Mind The Rant

Almond+ Router/Smarthome Hub Plus CT100 Thermostat = Remote Control Heat

2015-12-15T11:47:00.001-05:00

A few years have gone by since I wrote about the original Almond touchscreen wi-fi router and range extender and my consulting relationship with Ram Malasani, the founder of the company that makes it.

Since then Ram initiated a Kickstarter campaign to fund a successor product that he dubbed Almond+. I joined 7,606 backers who pledged $855,625 to fund the campaign and ponied up $95 for an early production unit, which combines an advanced wi-fi feature set with built-in Z-Wave and ZigBee smarthome capabilities. (Ram also asked me to produce a user guide for Almond+, but despite managing to knock out basic set-up instructions I found I was unsuited to the hectic pace of documentation writing.)

During my brief stint writing Almond+ documentation Ram supplied me with a couple of other Almond+ test units, both of which have performed flawlessly, plus a few low-end smarthome gizmos (e.g., power plugs and motion detectors) and, eventually, a 2Gig CT100 Z-Wave thermostat.

The CT100 got my attention. My wife and I have a cottage in upstate New York, where winter temperatures routinely drop into the single digits. Being able to monitor the cottage’s thermostat remotely and turn it up before arriving sounded pretty sweet.

Last month I finally had the chance to remove the old thermostat upstate and replace it with the CT100. And because I’d already made a video illustrating how easy it is to set up the original Almond as a range extender, I thought it would be useful to make another illustrating how easy it is to install the CT100 and pair it with Almond+. Have a look:

Truth in advertising prompts me to admit that as easy as I made this installation appear, there’s an important power issue about the CT100 that, for the sake of brevity, I left out of my video.

How Long Will the CT100 Work on Batteries?

As my installation makes plain, the Honeywell thermostat I removed, like an old-fashioned landline telephone, doesn’t need an external power source to function. The CT100, on the other hand, needs at least four AA batteries. Long before installing the CT100 I removed the cover from the Honeywell unit and, with a little online research, determined that neither of the two wires it uses supplies current. Once I’d satisfied myself that the CT100 would work on battery power alone I began to wonder: just how long would it work?

In principle I wasn’t crazy about using a thermostat whose batteries had to be changed periodically, and frankly I was worried about the batteries running low in the dead of winter when the cold and snow make upstate visits a hassle. Then there was the prospect of a power outage. In the absence of power the original Honeywell thermostat is also useless, but I wasn’t sure if the CT100 and Almond+ would resume chatting to each other—and to me via the Internet—once the power came back on.

Especially since, long before installing the CT100, I’d done a test pairing with Almond+ and noticed that after a few days Almond+ seemed to lose touch with the thermostat. That, at least, was the conclusion I reached when I used the free iOS app that Securifi provides for monitoring and controlling connected smarthome devices.

While at the cottage upstate I’d try turning up the heat on the working Honeywell thermostat, wait for the temperature to rise a few degrees, and then, once the CT100’s internal thermometer also reflected the change, see if its new temperature readout successfully reached the app on my iPhone.

Unfortunately, it often didn’t.

Rebooting Almond+ solved the problem, but only temporarily. In a matter of days it would once again lose touch with the CT100.

When I told Ram about the problem he suggested I try using a beta version of the Almond+ firmware—one that allows a user to set automated rules, including one to tell Almond+ to reboot at regular intervals. (BTW: This beta version has since been released.) Sure enough, after telling the firmware to reboot Almond+ every morning at 5 AM I found it reliably communicating with the CT100.

But then, I was still stuck with a thermostat that relies on battery power to function.

The Key to Running Thermostats on Household Current: The “C” Wire

As I was to learn, because the thermostat wiring in our cottage is missing the mysterious “C” or Common wire, which supplies current, I had no choice. (The original Honeywell thermostat was so simple it didn’t need external power.)

And yet, when I took a closer look at the thermostat wiring coming out of the wall I discovered there weren’t two wires sheathed in the bundle, there were three. One had been tied off because it wasn’t needed.

I took a look at the controller attached to the furnace and saw that, sure enough, the third wire in the bundle was tied off at the other end, too (see the red arrow):

Would it be possible to replace this controller with one that supplies current?

Grayfurnaceman to the Rescue!

What I needed was a furnace nerd. A little searching on YouTube revealed a channel called Grayfurnaceman and a related website called Grayfurnaceman.com. The website homepage graciously offers a contact form “for comments, questions and help with troubleshoot[ing]. Feel free to ask and I will try to help.”

So I asked, and Grayfurnaceman helped:

There is a control that includes a 24 volt transformer that can power the thermostat. Here is the Honeywell part #: R8184M1051/U. It has pretty much the same high voltage wiring as your control. Hope this helps.

It does. Thanks, Grayfurnaceman!

Lately Honeywell part #: R8184M1051/U has been on my mind. Since I installed the CT100 my Almond iPhone app has been reporting a declining % battery charge in those fresh AA batteries I installed. Here’s a screencap I did today:

That 83% charge is worrying. It’s been only 5 weeks since I installed the CT100. If its batteries lose 17% of their power every 5 weeks they clearly won’t last more than 6 months!

Aside #1: When I first installed the batteries in the CT100 it reported their charge as 97%, so I suppose it’s arguable they’ve lost only 14% of their power over the first 5 weeks.

Aside #2: For a while I had my iPhone’s Almond app set to notify me anytime the CT100 recorded a temperature change. So every few hours I was getting push notifications about swings of a single degree as the thermostat kept turning the furnace on and off to keep the house at the steady 60 degrees Fahrenheit I’d selected. Suspecting these notifications were adding to the drain on the batteries, I eventually turned them off. So it’s possible that alarming 17% loss is attributable largely to my profligacy with push notifications.

Almond+ Now Supports Nest, Too

And this just in: yesterday’s edition of The Verge reports that Almond+ now supports the Rolls Royce of thermostats, the Nest, as well as such other Nest products as the Nest Protect smoke detector and Nest Cam security camera.

A little Googling tells me the Nest thermostat currently goes for about 3 times the price of the CT100—and the Nest definitely requires an external power source, so running it on batteries isn’t an option.

A brief look at the Nest’s installation guide also suggests that the CT100’s installation instructions, though text heavy, are less ambiguous and more comprehensible.

Of course, as my video makes clear our furnace is pretty basic—so my installation was straightforward. And the Nest supposedly learns about your heating preferences and will act on its own without requiring your intervention. Which could be cool.

For the moment, though, I’m pretty happy with the CT100.

Turn on YouTube’s Speech-to-Text Closed Captions ... They’re Hilarious!

2015-08-04T11:19:00.001-04:00

The other day I discovered that YouTube has introduced automated, possibly on-the-fly closed captioning for a lot of its videos.

To see if the video you’re watching has this option, simply click on the Settings gear icon in the lower righthand corner of the video. If you see the Subtitles/CC option, select English (auto-generated) ...

... and you’re ready for instant autohilarity. (Aside: when you click English (auto-generated) you'll also find you can select a number of foreign languages — from Afrikaans to Zulu — into which Google will translate its English captions.)

I made the discovery while watching this video posted by Sean Hodgins:

I don’t mean to make fun of Sean — it’s obviously not his fault YouTube has attached some nutty closed captions to his video. But unfortunately for the guy Google’s speech-to-text algorithms seem to have a tough time figuring out what the hell he’s saying.

“Murni” Like Swelling (Don’t You?)

In fact, Sean has just sat down and commented, “Man, it’s hot already,” quickly adding: “I’m already, like, sweating,” when YouTube swings into action, dutifully transcribing Sean’s words as ...

Fun fact to know and tell: according to Google Translate, murni is the Indonesian word for pure.

A bit later Sean explains how much easier it is to edit Vine videos than it used to be, before external content could be spliced in. “Now everyone just edits them on their computer,” he points out, “which is super easy, and then puts them on Vine.” But YouTube, which back at 0:13 in the video has already turned “Vine” into “buying” and the words “the Vine app” into “%uh by a nap,” now comes up with an even more exotic interpretation ...

Sean Gets His “Butterworth”

In other spots YouTube manages to botch only a single word — but even then its version turns out to be magnificently inept. After demonstrating how to build an Arduino-based controller for shooting Beme app videos without having to hold the phone against the body, as the Beme app typically requires, Sean concludes, “Yeah, see? That’s how it works. Super simple.”

OK, now it’s your turn. Take a look at this intriguing transcription and see if you can guess what Sean is really saying:

That’s a toughy, isn’t it? Indeed, out of context Sean’s real words may sound just as enigmatic as YouTube’s rendition: “This booster actually,” he says before arriving at this caption, “sucks power when it’s not doing anything, and this is just some button.”

Talk the Talk, Then “Do” the Walk

What’s more, because Nature — and Google — abhors a vacuum, YouTube even captions Sean’s words when he’s not talking at all. Late in the video, with the music swelling and Sean marching outside to greet the day, YouTube’s closed caption nicely sums up his will and determination ...

Of course, my guess is that Google has deliberately introduced this “feature” in beta (or, if their dev team is being honest with themselves, in alpha). As they did with Google Maps in 2005, the Googleplexers figured they’d publish the tool early and gradually, inexorably work out the kinks.

Until that day arrives, though, turn it on, tune it in, and watch those priceless captions drop out.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Super Panavision Cameras in John Frankenheimer's "Grand Prix"

2015-02-07T17:28:00.000-05:00

Note: this blog post contains what some may consider spoilers.

I saw John Frankenheimer's movie Grand Prix in a theater in Times Square not long after it was released for the holidays in 1966. Call it January or February 1967.

Either way I was an impressionable preteen and Grand Prix was an intensely visual movie that shunned many of the lazy conventions of mid-60s moviemaking—most notably the use of rear projection (referred in the biz, I think, by its initials, RP) for scenes taking place in cars. Grand Prix is all about cars, after all; I admire Frankenheimer for deciding that RP had had its day and needed to be banished for any race car movie intended to look remotely realistic.

OK, so Turner Classic Movies owns the rights to Grand Prix and, because the movie managed to win Academy Awards for Best Sound, Best Film Editing, and Best Sound Effects, TCM trots it out every year to show during its “31 Days of Oscar” run up to the Academy Awards ceremonies. Thanks to TiVo, the other day I snagged it and watched it for the first time in perhaps 40 years—maybe longer.

Grand Prix isn’t a great movie, and I’m not even sure it’s a good one. Its bland behind-the-scenes melodrama was probably creaky even in 1966, but that’s not why anyone would ever bother watching it, then or now. The races are the thing, and they’re captured with as much vigor, expertise, style, and motion as Hollywood could muster in the analog era.

What I hadn’t noticed when I was a kid and only noticed now, though, was Frankenheimer’s willingness to use—and flaunt—what must have been the latest in camera technology back in 1966: handheld Super Panavision cameras!

What do I mean by flaunt? Just this:

These frame grabs courtesy of my TiVo Premiere, my Panasonic Viera HDTV, and my Canon S110 digital camera. Apologies for those annoying moire patterns.

The guy on the stretcher is Brian Bedford as race car driver Scott Stoddard; he’s just had a terrible accident at Monaco and is being rushed to a medical rescue boat. And the guy in the beige sweater following behind is carrying what I’m satisfied is a handheld Super Panavision camera.

In fact, I’m pretty sure he’s not only carrying it—he’s actually using it. Because after he and the rescue crew get across the road ...

... we cut to a lengthy handheld shot that’s surely taken from his camera:

If you’re old enough you can imagine Frankenheimer’s rationale for this kind of cheeky visual cheat.

In the 1960s footage shot with handheld 16mm movie cameras had become a staple of the evening news. And because by then there was a critical mass of movie and still cameras shooting all major public events and catastrophes (Grand Prix even devotes a few moments trying to work up the audience’s outrage about news photographers who swoop in to get graphic footage of gory race car accidents) most everyone recognized and even expected them.

That civilians couldn’t tell the difference between the lightweight 16mm movie cameras deployed by TV news crews and the hefty 65mm Super Panavision hardware Frankenheimer’s crews were using is something I'd guess the director was banking on.

Frankenheimer was happy to double down on this gimmick, too. When Yves Montand, playing race car driver Jean-Pierre Sarti, wins the next race and gets his wreath in the winner’s circle, we first get an eye-level shot of him—one that includes his illicit lover, Eva Marie Saint, excitedly clapping her white-gloved hands:

And in the next cut we can see the Super Panavision camera at left that got that eye-level shot—plus a second Super Panavision camera at the bottom of the frame (I actually didn’t notice that second camera until I took this photograph):

If you’ve got a DVR, stop it at this shot and, when you restart, keep your eye on the Super Panavision camera at left. You’ll see the unmistakable rotation of the film sprockets in the camera magazine, demonstrating that this camera is indeed shooting.

Nearly as interesting as these inside-baseball visual cheats is Frankenheimer’s—or it may have been director of photography Lionel Lindon’s—preference for making these hand-held shots rock steady. They never call attention to themselves.

Indeed, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, before the Steadicam and Panaglide handheld camera stabilization systems were invented, it became common for directors to lend their films some instant cinéma vérité cred by inserting shaky handheld point-of-view and action-news-style shots. Frankenheimer exploits these handheld Super Panavision cameras elsewhere in the movie, especially when he needed to film scenes in cramped location interiors. (Impressively, I don’t think any of Grand Prix’s interiors were shot in a studio.) But unless you’re paying attention you simply don’t notice these shots were achieved without standard tripods.

Frankenheimer was willing to get rid of RP, and I thank him for that. But when it came to handheld shooting, at least, his visual style remained adamantly old school.

Adobe Creative Cloud: What You Worry?

2013-10-17T13:57:00.000-04:00

Adobe Chief Marketing Officer Ann Lewnes (visual approximation)

Adobe Chief Marketing Officer Ann Lewnes is not a worrier. And she doesn’t think you should be one, either.

Allow me to explain.

Adobe Get’s Hacked (and Maybe Into The Guinness Book of World Records)

Since I posted this story on October 17, 2013, it's gradually become clear that the fiasco that provoked it—a massive hack against software giant Adobe's web servers—was far, far greater than originally reported. When Adobe Chief Security Office Brad Arkin confessed in a blog post on October 3 that attackers had compromised the names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other customer-order information for some of its accounts it put the number at a mere 2.9 million. Then, at the end of October it appeared that hackers had actually snagged 38 million accounts. And now, in mid-November, the number has grown to 150 million and, since nature abhors a vacuum, web sites are sprouting up to allow you to enter your email address to see if you're one of the unlucky ones.

As Violet Blue reported on ZDNet on November 11, "As breaches go, you may very well see this one in the book of Guinness World Records next year, which would make it astonishing enough on its own."

And just as astonishing is this little tidbit from Mashable:

It was recently reported that the three most popular passwords among Adobe users are: "123456," "123456789," and "password" — a sign that users are picking easy-to-guess passwords.

But back to Adobe's Brad Arkin. In announcing the breach he also stated that Adobe was resetting all relevant customer passwords and explained that “If your user ID and password were involved, you will receive an email notification from us with information on how to change your password.”

Sure enough, as a sometime Adobe user I have an Adobe ID. (In fact, for reasons I can’t quite remember, I’ve got two.) So a couple of days later I got the promised email:

(Aside: A couple of days seems like a long time for a company Adobe’s size—responding to a breach of 2.9 millions names—to alert me that attackers had illegally entered its network and possibly obtained my ID and password. Perhaps I was deliberately placed at the tail end of the notifications because, thank God, I had no credit card information sitting on Adobe’s servers. The last time I’d actually used my Adobe ID was to get some tech support for Adobe Digital Editions e-reader software—and luckily Digital Editions is a free download.)

What You Worry? Join the Adobe Creative Cloud!

So I was more than a little surprised when on October 15—less than a week and a half after Adobe had notified me to reset my password—I got an invitation from Adobe to join, explore, and create with its (recently revealed to be eminently hackable) Creative Cloud:

Yes, for only $49.99 per month—$599.88 per year—I, too, could download full versions of every Adobe app, get 20GB of cloud storage, create customized portfolios with a free Behance ProSite membership ... and spend my spare time wondering when MasterCard would call to ask if it really was me who just went on that outrageous shopping spree at Best Buy.

No thanks, Ms. Neu—I mean, Ms. Lewnes. I’ll stand pat.

Oh, and Brad: I notice you haven't posted any updates to your original October 3 hacking alert on the Adobe website. What, you worry?!? Nah.

Postscript (12/12/13): Worried less than ever, Adobe continues to email those like me who have Adobe IDs but haven’t yet signed up for full-fledged Creative Cloud accounts. Got another “Join. Explore. Create.” email today. Seriously, Adobe: before you send out any more of these sunny promotions don’t you think you owe it to your prospects first to devote an email explaining all the industrial-strength security measures you’ve put in place to make sure a 150-million-account hack never happens again? After all, since you’ve decided to get out of the software-in-a-box business and get into the software-in-a-cloud business it’s sort of critical that your user base not be perpetually nervous about black hats hanging around jiggling your virtual doorknobs.

OK, Google: Maps, Map Maker, and All Those 6 Bond Streets

2013-05-20T15:35:00.000-04:00

Now, with Google and online maps at our fingertips, what was once normal can be seen as uncivilized — like asking someone for directions to a house, restaurant or office, when they can easily be found on Google Maps.

—Nick Bilton, “Disruptions: Digital Era Redefining Etiquette”, Bits blog, New York Times, March 10, 2013

This post is dedicated to you, Nick.

In September 2012, when Apple rolled out the iPhone 5 and abandoned Google Maps for its disastrously not-ready-for-primetime homegrown map system, New York Times consumer tech columnist David Pogue blogged about “What Makes Google’s Maps So Good”. In his post he revealed something I hadn’t known: Google Maps receives error reports “by the thousands” from human users via Google Map Maker.

Pogue described Map Maker as “a Web site that is live in 200 countries (and just started in the United States) that lets average citizens make corrections to Google’s maps as they find them.” Excited to learn that Google Maps had the same kind of cool end user editability that Jimmy Wales had given Wikipedia, I headed right over to Google Map Maker to correct Maps’ misplaced address for the Tendai Buddhist Institute on Route 295 in East Chatham, New York.

Zen and the Art of Geolocation Maintenance

You see, the previous summer my wife and I were visited at our weekend house in East Chatham by a young Asian man on a motorcycle who was searching in vain for the Institute. We were a bit stumped about why he’d roared up our driveway for directions, since our house, obscured by a vast stand of Norwegian furs, is completely invisible from the road. But when I checked Google Maps on my LG Optimus V his reasoning was clear: Google had located the Buddhist retreat practically in our front yard.

In reality, though, it was (and is) a good half mile down the road.

Of course, when I used Map Maker to submit the correct address for the Tendai Buddhist Institute my expectations were low. If Map Maker received error reports “by the thousands” from human users, how long would it take before mine was vetted, let alone accepted? But within hours of submitting the change I received an email confirming its approval:

I was stunned. True, it did take a few weeks for the correction to be pushed out to my—and everyone else’s—phone via a Google Maps update. But it’s only natural for Google to bundle its Map Maker corrections and distribute them en masse at irregular intervals.

“Do You Know Where Bond Street Is?”

Then, months later, came another, far deeper Google Maps mystery. That of 6 Bond Street, New York, NY.

It’s early evening on the last day of February and I’m walking my two dogs when a thirtysomething guy, his smartphone pulled out and Google Maps on display, asks me if I know where Bond Street is. I’ve lived in Manhattan for over 20 years and in SoHo for nearly as long and Bond Street rings a bell for me, but I’m embarrassed to admit I can’t place it.

But hey: if thirtysomething guy has Google Maps on his phone, why can’t he place it?

It turns out he’s already visited the designated location, which is only about 50 yards from where we’re standing at the corner of Bleecker Street and Minetta Lane. Google Maps insists it’s just uptown on Sixth Avenue. I walk my dogs in this neighborhood all the time and I’m sure I’ve never seen a Bond Street around here.

Redundantly, I pull out my LG Optimus V and look at Google Maps myself. Here’s what it showed me a day or two later when I took time to do a screen capture:

Google Maps’ default location for 6 Bond Street, New York, NY as displayed on my LG Optimus V. The red arrow shows where thirtysomething guy was standing when he asked me if I knew where Bond Street was.

My phone serves up the same nonexistent location his does. I can see it isn’t right and tell him so.

This impoverished help prompts thirtysomething guy to thank me profusely, which only makes me more embarrassed that I’ve failed at what I regard as a New Yorker’s prime directive—to supply decent directions to tourists and other bewildered visitors to my neighborhood and environs.

Thirtysomething guy, however, is unruffled by Google’s misdirection and, waving his phone before me, fires up another app on his smartphone—“Have you seen this?” he asks me with a big grin—to ping a car service to pick him up.

He’s happy and I, the New Yorker who doesn’t know where Bond Street is—and, thanks to Google Maps, still doesn’t know where it is—find myself back on my dog walk, brooding about finding the real address and using Google Map Maker to fix it forever.

One Simple Address, Two Wrong Locations

Back at the apartment, I launch Google Maps on my desktop PC and search on “6 Bond St., New York, NY”. It serves up the same nonexistent location thirtysomething guy and I got standing in front of American Apparel at Bleecker and Minetta:

Google Maps shows 6 Bond Street located in the middle of an apartment bloc on 6th Avenue. Again, the red arrow shows where I ran into thirtysomething guy. Google Maps' Did you mean: suggestion in the upper left nav—circled in red—makes clear Maps has an alternate address for 6 Bond Street in a different Zip code.

OK, Google: Did you mean: suggests you’ve got an alternate location for 6 Bond Street in Zip code 10013. I click on the link to see where it is:

Google Maps’ Did you mean: alternate location for 6 Bond Street in Zip code 10013 puts it next to a Maserati of Manhattan dealership. No actual Bond Street can be seen anywhere in the vicinity.

Good lord. This one is farther downtown, below Canal Street in Tribeca, once again apparently on Sixth Avenue. But as with the other location, there’s no thoroughfare marked Bond Street anywhere near the red A pushpin. Google Maps displays two wrong locations for one simple address.

Doubting my sanity, I get a second opinion from the Amerigo Vespucci of browser map tools: MapQuest. Where does it place 6 Bond St., New York, NY?

Sensibly, MapQuest displays 6 Bond Street on Bond Street. (And without suggesting an alternate location.) Once again, the red arrow shows where I ran into thirtysomething guy. Turns out the real Bond Street was only about 10 blocks away from where we met—a 10-minute walk.

Thank God! MapQuest displays a 6 Bond Street that’s actually on Bond Street. Thirtysomething guy’s mystery address is a mere 10 blocks east of our fateful meeting spot—10 minutes on foot. And mercifully, MapQuest doesn’t suggest alternate locations, either. In the search for 6 Bond Street, MapQuest’s data is better than Google Maps’ data.

Time to head to Google Map Maker to fix this bizarre mess.

These Aren’t the Bond Streets You’re Looking For

Strangely, when I arrive at Google Map Maker I find that it displays 4 locations for 6 Bond Street—none of them the incorrect one near Minetta Lane that baffled thirtysomething guy and me. However, it does show the Tribeca location next to Maserati of Manhattan. So I opt to delete it first.

However, Google Map Maker wants a reason for the deletion and I find the choices a little confusing:

Am I deleting this 6 Bond Street because this Feature does not exist or because A duplicate of this feature exists? Or are all these Bond Streets some kind of spam/abuse?

I go with A duplicate of this feature exists. Later, after some equally befuddling correspondence with a member of The Google Mapmaker Team, this location is indeed deleted.

Unfortunately, that still leaves Google Map Maker showing a few 6 Bond Street locations that, unaccountably, don’t include the wrong one (just uptown along Sixth Avenue) that vexed thirtysomething guy and me:

After deleting 6 Bond Street next to Maserati of Manhattan I see that Google Map Maker still brings up 3 locations—including the correct one—that Google Maps doesn’t bother showing me on my PC. As before, the red arrow shows where I ran into thirtysomething guy.

Still, location A is clearly the correct one (with a proviso I’ll get to in a moment)—and yet it doesn’t seem to be even a Did you mean: option in Google Maps. Then there’s location B, way over on the western edge of Manhattan, near the Hudson river—another place nowhere near a visible Bond Street. But location C incenses me, because it’s situated in my own neighborhood, a mere 5 minute walk from my apartment, in a spot where I know there is no Bond Street.

It’s the location I decide to eradicate next:

Take a look at this Google Map Maker screen I captured in the midst of submitting this second correction. First, there’s the preposterous location A pushpin for 6 Bond Street in the middle of a copse of trees that define the tiny Playground of the Americas (run by the NYC Parks Department) at the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and West Houston Street. Incredulous, I visit the location and take a picture myself:

Google Map Maker’s location C for 6 Bond Street, New York, NY turns out to be the Playground of the Americas on Sixth Avenue. I visited the Playground on March 1, 2013 to take this snapshot, so the trees, of course, are leafless.

Then there are the culprits who apparently decided to contribute this particular 6 Bond Street to Map Maker: Google Automated Miscellaneous B… and Anonymous 4179. (What were they thinking … assuming they’re actually “theys” and they actually “think”?)

After this deletion, however, I run into another difficulty. While attempting to remove the next wrong location I get a pop-up dialog box telling me “This action will remove changes already in progress. Do you want to continue?” I’m not sure why Google Map Maker is warning me this way—is a Map Maker visitor permitted only one correction per session? Does Map Maker not participate in Google’s one-account-logs-in-everywhere system? Did I fail to log in properly because I’ve got more than one Gmail address? I'm spooked and decide not to continue.

Dear Google Map Maker: About All Those 6 Bond Streets...

Later, I decide to write a lengthy feedback note to Google Map Maker laying out this dizzying multiplicity of 6 Bonds Streets. I mention thirtysomething guy, the original bogus Google Map location for 6 Bond Street (which Google Map Maker doesn’t display!), the confusing pop-up dialog box warning me I'll lose changes already in progress—basically everything you’ve read so far. I sum it up in a message I send March 6:

When searching for the address on my Android phone Google Maps displays an incorrect default location, with the push pin showing a point along Sixth Avenue just below Minetta Lane. (I’ve walked to this location and studied it. I can find no trace of a Bond St.)

It also shows the “Did you mean:” line at the top of the map, suggesting there is an alternate location for this address; however, in conducting this search repeatedly I’ve found that Google Maps seems to vary between showing 2 alternate locations for 6 Bond St. (both incorrect), and 3 alternate locations (one of which *is* correct).

Google Maps’ correct address for 6 Bond St., unlike all the others, actually depicts Bond St. on the map, but the Zip code attached to it is incorrect. (It indicates that 6 Bond St. is in Zip code 10011, when in fact all of Bond St., which runs only a couple of crosstown blocks, is located within Zip code 10012. See here: http://www.maptechnica.com/zip/10012.)

About that last bullet: Yes, even when Google Map Maker displayed the correct address for 6 Bond Street it still managed to apply the incorrect Zip code:

As the MapTechnica Zip code map I link to above makes clear:

All of Bond Street in New York City is located in Zip code 10012.

My Yeoman Efforts Pay Off

But today, thanks (I hope) to my yeoman behind-the-scenes efforts, searching on “6 Bond Street, New York, NY” brings up the correct address, in the correct Zip code, as the default:

Sure, you’ll notice there are still two other Did you mean: alternate locations—including a new one clear over in the East Village:

But I just discovered something wonderful in the lower righthand corner of the Google Maps screen: you can click through to Google Map Maker from any bogus location like this one:

Nice! Think I'll head over there right now.

And Nick: the next time someone violates your sense of etiquette by asking for directions while holding a smartphone displaying Google Maps, calm yourself by repeating this mantra: Number 6 Bond Street, Number 6 Bond Street, Number 6 Bond Street.

Epilogue (1/27/2015): The warp velocity of Internet time seems to apply to Google Maps as much as to anything else on the web. Since I published this post I can report the following: 1) The Tendai Buddhist Institutes’s Google Maps location has reverted to the same deeply inaccurate position it held when that young Asian man cycled up our driveway to ask about it during the summer of 2012. I notified Google of the error a few days ago but have little confidence it will ever be correctly designated on Google Maps; 2) searching for 6 Bond Street, New York in Google Maps does indeed bring up the proper address—and without even one idiotic Did you mean: alternate locations; 3) Google has done away with the Edit in Google Map Maker option it used to display in the bottom righthand corner of any Google Maps map display; I'm guessing the company got far more edits, productive and unproductive, than Google’s skeletal team of Map Maker humans could possibly vet.

Twitter Followers, Real Twitter Followers & Celebrity Twitter Followers

2013-04-06T16:18:00.003-04:00

I’ve had a Mind The Rant Twitter account for about two years. And during that time I’ve cultivated a vast throng of 117 loyal followers:

I know. Not many. Part of it is my fault: I don’t tweet enough. And though it took me a while to cotton on to Twitter etiquette, which is nothing more than blatant logrolling, I’m proud to say I haven’t chosen to follow everyone who has chosen to follow me.

For instance, I’ve resisted those bizarre instant Twitter porn accounts where someone, putatively a hot woman, offers homespun aphorisms from The Hooker’s Almanac and provides a profile link to some URL with “sex” or “xxx” embedded in it. I’m also sorta proud that the number of followers I maintain is always more than half the number of tweets I’ve posted.

But today I visited my account to see if I’d captured any new followers and discovered one of those instant ones—not a porn account, I’m relieved to say—from somebody named Renita Escarcega. Renita has tweeted only 13 times, has 0 followers (4/7/13 update: 18 tweets and 112 followers!), and her profile contains only a link:

So, with a certain trepidation, I clicked on it and was taken to Twitter Valhalla, otherwise known as FollowersDelivery.com.

As FollowersDelivery.com promises, the site can help you

Get more Twitter Followers overnight, and strengthen your online credibility. Try the Safest, Fastest and Easiest way of getting Twitter Followers.

100% Guaranteed Twitter Followers, NO Account Password Required!

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I was familiar with these appalling little businesses thanks to articles in the New York Times (one of which, “Fake Twitter Followers Becomes Multimillion-Dollar Business”, appeared only yesterday) but was still amused to discover that FollowersDelivery.com wisely distinguishes between delivering Twitter followers and Real Twitter followers, who are, naturally, twice the cost:

So how many Twitter followers does $20 buy? Looks like 1,000. Of course, economies of scale apply to harvesting Twitter followers just as naturally as harvesting wheat: $50 buys you 5,000 followers, $80 buys 10,000, $170 buys 30,000, and $420 buys a whopping 100,000 followers. (That’s less than half a cent a follower!)

Of course, the more you want the longer it takes. Up to 5,000 takes 24 hours, up to 30,000 takes 48 hours, and up to 100,000 takes 72 hours. And for those 100,000 follower orders, you have to wonder how it’s done. Delivering all of them for less than half a cent a piece at a profit suggests bots at work. Even in a developing country it seems implausible that anyone is willing to sign on to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to create Twitter accounts for a quarter of a cent per account.

That’s where Real Twitter Followers come in. They’re more costly and they take longer to harvest: 1,000 cost $40 and take an entire week to deliver. That’s 4 cents per follower—so, I’d think, easily within reach of a Mechanical Turk job offering 2 cents per Twitter signup. With Real Twitter Followers the upper limit is also far smaller: you can’t go higher than 10,000, and, perversely, they’ll cost you more per account than 1,000 followers: $580 or 5.8 cents per signup.

Yet after going back over the terms I discovered that FollowersDelivery.com claims that both Twitter Followers and Real Twitter Followers are sourced the same way, by real people:

And how about the most expensive Twitter followers of all? Celebrities, of course!

Hey: looks like we’re in luck: FollowersDelivery.com is offering a $20-off special:

Expensive? Sure. But don’t forget:

Goodreads, Amazon, Anna Karenina: Coincidence?

2013-04-04T11:20:00.000-04:00

Last week, when Amazon announced that it had bought community reading site Goodreads for an undisclosed sum, there was plenty of sturm und drang about what Amazon would do with the treasure trove of Goodreads data about the books its members read, rate, and recommend.

Would Amazon start posting Goodreads reviews on Amazon? Would it start selling cameras and lawn mowers to Goodreads members? As the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, Amazon’s acquisition has already “set off a backlash among some fans of the popular site who treasured its independence.”

So, as an Amazon customer and a Goodreads member, let me report an interesting coincidence.

Just last Saturday I added Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to my Goodreads My Books list. (I’m about a third of the way through it, with mixed impressions so far. When I'm done, will I join the ranks of the 10,292 Goodreads members who have already posted reviews? Not sure.)

Imagine my surprise, then, when Amazon sent me an email this morning with the two-word subject line Anna Karenina.

When I opened it, this is what I saw:

Is Amazon taking advantage of Goodreads member data already? Sure, this film adaptation of Anna Karenina is a recent release—hey, it’s the reason I started reading the novel in the first place—and yes, I’m a TiVo owner who has rented and bought movies and TV shows from the Amazon Instant Video Store, whose new movies this email is touting.

As I said, it could be just a coincidence.

Le papier ne sera jamais mort / Paper is not dead!

2013-03-12T13:09:00.000-04:00

“…every piece of entertainment, like every political speech or swatch of advertising copy, has nightmarish accuracy as a triple-distilled image of a collective dream, habit or desire.”

So said James Agee 70 years ago.

I can’t compete with Agee’s eloquence, but advertising’s nightmarish accuracy in triple-distilling our collective dreams, habits, or desires sometimes seems profoundly superficial, which—depending on your preference for reading via paper or pixels—may determine your reaction to this brief French television commercial (not to worry: you needn’t know French to understand or appreciate it):

I do wonder about one apparently vital decision the advertising agency behind it, Leo Burnett, or the crew Burnett hired to create it, made in casting the father. Assuming we’re hearing his actual voice, his accent sounds unmistakably American.

Am I jumping to conclusions thinking the (presumably French) casting director made this choice deliberately—that this man’s obsession with a tablet that looks unmistakably like the All-American iPad offers the French TV-viewing public one more opportunity to laugh at us and our technofetishism?

Kinda looks that way.

Postscript: my sister Leslie—who actually emailed me the link to this video and who speaks excellent French—demurred when I suggested to her that the father is (or is meant to be taken as) American. She pointed out that when he pronounces his wife’s name he emphasizes the second syllable, “ma”, while an American would emphasize the first syllable, “em”. I guess she’s right.

And it’s true that the commercial works hard to evade being pinned down linguistically or culturally. In the father’s first intrusion—when he illustrates how perfect the tablet is for drawing—he avoids spelling out a word and simply swirls a couple of circles. Then, later, the ad agency decided he should show his wife she could be using the tablet to solve a Sudoku puzzle instead of, say, a crossword. Sticking with numbers once again preserves the commercial’s international appeal. Very clever, these Mad Men.

Equally interesting is that the ad doesn’t insist on portraying Emma as a Luddite. In one scene the crime in her husband’s eyes is that she’s printing something out while working on the home computer. The implication here seems to be not merely that Emma has refused to go paperless but that she insists on using yesterday's cumbersome desktop technology (which requires its own room!) to accomplish tasks the sleek, portable tablet can handle anywhere. She’s clinging to old, workaday tech instead of excitedly embracing tomorrow’s. Which means Emma’s pretty much like all of us who are annoyed that the pace of change dictates we buy a new gadget every year or two—even when our old gadgets still work fine.

A Video Instruction Tool Called Teachem

2013-02-27T14:11:00.000-05:00

Just discovered a website called Teachem.com that allows a person, organization, or business to repurpose instructional videos it has posted to YouTube. It's easier to show how Teachem.com works than it is to explain it, so below I've posted the Securifi Almond Range Extender Demo I created in the Fall of 2012.

As you can see, once you've created the "classroom" version of your video on Teachem the site provides embeddable code you can insert into a blog page:

Beyond that, Teachem lets you start a virtual school by aggregating your courses in a central location and branding it with your organization's logo. You can also take advantage of YouTube's versatility in allowing private videos to be uploaded; in such cases only those who enroll at your Teachem school can view and consume your content.

It's an interesting idea, though at the moment, because it's free to register at Teachem (and just as free to create courses with anyone's YouTube content -- not just your own), it's unclear what kind of revenue model the site's creators envision for it.

The New Yorker Magazine v. The New Yorker App

2013-02-12T15:02:00.002-05:00

My wife subscribes to The New Yorker magazine, which means I can also read every issue on my first-gen Kindle Fire using the Amazon App Store’s New Yorker app.

Since receiving my Kindle Fire in November 2011 I’ve downloaded perhaps a dozen New Yorker issues and, despite the time and design savvy that obviously went into the app, by now I’d largely lost interest in reading the magazine this way. Aside from the long download times each 75MB to 150MB issue requires (even with decent cable modem speeds it takes several minutes before one is ready to read), I found the added features—sound clips, slide shows, the occasional video—underwhelmng. The printed word has always been what The New Yorker is all about. The app, not surprisingly, didn’t seem to change that.

Until the other day.

Browsing the print edition issue for Feb. 11 & 18, 2013, I came across what I quickly decided was an all-too-cute profile of an artist whose strenuously whimsical paintings depicted one thing and one thing only: the grocery aisles at WalMart. That article had been titled, predictably, “WALART”. The first page looked like this:

With nothing better to do I read the piece, which wasn’t lengthy, and didn’t find much to change my mind about the artist, Brendan O’Connell. He struck me as a lucky stiff who’d stumbled upon a formula for selling gimmicky, otherwise forgettable pictures about an (ironically) iconic American institution. That he based his paintings on photographs he took himself—photographs that until recently got him thrown out of WalMart, which doesn’t allow picture-taking on its premises (but has now made an exception for O’Connell, because he’s become something of a celebrity)—didn’t change my opinion of him or his work.

Until a day or two later, when I downloaded the Feb 11 & 18, 2013 issue to my Kindle Fire.

If you take another look at the first page of the story (shown above) in the New Yorker’s print issue, you’ll see a picture of O’Connell in his Connecticut studio sitting in front of some of his works. Now, as it happens, in the print edition that photograph is your sole means of evaluating O’Connell’s art. There are no other examples of his paintings attached to the piece by Susan Orlean, which runs a mere 5 pages.

In the New Yorker app issue, however, you’re given a slide show of 7 of O’Connell’s paintings. And when I viewed them (some I was already familiar with because Orlean had described them in her article), even on my Kindle Fire’s modest 7-inch screen I could scarcely believe they were done by the same guy gloating in front of those seemingly slapdash drippy Warhol-derivative riots of color you can barely make out in the print article’s one photograph.

Here’s the slideshow:

Note: The New Yorker app appears unable to render slide shows like these in landscape mode.

Note: The app does have a bug when you attempt to browse pictures using the left and right carets at the bottom right of the screen. You'll notice this picture, which is actually entitled "Wonder Bread", has inadvertently retained the title and number of the previous slide show picture, "Whistlers Mother"

Seeing even these tiny reproductions was shocking. There was no question that “Catskills” was deft and playful and amusing. I’m not sure I like the idea behind “Whistlers Mother”, since the name stems only from the profile of the woman on her Jazzy and its passing resemblance to Whistler’s portrait in profile of his mother; there’s also a Diane Arbus quality to the picture that detracts from its mirth. “Wonder Bread”, on the other hand, is nearly (and improbably) photorealistic, done with just enough carelessness to magically suggest brushstrokes. I’m not sure how I feel about “Foraging (I Want Candy)”; the girl’s tendrils of hair remind me somehow of Edvard Munch, which put it at odds with its bright colors and childhood subject. I don’t feel qualified to comment on “Checkout” because the image (and perhaps the original?) is so damned tiny. (Update: actually, “Checkout” turns out to be a rather enormous 7 feet by 8 feet.) But “Elmers” is quietly joyous for anyone who’s ever made art in grade school, and “Giant Utz” manages to depart magnificently from the near photorealism of “Wonder Bread”. It defiantly pulls apart the integrity of the Utz snack bags and their designs and very nearly, but not quite, discards them for an abstract study in chaotic yellow, orange, and green rectangles that slightly resemble shooting gallery targets. It is genuinely whimsical and just plain fun. As are most of these works.

So while I may not have fallen in love with everything in the slideshow, is there any question I was humbled by this experience and more than a little troubled by it? How could I have read this article on Brendan O’Connell via two different delivery platforms that brought me to two such entirely different conclusions about the man and his art?

There’s a message here for those trying to reinvent magazines or illustrated books or any medium that relies on conveying images well. It begins with the vexing reality that image-intensive files tend to be enormous (this New Yorker app edition weighed in at about 153 MB) and time-consuming to download, making them unwieldy and unattractive, and ends with the invigorating if obvious conclusion that if you want to write about an artist you’d better show professionally scanned samples that bring his or her work to life.

Inviting readers to appraise an artist’s work and not just hear a good story about it—to take them by the lapels and insist they look at some pieces—enjoins them to pay attention and take an active role. I know we’re not accustomed to thinking of reading as passive, but in this case, for me, it was.

I jumped to conclusions, Mr. O’Connell. For that I apologize.

Postscript: Brendan O’Connell appeared as a guest on The Colbert Report on March 6, 2013. His “Giant Utz”—which O’Connell refers to on the show as “Great Big Utz”—was one of the pictures Colbert displayed during the interview. I was surprised to hear O’Connell refer to “Great Big Utz” as a very large painting (“like 7 feet by 8 feet”) with, after some prodding by Stephen Colbert, a very large price to match: $40,000. So as limited as The New Yorker magazine’s profile of O’Connell may be, I guess The New Yorker app’s slide show on my 7-inch Kindle Fire had its own limitations.

* * *

For a slightly different take on what can happen when words and graphics are embedded together in a file, see the difficulties I encountered reading the so-called Powerpoint chapter of Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From the Goon Squad on my android phone and first-gen Nook.

Bookish Launches ... and Shows Growing Pains

2013-02-05T22:21:00.001-05:00

Update: I've just realized that my post is misleading because my misadventures with Bookish took place primarily because I focused on choices involving an ebook edition and not a print edition. My explanation will make more sense if you read the post first, so I'm adding it below as a postscript.

Unless you’re a diehard publishing nerd you’ve likely never heard of Bookish—a joint venture of Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Penguin Group (USA) that’s seemingly been gestating forever (but in real life for only a couple of years) and finally launched ~~today~~ yesterday.

As CEO Ardy Khazaei explains, Bookish is an online bookseller “created to serve as a champion of books, writers and, most importantly, readers” and, by seeking “to expand the overall marketplace for books”, declares itself impartial about “whether a book gets into a reader's hands via Bookish's e-commerce partner or another retailer, [because that way] everyone — from the publisher, to the retailer, the author and the reader — wins.”

So yes, Bookish sells the books it displays via its “e-commerce partner”, book distributor Baker & Taylor, as well as willingly sending visitors to Amazon, Barnes & Noble.com, Books-a-Million, IndieBound, or Kobo if they’d rather complete their purchase elsewhere. Of course, given the rather lengthy head start these other online vendors have had in selling printed books and ebooks and cultivating a loyal customer base it’s hard to imagine why anyone would begin their book search on Bookish instead.

Nonetheless, curious to know what the site offers and how it operates I set up an account and started browsing. Not surprisingly, the young site shows growing pains.

My Tale of American Innovation

Clicking on the Subjects menu at the top of the home page, I landed on the Business page (which I once merchandised for Barnes & Noble.com) and scrolling down was intrigued by a collection titled Tales of American Innovation, from Bell Labs to Apple, where I found a book, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, that sounded interesting.

But when I checked the price in the upper righthand corner of the product page I was surprised—and a little puzzled—to see that I was looking at an ebook that was “Not in stock. May be available elsewhere.”

I figured the ONLINE STORES button would tell me about places where the book might be “available elsewhere”, so I clicked on it and sure enough …

... there were my choices.

Click on Barnes and Noble, Go to Amazon

Unfortunately, clicking on the Amazon link didn’t take me to Amazon’s page for Dealers of Lightning. Instead, it took me to Amazon’s home page. Then, oddly, I found that clicking on Barnes and Noble also took me to Amazon’s home page. [2/6/13 update: last night I emailed support@bookish.com to notify them of this problem and, to my amazement, just after midnight received a reply notifying me the snafu "has been solved." But when I refreshed the page this morning and tried clicking on Barnes and Noble I was still sent to Amazon. Possibly the correction has been queued and will go live with other corrections a bit later.] Next, I discovered that the Books a million link (attention, Bookish: the bookseller’s name is spelled Books-a-Million) failed to go anywhere except to a cleverly designed 404 page not found display:

It might take you a moment to notice that the book being displayed in Bookish’s 404 page not found graphic shows that page 404 has been torn out and is missing. Cute, huh?

Inevitably, the iBookstore link takes you to Apple’s web page for downloading the company’s iTunes software, without which one cannot buy an ebook from Apple. But mercifully, the IndieBound and Kobo links function properly, though they, too, take you to each online store’s home page and not to its Dealers of Lightning product page.

Whoa: Other Formats and Editions, Too?

Curiously, though, I quickly learned my options didn’t end there. Just below the eBook box was this:

So right off the bat I could see that somewhere else I could buy this ebook for $11.04 instead of Bookish’s $11.99 list price.

And that + sign suggested there were more buying options to explore, so I clicked on it:

Then, of course, I saw the Show all ebooks (7) link and compulsively clicked it. To my surprise I got a large pop-up:

OK, I thought. These options, though admittedly not competitive from a price standpoint (five of the seven are $11.99, after all), seem to supply a multitude of vendor choices. But $11.04 was clearly the best deal, so I clicked on it and landed on a Bookish Dealers of Lightning product page unlike the one I’d first visited. Here’s how its price box read:

This was starting to get a little weird. Remember that when I initially landed on the Dealers of Lightning product page Bookish had informed me that the ebook was “Not in Stock.” But that it “May be available elsewhere.” Was this elsewhere?

Not in Stock Yet Somehow Ready to Buy Now

Not noticing that the lower price and BUY NOW button weren’t the only thing different about this Dealers of Lightning price box—I failed to read that I was now being exhorted to “Read with the Bookish Reader app on Android, iPad & iPhone coming soon”—I clicked the BUY NOW button to see what would happen next.

Quickly I was being asked to enter my billing address and payment information, which suggested to me that, contrary to Bookish’s initial claim that this ebook wasn’t in stock, I was being asked to pay for something Bookish had every intention of delivering as soon as I entered a valid MasterCard, American Express, Discover, or Visa card number. Though I didn’t follow through and buy the book, I’m guessing that had I done so I’d have received an ePub file I could have read via the popular Calibre PC reader or sideloaded onto any ereader, such as those from Nook or Kobo, that supports the ePub format.

Finally, I should note that despite Bookish’s nonpartisan approach to bookselling—and its willingness to send me to my preferred vendor—its price lists, I suppose inevitably, aren’t up to the minute. When I went to Amazon and searched on Dealers of Lightning I discovered that the Kindle edition was selling for less than the lowest price Bookish had already shown me:

Here’s hoping Bookish can solve some of these vexing problems—especially the one about sending visitors directly to another online vendor’s product page instead of to its (far less convenient) home page.

2/6/13 Update: Bookish does send visitors directly to the product page on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, IndieBound, and Kobo if their Bookish jump off page is for the print edition of a book and not for the ebook edition. The reason is simple: for ebooks Bookish supports (and is writing Android, iPhone, and iPad ereader apps that can display) only ePub and PDF document file formats and not Amazon's MOBI format for the Kindle. So when it supplies Amazon as a purchase option for an ebook it faces a dilemma: it doesn't want to send Bookish users directly to Amazon's corresponding Kindle page because the ebook they purchase won't be readable on the Bookish ereader app. So I'm guessing Bookish has decided the default in these cases is to send visitors to the online vendor's home page. If so, it's still an odd choice since, as I mentioned earlier, Barnes and Noble and Kobo (as well as the iBookstore and, I suspect, Books-a-Million and IndieBound) all support the ePub file format for their homegrown ereaders.

A Money-Saving Idea for John L. Workman, CEO, Omnicare, Inc.

2013-01-08T13:53:00.001-05:00

Dear Mr. Workman:

How’s it going? I notice you’ve been CEO of Omnicare only since October 2012, so maybe you haven’t found your sea legs yet.

(BTW: Are you the CEO or the interim CEO? Things seem to be in flux over there at Omnicare, what with Joel Gemunder resigning in 2010 and then suing the company for breach of his $146 million separation agreement, and then his replacement, John Figueroa, quitting in June 2012, apparently because Omnicare had to pay $50 million [according to USAToday] “to settle allegations that it improperly dispensed drugs for nursing home patients without a doctor's signed prescription”. Wow, three CEOs in three years. Looks like you’re in a tough business!)

But you’ll be happy to know I’m writing to you with an idea that can save your company tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands, even millions—of dollars a year.

I hit upon this idea when, as the proxy who pays my mother’s pharmacy bills (she’s no longer well enough to pay them herself, you understand), I recently received one of those serious 1st NOTICE past due account letters from your company.

Here it is, with just a few details blurred out to protect my mom’s privacy:

Did you look it over? Did you see those spots I circled in red? I bet you already know what I’m going to suggest Omnicare do!

That’s right: skip billing customers whose balance due is $0.00.

Now, of course, I don’t know how many zero dollar past due account letters Omnicare mails out every year, but I’m guessing it could be more than a few. Why not get one of your database gurus to write some code—I’m not a tech nerd, so I don’t know how the lines would read—to have Omnicare’s servers only generate a past due account letter when the balance due is greater than $0.00.

You could even play it safe and only generate a letter when the balance due is greater than or equal to, say, $1.00. (I don’t know how much your dunning letters cost to print and mail, but your database gurus could certainly ask and make sure those letters don’t fire until those costs are fully covered.)

And no, I’m not going to stand on ceremony and demand a royalty for implementing a sure-fire money-saving suggestion like this one. A lesser man might insist on 2% or 3% of your annual savings as a kind of finder’s fee, but not me.

I bring this idea to your attention and ask only that you give it your full consideration.

Thanks for listening.

Sincerely,

Richard Hartzell

Principal Rantiste

MindTheRant.com

Solo, Piano -- N.Y.C.

2012-12-12T22:45:00.004-05:00

I’m not inclined to repost anybody else’s work, but after watching this devastating little film on the New York Times website this evening I’m making an exception. Take a look—and be patient. The ending will surprise (and maybe rattle) you.

Tumblr Devs: Are They 30 Years Young Yet?

2012-12-11T22:05:00.001-05:00

When you finish signing up for a Tumblr account, the site asks how old you are:

If you enter a number below 30, Tumblr responds this way:

If you enter a number of 30 or above, Tumblr suddenly morphs into Willard Scott on The Today Show:

Apparently turning 30—excuse me, becoming 30 years young—is a cause for profound self-reflection in our lives … or at least the next best thing: home video blogging:

Note that this video, one of 132 posted by the breathtakingly self-pleased and blindingly teeth-whitened katilette (“You're only as old as you feel!”, her description of this video declares), has, as of today, garnered 75,880 views and 2,971 likes. Looks as if, as far as life’s milestones, katilette’s YouTube subscribers, and Tumblr’s developers are concerned, 30 is the new 70.

Postscript (5/21/13): When I first posted this item back in December 2012 I knew nothing about the people behind Tumblr, including its founder, David Karp—now in the news because Yahoo has agreed to buy his site for $1 billion. But based on the ultra-cute signup I described above I can't say I'm surprised to learn that Karp is 26 years old.

Almond: Touch Screen WiFi Meets 2 ½ Min Range Extender Setup

2012-09-26T11:33:00.000-04:00

My main rationale for this blog has always been to write about consumer technology that’s seldom as simple or effective as its makers—or its marketers—claim it to be.

The disconnect between what’s promised and what’s delivered typically leaves me conflicted, part of me seething with frustration at the nonintuitiveness of the device or service I’ve paid for and another part worrying that this complexity somehow proves I’m shamefully unqualified to use it. Neither response is good for the soul … or for the tech industry.

I believe Ram Malasani, the Indian-born CEO of tiny Taiwan-based tech startup Securifi, feels the same way.

I’ve gotten to know Ram a bit since last winter, when he engaged me to write a press release and make a demo video for his company’s debut product, a wireless router he’d given the whimsical name Almond.

Almond: “The First Router for the Post-PC Era”

Just one thing set Almond apart from the zillions of other routers out there: a touch screen:

Most of Almond's set up and configuration chores can be performed from its touch screen, eliminating the need to boot a PC, launch a browser, enter a private IP address, and navigate a web UI.

Ram claimed Almond’s touch screen not only simplified set up but completely obviated, at least for home users, the need for a PC to configure it. (Almond can be set up via the usual web interface, but it’s needed only to configure advanced features such as port forwarding or assigning static IP addresses.) When he pronounced it “the first router for the Post-PC Era”, I made sure to include that provocative phrase in my release, and CNET’s router columnist, Dong Ngo, picked it up for his first Almond story.

Uh Oh: Could Almond Be Vaporware?

In the early going it wasn’t easy nailing down Almond’s feature set because Ram—embodying the fevered creativity I imagine typical of tech entrepreneurs—kept thinking up ways to expand it. At CES in January 2012 and at succeeding winter trade shows he was promising Almond would hit the market in the Spring of 2012, but by March he’d decided his router should double as a range extender (also known as a repeater or booster in nerdspeak) for an existing router. I understood that making Almond a dual-function device would give it more bang for the buck and widen its market, but my press release, issued late in February on PRWeb, had said nothing about the router’s range extender capability.

And as I became more invested in Almond’s success—continuing to discuss product packaging, the interface, in-the-box setup instructions, tech support, and other issues with Ram—I worried that adding range extender functionality would delay the product’s availability well into the Summer, draining any momentum generated by my release and leading the tech press (and even me, in moments of weakness) to suspect Almond was vaporware. Hadn’t D-Link shown off a touch screen wireless router at CES two years before Almond’s debut there but ultimately chosen not to manufacture it?

I suggested Ram skip the range extender functionality for the initial product and offer it in the next one.

As it happened, he didn’t listen to me. Which meant Almond didn’t become available until mid-July. Except that turned out to be a very good thing.

Set Up Almond as a Range Extender in 2 Minutes 30 Seconds

Almond is now readily available on Amazon Marketplace and on Newegg, and based on early customer reviews its range-extender functionality appears to be extremely popular. I’m not surprised.

Almond’s out-of-the-box setup wizard asks whether you’d prefer to use it as a router or as a range extender, and, as easy as it is to configure Almond as a router, turning it into a range extender is such a piece of cake—taking a mere 2 1/2 minutes—you have to see it to believe it:

Now, if your wireless router can’t be configured as a range extender, or if it can but you’ve never needed to use it as anything but a router, you may not be impressed by my demo video.

On the other hand, if like me you’ve actually spent 70 bucks on something similar without a touch screen—and then discovered what was involved in getting it to talk to your router—you may be shaking your head in disbelief. Which is what I did, thinking back on my experience with D-Link's DAP-1522. Let me explain.

My TiVo Premiere Needs a TiVo-branded WiFi Adapter

In January 2011 I took TiVo up on a tantalizing offer: get a TiVo Premiere DVR for free in return for paying $19.95/month ($21.76 with tax) for 2 years of TiVo’s TV program scheduling service. Basically I was agreeing to fork over $478.80 on the installment plan to own a TiVo capable of recording and playing back HD video. Since I’d just bought a 37” Panasonic HD TV capable of displaying 1080 lines progressively it seemed like a good idea.

Then I discovered that the Netgear USB WiFi stick the TiVo website had recommended for networking my old TiVo Series2 DVR—and which I’d dutifully purchased—wouldn’t work with my new Premiere. In fact, I learned that the only WiFi client that would put my new Premiere on my home network was TiVo’s own pricey branded device.

My existing device would no longer work? I had no choice but to pay extra for a TiVo-branded WiFi adapter? I was plenty annoyed.

Luckily for me (I thought), I’d recently heard about something called a wireless bridge. A wireless bridge does much the same thing a range extender does, except it’s intended to give wireless capabilities to devices that, lacking their own wireless network adapter, have only an Ethernet port for networking. Basically the bridge fools such a device into thinking it’s got a wired Ethernet connection to a home network instead of the wireless one the bridge actually supplies.

TiVo Premiere and D-Link DAP-1522: Lengthy Negotiations

Since my new TiVo Premiere had an Ethernet port I figured I could buy a wireless bridge, use an Ethernet cable, and plug the Premiere into my wireless router via the bridge. No need to pay TiVo for its required wireless adapter.

Even better (I thought), I’d noticed that D-Link made a wireless bridge—the aforementioned DAP-1522. Since my home network ran on a D-Link DIR-655 wireless router I figured the two devices would talk the same language to each other and set up would be a breeze.

Silly me.

Despite their commonality as D-Link products, the DIR-655 and DAP-1522 mysteriously used nonoverlapping IP address sets—so getting the D-Link router to hand the D-Link wireless bridge an IP address it would accept turned out to be nonobvious … at least to me.

But since I don’t like to be defeated by fussy hardware or software, after a couple of hours of noodling around, trying different ideas, and opening a Word file in which I documented for posterity what didn’t work and what did, I got my TiVo Premiere online.

If Only Almond Could Be a Wireless Bridge!

So imagine how I felt when Ram—Securifi’s idea man and CEO—told me that in range extender mode Almond’s Ethernet ports also allowed it to be used as a wireless bridge.

Had Almond been available in January 2010 I could have avoided the hours of agita D-Link’s DAP-1522 gave me. Assuming, of course, I’d heard about Almond in the first place.

Which is why I’m blogging about this amazing little router/range extender/wireless bridge now.

Yes, I’ve consulted for Ram and Securifi and been paid for it. Yes, my paid relationship with the company entitles you to be skeptical about my motivations for touting Almond.

But if you’ve read my blog, you know I don’t like to shill for inferior tech.

And Almond isn’t perfect. As easy as it is to set up, it can be a bit slow to save your settings while you’re configuring it. The 2.8" screen, though clear and responsive, can get a little cramped when you’re trying to enter a lengthy alphanumeric password on its virtual QWERTY keypad. And Almond isn’t always as informative as it might be when you accidentally press the wrong on-screen button.

In the scheme of home networking and its perpetual gotchas, though, these are quibbles. The touch screen streamlines setup enormously and allows you to skip the chore of firing up a PC, launching a browser, entering the router’s URL as one of those cryptic IP addresses (my D-Link's, 192.168.0.1, is taped to the front of my PC), and wandering through the average multilayered, multitabbed, multiexasperating web UI.

Not to mention that Securifi’s dev team issues helpful firmware updates at a furious pace.

Get Even Firmware Updates Via Almond’s Touch Screen

Which brings me to another forehead-smacking Almond feature: it even delivers firmware updates via its touch screen. Just find and press Almond’s firmware tile:

And, if a new update is available, press the Update Firmware button:

I’ve told Ram it would be great if Almond’s touch screen notified you as soon as it learned about a firmware update. So will we see that feature turn up soon in a future firmware release?

Maybe. Stay tuned.

* * * * *

Update: Securifi is hard at work on an even more ambitious version of Almond—one you can control remotely with a smartphone to perform chores like locking your front door or adjusting your home thermostat—known as Almond+. Check it out!

iPhone 4S on Virgin Mobile June 29, 2012

2012-06-11T19:58:00.002-04:00

Yep, it's official. Got the email from Virgin Mobile about 20 minutes ago.

Not sure why the Virgin Mobile website is willing to say only that the iPhone is "coming soon", but the email says it'll be available starting June 29. See the screen cap above, where the date appears in the fine print.

No word on what the upfront cost will be, but PC World has already assembled a chart showing the total cost of ownership for 2 years and it looks like Virgin Mobile comes out on top despite your obligation to fork over $649 for the iPhone itself. Yowza!

Related question: is that retail iPhone unlocked? Should a Virgin Mobile subscriber discover that her Sprint-run CDMA network is -- as the kids say -- a fail, would it be possible to take the phone to, say, Verizon's CDMA network instead? Those CDMA phones have no SIM cards, so if Virgin Mobile is baked into the firmware that would likely be a no.

Indeed, I just checked to see what a brand new unlocked 16GB iPhone costs on the Apple store and, by golly, it's $649. Moreover, it comes with this caveat from Apple:

The unlocked iPhone works only on supported GSM networks, such as AT&T in the U.S. When you travel internationally, you can also use a micro-SIM card from a local GSM carrier. The unlocked iPhone will not work with CDMA carriers such as Verizon Wireless or Sprint [or, my 2 cents, Virgin Mobile].

Lastly, if you're willing to join Auto Pay -- which allows Virgin Mobile to bill your credit or charge card automatically -- you can save 5 bucks a month and pay as little as $30 a month (though, yes, you'll also be charged sales tax on top of that) for the usual 300 voice minutes and unlimited (as in 2.5GB) text, email, and web data.

Virgin lets you sign up for email updates, though I'm not sure what they'd be updating you about ... unless that June 29 arrival date is tentative. (Possibly they'll alert you when you're eligible to preorder?)

Ah, Virgin Mobile. Your diabolically clever marketers specialize in Faustian bargains like these.

Put Harry Potter on Your iPad in 5 Easy Steps

2012-04-16T18:10:00.001-04:00

NOTE: This post does not offer workarounds for iPad users intent on enjoying Pottermore’s Potions and Wizard’s Duel activities, which require the Adobe Flash Player. It’s my understanding Adobe Flash is (and will forever remain) unsupported on Apple’s mobile devices. Sorry!

Pottermore Shop doesn’t yet have an official relationship with Apple’s iTunes store—one that, were it in place, would presumably allow anyone to link an iTunes account to Pottermore Shop and send a purchased book directly to an iBooks bookshelf. Instead, here’s the rather involved 10-step procedure Pottermore Shop recommends for iBooks users:

iBooks App:

Purchase your eBook (or collect it, if it is a gift)

Your eBook will then appear in 'My books'

Click the 'Select' button under the eBook you wish to download

Choose the 'Direct download' option

Click the 'Yes, download this book' button. Your eBook will now be prepared and download to your computer. If you are prompted to save it to your computer, click 'Yes' or 'Save', taking care to note where it is being saved

Open iTunes on your computer

Locate your eBook on your computer and use your mouse to drag and drop it into the 'Books' section of iTunes

Download the free iBooks App to your device

Connect your device to your computer and sync it with 'Books' in iTunes

Open the iBooks App on your device and access your eBook

However, if you’ve got an iPad, an iTunes account, and the iBooks app you can cut these 10 steps in half and simply direct download the Harry Potter ebook to your iPad. Which means you’re beginning as Pottermore Shop suggests above ...

To add a Pottermore Shop ebook directly to your iPad, select the Direct Download option

... but after Step 5 you’ll see this helpful message on your iPad:

Once the direct download is finished, your iPad will invite you to open the file in your iBooks app. It will also place the book on your iPad's bookshelf.

I suppose there are other ereader apps available for the iPad, which is why you’re also given the choice of using the Open in... button. I used Open in “iBooks” and found the DRM-free epub file opened flawlessly (which it should, since iBooks supports its epub file format).

Granted, Pottermore Shop may recommend its laborious 10-step approach to ensure that you place the DRM-free copy of your Harry Potter ebook on your Mac or PC for safekeeping. That way should your iPad meet an untimely end and you require a new (or reformatted) one from Apple you won’t use up another of your 8 (or fewer) allowable downloads obtaining a new copy of your ebook. Instead, you can simply synch the replacement iPad with your computer and voilà!—your Harry Potter ebook is once again ready to travel.

On the other hand, if you’re impatient to read and would like to skip a few steps ... my approach will save you serious time.

Pottermore Shop Scotches My 8-Download Limit

2012-04-12T14:13:00.000-04:00

16 April 2012 UPDATE: When “The Pottermore Shop team” was pleased to inform me in its email late last week that the remaining downloads of my Sorcerer’s Stone had been “increased” (see post below) I should have double-clicked on my copy of the book in my account’s “My Books” page and inspected the number of remaining downloads it displayed. Had I done so I’d have seen the total number was now 6, or merely 1 more than it had been before. Basically I’d been spotted an extra download in compensation for my original trouble obtaining a readable copy of the DRM-free edition for my PC. Hardly noteworthy. However, I used the extra download to try pulling a copy of Sorcerer’s Stone onto my mother-in-law’s iPad, which turned out to be a breeze.

* * * * *

Curiouser and curiouser.

Received an unexpected email today from “The Pottermore Shop team”. If you’ve read my post Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s DRM-Free eBook, you know that I experienced some difficulties directly downloading a DRM-free copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to my PC. I vented my frustrations to Pottermore Shop’s tech support and initially received an unhelpful email reply with step-by-step instructions for downloading the file. I replied to the reply that downloading the file wasn’t my problem: reading the file was. Well, today’s email explained that my “query” had been forwarded to “our technical team and we’re now pleased to tell you that the remaining downloads of your Harry Potter book "The Sorcerer's Stone" have been increased.”

Upon visiting my Pottermore Shop account I discovered, indeed, that I now appear to have an indefinite number of downloads at my disposal and the 8-download limit has been done away with. The Q&A on the right nav of “My books” page puts it this way:

How many times can I download each book?

The books that you buy from the Pottermore Shop can be downloaded multiple times each for no additional cost.

OK: multiple times is an ambiguous number. And, oddly, Pottermore Shop doesn't seem to have discontinued the 8-download limit across the board; it’s still mentioned on the site’s Downloading eBooks page.

So good on Rowling and Co. to own up to their mistakes and take action to set things right. But it appears this gesture is strictly for customers the site judges to have been inconvenienced during Pottermore Shop’s rocky opening. It doesn’t represent the kind of sea change in sales philosophy I’d originally thought (and hoped) it to be. (Yet to be learned is whether this indeterminate limit applies to any future ebooks I might buy from the site.)

BTW: through all of this I’ve failed to point out that, ironically, my first, unreadable direct download from Pottermore Shop never counted against my now revoked 8-download limit. It was only after initiating the successful download the following day that I noticed my Pottermore Shop download count had reached 3—1 for my Kindle version, 1 for my Nook version, and 1 for my readable, DRM-free direct download. The previous day’s unreadable download had clearly never been counted at all.

Lastly, I did confirm that that infamous first, unreadable file, 9781781100271_epub.v1.epub, was in fact Nook-DRMed. Here’s how I verified it: after synching my desktop PC with my Nook account my Nookcentric copy of Sorcerer’s Stone—the one Pottermore Shop had successfully sent directly to my B&N cloud account to read on my Nook 3G—appeared on my hard drive in the folder My Barnes & Noble eBooks. Its name: harrypotterandthesor_9781781100271. So I moved it to a backup folder, copied 9781781100271_epub.v1.epub into My Barnes & Noble eBooks, and renamed it harrypotterandthesor_9781781100271. With the new name I was able to open and read it with my PC’s Nook ereader software. It was clearly identical.

Harry Potter Audiobooks: Team Dale vs. Team Fry

2012-04-02T15:26:00.000-04:00

Search for Harry Potter on Audible.com or Audible.co.uk and here’s the banner ad you’ll see. Apparently Pottermore Shop now has exclusive rights to downloadable audiobook editions of the novels.

When Pottermore Shop opened last week (and I went on an unmagical adventure trying to download a DRM-free epub file of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) I discovered there were 5-minute samples of both the Jim Dale and Stephen Fry audiobook readings of all 7 Harry Potter novels.

I was eager to compare them.

Since we live in New York, my wife and I have bought for our daughter the Jim Dale readings of most of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. But choosing Dale was less a preference than a requirement. Bloomsbury holds the UK rights to the books and Scholastic holds the US rights; each was entitled to license audiobook subrights separately for its territory.

Any Potter Audiobook You Want So Long as It’s Dale

So if you live in one of the 50 states your choice is Jim Dale, and in the Commonwealth it’s Stephen Fry. It’s a little like Henry Ford’s famous comment about the Model T: Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black. In the US you can choose any Potter audiobook you want so long as it’s Dale.

Though Pottermore Shop is happy to tease you with samples read by both actors, its servers appear to recognize where you live and won’t permit you to buy Fry’s readings if you live in the US or (I’m guessing since I haven’t quizzed anyone shopping from London, Glasgow, Dublin, Ottawa, or Melbourne) Dale’s readings if you live in the UK. More about that later.

Let’s begin by listening to Dale and Fry reading the beginning of chapter 1 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, which is what the marketers for Scholastic in New York insisted Rowling’s first novel be renamed when they were told the original UK edition would be called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone—because (according to Wikipedia) they knew American kids wouldn’t read any book with the boring word philosopher in the title.

NOTE: I’m using the European music-sharing site Soundcloud to host my Dale and Fry audioclips. Please accept my apologies if the site is down and you’re unable to listen to them.

Here's Dale:

And here's Fry:

For some time I’d been under the mistaken impression that the central difference between Dale’s and Fry’s reading styles was Fry’s refusal to devote himself to the kind of voice impressions that Dale relishes. But listening to all the Pottermore Shop samples makes clear this isn’t the case. While the chapter 1 excerpts above don’t offer much variety in voices—most of what we hear is an interior monologue by Mr. Dursley—I recommend those of you unfamiliar with Fry’s readings listen to his other samples. The difference in voice characterizations isn’t nearly as dramatic as I’d been led to believe.

The Long (Fry) and the Short (Dale) of It

Indeed, I stumbled on the most measurable difference between Dale and Fry by accident when I noticed that Dale’s samples encompass a larger slice of the book than Fry’s. For instance, in the brief excerpts above Dale reads these lines that Fry doesn’t reach:

Mr. Dursley always sat with his back to the window in his office on the ninth floor. If he hadn’t, he might have found it harder to concentrate on drills that morning. He didn’t see the owls swooping past in broad daylight, though people down in the street did; they pointed and gazed open-mouthed as owl after owl sped overhead. Most of them had never seen an owl even at nighttime.

Just as surprising is that Dale’s excerpt, though it bites off a bigger piece of the book, is actually shorter than Fry’s: 4:52 vs. 5:13.

What I found extraordinary about this discovery was that I hadn’t noticed Fry’s leisurely pace at all while I was listening to him. As deeply familiar as I am with Dale’s approach I hadn’t found myself becoming impatient with Fry or even considering that he was speaking more slowly than Dale. Yet the differences in speed between the two really add up—especially in the later, longer books.

For instance, Pottermore Shop lists Fry’s reading of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as 20.5 hours and Dale’s as 18.5 hours, while Fry’s reading of Rowling’s longest Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, runs 29.25 hours versus 26.5 hours for Dale.

Of course, no one wants to speed hear an audiobook. (Unless it's about, say, how to improve your leadership abilities ... or earn that first million.)

Fry: A Leisurely, Nuanced Read

And thanks to being given the chance to compare Dale and Fry word for word I did notice, in just these short excerpts, Fry offering more nuanced interpretations than Dale. As he reads Rowling’s description of Mr. Dursley—“He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large moustache”—Fry seems to delight in this nonsequitur, changing inflection to note blithely that having a very large moustache has nothing to do with having hardly any neck.

By contrast Dale’s reading is far more routine.

Then, too, Fry picks up on the parallel description of Mrs. Dursley having “nearly twice the usual amount of neck”, appropriately emphasizing nearly twice to make clear the distinction between Mrs. Dursley’s long neck and Mr. Dursley’s short one.

Dale, unfortunately, fails to convey this difference to the listener.

Lest Dale fans protest that I’m picking on him, rest assured I love his readings—especially his energy, theatricality, and otherworldly voice for Dobby the house elf. In looking around the web for preferences about Dale and Fry I ran across someone defending Dale’s readings by observing that he recorded three of the Potter books before the first movie adaptation was released—and that his voices seem to anticipate those used by the film actors. Indeed, it’s hard not to see Robbie Coltrane when listening to Dale’s Hagrid, or Dame Maggie Smith when listening to his Professor McGonagall. Though I’d imagine the same is likely true of Fry’s voices for these very distinctive characters.

How to Flout (Maybe) Pottermore Shop’s Audiobook Copyright Safeguards

Ultimately, though, true Potter fans should be given the chance to hear both readings unabridged and judge for themselves. So it’s vexing to discover that Pottermore Shop hews to copyright laws that keep Americans away from Fry and Britons away from Dale.

Someone, however, has noted a workaround for this problem. I haven’t tried it and can’t guarantee that it works, but it sounds plausible. Pottermore Shop’s product pages encourage giving all the Harry Potter works as gifts, and when you click the Buy as a gift link you see this popup:

Take a closer look. This instance of the gift popup appears if you’ve selected one of Stephen Fry’s readings—so the default location shown for Where do they live? is United Kingdom, which is where you’d ideally be residing to be entitled to listen to his work. (I’m guessing Canada and a number of other UK commonwealth countries would also work here, but why fuss? Let’s stick with the default!) Pick your own email address as the email address for the gift recipient—though make sure it’s not the same address you’ve used to establish your Pottermore Shop account. (Does Pottermore Shop know a random Gmail or Yahoo! or Hotmail account belongs to a US resident and not a UK resident? Seems unlikely.) You should shortly be sent a download link for the audiobook of your choice.

Again, I haven’t tried this ploy and can’t honestly claim it works. And technically I’m obliged to remind you that even if it does work you’re violating international copyright laws by exploiting it.

12 June 2012 Update: I have confirmation from a visitor that the Buy as a gift stratagem does indeed work! However, based on this visitor’s personal experience (and difficulties) it’s advisable that once you’ve completed the gift purchase you log off Pottermore Shop and either flush your browser’s cookies or open a different browser entirely to complete the gift download. It’s also advisable to send your gift to an email address that differs from the one you used to open your Pottermore Shop account. Still, gratifying news for Potter fans who’d like to broaden their audiobook horizons.

Whose Team Are You On?

On the other hand, if it does the trick I’d love to hear from anyone who’s been successful with it. While you’re at it, let me know whose team you’re on.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s DRM-Free eBook

2012-03-28T18:26:00.001-04:00

As you may know, yesterday J.K. Rowling opened Pottermore Shop: an ecommerce site where one can purchase Harry Potter novels as unencrypted ebooks (in the ePub file format) or audiobooks (in the MP3 file format). For more on the site’s downloadable MP3 files, see Harry Potter Audiobooks: Team Dale vs. Team Fry.

The world’s richest author seems to have recognized that since her works have earned her a king’s ransom in royalties and subsidiary rights sales she can afford to offer her ebooks, heretofore unavailable anywhere else, without the DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions mainstream publishers generally insist on to thwart duplication and piracy.

Wanting to see how Pottermore Shop worked—and whether this whole DRM-free thing was for real—I headed over to the site yesterday to buy the first installment of the Potter saga: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (known to you lot in the U.K. as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone; Wikipedia supplies the strange story behind the U.S. title change.)

Once I’d made my purchase, I quickly linked the book to my Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com accounts and discovered that the books transferred to my Kindle Fire and first-gen Nook 3G without incident. Ditto the Nook app on my rusty Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V android phone.

Read the Same Harry Potter novel on a Kindle and a Nook

The result was Potteresque eMagic: with a single $7.99 purchase I could now read one book on two entirely incompatible ereaders using two entirely incompatible file formats.

That said, the sales terms Rowling’s ecommerce site employs are generous but not philanthropic. Once you’ve purchased a file from Pottermore Shop you’re entitled to download it up to 8 times. So by linking my Harry Potter novel to my Amazon and BN.com accounts I’d used up 2 of my download privileges.

But with 6 more to play with I decided to try downloading the ebook to my PC to read it with basic ereader software like Calibre or, as Pottermore Shop recommends, Adobe Digital Editions.

That’s when the headaches started. Neither program would read the file.

No DRM? I Beg to Differ!

Indeed, Calibre told me flat out that the file was DRMed:

The message I got from Adobe Digital Editions was a little different but no more rewarding:

I won’t bore you with everything I tried to solve this problem—including sending a complaint to the Pottermore Shop help desk that resulted in a set of emailed step-by-step instructions for downloading the file, which I’d carefully explained was not the issue—so I’ll cut to the chase.

Today I went back to Pottermore Shop, logged in, and downloaded the file again.

The File With Two Names

Oddly, the file I received today had an entirely different name (HP1_Sorcerers_Stone_en-us.epub) from the one I received yesterday (9781781100271_epub.v1.epub). Much to my surprise this second file opened without difficulty in both Calibre and Adobe Digital Editions. It was clearly non-DRMed.

But now I had a mystery on my hands. Why had Pottermore Shop supplied me with an encrypted file to download when its philosophy was to shun DRM?

I confess when the first file I downloaded turned out to be unreadable I’d spent some time searching for open source DRM removal tools. It goes without saying that I had no intention of doing so to share my Harry Potter ebook with the online world; I was just a bit annoyed that I’d been promised an unencrypted file and somehow not received one.

My search led me to a set of plugins for Calibre that were supposedly capable of removing DRM from a variety of encryption systems, but when they didn’t work I decided to post a comment about their failure to the site that had pointed me to them.

There I learned that apparently my file name, 9781781100271_epub.v1.epub, betrayed it as a Barnes & Noble.com DRM-encrypted ebook. As odd as this information was, it made a strange sense: before selecting the Direct Download option on Pottermore Shop I’d linked my Pottermore Shop account to my Barnes & Noble.com account. Apparently Rowling’s programmers hadn’t considered that anyone buying a Harry Potter ebook and synching it with a Kindle or BN.com account might during the same session choose to have the file downloaded directly to a PC. So that somehow the Pottermore Shop server farm ended up sending me the file it had just sent to BN.com.

This explanation may be entirely wrong, but it fits the facts—including the message I’d received from Adobe Digital Editions that it couldn’t open 9781781100271_epub.v1.epub because it was “licensed for a different user account”, i.e., the one I had with BN.com. When I went back to Pottermore Shop the following day I started a new session and chose to do only one thing: direct download the file again. And this time the file was indeed unencrypted and had a completely different name: HP1_Sorcerers_Stone_en-us.epub.

At last, then, my sub-$10 investment had delivered a book I could read on my Kindle Fire, Nook 3G, smartphone, and any PC equipped with decent ereader software. And though I’d probably be violating the spirit of Pottermore Shop, if not its terms and conditions, a book I could share with my teenage daughter by putting it on her iMac or iPod Touch.

One File, But Two Steps to Read It on Your Device

On the other hand, as remarkable as this achievement is in the annals of ebook selling it does have its complexities—and I’m not talking about downloading the same ebook twice and getting two totally different files.

First, buying an ebook from Pottermore Shop obviously requires a web browser. That means if you’ve had the misfortune of buying a dedicated ereader with an E-Ink screen instead of a newer generation tablet you’ll be hardpressed to use its painfully slow native browser to initiate a Pottermore Shop purchase. (Harry Potter ebooks aren’t even searchable via my first-gen Nook 3G’s bookstore. Barnes & Noble.com clearly doesn’t want anyone with this Model T E-Ink ereader attempting to complete a transaction of this kind.) And even if you have a tablet you may think twice before using it to set up a Pottermore Shop account. I took one look at the web form I would have had to fill in using my Kindle Fire’s virtual keyboard and decided to use my PC’s real keyboard instead.

(I suppose an iPad might be a different story, but at the moment Pottermore Shop doesn’t have an agreement with Apple to allow your iTunes account to be linked to Rowling’s ecommerce site. Whether downloading a purchase directly to an iPad might circumvent this problem is a question I can’t answer—at least until I have the opportunity to try it with my mother-in-law’s iPad 2. [Short answer: yes, direct downloading to an iPad works fine.])

So buying a Harry Potter novel from Pottermore Shop for your Kindle or Nook or Sony Reader is almost inevitably a two-step process requiring 1) a browser to purchase and initiate the transfer and 2) the ereader for completing the transfer and reading the book. Since Kindle and Nook ereader owners (not to mention those who use ereader apps on their smartphones) are accustomed to the convenience of shopping and reading via a single interface on a single device, Pottermore Shop complicates the transaction a bit.

It’s possible this complication is what decided Rowling to skip DRM altogether. She may have realized the process was going to be arduous enough without introducing encryption into the mix.

A New Kind of “Social” DRM: Watermarking

Lastly, for those of you aching to liberate a DRM-free Potter novel via a bittorrent site, bear in mind that Pottermore Shop files are watermarked. Which means the files are given a clearly visible string of characters that when decoded apparently identify the original purchaser. Here’s mine as it appears on the copyright page on my PC download file when I view it in Calibre:

If Pottermore Shop succeeds, can we expect to see other mainstream publishers—or authors—selling us unencrypted ebooks with “Social” DRM? I wish I could say I was optimistic. Forbes estimates J.K. Rowling’s net worth at $1 billion. She’s got the resources, the clout, and the fan base of no other author on the planet. She can afford to sell ebooks this way ... and to dictate terms to ebook retailers who are accustomed to dictating terms themselves.

I don’t look for Rowling to launch a trend.

* * * * *

POSTSCRIPT: On April 12, 2012 Pottermore Shop emailed me that it was doing away with the 8-download limit on my copy of Sorcerer’s Stone. At first I assumed it was doing away with such limits across the board for existing and future purchases, but after spending some time at the site it appears this concession has been extended only to customers who suffered the kind of snafus I experienced during the store’s rocky opening. Too bad.

* * * * *

AND what about Pottermore Shop audiobooks? If you’ve heard Jim Dale read them aloud, can you try Stephen Fry—or vice versa? Discover the differences between the US and UK spoken-word editions (plus a devious ploy for downloading the version international copyright law says you’re not entitled to own) in Harry Potter Audiobooks: Team Dale vs. Team Fry.

MQMAT2CHHW8G (Are You Listening, Technorati.com?)

2012-02-06T22:03:00.003-05:00

OK -- had I known how hard it was going to be to prove to Technorati.com that I run this blog I might not have bothered ... but since I went to the trouble of creating a profile for myself I might as well respond to the site's robo email and add this code that proves I'm really in charge of Mind The Rant:

MQMAT2CHHW8G

The rest of you may safely skip this post. Nothing to see here. Tell your story walking. Et cetera.

What Time Does Super Bowl 2012 Start?

2012-02-01T10:19:00.006-05:00

Madonna -- seen here in a carefully cropped crotch-free shot I borrowed from the NFL's website when no one was looking -- will be the halftime show for Super Bowl MMDCXLVWXRK "K-Rock" II v. 2.0 featuring LG Safety Smarthelmets™ with Heads Up Display, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1" Touch Screen First Down Markers, limited edition Wilson "The Duke" Bluetooth-aware footballs, and other stuff too awesome to mention.

Last year, before I'd even started this blog, I read somewhere online that enterprising websites like The Huffington Post engage in inventive (some might say unseemly) tactics to increase their site traffic.

One such tactic is to take a predictable Google search question like "What Time Does The Super Bowl Start?" and make it the headline for a very short item -- one that coughs up the answer and embroiders on it a bit to keep visitors reading and, if the site's lucky, pausing long enough to click another local link. (Plus there's the fringe benefit of padding your traffic numbers for prospective advertisers.)

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

True, I have no prospective advertisers -- or active advertisers, for that matter -- to snow with traffic numbers, but I can see if posing such a question will magically boost Mind the Rant's elusive mindshare for a day or two. It's unlikely to goose my returning visitors, but it may generate the odd cranky comment. Which, when you're laboring in the kind of splendid isolation I enjoy in my patch of Internet Siberia, somehow qualifies as a positive.

So what time is the Super Bowl, anyway? According to the NFL's website, which currently brings up the #1 result on this search:

The 46th Super Bowl will take place on Sunday, February 5, 2012. Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30 EST / 5:30 CST on NBC.

You're welcome, Super-Bowl-commercial-and-NFL fans.

In a refreshingly unrelated sports story, check out Mets knuckleballer and mensch R.A. Dickey talking about climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro for Bombay Teen Challenge, a charity that fights human trafficking among the dispossessed "living on the streets and in the red light district of Mumbai." (I haven't watched this video yet, but I'm guessing Dickey skips the part about the Mets telling him they'd void his contract if he had an accident during the climb.) Go R.A.!

Postscript: It's official. Though I don't pretend to understand how my blog attracted well over 100 page views for this post -- there are a staggering number of far, far more popular websites that exploit the 'ole "What Times Does The Super Bowl Start?" ploy -- it apparently works for even the lowliest of Internet outposts. Here are the numbers Blogger's stats showed me this morning (2/6/12) for the last week :

Thanks for stopping by, everyone. Don't be a stranger.

Oh, and while I'm here, congratulations to the New York Giants and Eli Manning for pulling off that nailbiting 21-17 win yesterday over the New England Patriots. I don't pretend to be either a Giants or a football fan, but I grew up with my Dad shouting at the TV on Sundays and I tuned in a couple of times -- including for that wild windup to the 4th quarter. Since the Giants were technically the underdogs -- and Eli Manning is apparently the Rodney Dangerfield of quarterbacks (due largely, I suppose, to the long shadow cast by his brother Peyton) -- I was rooting for Blue (even though they were wearing white and red). And I guess Eli will finally get some respect. Nicely done, Big G.

Virgin Mobile to Throttle Unlimited Service

2012-01-26T13:50:00.012-05:00

All good things must come to an end.

When I bought my Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V at Radio Shack last February, I was excited to be getting a genuine android phone as part of a package that promised to give me 300 voice minutes plus unlimited text and web for a mere $25 a month.

Then, of course, Virgin Mobile decided this package was a bit too generous and changed its price to $35 a month. (Luckily, fingers crossed, I'm still grandfathered in at the $25 rate.)

But yesterday I received a text message from VMFreeMsg:

Your Beyond Talk Plan is about to change. Starting 3/23/12, data speeds may be reduced once you hit 2.5GB. For more info, click http://msg4u.us/th2

And today came the email. The heart of it read:

To make sure we can keep offering our Beyond Talk Plans at such great prices, we're putting a data speed reduction in place for anyone who uses over 2.5GB of data in a month.

How will it work?
Starting March 23, 2012, if you use over 2.5GB of data in a month on your Beyond Talk Plan:

Data speeds may be reduced to 256Kbps or below for the rest of your month. During this time, you may experience slower page loads and file downloads and lags in streaming media.

If data speeds are reduced, they will return to normal as soon as your next plan month starts.

If you'd rather not wait for your new month to start, you can restart your plan immediately through My Account.

Then Virgin Mobile offered me assurances that based on my activity for December it didn't appear the 2.5GB cap would affect me. And it was quick to reassure me just how much 2.5GB really was:

If you continue to use the same amount of data as you did in your last plan month, you should not see your data speeds reduced. Just to give you an idea, in order to hit 2.5GB, it's about 400,000 Mobile Internet page views, about 90,000(!) emails (without attachments), 91 hours of streaming music
or 20 hours of video clips*.

Uh oh. An asterisk. I looked at the bottom of the email for an explanation:

*Data usage per activity is based on an average. Bandwidth varies by website, video, email and other Internet application.

(Yes, I thought. I believe I'm familiar with the variability of bandwidth, thank you.)

I wondered whether Virgin Mobile had changed the promotional copy on their website to reflect this shiny new limitation, so I went over to their USA store for a look:

Nope. Nothing there. How about inside? After clicking on the Plan Details tab I scanned the page and spotted this:

OK, there was a red flag: "Unlimited does not mean unreasonable use." (Something told me this disclaimer predates the upcoming 2.5GB cap, but I could be wrong.)

Anything else? I visited the promotional page for my phone, the LG Optimus V, and looked around. Nothing jumped out at me, so I clicked on Plan Details for the phone and was sent back to the page where I started, which featured the Plan Details tab and several others. I clicked on the FAQs tab and saw this:

Now we were getting somewhere. Those last three questions hit the mark.

Virgin Mobile answered the first question, When and how will data speed reduction affect my Beyond Talk Plan?, this way:

Starting March 23rd, 2012, if you use over 2.5GB of data in a month, your data speeds may be reduced to 256 kbps or below for the rest of that monthly plan cycle. During this time, you may experience slower page loads and file downloads, and lags in streaming media. Data speeds will return to normal as soon as your next plan month starts. If you'd rather not wait for your new month to start, you can restart your plan immediately through My Account.

It answered the next question, How will I know if I hit 2.5GB?, this way:

When you reach that threshold, and your data speeds are reduced for the rest of your plan month, you will receive a text message notifying you of this change. If you are susceptible to data speed reduction, you can check how much data you've used at any time during the month by logging into My Account, and checking Data & Web history.

And that third question, How much data is 2.5GB?, it answered the same way it had that same question in the email Virgin Mobile sent me this morning. (About those 400,000 Mobile Internet page views, 90,000 emails without attachments, 91 hours of streaming music or 20 hours of video clips. Mercifully or ironically -- take your pick -- my LG Optimus V's mediocre battery life serves as a built-in brake on this kind of heavy data consumption.)

So to sum up, these details weren't exactly unavailable at the Virgin Mobile website ... but VM wasn't exactly broadcasting them, either.

I admit I'm not really breaking news. Android Central reported this planned change back on January 18. And according to them, Virgin Mobile wanted to start throttling data last year but delayed their decision.

Lastly, I suppose the most important question for Virgin Mobile's android phone users is how to measure data usage to avoid getting that fateful text message from VM telling you you've hit the 2.5GB wall. Logging into your VM account every week to check would be tedious; I don't consider it realistic advice.

Offhand my only suggestion is to try an android app from Android Market called Call Meter NG. It's pretty useful and lets you measure your usage for Calls, SMS, and Data (2G/3G/4G). Here's a screen shot showing my usage so far this month:

The app is flexible enough that it lets you set the beginning of your plan month, so it needn't start on the 1st. (You'll note that mine starts on the 6th of every month.)

But I'm not entirely sure how to interpret the Data (2G/3G/4G) usage. ~~It looks as if I've used just over 1GB so far (867.05MB In + 170.48MB Out), but frankly I don't know if that includes or excludes SMS data.~~ UPDATE: the numbers to the right of the | separator show lifetime usage; the numbers to the left of the | separator show usage since the beginning of the billing period -- in this case 1/6/2012. If you know, please comment and enlighten me and the LG Optimus V community. Thank you.

UPDATE: Just discovered another interesting app that keeps track of your data usage and will actually notify you when you're about to reach a preset cap. It's called Onavo. I just installed it and it looks pretty nice -- its setup lets you enter your monthly cap (VM users, please note that the cap field defaults to GB but can be changed to MB, which you'll need to do to enter 2.5GB as 2500MB) and will notify you when you've reached a % of the total you can select yourself. (The default is 75%.) It also watches your apps as you use your phone and can tell you which ones are the biggest data hogs. So far so good.

Is Your WPA/WPA2-enabled Wi-Fi Router Secure?

2012-01-11T12:48:00.011-05:00

Quick Summary: If you're looking to secure your router against the WPS vulnerability, the best thing to do is log into your router's web-based setup and disable WPS immediately. However, as of this writing a number of routers -- notably those manufactured by Linksys -- sport WPS configuration tools that claim to let you disable WPS but actually don't. To find out if anyone has tested your router's WPS vulnerability (and noted its ability actually to be disabled via the device's software interface), check this crowdsourced Google Docs spreadsheet. My router, the D-Link DIR-655, appears there and indicates that WPS can be disabled by logging into its setup screen and changing its WPS configuration. Moreover, D-Link tech support confirms this procedure. (See below.) Note: per a recent Security Now! podcast, host Steve Gibson explains that the Wi-Fi Alliance requires that all Wi-Fi Alliance-certified WPS-capable routers have WPS enabled by default. So even if you've never bothered using WPS you should still check its status via your router's setup interface.

How to log into your D-Link DIR-655 router to disable WPS:

Fire up your browser and log into your router by entering its default URL: 192.168.0.1
Click on the Advanced menu item at the top of the home page
From the Advanced page's left nav, find and click on WI-FI PROTECTED SETUP
Uncheck the Enable box

That should do it. If you're a natural-born paranoic and still want to evaluate your router's vulnerability using the current exploit, you can learn more about it by clicking on the Ars Technica article link below. Please be responsible and use the tool only to evaluate and correct your own router's vulnerability. Thank you.

* * * * *

Yesterday I sent the following email query to D-Link tech support:

I just read an online article about a fatal security vulnerability in routers that support WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup). Since my D-Link DIR-655 is one such router, I'm writing to ask that you investigate this vulnerability in all of your WPS-supported routers and assure your customers either that they can and should turn off WPS via the web interface or that you are hard at work on firmware patches that will allow customers to turn off WPS via the web interface.

I read the article on Ars Technica here: http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/01/hands-on-hacking-wifi-protected-setup-with-reaver.ars

The article reports that the researchers who discovered this vulnerability -- one that makes it possible to crack any WPA/WPA2 password because it circumvents WPA/WPA2 to focus strictly on guessing the WPS PIN -- found that Linksys routers that allegedly permit users to turn off WPS via software were still vulnerable to the exploit. In other words, WPS was *still* enabled in these Linksys routers even though the software setting showed it was disabled.

I've disabled WPS in my D-Link router and I'm very keen to know whether I have indeed disabled it or whether I'm still vulnerable to this alarming exploit.

Thank you.

I'm pretty anxious to hear what they have to say. I take Wi-Fi security seriously -- so seriously my WPA2 password comes from Steve Gibson's GRC.com website, which will generate a secure one for you of 63 random printable ASCII characters, 64 random hexadecimal alphanumeric characters, or 63 random alphanumeric characters. To learn that the length and randomness of my password doesn't matter -- that the backdoor exploits the super-simple WPS feature I've never bothered using -- is deeply troubling.

I'll let you know what I hear.

(In the meantime, I just visited Steve Gibson's Twitter account and one of his tweets includes a link to a "Waiting for the WPS Fix" piece on SmallNetBuilder.com. While it's already old news [the piece pubbed on 1/7], it does list a number of router vendors, including Buffalo, Cisco [which owns Linksys], D-Link, Netgear, TRENDnet, and ZyXel, and what they've said publicly about fixing the problem on their company's products. I'm afraid D-Link's response was pretty boilerplate.)

Update #1: Steve Gibson has also tweeted about an open Google Docs spreadsheet where router users who have tested their own router via the exploit can post vulnerability results. The spreadsheet currently reports that D-Link's DIR-655 router, which has WPS enabled by default, appears to be invulnerable to the current hack when its WPS functionality has been manually disabled. I did so yesterday as soon as I learned of the problem, so I'm much relieved to think that may be all I need to do. For those of you with a D-Link DIR-655 router, you may turn off WPS by logging into your router (its default URL is 192.168.0.1), clicking on the Advanced menu item at the top of the home page, and scanning the Advanced page's left nav until you spot and click on WI-FI PROTECTED SETUP. From that page uncheck the Enable box and that should do it. And thank you, Steve Gibson, for helping to keep laypeople like me secure from black hat hackers.

Update #2: Got a reply from D-link tech support this afternoon (1/11/2012). Here's what it says:

Dear Richard,

Your Case ID is [I've deleted this number for publication]

[Critical: Please do not change the subject line of your email when you reply. Leaving the subject line as it is will allow us to review your complete history and help us to better serve you.]

Date of Reply: 1/11/2012 10:52 AM

Products: DIR-655

Our Product Management team is currently investigating the issue

To disable the WPS function on the router uncheck the Enable WPS box and saving settings.

Should you require further assistance with your D-Link products, please reply to this message, or call toll free at 877-453-5465.

Thank you for networking with D-Link .

Sincerely,

Eric French

D-Link Technical Support

So: pretty much what I already knew. You'll note that Eric doesn't mention he realizes that I'd already stated in my original email that I'd done what he's now recommending: turn off WPS manually. And if he didn't read that far, you'll also note that he doesn't bother supplying step-by-step instructions for turned it off, which, since he works for tech support, would be preferable to the terse help he does give. Many D-Link customers likely won't know how to do what he's suggesting, and by failing to go into any detail he's guaranteeing that a portion of the company's user base will tie up its 800 number, get cranky on hold, and vow never again to buy a D-Link product. (Or maybe it's just me: 5 years ago I vowed never to buy another Linksys router after that company forced me to wait nearly 6 months to receive a $15 rebate check.)

Update #3: If you've read this far, you might like to check out my post on Securifi's Almond touch screen wireless router. Its touch screen allows you to set it up without touching a PC or a Mac, and its built-in wizard simplifies configuration so much you literally need no more than 2 1/2 minutes to turn it into a nice range extender for whatever wireless router you already have. (It's just as easy to set up as a wireless router, too.)

Homage to YouTube's Dan & Dan

2012-01-06T14:35:00.004-05:00

As with most interesting stuff on the web, I just stumbled on Dan & Dan's hilarious YouTube videos by following a link posted in a comment about a completely unfunny blog article.

I urge you to check out all of Dan & Dan's work, but the video that inspired me to do my first YouTube video response is this one:

And to understand just how technically difficult it is to pull off this kind of amusing confection, check out my video response:

You needn't bother commenting about what's wrong with my video ... it's painfully obvious. My Canon SD800 IS Digital Elph exhibits a common problem point-and-shoot cameras have maintaining color and contrast consistency from one shot to the next. When I edited the movie in my two- or three-year-old copy of Pinnacle Studio Ultimate HD ver. 14 I fooled around with the color and contrast correction plug-ins, but they're not exactly as simple to use as Picasa's red-eye reduction feature.

Still, not bad for a first effort using the cheap, readily available technology lying around my house.

One last thing: Dan & Dan moderate their video responses, so as of this writing my video isn't yet accessible from the "iPad Head" YouTube page. Will my response be approved? Stay tuned.

1/10/2012 update: Dan & Dan graciously allowed my video response to appear on their video's YouTube page. Thanks, D&D!