
And it never locks up at a good time. Because either it locks up while it’s in my pocket, with the backlight on full brightness, and it sits in my pocket for who knows how long w/o receiving calls or texts, and running down the battery, or it locks up right when I’m trying to open an app, or take a call, or send a text - i.e. when I need to use it.
Earlier this spring it locked up unbeknownst to me while my wife had taken my daughter to the emergency room. I took it out of my pocket and realized it’d been locked up solid for 20 minutes (the clock display stops updating, so it’s easy to tell how long it’s been frozen). If my wife had needed to get ahold of me in that time, she wouldn’t have been able to, and I would’ve never known until it was too late. Unacceptable.
Earlier this week I was out shopping when my wife texted me to pick up something else at the store. I tried to send her a return text, and it appeared that it wouldn’t send the text. So I tried going into and out of airplane mode, to see if that’d reset the radio and send the text. No such luck. Then I tried gracefully rebooting the phone to see if that’d fix it. Still no dice. Then I crash rebooted it. Finally it did send the text. Actually, it sent my first text about half a dozen times. I finally gave up and just called her.
Oh, but that crash reboot - it completely hosed up my alarm clock app. I tried just deleting the data and cache for the app, but that didn’t fix it. Finally I had to uninstall the app, reboot, clear my phone’s cache, then reinstall the app to finally get it working. And then set up all my alarm settings again.
So what does it do well?
I’ll tell you what this phone does well: if I just want to use it as the Android equivalent of a 3G-enabled iPod Touch, I’m OK with it. I can check Twitter, run my weather and news apps, keep a calendar and some contacts on it, do some Facebook and a little Instagram, and it works tolerably. Especially on wifi.
It’s only when you get to these edge cases like, oh, I don’t know, making a phone call that it seems to totally go to crap.
So, I’m gonna switch.
Now, if the nice customer service person from US Cellular wants to explain to me again why I shouldn’t let this experience “scare me off”, I’d be entertained to hear about it. I’ll kinda hate to leave US Cellular - their customer service has been pretty good and their package prices are reasonable - but at this point I’m much more interested in having a device that works, even if it means I have to pay a little more for it. If my experience with my other Apple devices (two iTouches, an iPad, a Mac Mini, and an iMac) are any indication, and if my family and friends' reports are to be trusted, I’ll be much happier with the iPhone.
Getting rid of the Dish: The Nerd Post
So we’re getting rid of our Dish. We’ve had cable or satellite TV pretty much ever since we moved into town seven years ago, but now we’re cutting the cable. Now, we’re not giving up television altogether; we’re just switching to a setup that will let us record and playback over-the-air TV, and giving up the paid stuff. There are a couple of sides to this, so I’ll make it a couple of posts. This is the nerd post. You have been forewarned.
The Goal The Dish DVR we are replacing allowed us to record shows and watch them on either of our two TV locations, one downstairs in the family room, the other our little 13" standard-def TV in our bedroom. We don’t watch the upstairs one that much, but it is very handy to keep around for times when the girls want to watch a show, and for in the mornings when they’re awake but we want to sleep in some. :-) We didn’t have HD through Dish Network; I really wanted HD. Oh, and I’d really like to still be able to watch some Cubs games. That’s about it.
What We Ended Up With: Downstairs
To go with the 42" Vizio LCD TV downstairs we invested in a relatively-inexpensive tower PC. It’s got a dual-core Pentium processor, 4GB of RAM (I know, I know, the 32-bit OS won’t use all 4, but that was the stock configuration), a 1TB hard drive, and lots of room to expand. It came with Windows Vista Basic (ick); I upgraded it to Windows 7 RC, and have preordered a regular Win 7 license for it. Add a Windows Media Center remote, and it works pretty smoothly. A little noisier than I’d like, but tolerable. This machine is our primary recording unit.
For an OTA tuner, I got a HDHomeRun networked tuner. If there’s one piece of this system that I’m most happy with, it’s the HDHomeRun. It’s got dual tuners in it. Basically, you plug in your OTA antenna and your ethernet to the back of the tuner, and you’re done. There’s a small piece of software to install, but then Windows Media Center (and EyeTV on the Mac) pick it up with no trouble whatsoever. (Supposedly XBMC in Windows will handle the HDHomeRun, too, but I haven’t been able to get it to work.)
The final component downstairs is an old tower (I forget the specs) running Ubuntu. I mostly use it as a place to save backups; there is just north of 1TB of disk space in it. I’ve also got some recorded TV stored on it which gets served up to the other computers on the network.
What We Ended Up With: Upstairs
Our little friend the Mac Mini moved upstairs. To go with it, I found a Dell 22" 1920x1080 LCD display on sale cheap. While we do have EyeTV installed, and could record from upstairs, the limited HDD space on the Mini (100GB) has me recording downstairs instead. (Yeah, I could do some fun AppleScripting to move files to a different machine once they are done recording… but that’s more work than I wanted right now.) The Mini is running XBMC for playback, and in the event we want to watch something live upstairs, we switch over to EyeTV. Not as elegant as I’d like, but it works pretty well.
What We Ended Up With: The Headaches
The biggest challenge in this setup is that I’m the idiot who’s running three different OSs among my three computers. Oh, and also running a beta OS on the Windows box. So Windows 7 Media Center records OTA TV into a new file format (.wtv). WTV files aren’t yet supported by the FFmpeg codec, which means XBMC won’t play them. Fortunately, W7 provides a WTV-to-DVRMS converter, and FFmpeg does support DVRMS. So, I’ve got a little nightly batch file that runs to convert all of the day’s WTV recordings to DVRMS and file them off in appropriate directories in the shared library area.
Sooner or later the available toolset will catch up with the Windows 7 WTV format, at which point things like commercial skipping and direct playback in XBMC will be available, smoothing things out a bit. For now, though, we’ve got a workable solution that records the shows we want to watch and lets us watch them in either of our two desired locations, and the ability to get rid of a monthly bill from Dish for a bunch of channels we never watch.
Fever° Version 1.01
This morning Shaun Inman pushed out (with notice via Twitter) version 1.01 of the Fever° feed reader. First of all, major kudos to Shaun for the auto-updater built in to Fever°. (Yes, I’ll go ahead and conform to the official naming of this tool, adding the little degree symbol to the end.) Once Shaun pushes the update out, Fever° will auto-update within 24 hours. Or, you can do an instant update from the menu. Very cool, very very simple. (Here’s the changelog for V1.01.)
I’m not sure exactly what all kicked loose, because it seemed like some feeds started working even before I pulled down the 1.01 update, but since updating Fever° is kicking butt. The scrolling issues I reported in V1.0 are all fixed, and the feeds appear to all be pulling in nicely. I’m gonna run it side-by-side with Google Reader for the day to make sure they seem like they’re catching the same stuff, and if Fever° passes that test, I’ll be saying adios to GR for the foreseeable future.
Now if I could just get him to set up some sort of referral bonuses…
Shaun Inman's "Fever" a day later
I’ve had a Fever install up and running for 24 hours now, and I’ve gotta compliment Shaun for working through the emailed bug reports - he responded back twice, once to acknowledge my email, and a second to ask if I had any tips on reproducing one of the errors I reported. ( I couldn’t reproduce it either.)
Where I am seeing problems, though, is in the feed updates. I thought it seemed kinda slow today activity-wise, so I just went and opened up Google Reader. Sure enough, GR has nearly 1000 unread items, just from the last 24 hours. I’ve seen maybe 200 or so in Fever today. I spot-checked a couple of feeds, and yeah, they’re missing. For instance, Andrew Sullivan over on theatlantic.com has at least a dozen updates since this morning… but Fever, even though it says it’s refreshing every 15 minutes, doesn’t have anything newer than 16 hours old.
My one fear with host-it-yourself apps like this is that all of the connectivity issues get thrown back upon the user (and webhost) to resolve - i.e. if there’s no other discernible bug, maybe it’s just something with your server. In this case, though, I think there’s something else going on.
Anybody else have any Fever reports, good or bad?
A first look at Shaun Inman's "Fever"
Twitter and the blogs have been abuzz today over Shaun Inman’s newest creation, called Fever. Some of you may be familiar with Shaun’s previous creation, Mint, a really nifty blog stats package that you host yourself. Inman is on familiar ground this time with Fever, creating a spiffy feed reader, full of AJAX-y goodness, suitable for hosting on your own website.
I’ve been a regular Google Reader user for years now, occasionally trying out other readers… there was that fling with Feedlounge, before it went under, and occasional dalliances with NewsGator’s line of readers… but I’ve always gone back to Google Reader. I took a look at Inman’s demo of Fever, though, over on feedafever.com, and knew it was time to give it a try.
Does the world really need another feed reader, anyway?
Creating a new RSS feed reader is no simple task. Taking accepted existing designs and improving on them requires creativity and good ideas about usability. Inman is on the right track here. But aside from the UI design, Inman has created a dual-purpose tool. On one hand, Fever is a traditional feed reader. You subscribe, it updates the feeds, you read. On the other hand, though, Fever is something like your own personal Digg. You can subscribe to all those noisy feeds, those linkdump feeds that occasionally have something interesting in them, and identify them as “Sparks”. Then Fever will aggregate them, pick out the hot topics, and present them to you in a “Hot” category, grouping them around a specific topic or link. This, to me, looks like the really slick part of Fever.
After the jump: my experience with installing Fever, importing my feed list, and some thoughts on usability and performance.
Purchase and Installation
Like Mint before it, Inman’s pricing model is similar to that of off-the-shelf software: pay once, install on your own machine. In this case, your own webhost. $30 buys you a license which is tied to a specific domain name.
Installation is ridiculously easy. You download a little “tester” zip file, unzip it and upload it to your domain, and visit the one page that it creates. The tester does some cursory checks to ensure that adequate versions/settings of PHP and SQL are present, and then does a database check to ensure your database is set up with adequate permissions. A word of warning here: pay attention: the database settings you use to test here will be used to install Fever should you choose to purchase it. This wasn’t clear to me when I did the install. Fortunately it didn’t become an issue.
Once your server has passed all the tests, you are given a link that will take you back to feedafever.com, where you can drop your $30 via Paypal for the license. Once you pay up, you are given a license key which you can then copy and paste back into Fever. Normally, at this point, you’d be expecting to have to download a full install, upload it, do some manual configuration, and so on, right? Not with Fever, though. Once you give it the license key, Fever silently installs the full setup (about 900 KB of files) and you’re up and running. Brilliant.
Importing Feeds
Next I went over to Google Reader and dumped my OPML file. I’m a heavy user, probably not quite in the ‘power user’ category yet, but the OPML had 454 feeds, about 100KB worth of XML. It took about two clicks to suck it into fever, and the import went very smoothly. Compared to the import times when I’ve tried using FeedDemon, FeedLounge, or (shudder) Bloglines, Fever screamed through the import.
You have the option of keeping all your categories from the OPML or choosing not to when you import. I did keep my categories, but found a small issue with that choice later on - there is a bug (design choice?) that keeps the category list from scrolling. So, I can only see about half of my lists. Not a fatal issue, but something that needs fixed.
Once the feeds were imported, Fever started kicking off updates of all the feeds. This just takes a little while. If you want to set up a cron job on your server, you can have Fever pull in updates every 15 minutes ‘round the clock. If not, Fever will update every 15 minutes when you have it open in a browser. I have yet to set up the cron job - we’ll see how it goes.
General Usage
Fever is set up with the power user in mind. Keyboard shortcuts are built-in and intuitive; they allow you to do navigation, switch between two-pane and three-pane views (shown below), and the space bar lets you jump one article at a time, or, if it’s a long article, one page at a time. Slick.
Fever looks great, too. The overall layout feels a lot like Google Reader, even more like its Greasemonkey-enhanced alter ego Helvetireader. Group and feed lists are on the side, and you have the choice of showing or hiding unread counts.
When you go to the Hot category, Fever assigns “temperatures” to the topics and presents the links in grouped form. For example, in the shot below, “Sojurn Community Church” is a hot topic among my feeds, and the half-dozen links discussing it are listed below. Clicking on any of them opens the actual blog article in a new tab. The “temperatures” are the one thing I’m actually a little unsure about. While they are a nice way of showing “hot” topics, having the temperature listed there in a BIG font seems a little big cheesy. We’ll have to see how it stands the test of time.
Performance
I have yet to hear from my webhost and friend Geof complaining that the server’s taking a beating, so I’m hoping Fever has a smart backend that won’t tie up the server. Right now the SQL database is taking about 13 MB of space. I’m a bit curious to see at what point Fever starts pruning old feed items and how large my database might grow to be.
Bugs and Quirks
I do have a few gripes with Fever that I hope will get ironed out in short order. (Note: Fever automatically checks the server for updates to itself! Awesome!) The first is the feed editing dialog. (Click on the image to see it full-sized.) Maybe it’s just because I have a lot of groups defined, but when I bring up the feed editing dialog, the bottom of the box is off-screen, with no way to scroll to it. (This is running 1280x800 resolution with Firefox fully maximized.) Fortunately, if I F11 to full screen view, the whole thing just barely fits on the screen. Otherwise, I’d be stuck.
The other general gripe is the mechanism for sorting feeds into groups. As I said earlier, I had a lot (50?) of categories defined in my OPML file, so I decided I’d consolidate things a bit. Creating a new group is easy; picking the feeds for it is less so. Once you decide to edit a group, you are given a scroll box with your entire list of feeds. It’s a multi-select box, which means you better make sure you hold down the Control key while you scroll through and select the ones you want - otherwise you’ll be starting over. Ugh. Suggestion for Mr. Inman: use check boxes. Or even better, figure out a way to drag-and-drop.
As a general note, there is an iPhone/iPod Touch interface built in for Fever. To this point, though, it’s not liking my Fever login… not sure why. Gotta keep trying.
Summary
All in all, Fever is a welcome addition to the world of feed readers. For a tool I’m gonna use every day, I’m willing to spend a few bucks, and I think in this case Fever is $30 well spent. I’m looking forward to having a few days to get things organized, and for a few bugs to get sorted out, and I may well have a new favorite feed reader. Time will tell.
A weird iPod Genius playlist bug
Discovered this one last night: when I tapped the Genius icon to create a Genius playlist out of the currently-playing song, the playlist it created began with a different version of that song. It was repeatable, happened twice.
In detail: I was playing “All the Way Home (live)” from Andrew Peterson’s Appendix M record. I hit the Genius button to create a playlist, and it generated one quite neatly. Unfortunately, rather than starting the playlist with “All the Way Home (live)” from Appendix M, it started the playlist with “All the Way Home” from AP’s Carried Along.
Don’t know quite what’s going on here, but something ain’t quite right with the Genius.
I tried Opera for a day
No, Dad, regardless of the title, I’m not talking about Wagner or Puccini or that kind of opera… sorry. But with Firefox 3 coming out yesterday, I figured I’d be the contrarian and give that other browser a try; Opera was promising more features with version 9.5, and I hadn’t played with Opera in quite a while. So yesterday was Opera trial day. Mind you, I’m a quite-happy Firefox user, but I figured I should give it a try.
My first impression when starting Opera: It’s pretty. I like the UI, though admittedly I’m a sucker for new, shiny toys. But it looks good. And the rendering looks good, and it seems fast. So far, so good. Sadly, on my list of comments/thoughts about Opera, that’s pretty much the end of the good things.
Then there’s my list of annoyances. First stop: Gmail. I keep Gmail open all the time, and use the Google Talk function embedded in Gmail as my primary chat engine. It seems to be the only thing that’ll function here at work. Well, the GTalk panel doesn’t even load in Gmail. Quick Google search, and ah, I can use the &nobrowsercheck option in the URL. Then it shows up. Cool!
But it ends up there’s a reason Gmail doesn’t load chat in Opera; it doesn’t work. You can’t initiate a chat with anybody from the chat panel, it won’t pop up the little window. If someone else starts the chat, then you can pop it up, but you can’t pop it out; it’s stuck within the main Opera window. No good to me.
Another Google search provides my next try for GTalk: load it up in the “Panel” aka sidebar. It loads up better there, but again you can’t pop out chat sessions; they’re all stuck within the panel. Given that I like to have more than one session going at once at times, this just won’t work for me. Bummer.
Oh, and as long as I’m talking about searches - one weird thing: the hotkey to get up to the search box is different between Opera and Firefox/IE. FF/IE both use CTRL-K to put your cursor in the search box. Opera uses CRTL-E. Would it have been that hard to stay consistent?
Firefox users who check out Opera quickly notice that there are no extensions for Opera like there are for Firefox. Opera proponents quickly point out that some of the most popular “extended” functionality in Firefox is built-in to Opera natively; they cite Mouse Gestures and Content Blocking as examples. Now, Mouse Gestures I have to give them. I love using Mouse Gestures and they work well in Opera. Content Blocking… not so much.
I’m hooked on Adblock for Firefox. It just works. The net it casts for ads catches most all the ads without filtering out the pictures I want to see. Opera has a built-in “content blocker”, but it’s not very user-friendly. Right-click on a blank area of the screen, and choose Block Content. Then it highlights all the blockable items on the screen. Then you have to click on the ones you want to block. By default, it blocks everything from a pretty high level in the domain the ad is hosted. This is fine if the ad you’re blocking is from an adserver, but for some of the sites I visit, the ads are hosted right on the domain… which means Opera ends up blocking ALL the images from that domain, including the ones I want. Yes, you can fine-tune it, but it requires opening up another dialog, and it’s a pain. I’ll take the Adblock extension for Firefox any day.
Other little annoyances: I’ve grown to love the Remember The Milk extension for Firefox that embeds my to-do list into my Gmail screen. Not available in Opera. The drag-and-drop arrangement for my fantasy baseball team in Yahoo Fantasy Sports? Not available in Opera. It’s little things like that here and there that make my choice easy.
This morning with some relief I clicked on my Firefox shortcut and was happy to see FF version 3 loading up. This is a browser worth keeping.
Feed Demon Issues... Hello Google Reader?
An original user of Google Reader, some months ago when NewsGator decided to make its products free I decided to switch over and give them a try. I’ve been using Feed Demon for a while now and have been more or less happy with it.
The scary part about switching to a new feed reader for me is establishing a level of trust in it. The Most Important Thing that a feed reader has to do is to get me all the content. It can’t miss posts. It can’t drop ‘em. If it got posted on a feed I’m subscribed to, it better show up. And a couple of weeks ago I started getting suspicious of Feed Demon. I’m subscribed to Andy Osenga’s blog feed and his comment feed, and comments started coming through for posts I hadn’t yet read. The blog feed looked OK in Feed Demon, it just wasn’t updating. Strange. I unsubscribed and re-subscribed to the feed and then it all seemed to work OK again.
Fast-forward to today. I was reading through comments from Geof Morris’ blog and realized… I’ve never read that blog post. I went over to ijsm.org and found out that I’ve missed at least 10 days worth of posts from Geof. Not good. Not good at all.
Feed Demon has a version 2.6.1 Beta available, and I might just give it a try… but for now I think I’m going to return to my trusty friend Google Reader. I exported OPML from Feed Demon, imported it back into Reader, and everything worked very nicely. It imported my 400-feed OPML file without a hiccup and managed to recognize duplicate subscriptions and not double-subscribe me. Time to give it another go.
In theory I still really like the idea of Feed Demon, what with it allowing local applications on multiple PCs to sync to the same online account, and allow web-based access, too. I’m also happy to have a non-Google alternative. (While I’m not a Google hater, keeping all the eggs from the same basket always seems like a good idea.) But if I can’t trust my feed-reader, well, sorry, it failed Most Important Thing #1.
I've been found out.
OK, rarely will I write a full post to recommend someone else’s post, but the latest from software-manager-par-excellance Rands is just too good to pass up. He has me nailed. In his latest post, Rands lists off his “Nerd Handbook”. Becky had only to read the first two sentences and she was chuckling in the knowledge that this guy was describing me:
A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.
Guilty as charged.
A few other priceless bits:
Understand your nerd’s relation to the computer. It’s clichéd, but a nerd is defined by his computer, and you need to understand why.
First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong. A nerd has a mental model of the hardware and the software in his head. While the rest of the world sees magic, your nerd knows how the magic works, he knows the magic is a long series of ones and zeros moving across your screen with impressive speed, and he knows how to make those bits move faster.
Yep, that’s me.
Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.
The reason for this typeface selection is, of course, practicality. Monospace typefaces have a knowable width. Ten letters on one line are same width as ten other letters, which puts the world into a pleasant grid construction where X and Y mean something.
Ah, monospaced font, how I love thee.
Humor is an intellectual puzzle, “How can this particular set of esoteric trivia be constructed to maximize hilarity as quickly as possible?” Your nerd listens hard to recognize humor potential and when he hears it, he furiously scours his mind to find relevant content from his experience so he can get the funny out as quickly as possible.
Got me again.
And the most painful:
Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It’s the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn’t a computer anywhere nearby and you’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”
And your nerd says, “Cool”.
Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”
Cool. I mean, ouch.
There is a lot of good stuff that I didn’t quote here, so if you really want to get an insight into me, yeah, go read the article. For my sensitive readers, yeah, there are a couple bad words in the post. Ignore them. Read the rest of it. Well worth it.
Making the switch
After running the numbers and looking at likely use scenarios over the upcoming year or two, we finally decided to switch our cell phone service from US Cellular, our provider of the past seven years, to Verizon. Their plans are fairly similar, but when it came down to it, the employer discount that Verizon offers was enough to sway the balance in their direction.
So last night Becky and I had a couple hours while the girls were at a friend’s house, and we headed to the local Verizon establishment to get things set up. We had researched phones already, so it was just a matter of getting the phones and setting up the service. Some observations:
Good things:
Welcome/Service: Verizon gave a very good first impression. The manager greeted us as we entered the store, asked a few questions to find out how he could help, then took our names, double-checked that our existing phone numbers were portable (they are), and answered a couple questions while waiting for a member of the sales staff to get free. Well done, sir.
Ease of signup: We made this pretty easy because I already knew exactly what plan I wanted. I told the sales guy that we wanted that plan and those phones, and he pretty much took care of the rest. He was able to scan the bar code on my Iowa driver’s license to get all that pertinent info (no possibility of transcription errors!); the only thing I had to give him was my SSN and my email addresses (work email to qualify for the employee discount, home email for account correspondence).
Not-so-good things:
Phone availability: Our salesman went to the back to grab the phones we wanted and seemed to take a while. Finally he came back empty-handed and asked his co-worker if they were, in fact, out of the Nokia phones that we were looking for. His co-worker’s response: “I haven’t seen any of those in a long time.” Not an exceptionally heartening reply. However, Verizon will Fedex us the phones for free and we can activate them once they are delivered. While this didn’t allay the disappointment of not being able to walk out with a new phone, it’s at least a reasonable solution, and we’re getting good phones at a good price.
Communication: A couple of things here. First off, while it was clear I was getting some sort of employee discount on the service, it wasn’t clear that I was getting a similar discount on the phones. The phones that we were getting were listed on the placard as $80 with a $50 mail-in rebate. However, when they were rung up for sale, I was only charged $20 each; no rebate necessary. While I’m not complaining about the lower price, had I known that I was receiving a 30% discount on the phones themselves, I would likely have considered buying a slightly more expensive phone. But I’m happy with the one I’m getting, so that’s mostly their loss of a sale.
Second thing: I never once saw a piece of paper with the cell contract, details, or my contact information on it. I found this to be a bit odd. In past signups with US Cellular, I had to sign multiple copies of a contract, verify that all my information was correct, etc. This time: nothing. Now I know there’s a 30-day money-back period where I can go change things if they really messed something up, it would’ve been more comforting had I at least been given a one-page printout summarizing my purchase; something for me to verify that they got my name and email in the system correctly, that they had signed me up for what I wanted, basically just a receipt of sorts.
Which leads to the third issue - my email addresses. I had to dictate the email addresses to the salesman. He got the work email address correct; I had that email waiting for me this morning. But I have yet to receive an email to my home address; I was supposed to get one welcoming me to Verizon, giving links to log into the Verizon customer website, etc. I can only imagine that the sales guy transcribed it wrong, and of course, I had no way to verify it. (See above.) For future reference, how would you dictate ‘chris.hubbs’ as part of an email address? I said “chris dot hubbs” and assumed it was obvious, but I have a bad feeling that there’s an email floating around in cyberspace this morning looking for the ‘chrisdothubbs’ email address. :-(
Conclusion: I guess I’ll have to wait until we get the phones here later in the week to make a final decision. (Oh, another thing that would’ve been nice: a Fedex tracking number for the phones. Probably also emailed to chrisdothubbs.) Overall, it was a pretty good, easy experience last night; a one-page confirmation sheet, though, would’ve taken it from “pretty good” to “excellent”.
Convergence: Death of a PDA, Expiration of a Cell Contract
I’ve carried a PDA pretty much everywhere with me for the past several years; I think I’ve been through three different Palm models. My current one is a Palm Tungsten E2. I don’t use too many features on it, really; my primary uses are the calendar and a few games. The calendar is the biggie for me - I need something to keep all my work meetings and outside meetings lined up. The past few weeks my PDA has had trouble holding a charge. It doesn’t matter whether I charge it via USB or from the wall charger; within 10 minutes or so it complains about the battery being low and starts disabling functions. I’m assuming it’s nearing the end of its life - I’ve had it just over two years now.
Second upcoming event: our cell phone contract is just about up. I haven’t completely decided yet, but I’m thinking we’ll abandon US Cellular in favor of Verizon, for a number of reasons. With the new contract comes the opportunity to purchase a new phone at a reduced price. So I have a convergence here which might allow me to start consolidating electronic gadgetry. So I want to explore my options.
Desired operations:
Heck, I think that’s basically it. So what are my options?
Geof was the first to respond to my tweet on this topic. His words: “this is God’s way of getting you to buy an iPhone.” Geof was an iPhone early-adopter and has had nothing but good to say about it. And I will admit that I’ve drooled over the iPhone a time or two. Who can’t love its wonderful touch-screen interface and Apple styling?
I have a few issues with the iPhone option, though. I’m not crazy about the price, but hey, if I’m replacing a PDA, the iPhone isn’t really any more expensive. Does the iPhone even have a calendar feature? Surely it must. But I don’t really want to use it to replace my iPod - I want my iPod to be able to hold my entire music collection, and they don’t make a 40 GB iPhone yet. :-)
The other issue, which will be an issue for all web-enabled phones, is that I don’t really need full connectivity all the time. Goodness knows I check my email often enough as it is, I certainly don’t need another way that I can be distracted. And the data plans that come hand-in-hand with these smartphones end up adding $30 - $40 per month to your cell plan. For the type of plan we’d have, that’s almost a 50% increase, which is too much.
There are other cell/PDA combos out there; you can get a Palm Treo, any one of several models of Blackberry, and some “smartphones” that the cell providers offer. But again, I don’t want/need the data plan. I just want something that’ll give me phone capability and help keep me organized.
So what’s a guy to do?
Evaluating alternative iPod management software
Yesterday SimpleHelp.net posted 10 Alternatives to iTunes for managing your iPod. (They have since been dugg and their website is down. Bummer. You can still see the guts of the article from the Google cache.)
At my work location iTunes is verboten, so I’m all for exploring other ways to manage my iPod, or at least to play the tunes off of it while I’m at work. Here are my basic requirements:
Nice to have’s would include portability, support for Last.FM and the ability to copy songs off the iPod back to the PC.
There are 5 alternatives on the SimpleHelp site that are available for the Windows platform. Here are my reviews of them:
This was the first one, and at first glance was a strong contender. It has support for Last.FM, is portable, and has a pretty nice UI. Once I got it installed, though, I found some issues. Even though it appears to support proxy servers, I never could get it to talk to Last.FM. Secondly, the thing was a system hog - regularly freezing up for 30 - 60 seconds at a time when I tried to do anything. No thanks. And then the kicker: no support for AAC. Start -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> Uninstall.
Gave this one a try next. The install was quick, the software came up quickly, and it immediately recognized my iPod. Off to a good start! Didn’t seem to hog the system too much. Tried to play an AAC file… no joy. Skipped three albums in the playlist before it got to one that was .mp3 format. So much for that. Uninstall.
When I downloaded this one, it warned me that it was just a developer’s version, that there isn’t an official release of Songbird yet. Well, I’m brave, so I gave it a try. This is definitely the slickest one yet - good graphics all the way around (icons, skins, etc). This one is built on the Mozilla browser platform, so it has way more overhead than a player really should - about 60 MB installed. Then I had to install a plugin to get it to recognize my iPod. Once I got the plugin installed, it found the iPod fine, but then I had to wait for it to load the library. So I waited. And waited. And waited some more.
It must have taken Songbird about 45 minutes to load the library information from my 25 GB media library. Still, if that was a one-time startup thing, I can live with it. And it appears that it is - though who knows if it’ll have to do a full library re-scan when I change something? No telling. I was about sold on Songbird until I actually started playing music from it. AAC support? Yep. But as I played the songs, it hiccuped my audio on a fairly regular basis - every 15 seconds or so. This wasn’t due to CPU spiking - I had plenty of free CPU left - so there must be some inefficiency in the program itself. Uninstall.
The UI on this one appears to be a lot more barebones than some of the other contenders. The sorting options are bad; you can sort only by one field at a time (artist, album, etc), but then it doesn’t sort below that. For instance, I can sort by artist to get all of U2 grouped together… but then there’s no guarantee that the U2 albums will be grouped together. Given that I’m a guy who likes to listen to a whole album at a time, this is no good for me. Still, I should give it a try, right?
So I gave it a whirl with some .mp3-formatted files. The sound was OK, the playback controls simple but marginally adequate. Then I went to AAC. It won’t play AAC. Not only that, it doesn’t give you an error, or skip the tracks, or anything - it just sits there on the file and acts like it wants to play it, but it won’t play it. Unacceptable. Uninstall. Wait, don’t have to uninstall - this one is totally portable. Thank God for small mercies.
I left this one for last because it wasn’t new to me - I’ve been running YamiPod for a few years now, but only for the ability to be able to pull files back off the iPod onto the PC. I’m not real find of the UI, but it works, which is way more than I can say for some of these I’ve evaluated.
I haven’t actually tried to play anything back on it until just now. So let’s give it a try.
Amazing. It won’t play any of the files. What’s going on? Controls seem unresponsive, it’s not playing anything back. Well phooey on that. At least it’s portable, and it’ll copy files off the iPod neatly. I’ll keep it around just for that.
Winamp Winamp hasn’t been allowed on my office network computers for at least 5 years.
Conclusions:
Each of these alternative players has their strong and weak points, but when it comes down do it, none of them were good enough for me to use as a regular player. I will keep waiting for the Windows version of Amarok; right now it’s Linux-only, but there’s a Windows version coming, and Dan swears that it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Until then, I’ll keep using Foobar2000. It doesn’t manage my iPod; I have to point it to the Control directory of the iPod and then have it just search for files. But it plays consistently, manages playlists nicely, and has a Last.FM plugin. So, it’s a keeper. And I guess I’ll keep using iTunes at home. It’s a resource hog sometimes, but it does what it needs to.
Satisfaction
Well if I’m gonna gripe when I think things have gone wrongly, it is only right that I applaud when I feel that justice has been done. :-)
I made my trip to Best Buy this afternoon with my second defective refurbished iPod. I had been steeling myself for this visit, preparing to ask to speak to a manager if necessary. (I’m really bad at confrontation, but this has been getting ridiculous.) I went back to the Geek Squad counter and talked to one of their employees (one I hadn’t spoken to before).
I didn’t say much at all: “long story. This is the second refurb I’ve gotten, and it doesn’t work, either.” I explained the issue - the thing wouldn’t sync with the PC - it locked up after only 1 GB of transfer. He said “let me check something real quick…” and headed off to a computer backstage. He came back a couple of minutes later with some good news. “Let’s just get you a new iPod. That should make sure it doesn’t happen again.” FINALLY! So I went off to the iPod counter, requested a 30 GB black iPod, and headed over to Customer Service for the cashier to ring up the transaction.
Here’s where it gets better. They weren’t just gonna give me a straight exchange for a new 30 GB iPod (which in itself would’ve been an upgrade from the 20 GB iPod that I took in originally) - they were essentially just gonna refund back the $299 I paid for that old iPod and then credit it to me. When I realized that was the case, I suggested that I would instead like to take that $299 credit and apply it to a $349 80 GB iPod. The cashier was amenable to the idea, so I headed back to the iPod counter, got the 80 GB unit, and paid $50 from my pocket to get the new iPod. As a little bonus, Best Buy’s promotion this week gives you a $30 Best Buy gift card with the purchase of said iPod, so I got that as well.
As I sit here tonight typing this up, iTunes has copied over 622 of 5773 songs onto the new iPod. I don’t think I’ll sit up to wait for the sync to complete… but I will sure enjoy having an iPod back. Thank you, Best Buy, for finally getting this right.
Not again!
UPS dutifully delivered my second refurbished iPod this afternoon. The battery was pretty well dead, so I hooked it up to the wall charger for a few hours until it said it was all charged up. Then I hooked it up to the laptop, setup iTunes to sync 18 GB of music, and crossed my fingers. Would this one work?
No. iTunes claims that it’s synced about 350 songs, and then it gives a file write error and dies. I tried removing the song that it died on from the sync list and syncing again, still no joy. The iPod totally locks up, has to be reset, and doesn’t end up with more than the first 11 tracks of the first album on it. Now, I like Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, but I’m gonna need the iPod to hold more than that.
So I guess it’s back to Best Buy tomorrow for yet another return. I’m not good at being confrontational in the store - usually I figure that the person behind the counter doesn’t have much control over it, so why be hard on them? But this time I won’t wait long before asking to see a manager. I waited two weeks for this second refurb, and it turned out to be trash, too. I want a gift card. I know their policy says I need to get another lemon before I get a gift card, but I really don’t want to have to wait another two weeks just to find out whether the next one is any good.
Grrrrrrr.
iPod today?
Got an automated UPS phone call a few minutes ago saying that my iPod would be delivered today, and giving me the tracking number. Good thing it went to voice mail - no way I would’ve been able to catch the tracking number with only one live listen. UPS’s tracking system agrees that the iPod is on the truck and out for delivery. Now I’ll just keep my fingers crossed that this one works.
The trip to Best Buy, or, why you should think when you design a computer system.
So, as planned, tonight I went to Best Buy to find out what was up with my iPod replacement. Long story short, I took my original one in for repair, they sent me a refurb which was also dead, so I took it back, and they were going to send me another one. Two weeks elapse. We pick up on the story tonight as I talk to a member of the “Geek Squad” at our local Cedar Rapids Best Buy.
I explain my story. I brought in the refurb for the second return 12 days ago. The guy wasn’t able to enter it into the system yet, but assured me the system would let him enter it by the end of the day, so 3 - 5 business days and I should get a new one. 8 business days later, I’m back. I talked to them last Friday on the phone and they said yeah, the service tag just closed, so expect the iPod in a couple of days. Three days later, still nada.
So the guy looks it up in the computer and finally says “I think they sent it here by mistake. Let me go look.” So he goes into the back room, and eventually comes out… with the refurb I returned 12 days ago. And then he goes to explain. Yeah, they couldn’t enter it into the system until the previous service ticket closed. And the previous service ticket didn’t close until June 8th. It ends up the way their return software is designed, the service ticket doesn’t close until the one I sent back in is repaired and returned to store stock. Absolutely ridiculous! So my returned iPod has just been sitting there on the shelf for the last 12 days, with nothing happening.
I can draw a couple conclusions from this: First, the guy who told me he could have the service ticket entered “by the end of the day” was lying to me. Certainly he knew how the system worked. He just wanted to get me out the door. Second, they have some very poorly designed software. You telling me they didn’t think about this case where a refurb is itself bad? Or did they think about it and dismiss it as an acceptable error? Either way is unacceptable.
So now I have a new service ticket in hand, and can expect another refurbished iPod to be delivered via UPS in 3 - 5 business days. If that one is bad and requires a return, I’ll be interested to hear how soon they tell me they can enter it into the system… I won’t be too accepting of another two-week wait just to get a return into the system again.
I just want my iPod back...
After BestBuy’s impressive performance in getting me my first refurbished iPod, it has now been 12 days since I was promised my next refurbished iPod, and I still don’t have a replacement. I called the “Geek Squad” representative last Friday; he looked it up on the computer and assured me that my second service ticket had just closed out on Friday, so I should expect my iPod in “one to two” days, and if not, I should contact him.
I decided to be gracious and assume that he meant “one to two business days”, seeing as UPS doesn’t typically deliver on Saturday or Sunday. So I waited. No UPS man yesterday. We already have a shopping trip planned to that side of town for this evening; if I don’t get that iPod via UPS today I will be making a stop back at Best Buy tonight. I’ll be curious to see what line they’ll feed me - I certainly won’t be happy with “wait a couple more days” - at a minimum I’ll want a UPS tracking number or something to prove that my iPod has actually shipped. I’d really love it if they’d say “oops, something went wrong - can we just give you a merchandise credit for the original price of your iPod?”, but I don’t think there’s much chance that’ll happen. Oh, if it did, though? I’d put another $50 with it and get the 80GB iPod with video… Oh well, at least a guy can hope, right?
Back online
So just as I was about to get really frustrated with Qwest, UPS showed up with their “welcome letter” and login details about 5 PM Tuesday. It was easy enough to set up the DSL modem; they’ve actually streamlined their install process quite a bit in the last couple of years. Good deal.
Then I went to hook up my existing wireless router to it. No luck. Hooked it back up hardware, did some Googling, and found out that yeah, it’s potentially possible, but not simple, to get my D-Link router to work with their ActionTec DSL modem. :-( Rather than fight with it for hours that I don’t have, I went back to Best Buy, returned the DSL modem, and bought the DSL modem that is wireless-equipped. So, I’m out $50, but I can probably sell the D-Link to recoup part of that cost.
Back home with the right piece of hardware, it took mere minutes to have my wireless network back up and running. I’ll have to relocate the DSL modem this weekend; I really want it in the basement by the PC down there, but I can’t find the phone line. I stowed it up somewhere during the cleanup effort after the Great New Year’s Eve Flood of Aught-Six, and now it doesn’t want to be found. Still, it’s good to be back online. I’m also happy with the DSL speed - cable sure wasn’t supporting 100 Kbps uploads!