badlyDrawnToy

I recently moved house, and in the process lost my broadband connection for longer than anticipated. Having looked into the various USB Dongle solutions, I decided to opt for a tethered connection form my iPhone. I learned a lot from my week or so working this way – about my productivity, and about how affective tethering is.

Productivity

The thing I noticed the most was how much more productive I was. We all know how easy it is to get distracted by email, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and web surfing. And many of us know we should practice better time management. Well, next time you laugh at friend who tells you that where they work they don’t have internet access, I’ll have to admit, I completely understand why management make such decisions (unless your a web developer of course!).

Here’s my 2 tips to remaining productive:

• I really recommend only checking you mail periodically – it’s so easy to get into a conversation over email these days. I’d rather just fire-and-forget.
• Treat Twitter, Blogs etc. as a break from work, or something to read over breakfast/lunch/midnight feast depending on your working habits. I now read twitter feeds like RSS feeds – scanning for something interesting to pick up on.

Tethering

My experience was pretty good. I must admit, I’ve not used USB Dongles in anger, and form what I’ve seen, results vary widely. I’ve moved to Didsbury which has a strong 3G signal, and tethered over USB. My iPhone is the 3G, not 3GS. Here’s my experiences:

Speed

Connection is really good. I even managed to watch an episode of Dragon’s Den on my Mac with very little buffering. Of course, I couldn’t have done this on the phone itself.

Large File Downloads

Whilst streaming was fine, downloading wasn’t too good. I did try to download the whole episode, but it would have taken hours.

Image Quality

The biggest surprise was the poor quality of graphics. The quality is drastically reduced/pixelated. Hovering over the images reveals a hint that:

Shift+R improves the quality of this image. Shift+A improves the quality of all images on this page.

This intrigued me, so I did some digging and found that in the source of every web page, o2 is adding a call to a Javascript file in the header. This file, bmi.js, appears to replace images with low res versions. Not sure how, but it does seem to try to use iframes. It seems fairly harmless, but I did, on one occasion, find it broke a web page I was developing.

A quick look on Google reveals that thsi same file is used by Vodafone.

Battery Life

Whilst tethering, the phone does stay rather warm. With regards to battery life, as I was connected via USB, the phone remained fully charged. Interestingly, if the laptop is on battery power it still charges the phone, so the laptop loses juice pretty quickly.

Receiving Calls

Making ands Receiving calls whilst connected is fine. However, I did accidentally turn off 3G once. Whilst I could still browse OK, if the phone rings, you are disconnected.

Bugs

There is (or was, as I just downloaded the latest upgrade) a small bug with the address book. Every other letter in the right-hand alpha list became a bullet point. Odd.

Conclusion

Whether you think the £20/month tethering fee is justifiable or not is a different matter. It’s certainly cheaper than buying a USB Dongle if you only plan to use it the odd month or two. Regardless, if you have a good 3G connection I can recommend it – unless you hate low res images!

Tags: Apple, bmi.js, iphone, linkedin, mac

I’m noticing quite a few sites that cause safari to crash on my iPhone. Today I discovered that apple’s own site consistently causes it to crash. Simply click on the main menu link to the iPod + iTunes page, and wait for it to load.. and die.

Chances that apple will sanction Opera for the iphone ?

Tags: Apple, iphone, safari

I want to love Apple Macs. I really do. I want to be like Stephen Fry (in so many ways.. though not all). They look cool, and more importantly, the operating system (OS), Mac OS X, is really rather good. As a Java web developer it is brilliant – the power of unix without the need for me to get my fingers too dirty, plus great graphics support.

Sadly, as good as Apple are at design, marketing and software engineering, they are appalling at manufacturing. Whilst Microsoft’s strategy of leaving the hardware to everyone else initially caused endless problems with driver compatibility, Apple has always insisted that their OS only run on their own hardware.

With this in mind, you’d think that quality control would not be such an issue. Well it is. So much so, that there’s a web site dedicated to listing the defects with their products, and a flickr photos set showcasing one of the many issues.

Here’s my personal, miserable experience so far:

more »

Tags: Apple, defects, discoloured palmrest, macbook, screen flicker

So, I finally got my MacBook back the other day. It took two weeks to repair the flickering screen. Not too bad, though I had to get a friend to organise to drop off and collect as the store is no longer open at weekends.

The engineer phoned me to tell me that he replaced the heatsink and run in for 24 hours without a shutdown. The thing is, I never had a problem with it shutting down.. only with a flickering screen on start up. He told me this was fixed too.

Booted up the MacBook on Saturday. The screen started flickering. Un-bloody-believable. Admittedly, it’s not as bad as when I took it in, but this is how it started out the first time.

So I phoned the store, and after several calls to the manager ascertained that after they replaced the heatsink, they did see the screen flickering. They fixed it by resetting the memory (PRAM). doh! As if I hadn’t done that twenty times. As if AppleCare (phone support) hadn’t asked me to do this 20 times before agreeing that it needed repairing. As if the Apple store that had it for a week didn’t do this 20 times before telling me it needed a new logicboard! Two weeks they had, and all they did was reset the memory.

So no, I need to send it back (60 mile round trip to the store and back) so they can look into it again.

Apparently, my consumer rights are pretty thin. If I didn’t have a problem in the first few weeks, then I am deemed to have accepted the goods. So, I can’t demand a refund/replacement; only a repair. That said, they are required to repair the machine within a reasonable amount of time and they’ve wasted two weeks so far. The nightmare continues.

Tags: Apple, mac