Jimtac.com

Apple got hacked a little while ago… Well not so much hacked as much as was exploited as the ultimate target of a likely spearfishing/brute-force password guessing attack. The purpose of this attack was to have a single individual’s app-store offerings take up 42 of the top 50 paid apps in the ebook category. While this in and of itself is fairly significant, especially since it involved so many people having their iTunes accounts compromised, and their money being used to fraudulently prop up a criminal’s attempt to get on top of a list.

So while this sucks all around… It has caused Apple to do what corporations do best, overreact.

This particular overreaction takes the form of having to sign in to download an app/song/video/book via iTunes, then get pulled out of the process to a page that has you once again sign in to re-verify your account information (specifically your credit card’s CCV2 number) then you get to go back to iTunes and restart your downloads, the whole process taking around 30-45 seconds. Oh, and you have to do this for updates, and FREE content as well. OH… Aaaaaand you have to do this EVERY time that you try to purchase anything on a different device. So far the only things that I have been able to download without this ridiculous dance have been podcasts.

Now I’m the prototypical media consumer/over-user and I have grown to love the polished Apple-bred super-consistent user experience that makes it waaaay too easy to get the apps/content you want, when you want it, wherever you are, and on whatever iTunes platform you happen to be carrying with you. While nearly all of my music/videos are from my CD collection or free video sources, (notably excepting the free tracks at Starbucks, and digital copies from DVD/Blu-Ray discs), it’s things like apps that take my fancy over-priced shiny toys and turn them into useful tools that do what I want, which are what I really want to be able to get at the moment when a particular need arises.

Since I use an iPhone, an iPad, and sync them both to a MacBook, I now find myself thinking “Now which one did I sign in with last?” before I even consider tapping on the store icon/app since this new policy has been implemented. I know that this is just another first-world problem, but I unapologetically live in the first-world, and hate when layers of frustration are added to any workflow, especially when it’s in my personal life; at least at work I get paid to deal with broken processes.

On the upside I have popped into the AppStore FAR less than I did before, only venturing in to check for app updates, or when I hear about an amazing new app. I have no desire to go-in, go-out, go-in, go-over, go out, then finally to wait for the download to complete and install. Those who know me and my recent predilection towards Cupertino designed devices may very well think of me as an Apple fanboy, I’d posit that I’m actually a fanboy for great user experience and few do the experience better than Apple. This is one of the reasons that I’m so disappointed with Apple with this “solution” for a problem that they could have done little to prevent.

What I would liked to have seen is similar to how you can only authorize your iTunes purchases on 5 computers at any given time. Why can’t we associate our IMEIs or WiFi MAC addresses to our accounts as a method to maintain persistent authentication on our mobile devices in order to prevent this? I can’t really say, maybe it will happen in the future, maybe it won’t. I just hope it gets fixed soon.

And this concludes my rant-casting day

Tim

So Rogers being the wireless carrier that they are decided to pull the AWESOME, add to my existing data plan for $20, data plan that made me decide on the 3G iPad, and not only did they pull this, but they made a few other changes as well.

Since I couldn’t imagine limiting myself to 250MB in a month, I HAD to get the $35 5GB plan and even though I never come close hitting that 6GB that I’ve got for my iPhone, I’m determined to push it with this device. How would one determine their progress in this endeavor? Simple, get the Rogers My Account app, which is where things get interesting…

When I opened my Rogers app the first time on my shiny new iPad on Friday, it oddly didn’t show anything yet, so I figured I’d leave it for the weekend. When I checked it today I found something strange, in what it says about the “included” data amount. (see below)

Rogers appears to be thwarting my efforts once again… At least until they fix this presumptive “glitch”. (though I hope they make it permanent!)

Earlier today there was a great post from Ars Technica about the necessity of advertising on the internet, or rather the harm done by ad-blocking software. Now over the years I’ve been doing personal websites, business, and at one point even a podcast with my good friend Neil; all for myself, and all out of my own pocket. This  is pretty much how any of these sites that become ad-supported businesses started themselves. I applaud their ability to be able to quit their “day jobs”, and even grow into something bigger than themselves, which is just amazing to me.

The issue with ad-blocking is one that can be quite polarizing, for instance there is one camp that thinks that ad-blocking is a god given right of the internet, and the other thinks that it’s the tool of the devil. Luckily the Ars article tried to split the difference, though unfortunately it comes across being quite a bit on the latter, and it’s perfectly understandable why as well, since it’s not just one individual relying on that ad revenue. If it was a one person site then they could pack things up and it’s only  really affects themselves, but once you become responsible for others, then he whole world changes.

I personally do use ad blockers in firefox, [though not in chrome which I now primarily use on all of my Macs], but I use a more surgical approach than simply hitting block every time I see an ad. The whole reason that I started using adblock in the first place was because of those distasteful ads that the Ars Technica article spoke of, them and the ones that block my view of the content that I would otherwise prefer to support, and if I have to keep blocking ads when visiting a particular site, I just stop visiting those sites since I’m obviously not the target audience for the ads that they are accepting, and supporting sites that accept ads that I find objectionable [in whatever sense] is not something that I’ll be doing anytime soon.

I’m not going to stop using ad-blockers to remove content that I don’t want to be subjected to, ads or otherwise, but I will continue to make judicious use of the whitelist, as well as the blacklist features of them, in order to ensure that I contribute to the content that I want to see remains available for me to consume, and I hope that you do to.

Week one of March has come and gone, with some interesting hiccups…

If you were a happy Windows 7 RC1 user, you are now an unhappy Windows 7 RC [occasional] user. I hope that if you do fall into this camp, that you have purchased a full license for your recently narcoleptic PC. I’m of course referring to the March 1st expiry of the release candidate of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system, which instead of simply refusing to work, MS was gracious enough to give you 2 hours to use the OS to try to back up your files and regress to your previous OS, or install the retail version of 7 [of course you can only actually upgrade to Win7 Ultimate Edition without doing some hacking of an install disk]. Unfortunately, if you are one of those people who actually used a copy of RC1 as a functional PC trying to use it as a “real” PC in order to try and break things, 2 hours at a time, may not be enough. But either way, it’s time to pony up or fall back.

The next bit of crazy is that PSN decided to crap all over itself this past week, and it turns out that it was a bit of math that tripped those guys up. On the bright side, if you would have just bought the PS3 Slim, then you would have been fine; on the down side, most PS3 owners [myself included] do not have the Slim. When this first happened, you would turn on your PS3, and it would tell you that is cannot connect to the PSN, and would not play most games, or network, or … Well it turns out that it’s not just that the PSN was inaccessible, it turns out that the internal clock of all the pre-Slim PS3′s thought that 2010 was a leap year, and added the extra day to February. Good job Sony, at least I can take solace in the fact that I’m not the only one who hasn’t bought a 2010 calendar yet. At least it didn’t affect me, since now I’m about 52 hours into Mass Effect 2, which has completely negated my use of any other gaming system [or any other media]… So sorry WoW, but I think you can live without me for a bit longer since you’ve sucked months, and not just days of real time from me so far.

Oh, and I REALLY want an Iron Man TV!!!

Though I wish it was that hotrod red, with the arc reactor as the logo in the centre [like my LG Scarlet]

I’m a person who hates to see companies artificially degrade services for the sole purpose of getting you to pay more, in order for them to be able to do what they cannot without extraordinary measures being taken, thus justifying the cost. As the title suggests Canada Post seems to be doing that now.

I’m one of those that likes to actually track my packages from the moment that I get my packages tracking number, which is how I have been watching my package sit processed in a postal facility in Mississauga since a day after being notified that my order had been shipped by Amazon. Now if this had been a case of the package actually being in transit that would be one thing, but just sitting there… that’s another altogether.

Last time that CP messed up, my mail was about a month late in being delivered, now I’m sure that it wasn’t Canada Post proper, but rather the local contracted delivery person that decided to take 3 weeks off, and not line up a replacement, and the local postal facility for not doing something about it, and I guess that there are no checks in place to ensure that mail is being delivered on schedule… Oh and I don’t think that I’ve yet to mention that for some reason, financially relevant envelopes seem to come with torn flaps which are more than wide enough to peer inside, where the innocuous ones rarely arrive molested. I’ve been told that it’s simply the elastic bands used to bundle the envelopes to make delivery easier for the carrier; but when there are several envelopes in one bundle, and not just only, but ALL financial ones… hmmm…. Oh… (CP also has no direct way to report mail tampering, other than to the people suspected of it.)

When an ISP sells faster download speeds, they aren’t delaying your packets, but instead selling you a larger amount of the bandwidth capability of their network. This is in contrast to delays created by a process such as this “If you don’t pay us more, we’ll just hang onto this for a while, and if it’s not there on time… Well, sucks to be you.” mentality in constant use by courier and postal entities. I ask you, when was he last time that you were compensated in any way when a courier, or delivery company missed their delivery date, let alone a crown corporation?

Well here’s hoping that my delivery shows up on time on Monday… But I won’t hold my breath, since the door hangers letting you know about an attempted delivery show up in the superbox at the end of the street after 3PM (a few days late), letting me know that I have a package awaiting pick up, though I’ve yet to have an actual delivery attempt made to my door by Canada Post since I’ve lived here.

Tim

Edit Monday Feb 22 : Checked the mailbox when I got home from work at around 5:30, no notice. No door hanger on the door either, (not that I really expected it), so once again CP Fail…

Edit Tuesday Feb 23: It arrived [the "delivery attempt" notice in the mailbox], and I picked up Mass Effect 2:CE at the convenience store/post office, super awesome dent in the box, and the corresponding dent in the metal collector’s case inside and all…

Too much buzz goin’round these days… Last week we had the iPad in all it’s unibody fanciness. I [of course] will be getting one, though wether I spring for the 3G or just stick to the WiFi-only version really comes down to how much it’ll actually cost here in the land of the Canuck, and if we can get the same sweet “pay-as-you-go” 3G service as was shown off for the stateside crowd. At the moment I’m looking at the 32GB WiFi only, but if we get the 3G I’ll be rockin’ the 16 (or 32) w/ 3G…

This week it’s Google Buzz!!! All I’ll say is… Remember Google Wave??? Didn’t think so. If Twitter and Facebook weren’t so entrenched in the current collective internet consciousness this would be a bigger thing. I could see this become a widely used thing if it is completely open, and becomes fully interoperable with pretty much everything else out there. Which would drive people to use Google buzz as a single place to update their other social status updates, and I hope that eventually you can use “gBuzz” to update different social networks by checking off the networks that you want each status to go to. By having each status be selectable would allow for updates to be limited to 140 characters if you select Twitter (or other SMS rooted service), and if Twitter is deselected then it limits the length to the next shortest text limit.

The next buzz (or rather buzz-kill) is that even though it’s nice to have a job to keep me busy, I do find that it’s even more frustrating that I work for a company that’s an ISP, a Telco, and a Cable TV provider, which means that there are so many things that I just can’t discuss in a public forum, lest I be accused from within or without the company that I am acting as a mouthpiece of the company, and speaking on their behalf. BTW… I would never speak on behalf of my company [unless they decided to pay me tons of cash to do it, of course]. Throughout the 5 1/2 years that I was with TELUS I never spoke about the company, it’s business or anything related to the industry both for ethical, and for job-security [a.k.a legal] reasons. Why does this particularly frustrate me now, when it was simply par for the course before? Well to be honest, it’s because I see a company that preaches it’s open-ness with customers, but in the same breath attempts to force as closed an environment for it’s employees as possible.

On an aside… I think I may start posting about one of my favorite [non-tech] subjects: management faux-pas. It’s something that I avoided while working at TELUS because I was a manager there… But now I’m not a manager, so I feel like it’s less preachy, and just a bit whiny… we’ll see.

Until then,

Tim

There’s a lot of talk right now about the much rumoured mythical Apple tablet computer, and with all of this talk comes the rampant speculation. With random speculation people also come out saying that they have all kinds of “leaked information” from “an undisclosed Apple employee”. Well I don’t have any of that, but I do have my wish-list for what I want this device to be/do… Here goes:

1. A high quality remote desktop client. I want it to be able to smoothly control my Mac mini/MBP/PCs running VNC, even over back to my mac.

2. The keyboard should take advantage of the Apple patent filed which makes uses the whole hand for text input on touchscreens. I want it to bring up a small keyboard when one palm is on the screen, and a larger split keyboard when both hands are placed on the screen. I can’t stand not having a backlit screen when in a low-light environment, which is why I have one of my MBP’s as my couch computer, instead of one of my less pricey computers. A glowing OLED screen would solve it like my iPhone does.

3. I want it to have an iPhone-esque home button that when pressed once brings up the rear facing camera, once more the front facing camera. Aaaaaaand… when it’s held down for 3 seconds it launches the iPhone OS to run apps and the home button works like it does on the iPhone, until held down for 3 seconds again.

4. Total connectivity: USB, bluetooth, Wireless N, The MB Air’s remote drive, 3G SIM slot (not locked to a carrier), an SDXC slot, a dock connector for syncing/charging/using iPhone accessories [I said wish-list, not spec sheet]

5. A 10 hour battery…

6. An AMOLED screen.

7. The ability to control my AppleTV/Front Row by using their native interfaces while still watching content on them.

8. Essentially a 10.1″ MacBook Air with a touchscreen where the keyboard and trackpad are, minus the clamshell.

9. A 32/64GB SSD option

I know why I want one, and it’s the same reason that I wanted  a netbook, and an iPhone before that, and even a laptop before that. I want a device that will allow me to do all of the tasks that I want to do while mobile, but that I don’t need a massively powerful computer for. I have a desktop PC for my work-horse type things like video editing, or gaming. What I want is something that I can carry and not have to open up, set on a surface, angle the screen, position myself to type, and then get down to launching a browser and pulling up a website, when [like on my iPhone], I press a button, slide to unlock, open the browser and pull up the website. Sure, sure… I know, I know… It’s very much a “first-world problem” but hey, I live in the first-world, and anything that helps me maximize what little down time I have anymore, is something that I crave.

I use my iPhone for just about everything, but even with mobile safari being as amazing as it is, it’s just not the same experience as a larger screen… Plus, it can’t do flash… [fail]

Since my phone goes everywhere with me, and my computer does not, especially with the iPhone being “good enough” 75% of the time for most casual computing tasks, I have less of a NEED to buy this device, but if it hit’s a fair number of my wish-list, I’ll certainly buy one, and enjoy it.

Here’s hoping,

Tim

Who’d have imagined that when I got a “real job”, I’d have be too busy to do just about anything… Just ask blizzard about my WoW account. I’ve fallen into the trap of New Year’s resolutions myself, which include everything from not bothering a certain person by trying to talk to them, to the perennial ‘get more exercise’ one that we all have, and so far so good.

One of my more odd resolutions is to actually play my Xbox360 rather than just let it remain as a shelf for a thin layer of dust. Luckily for my resolution Assassin’s Creed 2 came out, and I’m a sucker for this type of stealth assassination game. AC2 fixed just about everything that was a problem in AC1, with the exception of when you start to free run Ezio decides to go “full-retard”. I understand that this time around Ubisoft wanted to give more control to the player, but as you speed up, you really need to have some better pathing assistance. Oh, and those stupid box carrying morons that wander around and intentionally get in your path, have yet again made the top of my list of things that suck the fun from the game. So far I’ve put in WAAAAY too much time into the game, but it’s still VERY fun.

Unfortunately for my resolution is that I’ve bruised all the bones in my left wrist, and severely sprained my right one in a pretty nasty fall while walking through the parking lot at work… Not cool… It’s been over a week, and I’m still in an incredible amount of pain, which is not being helped by my ignoring the doctors advice, and am only wearing a fancy wrist brace on my left wrist, and (so I can do things) nothing on my right one. All I can say is, thank goodness for modern anti-inflammatory and pain-killing drugs, they may not stop the sharp pangs of pain from shooting up my arms, but it sure helps for all the times in between them.

Here’s hoping that your new year is a good one.

Tim

TweetDeck even with it’s reliance on AIR is hands-down my favorite desktop client, and I’ve used [and paid for], but I keep going to TweetDeck on the iPhone only to be disappointed time after time. It crashed 4 times while trying to set it up, and at varying steps in the process which made it hard to blame one step that I could skip in order to proceed, one of which was that unlike the desktop app, you are required to allow TweetDeck to update Facebook [if you so choose to add FB access at all], or not be allowed to continue, which was also one of my crashes…

Once set up, I did like that there were decent options, and the ability to finally add multiple twitter accounts, though the MySpace account in the desktop version is not included, admittedly not a huge deal, but notable nonetheless. The look of the Light UI option was nice, but it does feel to me like it was tossed in as an option after other twitter apps included it. In the end I find that it’s with reservations added to my roster of twitter apps for the iPhone that will actually remain on my iPhone [if it remains crash free]. If TweetDeck adds push notifications, It’ll be my primary twitter app for the iPhone too. [I've also posted this to the related TUAW article]

I HATE the made up term “mashup”!!!!!!!!

That is all.

Tim