A couple of weeks ago I voiced my frustration at not being able to achieve a stable sync of my various address books. Unable to stand the uncertainty in now knowing if a password or a user ID is correct (also helped by the recent loss of almost every identity-related item), I decided to takle the issue and get to a resolution.
I mentioned I use a Pro account of what I believe is the best cross-platform for contacts syncing out there, Soocial, and with the help of their support (thanks Bart !) I did the following to achieve contact Nirvana: first, removed all the sources except the Mac, then added them back one at the time until I found that the offending connection was the Android one, which essentially duplicates (and conflicts with) the sync that happens between my Google account and the Android phone. It should NOT, but it does.
To avoid this problem, this is the full procedure:
enable Google Sync on phone (settings – accounts – Google – make sure “contacts” are checked)
clean up the set manually – easiest on the Mac Address Book
wait for changes to propagate
You may have to do some minor cleaning on Android as deletions do not propagate as seamlessly. Did I mention already how pissed I am at this obvious lack of control of my Digital Self?
My colleagues at work know how much I loathe wires and cables and connectors – “wireless” for me is an aspirational state of mind; like most other human beings on Sol’s third planet I had to accept the fact that most wireless devices require a tether for charging, leading me to use disposable batteries for many of my devices, with the obvious guilt feeling as I watch my pile of exhausted batteries grow.
Well, my battery consumption is about to drop like a rock, as I purchased Magic Feet, a totally stupid name for a ridiculously overpriced dock-like implement which can wirelessly charge (induction, I presume) my keyboard and mouse, with a third “place” for this soon-to-be-purchased universal spare battery.
Now, it should not be beyond comprehension that for us unwashed masses a standard for induction charging is useful and practical: as I am using my mouse, why can’t I charge my phone?
But this is an industry that took a decade to get rid of vendor-specific chargers, so I am not that hopeful.
..a little competition between people who know what the fuck they’re talking about, have the stamina to iron out potholes and be there for the long run.
Amazon Prime has multiplied several fold my online purchases, having an alternative will push it even further.
Then Wal-Mart and Target will realize they’re like the hosts of these insect larvae who when hatched eat them alive from inside; except that when they realize it, they’re dead already. Too bad!
Seems incredible that a simple task like getting a somewhat reliable clandar spanning across my various devices and platforms has so far eluded me, thanks to the quirky lock-in features that various vendors impose on us.
Simply stated, I want to be able to read and edit and sync entries on:
Google Calendar (web)
Calendar on Desktop OS X
Calendar app on iPad
Calendar app on Android
Travel schedules from Tripit
and I want to have the same bloody color across all of them: orange for personal items, blue for business and green for travel.
The solution I found so far is the following:
base everything on Google calendars
use the native Calendar apps on OS X and iOS, and the Google Calendar app on Android
ignore iCloud syncing
sync the Tripit calendar DIRECTLY into OS X and iOS (subscribe to the .ICS feed)
add the .ICS feed as a separate calendar on Google Cal using the “Add by URL” option and assigning the same color
Not the most elegant, as the Tripit feed gets split into two different streams, but I haven’t noticed any dupes or missing items so far or calendaring / scheduling errors.
Some of you may have noticed a flurry of posts and Facebook activity to promote the WCF and its associated Creative Class meeting; since at least one friend asked me why I am so active in this, let me share the remarks I sent to Juha, as they may be interesting for others.
Consultants are a dime a dozen. Of course, I think I am special, but so does any other consultant on the planet, without exception.
The only way I can actually demonstrate to be “special” is by managing a balancing act: on one hand, put to work my methodology in real life cases. I have been lucky enough to accumulate a wealth of experience and cases, but I need to continue practicing the concreteness mantra, to avoid becoming a hot air balloon, all theory and no practice.
On the other hand, I must continue to push the envelope of my thinking, by challenging its wisdom and comparing my experiences with others; this I can only do by reading, listening, discussing in a genuine open environment.
So the question is where I can find places where this discussion can actually happen. The big events have become the unquestioned domain of marketing show-off: MWC, SXSW, Burning Man and even fabled TED have all gone mainstream: nobody really discussed, everybody shows off.
In truth I remember well when Matthew told me I get my butt over to TED, or when Sean and Ana said they were looking for friends to spend a weekend in the Black Rock desert: I had never heard of these places and couldn’t be bothered, but they were right and I was wrong, so chalk these up as missed opportunities.
Is the WCF the next TED? I don’t really know – I got involved by chance, but I met some interesting people there, I had some interesting discussion and no, there’s not much marketing going on. This must be hell for Yana and Alex and Val and all the other fine people who are trying to pull this off, but on the other hand it makes the attendance experience so much more enriching from a human standpoint.
So here I am, torn between the hope that WCF becomes a huge success for those who pour so much effort in it, and a secret hope it remains a small group of people coming from all corners of the world, especially outside of the “traditional” western countries, which adds to the fascination for me and perhaps forces us to contemplate these new, huge, young and growing economic systems grappling with the same issues facing enterprises across the world, but with the clean slate of someone who skipped Porter and Kotler to land with both feet on Robert Scoble and Seth Godin.
The gear has arrived and I had my first hands-on session. I’ll jump right at the conclusion: fantastic!
Let’s start with this tiny LED HDMI projector by Brookstone which is a true gem; image quality is pretty good for a thing this small, and definitely more than adequate for business use. Just out of curiosity I tried blowing it all the way up to maybe 80′ with the result you see below.
The ergonomics are just right: as you can see the whole kit (well, almost) fits in this little neoprene pouch. The only items left out are the HDMI cable (more later) and the power supply for the projector, which, however is not strictly necessary as the device packs enough battery to keep you going for 90′.
Once opened, you can see the projector (left), the Apple TV (right), plus Apple Remote, minitripod and power cable for the Apple TV.
First thing is to screw the minitripod on the standard 1/2″ threaded hole at the bottom of the projector – thanks God this operation does not preclude access to any port or connector as sadly it’s so often the case with portable devices.
This results in a solid coupling – of course, any tripod will do: from the huge, multi-segmented professional ones to pocketable Gorillapods. The one you see in the picture was a suggestion by Brookstone and is very pocketable while offering a respectable 40 cm height when fully extended, which I believe is more than enough for most meeting room settings where you typically need to put the projector on a table. The pivoting head also allows you to do a little image orientation since the projector has no keystone correction.
You can now connect the Apple TV via any regular male-male HDMI cable, power it up and place it on top of the projector:
Both items are very light and produce very little in terms of heat; the projector ventilation in particular happens though the down-facing grid which is free.
Turning on and off and focusing of the projector are done through side mounted switches – again very easy and fully accessible.
But.
Yes, there is a “but”, perhaps the only one I found so far, and it’s about the damn HDMI cable: as you can see, the HDMI clunky connectors are almost as big as the devices, and the weight and the rigidity of a standard HDMI cable is enough to unbalance the setup.
I am sure there must be a better way to connect those two tiny devices, whose female HDMI connectors almost line up and face each other correctly. I scoured the Cables4less catalog (my usual source for all things cables) but for some reason nobody makes cables shorter than 0.5m which is still about twice what I need.
Additionally, regular HDMI cables are thick and rigid, which is my case is a problem, as they could easily topple my little tower. Flat cables are probably my best bet, so I must look for a short one.
90° adaptors and joiners are a possibility, but the probability of a stiff connector to be exactly the length I need are minimal.
The projector has its own speakers, which are predictably underpowered – my MacBook Air sounds better, in fact. It also has an audio out 3.5mm jack and an USB charging port to which I am hoping to connect these flat speakers by Insignia. I have used flat panel speakers before and I know they can deliver more than enough punch for a business presentation, and should be small enough to fit in the same pouch.
Now that the system is all connected you connect the Apple TV to the same WiFi network as your Mac, iPad or iPhone – you can have more than one Apple TV on the same network, each of them will have its own name and you can beam any of your screen(s) to any one of them and hot swap – I tried setting up an ad hoc WiFi network but that does not seem to work at all.
Also I tried using the portable hotspot feature of my phone to create an on-the-go network, but while I am able to get the devices on this network, its bandwidth is probably not enought to support AirPlay.
Using in a real life situation
The pouch contains all you need (once the short cable is found): if the meeting room has a big LCD TV, you only use the Apple TV connecting it to an HDMI input; if not, you will also need the projector – in both cases you can either use your iPad or iPhone as well as a more traditional Mac, the latter having the advantage of a much wider choice of transitions.
In all cases, the longest and more dodgy item of set up is connecting to the existing WiFi (obtaining the password, etc.) which has to be done each time, as the Apple TV forgets passwords once you connect it to a different network (why?!?!) but 10′ should be more than enough and of course you always run the risk that the meeting room DOES NOT have a wifi connection, in which case you’re stuck and must fall back to cables.
Assuming you’re not that unlucky, however, you then enjoy maximum liberty to roam around the room while you speak and, perhaps more importantly, can completely ignore technical constraints in the room setup and place yourself and your colleagues where it makes most sense; you will also be able to switch speaker simply by passing along the computer or iPad or, better, by having multiple copies of the presentation loaded on different devices and hot swapping them as you move from one speaker to the other.
My son travels a lot by train and has retained an insane passion for videogames, so I gave him a PSVita for Xmas. Upon unboxing it and starting one of the free games, it crashed with error C12828-1; unlike his dad he’s a great tinkerer with all things “real” and “physical”: you can ask him to fix the garage door, but has zero patience with electronics.
So the PSVita comes back to me to see if I can get it to work.
Them boards opinate that C12828-1 error could be related to a database corruption when attempting to write a status to the memory card (which we don’t have, but why the hell do they sell the console WITHOUT it if it’s mandatory?) which in turn could be originated by a faulty network connection: when the PSV tries to synch with the PS Network, the faulty connection returns a bogus error message which then screws the database and crashes the whole system.
So, in this order (and multiple times):
buy a memory card
format: NO JOY
hard reset the PSV
uninstall game
re-download it
re-install: NO JOY
restart it in Safe mode
format the memory card
restart in Safe mode
rebuild the database
restart in Safe mode
reinstall the OS
restart in Safe mode
shut off and on: NO JOY
disable the DHCP function and configure the PSV to a fixed IP address
open my wireless router admin panel
create a DMZ for the IP address of the PSV
restart the wireless network
repeat #7 to #14: NO JOY
buy another game (Assassin’s Creed III)
start from hard card
repeat #7 to 14: NO JOY
At which point I run out of options, and I do what my wife suggested five minutes after my son reported the problem: return it to the store, get another one, works like a charm.
Photography always interested me – I still remember my first job as a kid whose proceeds went into the purchase of a Miranda Autosensorex EE 35mm reflex camera which I still have and which was to be followed by numerous others with more glamorous badges. All these years of practice however, clearly showed I am not particularly gifted in the field unlike my daughter whom inherited the full batch of my photographic equipment before commencing the accumulation of her own (I merely saved her the painful and expensive trial & error process and told her she could have any brand provided it was a Nikon and any lens provided it was a prime).
After having squandered my fair share of money on expensive cameras, I have given up pretending and use my cellphone. I must say the results haven’t suffered much: they’re still the same average as they were before, proving once more that spending money on equipment hardly does anything to make a photo better. In fact, the few interesting image I got were more the result of “being there and then” and quick action, rather than carefully composed scenes.
In other words, for me photography is not about a great image catching an average instant but about an average image catching a great instant – serendipity, which involves absolute portability, always-on, speed; the role models for this type of photography are obviously war photographers and when you read the biographies of world-famous war photographers like Robert Capa or Henri Cartier-Bresson you see they did not lug around anything but a lightweight Leica rangefinder with a 50mm lens, yet they took incredible pictures (although I have read quite a bit of discussion whether RC’s “Falling soldier” was staged).
So my question becomes – what is the best camera for this kind of use?
Always informative DPReview has a similar article here which offers a list of potential candidates: if brands mean anything the choice should be none other than the Leica X1, which also resembles its ancient brethren with a retro-look which inspired many a competitor.
This is a very small camera that will fit in your pocket provided you do not wear skintight jeans – a very luminous f/2.8 24mm (equivalent of a 50mm on a film camera) lens and the huge 4/3 sensor are the aces of this little jewel; pricewise it’s not the cheapest camera (still a Leica, for God’s sake!) but when you think that the Leicas we mentioned above were sold for $5-6,000 in today’s money, the X1′s sub-1,000 euro price tag seems decidedly affordable; all you need to add to this is a monopod, and you’re good to go.
Getting stranded in the australian wilderness must be even less funny.
But if a hapless motorist leaves for said australian wilderness armed uniquely with an iPhone is now Apple’s fault? I have criticized Apple more than once, I have mocked the mistakes in their maps just like the next guy but are we really growing a generation of people dumb enough to stop reading signs, asking for directions and solely listening to a device which – who knows – may break down, may run out of juice, may not be able to get a satellite fix and whose quality of maps the entire world has jeered at?
And – of course – you don’t even bother to install on your precious iStoopid a shortcut to Google Maps, why would you?
I say, no digital tool ever will replace common sense; for anyone who’s convinced of the opposite, let Darwin run its course.
Interesting post on overused adjectives in your profile on LinkedIn, even though I think the article misses the key point: look at which attributes are most over-used in which country: do you associate northern europeans with creativity or southern europeans with responsibility, or arabs with motivation?
Perhaps no and therefore we, probably inadvertently, try to fight cultural stereotypes by saying that unlike most of our contrymen, we “really” are that one thing you do not expect from us.
But this still pertains to the domain of “how I see myself”. What about “how others see me”?
LinkedIn is trying to address this with the excellent “Endorse for” feature: unlike full-blown recommendations, which require people to actually write a note about that one person, endorsements are quick and easy. Over time and over a large enough number of votes, you will have a perhaps unexpected but unequivocal image of how the people you know see you.
