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

This week I discovered a cool piece of software that allows me to control two macs with one keyboard, and one mouse. Brilliant if you’re a geek!

Like any good developer, I’ve got mission control set up on my desk – my MacBook desktop is split across a dual screen, and I have another screen for my Mac mini (which acts as my development web server, my music server and my VOIP phone). Using two sets of keyboards and mice is a pain, and KVM switches are awkward, particularly as I remove my laptop frequently.

No fear, Synergy is here. This open-source solution allows you to arrange your monitors as one virtual desktop. Simply move the mouse cursor towards the other screen, and as it reaches the edge, it transfers control over to the other machine. You can even copy & paste between the two machines! The machines must be connected to a local network to work.

It’s a doddle to set up Synergy up on the Mac as there is an application called SynergyKM that includes a Preference Pane. Synergy works on Windows and Unix too, so I could use it to control Windows XP when testing web sites in Internet Explorer.. but now I have Parallels installed on my Mac, I don’t need another machine.

If you need to control more than two machines, that are all Macs, then there is also a similar freeware application called Teleport.

Geeky but brilliant

Tags: mac, os x, synergy

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

Well, my less-than three month old Apple MacBook is playing up – black screen, flickering screen – not happy. And I’m not the only one who is not happy. I took into the Apple store, and after one week, they informed me that the problem was related to the dreaded Random Shut Down. This problem is affecting loads of other people to the point where there is a web site dedicated to afflicted, disgruntled users.

Apple has acknowledged that there is a problem, and the Apple store told me that the logic board would need replacing…. but that there is a 4 week backlog in getting the (now updated) part! more »

Tags: Apple, mac