Google offers so many services and I doubt there is anyone who uses all of them all the time. So my predictions are based on the services I do use and what I see happening in that realm at the moment. Currently I’ve been poking around a few development tools and javascript libraries, and the thing I noticed was that for newer projects Google is using Github rather than Google’s own Project Hosting to share open source code.

So my prediction for the next Google service to go to the big server farm in the sky is . . . Project Hosting on Google Code!

Besides the projects that they’ve started hosting on Github, there’s also the fact they’ve split-off a lot of content that used to be code.google.com to developers.google.com.

Closing down their project hosting service will be more significant than closing down iGoogle or Reader, since it’s not just an end-point but rather a distribution channel for many open source projects (although none of any significance from outside Google – apart from Eclipse Labs and Apache Extras but even they’re in a separate sub-domain).

Although it is not a creation point, so all the data that is there is created apart from Project Hosting and transferring to new service should be almost seamless (for the creator). Even issues created for a project can already be exported quite easily.

It would be disappointing to see Google Project Hosting close down, they offer more features than almost any other hosting service (with the exception of Source Forge). It’s not the prettiest code hosting site on the internet but it has a clean interface and they support multiple version control systems, binary file distribution, and seamless integration with other Google services (like Blogger and Groups).

And of course, you are never being pushed towards a paid version, or restricted because you aren’t paying. Big or small, sucessful veteran or new upstart, all projects are treated equally.

So if we’re going to play Google Service Roulette, I’m betting the next one to go down is Google Project Hosting. They’ll start by no-longer creating new projects, then no longer accepting updates to existing projects, and then they’ll strongly encourage everyone to migrate (probably to Github) as they announce the end date.

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

Last fall, my good friend Katrina, awesome mother of 3 young daughters and dear wife to my good friend Alister, was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Denise and I were devastated, as were many of our friends. To us Katrina is this feisty little go-getter who never gives up and in her case there are treatments available that can significantly extend her life for several years with only minor side effects. She is in the minority for stage 4 lung cancer. Most people have only a short time. Although there is no cure, cancer research has given her the possibility of prognosis of years rather than months.

Research has come a long way since I lost my grandfather Ben to lung cancer in 1991. When my sister Julie was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s in 2002 after giving birth to my nephew Mathieu, she was greatly aided by advanced detection and immediate chemo and radiation therapy. In her case, the research and excellent facilities made her journey through the treatment to be a more humane one. She has been in remission since 2008 and her own feisty spirit has driven her to keep fighting for her life, running half marathons and giving birth to her daughter Sophie and her son Ben.

My sister is a special kind of classy lady that just doesn’t take any crap from anyone.

The Enbridge Ride to Conquer Cancer benefiting the Segal Cancer Centre at the Jewish General Hospital is a cycling journey through Quebec’s countryside – that I’m embarking on to fight cancer and honour Katrina and Julie’s ongoing battle. It will be a challenge in a number of ways, but with my bike, my helmet, and your generosity, a real impact will be made!

Contribute to this history-making event with a donation. Funds raised in The Enbridge Ride to Conquer Cancer will support breakthrough research, exemplary teaching, and compassionate care at the Jewish General Hospital.

Thank you in advance for your help.

We’d like to thank our DadCast and site sponsors SplitReason once again for their continued support. Check out this page or their site by clicking above for more awesome Tees, hats, caps and mugs.

However, for some reason our beloved Canadian company decided to launch the device in the United Kingdom, 5 days earlier than the employees on the campus where it was built can get it. Thanks Thornsten for another Great White Shaft.

via The Great White Shaft: BlackBerry Z10 Launches in the UK First.

With the January 31st, 2013 deadline looming for the chance to get a cheap Windows 8 Pro upgrade I decided to make the leap, hand-over my credit card info, and join the Windows 8 generation.

My joy was short-lived though. Well, I guess if you consider it lasted the entire time it took to download the upgrade and run the installer then it lasted for quite some time. But in the end, Windows 8 refused to install on my computer! Why is not entirely clear, but the message was absolute: Windows 8 installation has failed.

What makes this worse is before selling you the upgrade Microsoft insists on running a compatibility check tool. Now not every piece of software I had on the that computer was compatible – but that was to be expected and something I was prepared to live with. If that was really what prevented Windows 8 from installing then why wasn’t I told to un-install those pieces of software before proceeding?! I was confident my current Windows XP SP3 installation was all set to grow-up, but: Windows 8 installation has failed.

The computer also dual-boots to Arch Linux, but I don’t see why this should be a problem preventing me from installing Windows 8. In fact, I would expect Microsoft to see this as an opportunity to persuade me to rejoin the fold of faithful. I fully expected to have to reset my MBR once Windows 8 was installed, my GParted CD was on-hand and ready to go. But it never came to that: Windows 8 installation has failed.

And what makes this insulting, is googling “Windows 8 installation failed” turns up pages and pages of people with the same experience. Some managed to resolve the issue, most did not. I tried everything from disabling services, running as Administrator, deleting temp files, and even making a Steve Ballmer voodoo doll that I prayed to and sacrificed a chicken to. But to no avail: Windows 8 installation has failed.

As a last resort I supposed I could fire-up the Recovery Partition, re-install Windows XP from scratch, and then try the upgrade to Windows 8. But even then, after so many failed attempts, I’m pretty sure I’ll end up with: Windows 8 installation has failed.

So now my biggest concern is convincing Microsoft to give me my money back!

UPDATE: Windows 8 is now installed and running happily on my home computer! My problems seem to have come from Dell using a custom boot loader for their Dell Restore utility – which my installation of Linux had modified. Once I repaired that and restarted the installation process it went perfectly!

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

Samsung anti-BlackBerry ad targets business users | BGR.

Nokia 920 Fastball Challenge

Pretty sure that none of the iPhones would survive this, nor would I ever want to try it either.

Via WMPoweruser

We’d like to thank our DadCast and site sponsors SplitReason once again for their continued support. Check out this page or their site by clicking above for more awesome Tees, hats, caps and mugs.

Vintage Style Smartphone Etiquette Posters:

The posters are inspired from the old safety posters of the ’40s through the ’60s that would be put up in workplaces to remind workers the importance of wearing a hardhat or the dangers of loose clothing or not enough sleep.

via Art of Manliness

Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Ism’s in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, “I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.” Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus. I’d still have to bum rides off people.

But seriously, I have been working in IT for 20 years now and I don’t think there has ever been a time where I have ever had so many streams of information and miscommunication coming to me at once in all of that time. Think about how you gathered information and carried out your converstions ten years ago; now consider that all if not most of this is now coming at you on the smallish phone that your carry that with you at all times accessing the internet and your very own personal big data dump. That is a lot of stuff to keep in the back of mind, not to mention a lot of red badges to clog up a retina display. There is enough information in there to keep any normal sane human being up all night worrying himself into an ulcer.

Now here is the secret that no one has told you, but that the “disconnected crowd” are touting as the holy grail of salvation: it will all be there in an hour, after lunch, when you get home from your commute, tomorrow, or even Monday morning. Now the big difference with this crowd and the rest of us that by handing in their smart devices they can claim ignorance and peace because some icon is not flashing at them every time the check the time or lookup the recipe for Jamie Oliver’s Creamy Leek Pie. To a certain degree this just means that they are offsetting their stress for the next elevator ride with a colleague who asks if they’ve seen Jim’s email. The rest of us see the very same badges and either a) Panic because someone has just interrupted your plan to escape and take care of yourself or something personal or b) Grab a quick glance and decide to either act if it’s less than two minutes or file it for another time or worst of all c) Pick up and respond and get drawn into something that is probably just being pushed along by some one else trying to carve out some personal time.

Here is the real kicker. That badge is just a badge and it can grow in numbers all it wants, before that badge popped onto your screen, you had planned to do something. I have no idea what that was, but it was important enough for you to set some time aside to do it. So go ahead and take care of that since you had already booked yourself that time. For example, if you have to the take the train every night at 5PM because this is the last train to your neighbourhood for another 4 hours, would you stay glued to your workstation or on the office line rather than simply say: “I’m sorry I have to catch a train, can we talk about this tomorrow?” Of course not, however you will quite easily reach for your phone at your kids hockey game sometimes despite the fact that they’re in the middle of a game tying breakaway. I know this because I’ve seen it from the other side of the ice on the coaches bench. This is the kind of craziness that we put ourselves through every time we reach for our phones like pavlovian dogs when the little bell chimes or your upper thigh buzzes. The reason we do this is that it’s always easier to have a good excuse for not doing something than setting expectations of availability during our personal time. Last time I check most iPhones still go to voice mail even when you don’t check the Caller ID. The kid is on a Break Away… I’ve been playing hockey as long as I have been walking and never have I been on a game tying break-away… Don’t miss stuff like this.

There is a good reason why they call it a work/life balance. You have to take the good with the bad and know when to set the do not disturb mode to on, provided that it’s working that week. I am not claiming to have mastered GTD or personal stress-free ZEN mode, but I have made peace with myself and my bosses that I will remain available for all requests during reasonable office hours unless otherwise pre-determined due to a specific deliverable or urgency at work. In other words, I get my work done during office hours and unless something hits the fan, I am not expected to be on call after hours. And with almost two years into my current job, this has been acceptable for everyone and none of my projects have suffered from my coaching soccer and ringette or commuting to work by bike. Is this the result of setting the expectation early on or simply being able to make good judgement calls on when to go above and beyond, I could not tell you. But I have never felt better in a job than I do today and my health is at peak levels I have not seen in 20 years.

So what about all the personal distractions that my iPhone offers me during all the other times? Well I tend to welcome those without letting them getting in the way of the life I am living in the meat space. If I’m out with the Dads or the family, I don’t feel the need to live tweet it unless somebody does something that truly warrants the attention or that we need to share something with someone who is not present, but to be quite frank I’m usually laughing to hard to pull out the phone. These days, if I’m out with friends, everyone I would usually Tweet or SMS to are there with me. Sure I’ll grab the phone and swipe up to take picture or capture video and I’ll look stuff up to settle bar talk or use Yelp & Foursquare to pick the next stop, even use this or that app to buy coffee, check prices, or txt someone who might be running late. However, this IS the main reason that I bought this thing in the first place, before the iPhone I’d be calling Mononque or my Wife from Canadian Tire and Best Buy to run price checks.

Since I first used a Palm Treo, then a BlackBerry and now my second iPhone, I like to think that I have gained enough self-discipline to determine whether or not I need to use my iPhone’s connectivity in public or during family and friends time. I’ll be damned if I’d go without my phone’s power and functions simply because it beeps at me every once in a while. This thing has replaced my phone, PDA, point and shoot, map book, newspaper and iPod all in the space of 5 short years. Why the hell would I ever go back to wearing a utility belt or carrying a man purse just so I can have what I need on me?

I truly hope that disconnectors like Stephen Hackett do learn something from their experiments but honestly this just seems like a lot of useless pain and frustration that could have been sorted out with a few good frank discussions and a little self control. Granted this peice might get me banned from the 512 Pixels podcast for life but I trust that Stephen can see the value of a good counter argument, even if it is from a crazy old Canuck in the middle of the The Great White North.

In fact, the new Flickr is exactly the same as the old Flickr. It’s still the professional quality photo-sharing/managing/editing web-suite that was hugely popular before. Even their super-powerful mobile apps haven’t changed that much – they were among the most powerful and fun to use even before Instagram came along.

The first thing that happened is Instagram got Facebooked! I said it before, Instagram wasn’t worth $1-billion if Facebook just let it sit there. They have to do something with it; and when they did there was outrage and anger and a stampede back to Flickr!

The other thing, is Yahoo – credit to their new commander-and-chief Marissa Mayer – finally realized their most valuable property is Flickr. No one cares about Yahoo Auto, Yahoo Dating or Yahoo omg! These are copy-cat services in that there’s a million of them out there and if you’re not number one you’re irrelevant.

Although there’s other choices for sharing your photos, the social aspect and the community are very important. Other’s have tried, but Flickr has made professional (community and tools) their priority though they’ve still kept it easy to use.

The others, have just focused on the social aspect. Instagram is all about quirky filters; Google’s schizophrenic Picasa Web aka Google+ Photos is all about something depending on which of the three ways you access it (don’t forget it’s Blogger‘s backend too); TwitPic, Yfrog, etc. are all about tweeting photos on Twitter, which Twitter does by themselves now and prefers; 500px, MyShoebox, PhotoBucket, OpenPhoto, and the rest are trying to find their niche amongst the big players. And Microsoft’s Skydrive Photos fits in there too somewhere, mainly for the clueless and complacent.

The nicest thing about Flickr on Twitter is you get more than the short tweet (126 characters once the Flickr link is factored in) because the integration pulls in the photo, the caption, and the description!!!

Unfortunately your Flickr photos don’t show-up in the Twitter photo-stream, like they do if shared via Twitter, TwitPic, etc.

So, it looks pretty much like Flickr is going to become my photo-tweeting service of choice – replacing TwitPic; but I’ll still edit up the photos using Aviary‘s amazing full-featured editor before posting them.

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

Overall some pretty sweet improvements that should make collaboration with co-workers a lot easier and smoother. Now if we can just get it to preserve the pretty Apple fonts: Calibri != Helvetica

Introducing the GreatWhiteShaft.com: A site dedicated to keeping track of all the cool products and services that simply are not available to Canadians despite North American Free Trade, Commonwealth and just plain old common sense.

While our Yankee cousins stuff themselves with Turkey and plan their Black Friday assault in the morning, we have compiling a list of all the gadgets, music, sites, books and other online services that we are being deprived of North of the Border. So head on over, review the list, add to it or just help raise the stink that will right this great injustice.

“We are going to keep coming back. You might get one answer today, you might get another answer later,” he says. “We’re not done until we’ve checked all the boxes.”

And that really is the problem, it’s about coming back to a product after a big launch to tell your user that you got it wrong and that you need to fix bugs and check off some more boxes that you didn’t think were all that important the fist time. The one thing that Microsoft has never understood is that making a great product is not about checking off boxes from a long list, it’s about blowing those boxes right up. You need to ship GREAT products from day one, especially in the mobile space where things move so fast. Look at the Nokia 900, a beautiful phone that is now completely useless and can’t even run the new OS. A flagship phone that is obsolete months after it’s overly hyped launch.

Never talk about what you will be doing; sell the product you have now, stand by it and make damn sure it’s ready at launch. Sadly Microsoft will forever be cursed by its culture of shipping crap too soon out of beta and trying to fix it later with service packs. Just look at Android, the number of phones that get to benefit from new OS release gets shorter and shorter with every release. It’s pretty much become common practice to ditch entire product lines and release new hardware with new Android releases.

Even Apple, that has mastered the art of shipping good products, has been caught out with poor apps at launch (maps, passbook, ping) and OS glitches. However, they stand by the iPhone line, release patches regularly and have dependable OS release cycles that don’t alienate the previous generation of hardware. But they can only do this because they put so much care into making the best product and coupling it with incredibly well written software. Apple never checks off boxes, they are the one that make the boxes important in the first place and then they proceed to make them insignificant with the next release while everyone else is still chasing. Sadly Joe and the Microsoft team still don’t understand this. Stand by for “Windows Phone 8 SP1 r3 beta on the Nokia 925″ in a few months.

via The Verge

The new hardware is attractive for a number of reasons: it’s thin, it’s light, it features a lot of the latest technology like Bluetooth 3.0, USB 3, and dual-antenna a/b/g/n wi-fi (and we know there’s a mobile-wireless version coming soon too).

The coolest feature though is that it does not run on an Intel processor, but rather the Samsung Exynos 5 – an ARM A-15 processor like the kind found in smartphones and tablets! The A-15 is the latest iteration of the ARM design; and the Exynos 5 is a powerful chip with minimal power consumption – so no fans and longer battery life on a thinner, lighter battery.

About 90% of what I do my computers is web-based, such as e-mail, news, blogging, and even working with documents and spreadsheets on Google Drive. So a Chromebook would fill just about all my requirements. The only thing I’d be scared to try is managing my photo & video library or touching up my photos. There’s certainly no reason why a Chromebook couldn’t handle that and software like Aviary proves it possible but I think it will be awhile before we see digiKam ported to a Chrome App and there’s a truly comparable option.

What I can’t wrap my head-around though is why?! I have nothing against ARM-based computers or living my life on-line. But what I don’t understand is why we need another platform? At this point Android is a viable option for a netbook operating system. Chrome (the browser at the heart of ChromeOS) even runs on Android. An Asus Transformer is basically a Netbook running Android. Any Android tablet matched up with a Bluetooth keyboard is basically a netbook.

Even Microsoft with the launch of their Surface tablet and it’s choice of keyboard covers has basically said the netbook market was killed by the tablet market!

I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep repeating it as long as I have to: WE DON’T NEED ANOTHER PLATFORM!

Apple offers developers the burden of iOS and OS X. Google offers the burden of Android and Chrome. Microsoft offers the burden of Windows (in it’s many iterations) and Windows 8 new paradigm and Windows RT (all of which multiplied by the burden of traditional libraries or newer .NET libraries). And then of course there’s the waffling RIM that burdens us with the old Blackberry and the promise of BB10; and a flurry of other platforms like Firefox OS, Sailfish, and Tizen.

It’s not surprising that RIM and Microsoft are having trouble attracting developers to their app stores – developers are all sick and tired having new platforms dropped on them like a ton of bricks and being told “if it doesn’t succeed it’s your fault because you didn’t write any killer apps for it!“

So why didn’t Google put Android on this hardware and call it a Nexus NB (for netbook) or Nexus K (for keyboard) or Nexus RT (for Kiss-our-ass-Microsoft)?

As a Chromebook my only interest in purchasing one would be to wipe-out ChromeOS and install ARMedSlack. If it was running Android though I’d be perfectly happy to leave it as is!

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

SEC filings don’t make for very interesting blog posts though.

So, meh.

Source: SEC

Via: Read Write Web

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

The reality is that his will not lead to any meaningful change in Canada’s wireless landscape, because:

1. The telcos will voluntarily implement some of the codes prior to the establishment of the official code;
2. There are provincial consumer protection laws that already require some of the things the public is demanding; and
3. Most consumers (or at least the ones who post comments and in forums) are dumber than a sack of cabbages and just don’t understand how our nearly-but-not-really free-market works.

If you haven’t already done so you should post your comment on the CRTC web site (since they can’t really admit they read this blog).

Here’s what I had to say to the CRTC on this issue…

Code of conduct should include:
- decreasing cancellation fee proportional to remaining contract
- reasonable cost to unlock mobile phone once subsidy is paid off
- ability to remove unwanted software (apps) from the phone upon demand (not all smartphones have the capacity to handle the software installed by the carrier; but carriers do not test every model of every phone in every possible situation)
- individual service feature add-ons should be available at reasonable cost relative to feature bundles that include the individual features (i.e.: the sum of the individual prices should be more than the bundle price unless there is an obvious efficiency in having the two features simultaneously)

Let’s take a look at each one of those.

Cancellation fees

Many provinces, soon to be all I’m sure, already have clauses in their consumer protection laws that correlate your cancellation fee with the number of months you have left on your contract. It’s a moot point if the CRTC requires this since it’s already available to the majority of consumers but it would be nice to have a national standard.

Perhaps a more controversial addendum to this would be requiring the service providers to indicate what amount of your bill represents the subsidy and how much you can expect to save once your subsidy is paid off. Even going so far as allowing early pay-off so you can trigger the monthly savings ahead of time.

Unlocking

Unlocking is a more reasonable alternative to carrier’s feeble trade-in programs. Allowing consumers to sell or gift their phones and trade-up. You would have to pay off your subsidy first, but I think that’s totally reasonable.

Of course someone who expects to travel with their phone would simply have to purchase the phone outright and have it unlocked immediately upon purchase. If you know you’ll need an unlocked phone then pony-up the dough and buy one! Just because you decide to travel doesn’t mean the telcos have to give you special treatment.

Unwanted software

Okay, this might be a pet-peeve, but two things are certain: carrier software is often crap-tastic; and just because it isn’t branded spy warez r uz doesn’t mean it ain’t!

Most of the apps carriers put on your phone are simply white-label apps that have been re-branded and pointed to your carrier’s servers or data-sources. Not much design or development goes into these apps; hardly any testing; and definitely no support. So if you don’t use something you should be able to get it off your phone – especially if it’s something that feels it has to run in the background (and worse if it feels it has to always remind of this wonderful opportunity you’re missing out on).

We learned a lot from the Carrier IQ scandal a while back and so did the carriers: they now hide that functionality in apps that you actually want and seem genuinely useful. If you don’t want this stuff running in the background you should be able to remove it from your phone.

NOTE: I’m not a conspiracy-theory nut-job, but it’s fun to play one sometimes.

The other thing is, and this goes for OEM’s apps too, is that not every apps is tested in every possible way, and sometimes an app or OS upgrade is too much for a phone to handle, particularly an older phone. So once again, if you don’t use it you should be able to get the CPU/memory/bandwidth hogging app off your phone.

Individual Service Features

Okay, now this really is a pet peeve. Why is a bundle of un-related features cheaper than sum of the individual features? Remember, they’re un-related. Caller ID and Voice Mail and text messaging have nothing to do with each other. So why is it cheaper for me to get a bundle with all three than to just add Caller ID to my plan!?

I can understand why carriers would offer bundles of bandwidth and internet based services (like Mobile TV or sports broadcasts). But I don’t understand why they have to bundle everything!? It’s like every new junior marketing hire has to come up with a new bundle during his probation period if he wants to keep this job?!

Competition

And finally for all you twits whining about lack of competition in comments and forums. Competition does not mean the government will order Robelus to give you an iPhone 5 and unlimited internet. Competition means they try and sucker you for all the money they can while you try and sucker them for all the product and services you can – when you meet in the middle that’s the result of competition.

The new entrants, such as Wind, Public, and Videotron, will bring more choices to a certain segment of consumers. But they are not a choice for everyone – either because of their limited AWS handsets, their limited coverage, or their inability to bundle other services such as residential phone, internet, or television.

Increasing foreign investment is not going to make things any cheaper either. If someone invests millions or even billions of dollars it is because they want as much of the incredibly high margins Canadian telcos are making – not because they feel sorry for you and want to hand-out iPhones and unlimited internet like the Easter Bunny!

Don’t forget to post your comment on the CRTC web site and leave a little note saying “hello” here (I know you’re lurking there Chaiman Katz, c’mon – say hi!).

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

Understanding your personal spending, income, and expenses is essential today. With so many ways to make and spend money it’s no longer as simple as cashing your paycheque and making sure you don’t run-out before your next pay-day.

Budgeting

On-line and off-line software help us see where the money is coming from, where it has to go, and where it ends up. Most of these applications do a basic job identifying your sources of income and then provide a simple aggregation of your historical spending. Predicting (i.e.: budgeting) is usually just done by copy & pasting your past spending into future periods.

MyFinanceTracker allows you set spending limits or goals in various categories but doesn’t help you save for specific bills or expenses. This is sometimes referred to as envelope budgeting – the principal of setting aside a portion of the required amount from each pay cheque so when the amount is due you have it; or setting aside a set amount and not spending in that category until you have enough money in the envelope to cover the full amount.

None of the software I’ve tried has this feature.

Yodlee’s Heritage

As I said, myFinanceTracker is based on Yodlee. Yodlee is a direct competitor to Mint except their focus is selling the service to financial institutions who then provide (or re-sell) it to their customers. There is a consumer version offered directly by Yodlee as well though. RBC has based their offering on Yodlee Production version but with the Classic dashboard – not the newer, more app-styled, dashboard.

They’ve also included the FinApps store, but they don’t offer any apps other than built-in ones that come from Yodlee.

What I’d like to see myFinanceTracker taking greater advantage of the Yodlee platform, rather than lagging behind and leaving users wanting what they know is available directly from Yodlee.

Terms of Service Violations

This one of the things that bugs me the most. If you read your Electronic Access Agreement or Terms of Service or essentially your contract from your financial institution it includes a clause that says “don’t share your password with anyone! EVER!” At the RBC that’s in Part B, Paragraph 15, it says:

You must always keep your Passwords and Personal Verification Questions strictly confidential. You must not disclose your Passwords or Personal Verification Questions to anyone.

Admittedly in the same section they say you can share your credentials with an aggregator (like Yodlee or Mint) but they make it clear they consider that on par with handing your credit card to street junkie!

Now hypocritically in Part C, Paragraph 5 of the same agreement they turn-around and expect you to hand over they keys to all your other financial accounts like we walk around with our PIN’s tatooed on our foreheads!

So basically they’re saying trust us, but don’t trust anyone else.

Data Sovereignty

This one’s so simple it really scares me! Yodlee is based in the USA. That’s where everything happens, and that’s where the RBC is sending all your financial data so it can be displayed as a nice animated pie-chart in myFinanceTracker.

Except our neighbours to the south have enacted a number of laws (or at least tried to) that make me uneasy. Not the least of which is the Patriot Act. But in general, the notion of shipping my financial information to another country where, by definition, I’m a foreigner who doesn’t have the same right as a national seems like a bad idea.

In Canada our banks are subject to Canadian privacy laws and the oversight of our provincial and federal regulators, and industry groups. Yodlee (or Mint) are under no obligation to observe any of these rules. And in-fact as a foreigner you have little to no recourse against them or the American government.

RBC must keep Canadian’s data in Canada where it is subject to Canadian jurisdiction.

Conclusion

So in the end, I’m very disappointed with RBC’s myFinanceTracker. The core features are rudimentary; the advanced features of Yodlee are not yet implemented and there’s no evidence they will be; they expect you to violate your contracts with your other financial providers; and they’re shipping all your financial data to the United States!

And it’s Flash-based! Adobe themselves have (essentially) killed Flash so I’m really not that interested in investing my time in something that’s not going to evolve – and certainly won’t ever make it to any mobile devices!

If there was some way for me to opt-out of myFinanceTracker I would. Until then though I refuse to use and would discourage anyone else from using it!

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

So we are apparently a month away from another iPhone announcement and the Apple Rumour Mill is in full spin. So here are some of the articles you can avoid reading until Apple actually announces something.

1. It will be HUGE/MEDIUM/SMALL sized.

Every year someone bets the bank on the size of the actual devices based on some dude making minimum wage in an Asian factory, or an accessory supplier who obviously won’t be in business next year.

2. New Dock Connectors: Lightning Bolt of Induction

All your existing accessories are now crap, throw them out. Apple won’t even make an adaptor because it would be ugly and take away from the user experience. In fact, Jovy Ive is still so pissed that people still own Apple Hi-Fi, he’s made it his mission to kill the dock connector and render these useless. Apple is starting fresh, so should you.

3. Radio GaGa: 4G/LTE/NFC/ANT+/Bluetooth 5+

There is also a strong possibility of an FM and Sirius satellite radio being included as well. Although we are pretty sure that marine band VHF will only be included in the iPhone 5S which is rumoured to be rumoured in March.

4. No Home Buttons or 5 Home Buttons

Take your pick, at this point I don’t even care if they put a home button on the back and on the top. Just as long as they finally allow me to 4 finger swipe and pinch to close just like on my iPad.

5. They only made 5 of the mm, so start lining up after lunch today.

Seriously, every year I read 20-30 posts about how initial quantities of the most sought out phone EVER will be limited and then nerds, geeks and fanboys race to be the first to stand in line behind the Woz who, if you believe other rumours, will have had one in his pocket the whole time.

I guess that pretty much covers it then, you can all go back to reading and speculating that the iPad Mini is actually just a revamped iPad Nano a.k.a. iPod touch.

Then came computers and the venerable IBM keyboards. You know the ones, that were more likely to break the floor than break themselves if they fell off the desk. The clack-clacking (no dainty clicking on those keyboards) was the soundtrack to a generation of programmers.

Of course there were other keyboards but the standard was the off-white, weighed-a-ton IBM keyboard.

I’ve gone through lots of keyboards in my time since I got into computers. Whether I was programming or writing a paper, there was always the keyboard.

Don’t get me wrong, the swype-style keyboard on my smartphone is amazing – when it’s not censoring what I type – and I can’t believe I once thought I had to have a hardware keyboard on my phone to be productive.

But as walked around a local electronics retailer recently I noticed all the laptops on display had horrible keyboards! And for that I blame Apple! If there’s one thing I hold against them it’s how their popularity has driven competitors to copy their look even when the end-result is horrible functionality.

The laptop I type this on has a chiclet style keyboard (actually this was the type of keyboard first seen on cheap personal computers like the original Sinclair and Atari computers). It drives me nuts! It just doesn’t feel right. Of course it allows the keys to be smaller, which is fine if you have small fingers.

But my fingers are not dainty! I can’t hit the ESC key without hitting the F1 (and often F2) keys at the same time. And don’t get me started on that arrow pad that looks like it belongs on a game controller.

I have a Logitech wireless keyboard at home and full-sized keyboard at work. But by the very nature of laptop I’m not often sitting at a desk with it. Why can’t all the keys on my laptop have a decent size, that can comfortably hit with my finger while touch-typing. And not suddenly end-up in a help-page or refreshing the web page that contained my expertly crafted and witty oration on some else’s pathetic commentary.

So I challenge someone out there to defy Apple and make a laptop with keyboard that looks like a keyboard, sounds like a keyboard, and doesn’t jam three keys into the space where only one belongs!

Rant over. Carry-on. Nothing more to see here.

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

iGoogle is the start page for a lot of internet browsers around the globe. It’s the place where many of us go first thing in the morning to see our new e-mails, our agenda, read the news, and access our Google Drive.

Google seems to think the web has evolved to the point where iGoogle is no longer necessary. And they suggest that mobile apps and Chrome extensions will fill the void. Which I can believe on my phone – I’ve never used the mobile iGoogle homepage on my smartphone. But for my desktop and laptop I have not yet found a Chrome app that satisfactorily replaces iGoogle. And ofcourse you can’t take a Chrome Extension with you when you log in from another computer, or even a different browser.

There are a couple other alternatives too: NetVibes and Protopage. We’ll see if Google changes their mind if the drive to either of these two dashboards heats-up.

NetVibes is the more mature and feature rich platform, while Protopage still has some work to do to smooth things out and fill in the gaps.

Both are based on the idea of feed reading; and NetVibes has a beautiful reader mode that is worth it to make the switch from Google Reader. There are a few quirks to get used to:

• you can’t easily share, e-mail, or mark an item while viewing the full item – you have to check the item and then access the action menu at the top left – but you there are quick-access icons for this in both compressed header and tiled mosaic views;
• share options are limited to Facebook and Twitter, whereas Google Reader offered many more options and the ability to define your own; and
• there’s no starring or tagging, which admitted was of limited usefulness in Google Reader since it became subservient to Google+ but it would be nice if NetVibes offered it.

Hopefully NetVibes will get ambitious and challenge not just iGoogle but Google Reader too – the defacto king of feed reading.

Protopage only displays feeds in boxes as separate widgets, but it is possible to combine several feeds into one widget so you can compress it somewhat. But you can’t streamline it into one continuous feed.

The other thing a dashboard needs is active widgets. Not just the weather or the quote of the day; but e-mail, calendar, twitter and more. Widgets that you can interact with and manipulate the contents of.

In this case NetVibes definitely has the lead over Protopage with a well documented API and easy to use widget showcase. Unfortunately since NetVibes (or Protopage) isn’t hosting any of this data (unlike iGoogle that was hosted by the same people who host your GMail, GCalendar, GTasks, etc.) you need to authorize the dashboard widget to access that data. The essential NetVibes widgets seem to have this ability but the third-party widgets don’t – it’s not part of the API! So you can view your Google Calendar if you make it public but you can’t update it.

Hopefully we’ll see NetVibes and Protopage improve their API’s and either internally or with the help of independent third-party developers build widgets that let us re-create our iGoogle dashboard without having to abandon all the other stuff we have with Google – at least until they discontinue it too!

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

I installed ownCloud 4.0.4 in my shared hosting account. It worked on the second try (it would have worked on the first try if I had followed my providers instructions for configuring PHP first). The fact it worked so quickly, without any fiddling around, is a very good sign. I also installed the synchronization client on my laptop.

The basic functionality included in ownCloud is quite impressive. And version 4 brought a lot of great new features. Of coure you can synchronize your files (and if they’re media files you can play them back using the integrate web player). There’s also Contacts, Calendars and a Picture Gallery enabled by default. There’s a lot more you can enable out of the box, including Tasks and External Storage (such as DropBox and Google’s gDrive), and Bookmarks.

For more advanced functionality ownCloud offers an API and an app store for user’s to contribute their own extensions. And there’s quite a few interesting extensions already available.

ownCloud is written in PHP (requires version 5.3) so you can pretty sure it will run just about anywhere – PHP is available on all OSes and every shared host I know includes PHP in their most basic plan. It also requires a database but fortunately it supports SQLite (as well as MySQL and PostgreSQL) so even if your hosting plan doesn’t include a database you’ll be fine for three or four users.

Yes, ownCloud is mutli-user! So you can set it up for your whole family, your friends, or organization.

I was somewhat disappointed by a couple things in ownCloud though. First of all I found some basic things missing or counter-intuitive. And occasionally navigation doesn’t seem to work (ex.: adding a date to a task brings up two different calenders depending on where you click; the button to add a photo to contact are not always visible; etc.). This is polish that will come but makes wonder if basic testing is being skipped.

I’m a bit more concerned but some of the fundamental things which I don’t see. Like the synchronization client doesn’t support proxies! This means you can’t sync from the office (I don’t know any company that doesn’t have a proxy/firewall). Also the advantage of PHP is mitigated by the fact it’s not a long-running process, so every request to ownCloud kicks off a new PHP script. That mean’s it slow(er).

ownCloud is a great idea with some great implementation and a good foundation. I expect a lot can be done by third parties using the hooks built into the software and the API provided. But at the moment I don’t think it can replace my SugarSync account or win anyone over from DropBox, gDrive or iCloud.

I am looking forward to version 5 though. Assuming they not only add the promised features but also polish up the existing ones.

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

The Good Things:

• Shared Core support, the phone will essentially use the same kernel and even drivers as Windows 8 PC/ Surface.
• Support for Multi-Core chips. There will be some much faster phones.
• Support for multiple scaled screen resolution even up to 720P.
• Micro-SD card support for expandable memory
• IE10 is coming to Windows Phone 8, bringing HTML5 to developers and mobile users
• Native Code for native apps and increased applications complexity including games.
• NFC included and integrated in almost all aspects of the UI, including a new Wallet platform for unified payment in stores and online. (everyone is doing this)
• Windows Phone 8 will now include Nokia’s NAVTEQ maps data for native turn by turn offline mapping & directions
• They are finally bringing in Business Tools including BitLocker Encryption, MDM integration (suspect this means they will leverage SCCM)
• Full Mobile Office will be included, not sure what this includes yet.
• New UI, which includes live action tiles that can customized and resized like on the Android.

The Not-So Good Things:

• Current Windows Phone 7 will not be upgradable, not even the latest and greatest Nokia Lumia n900 phone. Existing users will have to buy new phones.
• Existing phone will get a last 7.8 update to enable some of the new UI.
• Microsoft still believes that Windows Phone is a Personal Relative Connected device. It might have business connectivity and security, but this is still a personal phone: IT Consumerisation.

The new Windows Phone 8 is a big step forward for Microsoft which brings them up to date with what Android and Apple are doing. And reaffirms the general industry move towards IT Consumerisation in the Mobile space. The business additions are very good. Most Microsoft Shop we need to look at this new platform very seriously as I stated with the Surface announcement as they are probably already implementing all the server and management tools to manage these new phones at a very low-cost and effort.

Both noted Windows Watchers (bloggers) Mary Jo Foley (ZD|Net ) and Paul Thurrot (quoted and linked below) have excellent pieces on the new platform already.

More on Built for Business from Paul Thurrot WinSuperSite

Built for business

One of the legitimate knocks against Windows Phone 7.x is that the consumer-focused platform wasn’t suitable for certain businesses because it lacked some key technologies such as device and storage card encryption. These arguments are no longer valid in Windows Phone 8.

Windows Phone 8 provides always-on device encryption, which like the similar feature in Windows RT is based on the mature BitLocker encryption technologies from Windows 8. This encryption works with both device and storage card storage, is hardware accelerated, and is on by default.

Windows Phone 8 also supports Secure Boot, just like Windows 8. Secure Boot is technically a feature of the UEFI firmware type and it provides always-on protection against malware, including before the OS is loaded at boot time.

Windows Phone 8 will include new Office 2013-based Office apps.

Windows Phone 8 will include device manageability capabilities that exceed what’s possible with just Exchange ActiveSync (EAS). I assume and expect that this will be the same management functionality that Microsoft is building for Windows RT.

And it will support side-loading of line of business (LOB) apps, meaning that enterprises will be able to deploy apps to Windows Phone securely, just as they can now for iOS and Android. (Microsoft will build support for this into its Windows Intune PC and device management service.)

Full Specs & Video…
MS Surface Video

1. 2 Models: 1 ARM model called RT and a Pro model with an Intel chip (no announcement of i5, i3 or other.
2. Full USB for both model, HDMI out (full spec sheet included)
3. The tablet is designed with a built on case that has a kickstand.
4. Both models still have fans
5. No network ports, they will be wifi only and need to be provisioned like phones rather than PC`s. Unless they also develop some type of serial cart to provision many.
6. It will have a stylus
7. The magnetic cover case is also made by Microsoft and has a built in keyboard AND trackpad. It is stunning. (see below)
8. All flash memory, 32GB(RT) to 128(PRO)

Another important note is that Microsoft is likely to leap ahead of Android and RIM with this device not to mention decimate the OEM`s trying to release tablets that are more like ultrabooks without a keyboard.
The decision to in-source the Surface is a strong move that means Microsoft is serious about taking the iPad head on. For the first time in a while I honestly feel like I have to get a review unit as soon as possible and have a good chat with some friends in Redmond about their enterprise angle for this thing, because we all know that this is the market they are really trying service here.

Specs from Microsoft and Engadget

Surface for Windows RT tablet

• Processor: NVIDIA Tegra-based ARM chip
• Weight: 676 grams
• Thickness: 9.3 millimeters
• Display: 10.6-inch ClearType HD capactive touchpanel
• Battery: 31.5Wh
• I/O: microSD, USB 2.0, Micro HD Video, 2×2 MIMO antennae
• Software: Windows RT + Office Home & Student 2013 RT
• Accessories: Touch Cover, Type Cover, VaporMg Case & Stand
• Capacity: 32GB / 64GB
• Availability: “Around” the Windows 8 launch (fall 2012)
• Pricing: To be determined

Surface for Windows 8 Pro tablet

• Processor: Intel Core i5 (Ivy Bridge)
• Weight: 903 grams
• Thickness: 13.5 millimeters
• Display: 10.6-inch ClearType Full HD (1080p) capactive touchpanel
• Battery: 42Wh
• I/O: microSDXC, USB 3.0, Mini DisplayPort, 2×2 MIMO antennae
• Software: Windows 8 Pro
• Accessories: Touch Cover, Type Cover, VaporMg Case & Stand, Pen with Palm Block
• Capacity: 64GB / 128GB
• Availability: “Three months after” the Windows 8 launch this fall
• Pricing: To be determined

We’d like to thank our DadCast and site sponsors SplitReason once again for their continued support. Check out this page or their site by clicking above for more awesome Tees, hats, caps and mugs.

Google now owns Quick Office

BlackBerry owns DataViz: Docs to Go

Apple writes its own: Pages, Numbers and Keynote

And MS is holding out for Windows 8 tablet for releasing Office 15 in November

What we have where is a Mexican Productivity Standoff…

via The Verge

The Diet Coda application seems to have been tailored [..] for quick editing on the fly. The application gives you a frictionless way to get into your Web content and start making changes without having to jump through a lot of hoops. It’s especially effective for users who are working with a lot of static HTML content.

via Ars Technica

Ars Technica has put in a fantastic review of Diet Coda, the iPad version of Panic Software’s award-winning Coda development suite. I through out my copy of Dreamweaver a few years back and opted for developing in Coda for the Mac alone. It’s been an awesome experience and I’m glad to have made the switch. Now Diet Coda allows me to quickly access some of my sites and make important critical updates when I know I’m going to be me miles away from my MacBook. It’s also going to be my only way to get access to my sites and make edit when I’m at work, a PC only zone.

You can get Diet Coda from the iTunes App Store here and you can find out more about Diet Coda on the Panic site here

Juice mobile claims:

“RIM’s death may be exaggerated and Android is taking a bite out of Apple.”

For now. The iPhone is the #1 selling phone, but RIM maintains 50% of Canadian market share.

As for the source of the research: Neil Sweeney, President and CEO of Juice, stated their reach covers

“hundreds of applications and publishers and hundreds of millions of impressions monthly.”

Even with all the press about RIM cutting 2000 jobs and the Chief Legal Officer retiring, it would appear that Canucks are still busy thumbing around on the last device to still have a keyboard despite the company still not being able to recover from a 75% stock price drop in the past year.

via Mobile Syrup

So here, in all its glory – but without any cool infographics – is the conclusion. Enjoy!

To summarize what I’ve discussed over the past couple weeks I’ve put together the table below. Remember that on line portfolios are offered by portal sites, news outlet‘s web sites, financial web sites, and your broker‘s web site. There are different styles of portfolios: Full portfolios let you track holdings and even transactions; whereas Watchlists only let you list a stock. Most of these sites contain ads, but some are less intrusive and others are more.

The rating scale is out of 10 and is highly subjective and compounded by the fact it entirely my opinion, not anyone else’s or an average of several people’s. Data is an evaluation of the completeness of the data; Use is an evaluation of the ease of use; UI is a first impression of the look & feel of the web site; and Total is the sum of the previous parts, out of 30.

You can also see this table in all it’s Google DocsDrive glory!

What’s clear from the table is that Google Finance, the Financial Times, and Market Watch have the best on-line portfolio managers. So if you’re going to spend the time to set one up and maintain it, then one of those three would be your best bet.

Part 1 – Introduction
Part 2 – Calculating Returns and The Portals
Part 3 – News Outlets
Part 4 – Financial Services and Brokerages
Part 5 – Comparison Table and Conclusion

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

Disclaimer The material in this article does not constitute advice and you should not rely on any material in this article to make any decision or take any action.

So far I’m pretty impressed, Flipboard certainly looks beautiful and makes viewing media laden tweets a joy – although tweets who’s media host is not integrated are still relegated to second place. And those tweets that link to an article an get a very fancy look with media from the article.

Flipboard home screen with G&M and Make

My two main sources of reading though are Google Reader and Twitter. For both of those Flipboard is a mixed result. Flipboard works best when there’s media to display, it makes the article look so much cooler. I’ve added The Globe and Mail, The Economist, and Make Magazine, which are quite nice to flip through – but I have to admit I had trouble navigating around the app to find stuff.

If you want to give Flipboard a try on your Android phone, either buy yourself a Samsung Galaxy S III or head-on over to XDA Developers to download the APK and sideload it yourself.

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

The first one to have really adopted the platform is our very own friend of the DadCast: André Nantel who was recently vacationing in the Caribbean paradise of St-Marten when he ran into some problems with a leaky kayak on a casual afternoon paddle. Luckily nothing terrible happened, but his accounts of the event where posted on Google Plus and are actually very interesting to read. The most interesting thing is that André did not choose to post about it on his on site Digital Apoptosis, his photo blog, or even through series of long-winded tweets. In fact over the past year, André has even been posting his photography on Google Plus forsaking both Flickr and his own site (except for the real awesome stuff). Among all of my Google Circles, he has been the most prolific, even beating out our very own Burg. Not only does he post regularly but he also posts some really good stuff.

The other person is TWiT regular, Mike Elgan, a technology writer (PC World, Mac World, Cult of Mac…) has pretty much given up Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and a whole bunch of other stuff in order to concentrate solely on posting to Google Plus. He actually has a very interesting workflow on how he pulls it all together which is explained on G+ Goto Gal.

So what Ben, André and Mike have all done is quite interesting in many regards. André is in over 12,000 circles and Mike’s reach exceeds 1.1 million, they both benefit from some serious eyeballs on their content and without the hassle of having to load analytics tools or making sure they have adequate server caching or plug-ins installed to meet that demand. Their site admin tasks are practically non-existent, reduce merely to viewing all the +1 that they receive. So when you look at it that way, why not?

However the downside is also pretty big. It all depends on how much you trust Google with all of your stuff and how much you trust them with your privacy. What are the chances that your private family circle items get reshared as public or spread like wildfire throughout your extended circles. Sure you can practice the old “if it’s that private, why is it even online” but if you subscribe to that train of thought you don’t really trust Google either so that debate is moot.

Some will argue the point of content lock-in or the ability to get your stuff out if you have a sudden change of heart or Google decides to pull the plug on yet another one of its social experiments. Anyone remember Buzz or even Wave? And then there is the army of us who believe that all of our content should always be stored safely in text format in at least 9 various locations: home, work, USB, dropbox, webserver, iCloud, Slydrive, Google Drive, Carbonite. And this is where it gets pretty complicated, Google’s track record for keeping your stuff backed up has actually been pretty good and let’s not forget about their whole Data Liberation project which actually makes it pretty easy to take your ball and go home. It won’t erase the echoes of your content, but it will allow you to keep what is rightfully yours and set up shop elsewhere.

Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier to move data in and out.

So the biggest issue that most folks have had is just how much they are willing to hold Google to the whole “Do No Evil” thing. Personally, I can live with some Google stuff and will even accept ads on those channels too but when it comes to my writing on technology, my photography, my podcasting, and even the other stuff I put on JohnnyLeCanuck.com, I take great pride in my ability to run my own server and host my own site on my own domain. It’s part of my Geek Cred and more important to me is that it’s still fun to do. So as much as I admire these three crazy ones, 2FatDads isn’t going anywhere and we will probably continue to be in only 6 folks circles. BTW you can always +1 us over here.

Oops I almost forgot about the title: So what does this mean for Blogger? I guess I’ll have to let our very own @Schultzter answer this one.

via Johnny LeCanuck

What’s most interesting though is in other news about Google there’s plenty of stuff besides the lawsuit. But the Oracle news is all lawsuit all the time!

So whether they won or lost I don’t think Google really cares, they’ve already moved on! Oracle on the otherhand, doesn’t seem to have anything else to talk about.

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

Some key updates to these terms include:

[..]
*Clarification of the information we collect from you and how we use it
*Your rights to access, modify or have your data removed from our servers
*Confirmation of your rights to the content you create and submit to the service

I got an email from Path informing me of the changes to the Privacy Policy. I admit that after the heat they took in the past over the contact retention issues, I am glad to see they are taking the right steps to appease their users. And more impressive is that they are going it at a time where there is still a small but very loud amount of angry Instagram users looking for a new home.

I really like Path, it has a nice timeline flow to it and it’s simply beautiful. I also went into path with the intent of only connecting with real friends. Whether they be online or MeatSpace, I am only connecting to peeps I trust. So if you’re getting a little tired of the FarceBook or are really looking for another community to join post in the InstaBillion-Era, give it a try and tell us how you like it.

Get the Path for Apple iPhone or Android

May the Fourth Be With You

T-Shirt of the Week: Sci Fi Reference @SplitReason

We’d like to thank our DadCast and site sponsors SplitReason once again for their continued support. Check out this page or their site by clicking above for more awesome Tees, hats, caps and mugs.

Financial Services

These are companies that are actually in the money business, they provide a portfolio manager as a courtesy or add-on to their primary business.

Barchart

Like the name implies this company specializes in charting the underlying financial information; and there’s a lot of impressive stuff you can do with their charts! And there’s even more technical information for those who invest by the numbers. There’s not much fundamental information though, like dividends and yields are missing. The site also has a very 1990′s feel to it – except for the charts, although beautiful they don’t quite fit into the surrounding site.

Morningstar

Quote on Morningstar

This is another name everyone who’s ever looked for the slightest financial information has run across, they are everywhere. And they’ve very generously made a lot of their information available on their web site with very nice quotes, charts, and other detailed financial and historical information. For the amateur the amount of information can be overwhelming, but you get a sense of what the professionals deal with.

And since Morningstar makes their money selling subscriptions to the pros the advertising on the site is minimal and most of the space is given to data and charts.

Quote on TMX Money

TMX Money

Let me get this off my chest: Why does the Toronto Stock Exchange – the primary source – ship us off to another company when we want to lookup TSE stock quotes?! Admittedly they’ve outsourced to Quotemedia, who turn numbers in works of art, but it still bothers me. The actual functionality is basic but the data is all there, amidst a fair bit of advertising though.

Brokerages

This is where the transactions really happen, so they’re listed here as a point of comparison since we’ve already established that you wouldn’t leave your banking homepage open on your computer all day long. A big difference with these portfolios is that you’re a paying customer, so there’s no advertising (apart from the occasional self-promotion) and you often get some premium features you’d have to pay for elsewhere.

Bank of Montreal Investorline

The BMO Investorline site provides clear but basic asset tracking information and has recently added some nice graphing features to track trends and mark dividend payments. The site is easy to use and the recent GUI upgrades provide a brighter look and feel . That said, some of the tabs still have almost a beta look to them and one can only hope they are not quite finished with their current overhaul.

In the gallery, if you look closely at the chart screen shots of BMO Investorline and the Financial Times we can see the look almost identical, so either they’re using the same provider or same underlying tools to generate the charts. Either way, Investorline has not make their portfolios as nice as the Financial Times has.

Qtrade

They’ve received numerous, well-deserved, accolades for customer service and innovation. The web site works very well and the portfolio has a comprehensive set of views. The quotes and charts are standard fare but since you’re a paying customer you do get more information than aforementioned free portfolios.

Quote on RBC Royal Bank Direct Investing

RBC Royal Bank Direct Investing

RBC’s on-line portfolio is probably one of the oldest in existence – or at least it feels that way. The on-line banking web site is making great strides towards the 21st century but the brokerage still seems stuck in the 90′s. Once you’re there though, and you’ve forgiven them for not looking like an Apple or Google web site, you’ll find plenty of information from Thomson Reuters that is well laid-out and accessible.

So what we’ve seen here is the portfolio managers from the brokers and from the companies supplying the financial data are not much better (or worse for that matter) than any one else’s. There’s no real advantage to using your broker’s portfolio and there’s the big disadvantage of leaving the site open and exposed for an extended period of time.

In the final installment I’ll summarize all my reviews in a categorized table and leave you with my final conclusions.

Part 1 – Introduction
Part 2 – Calculating Returns and The Portals
Part 3 – News Outlets
Part 4 – Financial Services and Brokerages
Part 5 – Comparison Table and Conclusion

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

Disclaimer The material in this article does not constitute advice and you should not rely on any material in this article to make any decision or take any action.

When the district sales managers of a luxury retailer logged into their corporate email accounts on shiny, new iPads for the first time, at the same time, cheers went up.

But something else went down: the Lotus Notes server.

Imagine all those iPads simultaneously downloading the full dump of Lotus Notes. Don’t point the finger at IT for this technical gridlock, not this time. The IT department didn’t even know about the iPad rollout until it was too late, and still had to deal with the fallout.

They hooked up to Lotus Notes & the IT Department didn’t even know it was being rolled out. REALLY?

If your IT department doesn’t even know that some rogue consultants had manage to either set up the Notes Traveler on their infrastructure or hook up a mobile device management(MDM) service like Good Technologies to their Domino servers then the whole team should be fired. You can’t blame Apple or iPad for creating a device that folks actually want to use, but you can put the blame on very bad decision-making and an IT department that appears to have its head in the sand rather than acknowledge that it’s customer aren’t very happy with the status quo.

The rest of this article is actually pretty good at explaining how Apple works with Big IT CO’s to help them prepare and plan for seamless integration. Apple alone has led the consumer market in provide BlackBerry-like integration and administration of their devices through MDM partners like AirWatch and Mobile Iron. And how there are actually plenty of good resources out there like Gartner and Forrester to help you figure out what the best practices are. The truth is that everyone from Dell to MacAffee have been throwing their hat into the MDM ring to try to get a piece on the iPad action.

I guess what really bugged me about this piece was that the author managed to find the most back water company running Notes and who’s IT department is so completely incompetent that they don’t realize everyone is walking around with iPads and that maybe some of them have found a way to get their email on it. Either that or the author has fabricated the entire scenario where Lotus Notes has a magical MS Exchange like service that users can turn on without any kind of infrastructure changes or firewall mods by at least ONE PERSON in IT.

via iPad in the enterprise: IT must stay ahead of the curve.

All of the Dads are back in the studios this week to talk about their recent movie night outing to see Wrath or the Titans, revisit the state of the student protests in Montreal due to proposed increase of the tuition fees. They also review the State of the BlackBerry as sent in by listener @FabHoule, Steph brings up the FlashBack Mac Trojan while Francois tackles the Instagram buyout by Facebook, Ben them jumps in and finally gives his two cents on Social Media before the while discussion tumbles down rathole full of comic book movies, b-class superheroes and Montreal Expos baseball nostalgia.

Once again we’d like to thank our sponsors Splitreason for their awesome t-shirts and ByteBuyers. Use Promo Code 2FatDads when visiting ByteBuyers.com and get an extra 5% on your next transaction.

The trouble is that the Pages file was stripped of its password. What?

So being wired the way I am, I proceed to run some scenarios to figure out what is broken and where.

Scenario 1: Create a new password protected file, wait for Carbonite to back it up and attempt to open it via the iPhone app.

Result: Fail – File opens, password stripped out

Scenario 2: Take the same password protected file and upload it to iCloud.

Option A: make a copy in Pages for iOS.

Result A: Pass – File opens, password intact

Option B: open the orignal file as Pages for iOS.

Result B: Pass - File opens, password intact

Scenario 3: Open file on PC/Mac and access via Carbonite web site via web browser.

Result: Fail – File opens without prompting for password

This begs the question, why is the password stripped out? Am I the only one to find this troubling? Maybe there’s a gap between my expectations and what I bought.

Expectation 1: I can recover all my stuff in the event that a tornado picks up my house and sends it to Oz. This is obviously not met, as my file content is the same, but now I somehow have to remember what I protected, and how.

Expectation #2: Any sensitive document I have is still encrypted even if it is accessible to someone who hacked my carbonite account. What good is all that “upload it encrypted”, if the payload is no longer encrypted at the file level. I would have expected to have access to a mirror image of my filesystem, that can be recovered “as-is”, so that I only have to worry about buying a new Mac, not trying to figure out what was encrypted, and whatever other property the file had pre-upload.

In case there is any confusion, I’m less than thrilled.

UPDATE: May 1, 2012

OK so now I’m thrilled again.

I decided to contact Carbonite today to get some answers (it was nagging at me, as I pick my vendors carefully). Their Customer Support acted promptly and got me chatting with their support team. I shared my desktop with them, I went on to demonstrate the steps that I blogged about above. The password was prompted every time. I went on to reproduce the test steps again (and again), new folder, new files, new passwords. Now I can’t get it to not prompt for the password.

So to be clear, I can now download from the web (to my Mac and PC) and from my iDevices and always get the password challenge. So my faith is restored in my backup strategy.

I kind of feel like that guy who goes to the to the garage, and the car doesn’t make the noise anymore. Kudos to Carbonite for being so responsive.

… I still want to know what the deal was April 30th,

News papers and syndicates that deliver the news; in particular the outlets that have a business focus we expect to have a robust portfolio. We all typically have a news outlet we go to first for our news, and we might even log-in so we can leave comments. Most likely the newspaper offers an on-line portfolio.

Some of these news outlets offer premium features to paying subscribes, or even have entirely separate offerings for professionals. This review however is focused only on what’s available to the general public as a free service. For the average individual, who just wants to keep tabs more frequently than monthly or quarterly statements, the fees to access the premium services are not justified.

Bloomberg

Bloomberg is an American news outlet with a business focus. Their portfolio, quotes and charts are clean and efficient. I especially like the use of charts directly in the portfolio. Overall though the portfolio is fairly basic and not very innovative.

It should be noted that Bloomberg is one of the primary providers of news and data for professional advisors and portfolio managers. But what I’m looking at here is what is available to the general public, without a subscription.

Canadian Business

This is more of a business magazine than a daily newspaper outlet and the appearance of the web sites reflects it. They’ve outsourced their portfolio, quotes, and charts to Barchart and unfortunately it shows – everything related to stocks seems to happen in its own little box. There’s some nice little fly-overs in their portfolio but you don’t get as much information as other sites.

Financial Post

They have a very impressive Watchlist feature that scrolls a ticker across top of the web site, and you can click on a symbol to get more information or go to a full blown quote & chart page. Although in the actual portfolio manager, the quotes, and charts are bare-bones and visually un-appealing. This a web site that makes me think of the early days of the web when Flash ads were all over the page!

Financial Times

This site has everything – including a pink background. And does it really well. My initial impression of the web site was not very good; but in terms of data and functionality this gets an A+. With the added bonus that it really is international – not just North American. There’s a lot of information provided on the first page for each stock, and charts open over the page (very web 2.0 – even though they preserve the Netscape-look of the site while doing it).

Globe and Mail Investor

The quintessential Canadian business news web site. Their stock and fund filters are the foundation used by many other organizations. They recently revamped their on-line portfolio and it looks much slicker, but it no longer has all the detailed functionality of the old one. You can’t track your exact position but, for stocks at least, you can track how many shares you own. The quotes and charts pages are split up along traditional lines, and their functionality is limited but at least all the Canadian data is there.

There are premium features available to Globe Plus and Globe Investor GOLD subscribers but these were not reviewed here.

Market Watch (Dow Jones)

Here is a very innovative portfolio manager, from the way it is laid-out to the way it works (it’s the only one that allows you to tag a stock and filter your stocks by tag). You can’t track all your transactions, but you can track your positions. The quotes for Canadian stocks are complete, and the charts are from Big Charts (another Dow Jones company so it’s not really out-sourced) so they’re very well done.

Note that Dow Jones is another important service relied upon by many professional investors and portfolio managers.

Of all the news outlets the best of the bunch are definitely the Financial Times and Market Watch. Unfortunately the Canadian ones in the bunch aren’t stepping up.

In the next installment I’ll look at what financial services companies offer the public and what customers of brokerages get.

<

p>Part 1 – Introduction<br/>
Part 2 – Calculating Returns and The Portals<br/>
Part 3 – News Outlets<br/>
Part 4 – Financial Services and Brokerages<br/>
Part 5 – Comparison Table and Conclusion</p>

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

Disclaimer The material in this article does not constitute advice and you should not rely on any material in this article to make any decision or take any action.

Calculating Your Returns

There’s a lot of ways to calculate your returns, but unfortunately all these web sites use the simplest of methods: Total Return. Basically, they compare the ratio of your gains (or losses) to your costs without taking time into account. This is fine if you bought all your investments in one shot (at least on the same day) and now you’re going to sit back and watch them.

Pass the popcorn!

In reality you want to know your annualized return. Which is a fancy way to say you want to your average annual return. Except it’s not as easy as dividing the Total Return by the number of years you’re invested (that would be the simple or arithmetic average – and it’s the wrong way to annualize your returns). A better way would be to calculate your geometric average or compound return.

But there are even better ways: Money-Weighted or Internal Rate of Return, Time-Weighted or Linked Internal Rate of Return, Modified Dietz Rate of Return, or the Daily Valuation Method. The best would be the Daily Valuation Method, but unless you have a super-computer you won’t be calculating this one.

Of all these probably the best compromise between efficiency and accuracy is the Modified Dietz Method (also known as Approximate Time-Weighted Rate of Return). Once you’ve calculated that for each period (monthly, quarterly, or annually) you can link it together geometrically to see your annualized return over the years.

Once you know your annualized rate of return you can properly compare your investments and see which ones really are doing well, and which ones just sound good.

For more details on the calculations, PWL Capital has a great white paper on on How to Calculate your Portfolio’s Rate of Return.

Now hopefully one of these web sites, at least the ones that track dividends, take all that information to calculate a proper annualized rate of return.

The Portals

These are the big internet sites where a lot of us start our day. They bring a lot together, like news and weather, functionality like web searches, e-mail and calendars, and more. Adding a portfolio to that isn’t a stretch but since it’s not their focus we might not expect anything exciting from them, but we hope that with everything else going there’s going to be some interesting integration – like easy searches, e-mail alerts, and social sharing.

Google

They nailed the user experience with a clean and simple design that puts more data onto one page than any other site, and there’s even a gadget for my iGoogle home page and functions for my Google DocsDrive Spreadsheets. The charts are perfection: I could configure my own default settings and with one click I could expand the chart to the full width of my screen. But they blew it on data since dividend information for Canadian stocks (ETF’s in particular) is sometimes missing, in-complete, or just plain wrong!

MSN

They have one of the nicest portfolios – it’s actually a Silverlight app so it better be slick! But the rest is held together with duct tape and bubble gum. And basic information for Canadian stocks – even blue chip stocks – is frequently missing. The initially beautiful web site falls apart just below surface.

Yahoo

This is what you’d expect from a web-base portfolio. It looks nice, but the functionality is pretty basic and regrettably dividend information is often missing for Canadian stocks and the news is U.S. focused. Since Yahoo has fallen on hard times they’re probably not putting a lot of effort into something you can get everywhere else, so unfortunately I have to recommend you go somewhere else!

In the next installment I’ll take a look at what the news outlets have to offer. While some are astounding there are a few stinkers in the bunch!

Part 1 – Introduction
Part 2 – Calculating Returns and The Portals
Part 3 – News Outlets
Part 4 – Financial Services and Brokerages
Part 5 – Comparison Table and Conclusion

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

Disclaimer The material in this article does not constitute advice and you should not rely on any material in this article to make any decision or take any action.

Google reserves the right to “use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute” content uploaded to their services.

I am no longer comfortable with this arrangement.

DO NO EVIL MY A$$!

via Ars Technica.

But who invented the spork? There’s no entry at the Culinary Hall of Fame. And what about all those other kitchen utensils that make great meals possible? The spatula and the spaghetti serving spoon, their inventors long forgotten. Who differentiated the butter knife from the bread knife?

We need a Kitchen and Culinary Utensil Hall of Fame! And the 2 Fat Dads are the calling the world out on this one, to get behind the movement remember those who make our movements memorable!

10 Hours is a Long Time

The biggest thing is that most folks that are ditching the notebook for the iPad have also been able to switch the way they tackle their everyday computing use. Andy Ihnatko and Shawn Blanc are both writers. As a Mobility Specialist in IT, I spend most of my time in and out of documentation, analysis and meetings that the iPad with a 10 hour battery life makes more sense than a heavy laptop with a painstakingly long boot ups sequence or a tendency to hang on sleep or hibernation. Apart from a few tasks that must be completed every month on a corporate computer (sounds like tree blood), I just don’t need to carry the laptop with me.

There’s An App For That

In fact, many of the modern Corporate IT departments have been quite responsive to their employee’s request for better remote access solutions. It’s not uncommon to hear about IT giving their users remote desktop or VDI access to corporate tools rather than handing out more laptops with tokens. I am even starting to see more and more companies producing web apps rather deploying full systems, now if Netweaver and Websphere could pick up their game and embrace Web Standards and HTML5 rather than plodding down the proprietary line any further. Even the big CMS systems and ERP systems are not ony making their product more browser friendly but many of them are even adopting HTML and web standards for their staple IE only tools. Even Microsoft is making a big play with Sharepoint by making the MySite available to iPad Users as a corporate DropBox alternative, not to mention that 2010 is meant to be mobile-ready, its not exactly Safari ready yet but it is getting better and better all the time. There are even a slew of SysAdmins and IT Professionals that have made the iPad as much a part of their uniform as the pocket protector, taped horn rims and solar-powered calculator watch.

The Legacy of Flash

The biggest issue of course is what do all these big companies do with the all of the Flash and Silverlight content they invested so heavily into a few year back. In many of the cases I have seen, all of this rich content dates itself really quickly or was poorly and hastily coded in the first place. What was good for the mouse like rollovers and pop ups simply do not translate to touch interfaces. In so many cases, even my old stuff, a rollover was used to explain something that could not be perceived or interpreted by the user interface. Producing high quality and succesful applications, whether they be native or web-based has become more and more complex usually involving designers, UI experts, integrators and developers. Where you could get away with a very simple design and let the developers hack and slice it up the way they wanted, in today’s world of retina display and touch interface, you really need to make your navigation simple and make sure that all interactions are intuitive. Unfortunately, this is where all traditional corporate dashboards and reporting tools fail. Rather than standardise and common words, symbols, actions, there is always a tendency to inject the corporate buzz speak, use variation of the logo or mascot to depict actions and then assume that everyone who uses the app will understand the business logic as intimately as the development team who put the app together. There is not much you can do about the business logic since most users will pick up on this with experience, but I still hold true to my old web dev mantra:

If you need an instruction manual to use a web site, the development team >has failed.

You Just Need to Work on That Flare

Once I got my workflows in order and manage to settle into the apps that I felt truly made me more productive, there was still one thing that held me back from using the iPad to it’s fullest. As great and powerful and beautiful as the iPad is it simply is not that easy to carry around sans-étui, naked. That 10 inch slab of gorrila glass might be strong, but it also attracts a lot on unwanted attention from keys, pens and whatever else you might throw into your courier bag, of course that is nothing compared to the damage an slate tile can do it from a 4 four foot fall. When I bought the first gen iPad, I think I spent more time debating the case than I did on whether I should get the 32GB or 64GB model (16 was never an option, too many photos and music). In the end I settled on the original Apple case because it was so simple and practical in function, although I really liked the DodoCase, the shipping fees to the Great White North where a little to steep.

When we started testing the iPad 2, we were handed a couple of demo units without cases or even smart covers and to be quite honest this made testing very difficult, instead of merely grabbing the tablet and going, we were consistently looking around for a safe way of carrying it around. We finally got a hold of some original Zagg Folio cases with keyboard for a pilot and suddenly the use cases and business scenarios starting multiplying themselves. I started to see the iPad as a very powerful V12 engine that in itself is very cool, but if you pop it into a Corvette or Suburban XL you will have truly different experiences, and it’s very subjective to say which is the best one. If you stuff an iPad into a Otterbox, you suddenly have a very robust field computer with many sensors, a camara, sound recorder and various input methods. However placing the iPad on an inCase Origami workstation along with the Apple Bluetooth keyboard provides a writer with a mobile and lightweight place to threw down his thoughts. The number of various cases, sleeves, stands, docks and holders are almost as great as the number of devices you can either plug into the 30 pin port or the headphone jack. From Square credit readers, photo card adapters to microphones, amp jacks and remote control devices, the iPad is quickly becoming the beige box PC that we you would see stuffed under desks or in studios, restaurants, lofts and garages in the early to mid nineties. The base computing platform is the same but the application use is what makes these tablets so flexible and adaptable. The comparison has been made so many times, and probably much better than this:

The iPad is very much a slate, a sheet of paper and canvas and what you do >with it is simply up to your creativity.

We just happen to be very lucky to live in a time where sharing one’s creativity does not require unlimited resources or the invention of devices like the Gutenberg press and broadcast radio and television networks. Producing quality enjoyable content can easily be done by the likes of you and me on relatively inexpensive devices like iPads.

So Do You?

Getting back to the original point of this post: Should we all be ditching our laptops and joining the tablet revolution? Absolutely not, just in the same way you should not be throwing out your drill-driver simply because you also own a series of Phillips, Robertson and flat-head screwdrivers that fit in your pockets. You need to equip yourself with the best set of tools, if that means a serious laptop that never really leaves your desk to which you add an iPad for your more mobile and single focussed task, then that is the tool set you require. A colleague recently mentioned that when you go to the garage, you don’t ask the guy to use a torque wrench, you ask him to change your oil. You need to start thinking of your computing needs in the same way. What do I need to do today: Produce and presentation and finish up my documentation. I am pretty sure that you never think:

I need to use this piece of clip art and the letter Q more often…

So think about the tasks you need to perform to do your job and think about whether the tools you have aid or impede your ability to complete those tasks. If you find yourself making all kinds of excuses not to lug around your laptop, then maybe you need to think about whether the iPad magically or sensibly makes those tasks easier to strike off your list. It’s taken almost a year, but I know what my answer is and I don’t know if it’s the same answer I will be giving 2 years from now, but at the price of the iPad, I am willing to give it a shot. Are you?

Introduction

Probably one of the best reasons to have your investments in a web-based portfolio manager is to avoid having to login – and stay logged in – to your brokerage whenever you want to see how things are going. And if your brokerage is also your bank and credit card issuer then it’s really not something you want to leave open on your computer all day!

Besides, most of us automatically log in in to a portal (Google, MSN, or Yahoo) or news site (Globe & Mail, National Post, etc.) anyways so we may as well take advantage of their portfolio managers at the same time.

One thing is certain, there’s a lot of differences amongst all the portfolio managers out there on the web! Not only do they look different, but they offer different functionality – some focus on quotes, some on charts, and some on analysis – and varying amounts of information (and completeness of the information).

The Players

I’ve compared portfolio managers from the portal sites: Google, MSN, and Yahoo; the news sites: Bloomberg, Canadian Business, Financial Post, Financial Times, Globe and Mail Investor, and MarketWatch; financial services: Barchart, Morningstar, and TMX Money; brokerages: Bank of Montreal Investorline, Qtrade, and Royal Bank of Canada Direct Investing.

You can see screen shots of a sample portfolio, quote, and chart from each one in the gallery.

My Methodology

I’ve tabulated a lot of the characteristics of each web site. But of course there’s more to it then you can get from reading down a column and across a few rows. There were three things I really focused on

1. the user experience: if I felt like I was back in 1995 and using Netscape Navigator rather than a modern browser on a modern web site then the portfolio manager got a thumbs down!
2. completeness of the data, especially dividends: investing for dividends is one of my primary methods and the more a web site tells me about the dividends the happier I am!
3. charts: I like my charts to cover 3 to 5 years, show Bollinger Bands, and dividend payments – AND I want all that in as few clicks as possible!

Everyone looks for something different, of course news, analyst opinions, financials tables, and more are all available to varying degrees.

I would also like to see a portfolio manager that goes beyond the generic performance calculations and puts something together not only for my portfolio but that also takes the dividends my investments generate into account. It’s easy to calculate total return and other metrics based on your cost and the current market value. It’s harder to take cash flows and time into account but I’d really like to see a web site that did that.

One thing I don’t like to see is a lot of advertising. I realise it’s inevitable these days but some web sites do a better job of integrating the ads and on others it is far to distracting to make the web site usable.

There’s a few I specifically didn’t compare:

• Vuru.co since they couldn’t provide analysis for bank stocks (good for dividends) or stocks younger than five years (conversions from Income Trusts);
• Quotestreamer since it’s a paid subscription and way beyond a simple portfolio manager;
• Globe Investor GOLD since it’s another expensive subscription service;
• Mint because they only work with linked accounts (I thought I could create a manual account but apparently no longer); or
• Yodlee since their portfolio manager is barely ready for alpha let a lone general use!

And I’m sure there others out there too that I missed, and I’d be happy to hear about them in the comments.

In the next installment I’ll look at the what the portals have to offer.

Part 1 – Introduction
Part 2 – Calculating Returns and The Portals
Part 3 – News Outlets
Part 4 – Financial Services and Brokerages
Part 5 – Comparison Table and Conclusion

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

Disclaimer The material in this article does not constitute advice and you should not rely on any material in this article to make any decision or take any action.

Now that Path has added that feature to Android, and because quite a few friends switched to Path after abandoning Instagram, I have given it another look.

The coolest feature of their lenses is they are applied while you are taking the picture! Not afterwards, so you can see live how the shot will look. You can always change the lens afterwards too.

Unfortunately Path doesn’t have all the editing features I’ve gotten used to now in Aviary – things like cropping the photo, rebalancing the colours, adding some mark-up, and more. And their lenses do not include the funky borders or other embellishments that Aviary (and Instagram) added to accentuate the effect.

So the question is, do I use Path as a Twitter client? Do I abandon Twitter (and it’s ecosystem) and live entirely on Path? Or is Path just not happening for me?

I don’t really have any compelling reason to be on Twitter over any other social network – I’m following a couple dozen people and the ones I interact most with I also see in-person or are on Path too. But my current workflow (snap a photo, edit & embellish with Aviary, and post to Twitter with hosting on TwitPic) works really well. Photos posted to Path and shared on Twitter are only visible if the viewer clicks through the tweet to Path (photos shared on Tumblr show-up on Tumblr but you have click through to Path to see the comment) – TwitPic photos show-up in the tweet.

For now at least, stay tuned to Twitter rather than Path.

Source: Path’s blog

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

Rule #1: Work with gravity – not against it!

It might seem like a good idea to start in the basement, where you can make a mess without worrying about cleaning-up right away, but it’s much easier to line-up your holes when letting a five-foot drill extension hang downwards than when trying to hold it upright above your head!

Tools and materials

Rigid 2 1/2 inch hole saw

You’re going to need some tools of course, here’s what’s essential:

• Drill, good and powerful, with a 1/2-inch chuck if possible
• 4-foot drill extension, especially if there are fire-breaks in your walls
• 2 1/2-inch hole saw, a solid one – not one of those multi-size ones
• Drill bits, for what ever material you’re going to hang the motor unit on
• Hack saw
• Workbench
• Mitre box
• Quick clamp
• Screw driver(s), depending on what kind of screws you’re using
• Tape measure
• Drywall saw
• Wire cutters
• Wire strippers
• Spirit level
• Flash light
• Permanent marker

Central Vacuum Parts

Every installation is different, but every kit is the same, so make sure you also have the following material:

• Straight tubes
• A variety of tube fittings (we’ll figure out exactly which ones later, but wider curves are better than narrow bends)
• Plastic pipe straps
• Metal strapping
• Outlets
• Sweep inlet (optional)
• Glue
• 18-2 wire, enough to go from the furthest outlet to the unit
• Marrettes, in case you need to splice any of the 18-2 wire together
• Screws and plugs, according to the material where the unit will be installed

Planning

The less bends and splits the better. If you’re house has two levels try to keep it vertical; if it’s a bungalow keep the outlets in a straight line.

Figure out where your outlets are going to go. This depends a lot on how long the hose is that you have. Make sure you can comfortably reach all around your house, under the beds, around furniture, and up to the tops of bookcases and armoires (with the duster attachment).

If your walls aren’t aligned and you would have to make an odd bend in the tubes see if you can up or through a closet instead, where no one will see your “short-cut” and you’ll avoid unnecessary work.

Mounting

The main unit needs to be solidly mounted but remain accessible so you can empty the canister regularly. Make sure there is enough clearance above and below the unit.

It should also be near an outside wall so you can exhaust to the outside (if you decide to, but doing so means the small particles that pass through the filter end up outside). There’s a muffler too you can put along the exhaust to keep the noise level down.

There also needs to be a power outlet nearby to plug the unit into.

Installation

Dry fit all your connections before gluing them together – you’ve only got one chance and if you get it wrong you’re headed back to the hardware store for more pieces! Note that the tubes should have a dashed line down the side and the fittings should have eight notches around the edge. Line up the dashed line with one of the notches and mark them both with the marker.

When cutting the tube use the mitre box and hack saw to make nice, straight cuts. Then de-burr the edge so it’s nice and clean.

Once everything is fitted you can start gluing. Make sure you can still move the pieces around enough to glue the next piece on, not so the system is so rigid. It may be better to work towards the middle rather than towards one end. Don’t forget to pull the 18-2 control wire along with the pipe and attach it to the outlets as you go.

And once it’s all glued together, or even as you’re gluing if necessary, don’t forget to put in some straps to hold the tubes in place. Either the pipe straps when the tubes are up against a solid surface or with a length of metal strapping when the tubes are hanging (make sure you wrap around the tube for a solid hold rather than just passing underneath the tube).

If you’re installing a sweep inlet be aware they’re not easy to do. Not only because they’re typically in awkward places but because the fitting snaps onto the back without glue you have to make sure you don’t dislodge it when you connect to the rest of the tubes.

Along the way you might want to use some duct tape on a few key joints in case you need to make any changes later. Or if you can’t finish the whole job in one go but still need to use the system.

Enjoyment

Now that the system is installed you can kick back, crack open a cold one, and compare your work to my installation.

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog