Acrobat.com on your iOS devices allows you to upload camera roll content from Safari.

The other day I found myself wanting to extract full quality, uncompressed video from my iPhone.  I didn’t have a Mac or PC handy, and I wanted to move the video to my iPad so I could work on it with iMovie.

I looked for apps first.  Transfer Big Files was most prominent in my searches.  It got mixed reviews and I never got around to trying it.   I moved on.

Then I stumbled into something by accident:  Acrobat.com.    From http://files.acrobat.com in Safari on my iPad or iPhone I can upload items from my camera roll, including uncompressed video files.  The web interface is clean and simple to use on an iOS device.  You’ll need a free Adobe account.

I tried to do the same thing with Dropbox.  On my iPhone I couldn’t navigate the desktop version of Dropbox.   On my iPad Dropbox only offered to upload a compressed version of the video.

Box.com let me upload uncompressed versions of video files the same way Acrobat.com did.  I had to load the desktop version of the site in iOS.

Once the video was uploaded from my iPhone to Acrobat.com I opened the Adobe Reader app on my iPad.  The app let me save the video file to my camera roll.  Using this workflow I can shoot video with my iPhone and wirelessly transfer the uncompressed full quality file to my iPad for further processing with something like iMovie.

It’s not an exercise for the impatient.  If you’re doing this kind of stuff a lot I’d look into another solution, like the USB camera connection kit.  That link has other solutions as well.

Notes:

Acrobat.com has a file size limit of 100mb.  You’ll get there fast with uncompressed iPhone video.

The free version of Acrobat.com provides 5GB of storage.

This Adobe document says you can’t upload .mov files.  But I’ve been able to.  Maybe they can’t be shared.

The 31 second uncompressed video I uploaded was 68MB.

I only tried Safari, not other browsers on iOS.

Uploading uncompressed video with Safari

The issues are somewhat varied. Some report basic connectivity problems and many report a significant slowdown on their network.

But the main reason I’m posting is to point out a couple of Apple Support documents I’d never seen before, referenced by Vijay S on the Apple Discussions support site. The articles address setting up a roaming network. Roaming means you have multiple base stations, and your devices automatically connect to whichever one has the best signal without your intervention. Vijay points out that setting up a roaming network might not be as intuitive as you’d expect. I’d have to say I agree.

When I extended my wireless network I referenced a book I reviewed a long time ago, Taking Control of Your 802.1n Network by the incomparable Glenn Fleishman. If you’re interested in fine-tuning your Apple-based network you should grab this book. The latest edition includes updates covering changes to the Airport Utility and Mountain Lion.

The two Apple documents referenced by Vijay are :
Extending the range of your wireless network by adding additional Wi-Fi base stations
and
Setting up and Configuring a roaming network (802.11 a/b/g/n)

One point that gets some emphasis: If you can use Ethernet cable to extend your network you should. When we had our kitchen renovated last year I finally got an Ethernet cable running to the back of the house. My main Airport Extreme base station was upstairs toward the front of the house. Now I have coverage in the back of the house as well via an Airport Express wired into my network.

The key thing I learned when reading the Glenn Fleishman book was making sure your wireless networks have the same ssid name, password, and security settings. The only exception in my case is that I’m running both 5 and 2.4ghz networks. The 5ghz networks have different names than the 2.4 ghz networks because you probably have a reason for picking one over the other.

Some people prefer to lump their 5 and 2.4ghz networks into one name; you can read up on that in this Ars Technica article. Personally I agree with this comment so I can easily identify which band I’m connected to.

With two base stations serving up wireless networks named and secured the same way my wireless devices can roam from one base station to the other without the user noticing. It’s great.

What’s Apple’s Answer to Sonos?

Speculation about Apple’s product pipeline is endless. Lately the frontrunner has been an Apple TV. Wall Street and the media want nothing short of a miracle: A device that combines the current Apple TV and the best display ever imagined — while instantly replacing every cable box for every carrier.
But how many could they sell? Devices like the iPhone and iPad sell in very large numbers, like the iPod before them. The reason? iPods, iPhones, and iPads are largely personal devices. A typical household buys more than one and upgrades regularly. Some households would buy more than one television from Apple. But how many? And how often?
For Murphy, the next product is obvious and Sonos is already making it: Intelligent, wireless speakers.
How often do we hear about Apple’s ecosystem? How big is music in the ecosystem? It’s huge. Apple’s stranglehold on the digital music industry has helped lock in customers. But one could argue that the stranglehold is loosening. Why not sell consumers more devices for music playback? And here’s the kicker: A significant number of households would buy more than one speaker.
Tim Cook’s quote about the television feeling decades behind has been repeated over and over. But what about stereos? Receivers with an endless array of ports on the back. Speaker zones. Digital inputs, analog outputs, consumer confusion. Speaker wire catching dog hair on the floor. Awkward remotes requiring line of sight.
Sonos has a lot of these problems beat. Wireless speakers with decent sound. Your phone, tablet, or computer as a convenient and simple remote. Dead-simple configuration. Built-in support for services like Pandora and Internet radio stations. In a way Sonos is an Apple TV for music.

So where’s Apple on this? You can be sure Apple is well-aware of Sonos. Steve Jobs even warned Sonos they could be infringing on Apple intellectual property. So why isn’t Apple competing with Sonos?
Sonos speakers aren’t for budget shoppers and aren’t what I’d call an impulse buy. In our case we were looking at wired speakers throughout the house. By the time you add receivers, amps, speakers, wiring, and an Airport Express for each “zone” of the house you’re into some significant expense. Sonos is a viable and affordable alternative to this path. We actually rejected Sonos based on cost until we started researching the alternatives.

Back to Apple: They launched a speaker unit years ago that didn’t last long. The Apple HiFi had an iPod dock and Jobs said he was getting rid of his stereo. But the HiFi didn’t have WiFi – limiting it to one room. Sonos speakers can be deployed throughout your house and play in sync or independently.
Maybe Apple was a little too early with the HiFi. They shouldn’t let that stop them from trying again. iPods didn’t have wifi back then, there was no AirPlay. But now AirPlay and Homesharing are the glue holding the ecosystem together. Apple shouldn’t be ignoring speakers. Speakers should at least have the hobby status (or is it ‘intense area of interest’ now?) the current Apple TV holds.

Buy Sonos or Build Your Own

Should Apple just buy Sonos? Sonos isn’t making a huge profit. But their equipment is somewhat expensive. It seems like the margins could be high if they charged near the current prices and were selling an Apple-like number of units instead of a Sonos-like number of units. There might be some sticker shock when you see Sonos pricing. But Sonos customers seem to have an Apple-like satisfaction with their purchase.

It’s hard to see why Apple couldn’t make their own wireless speakers. They’re not unfamiliar with speakers. They know wifi. But could they do it as well as Sonos? What does Sonos have that makes them a buyout target?

The most obvious one is Sonosnet, the technology the speakers use to communicate with one another. Sonosnet is self-configuring, allowing each Sonos component you add to your system to communicate seamlessly with the others. The underlying protocol is essentially wifi, but there’s more to Sonosnet than just wifi. Each speaker is capable of communicating with all the rest. That speaker in a remote corner of the house only has to reach one other speaker wirelessly to participate in sync with the other speakers. And you don’t have to configure any of that.

What about multiple speakers? Sonos speakers can work as individuals or all in sync. Or anything in between. All your downstairs speakers can be playing Pandora while all the upstairs speakers play directly from an iPhone’s local music store. With a few taps every speaker could be playing Pandora.

Currently you can play to multiple Airport Expresses or Apple TVs from a Mac or PC running iTunes. But you can’t do that from iOS devices, including Apple TV. AirPlay on iOS and Apple TV limits you to selecting one output. That’s a pretty big limitation when your goal is whole-house audio. Worth buying Sonos for? Probably not.

What about the speaker technology? I don’t know. Sonos sounds good and they play in sync. That’s all I know about speakers.

Sonos gear already has an Apple-y feel to it. The products have a minimalist, clean finish and the interfaces are designed well. Apple would quickly have a number of products ready to ship, including the new Sonos Playbar.

Sonos isn’t perfect. Its iTunes interoperability isn’t via any APIs. Sonos scans your underlying music files instead (which it helps you share) and builds its own index. That’s an opportunity for Apple: Allowing Sonos to pull directly from iTunes and iTunes Match.

The more I think about it the more I think it won’t happen. It would have happened by now. If Apple does make its own wireless speakers I can think of some added features I’d like to see. Like a system-wide intercom to boss people around in my house.

Note: Sonos recently added a new component, the Playbar. It’s designed to complement your television.

OSXDaily has a practical post about how to make the Finder more useful.  Over the years the Finder  has evolved.  A user who’s new to the Mac might find it’s easier to keep their bearings once they’ve implemented some of the suggestions.

For example, the post recommends having new windows open to your home folder.  And always having the path displayed to the current folder.   Along with other ideas that make a lot of sense.

Limitations:

File size limited to 250mb.
Offer could end any minute.
Requires setting up new Box account.
Must agree to personal use only.

I use Box from time to time. There’s a lot of overlap with Dropbox but it looks like Box is more interested in facilitating sharing for commercial purposes. That said, this offer is only good for personal use.

The inside of my MBP, before replacing the drive.

A few weeks ago I realized I was going to need a dedicated laptop for a client I’m working with.   I thought about taking Mrs. Murphy’s first-gen Air off her hands – but it seemed pretty pokey and I quickly lost interest.   I looked at buying a new Air and realized that by the time I configured some customizations it would be more than I wanted to shell out for a machine that would get limited use.

Then I remembered a Macbook Pro sitting on a shelf in my office.  It used to be our DVR until I got a top-of-the-line iMac last year.  The MBP hasn’t done much since – partly because the battery bulged about a year ago and a laptop without a battery is somewhat limited.

The MBP is a 3,1 for those of you who know that sort of thing.  For the rest of us: it’s a model that was introduced at the end of 2007.   Five years ago.  A little less for this particular serial number, which according to Powerbook Medic was stamped out in early 2008.   It shipped with 2GB of RAM and a 5400RPM hdd,  160GB of storage.   It’s a 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo.   Back in 2008 it was a mighty fine Mac.

The problem:  After years of use I had little faith in its reliability going forward.  The drive had worked hard recording HD television shows and football games and converting them to m4v files using a Turbo.264 USB hardware encoder.  The drive sounded a little tired.  Whether it actually was or not didn’t matter, I didn’t trust it.    So I started reading up on SSD drives.  I didn’t, and still don’t, know much about them.  Mrs. Murphy’s Air is the only machine we’ve ever had with an SSD.   In hindsight I should have gotten one for my iMac, without a doubt.  The hdd is clearly the bottleneck on that machine.

Anyway, I did some reading about SSD drives in an effort to find one compatible with my MBP’s SATA support.  After a lot of reading at Newegg and Amazon I settled on a Crucial M4.  I got it from Amazon for $99.   Like I said, I don’t know much about SSDs so I wasn’t 100% sure it was compatible.

The tricky part was installing the SSD.  I’d only opened up a MBP once before.  Apple opened one for me once to repair a fan, and they never got the case back on properly.  It was bent in the front and the trackpad button was never quite right, it had a dull or non-existent response every time you clicked it.   More on that later.

If you’re patient and you have the right tools the MBP isn’t horrible to take apart.  The screws are tiny and uncommon and there are a lot of them.  But if you have a container to sort them in it’ll make things much easier.  I labeled each group of screws and placed them in a divided sorting box.  Ice cube trays would work well too.

The hardest part:  separating the top case housing the keyboard and trackpad from the lower case along the front edge.  There are hidden clips that you need to release without bending.   If you get past that you’re golden, all the other sides use screws and are already separated when you go after the front edge.

Inside the laptop the hdd is wedged in pretty tight.  Mine was a tiny bit different than the description at ifixit, where I found the instructions.  Still, it was a fairly straight-forward procedure to remove the old drive and install the new.  Work slow, be careful, be patient.   And make sure you have the right tools.  There’s a ribbon cable glued to the drive that needs to be gently pried away.

I also got 4GB of RAM ($54), doubling what I had and maxing out the machine’s capacity.  Finally, I got an Anker replacement battery for $69.   It seems to hold a couple hours of charge.  I’m just happy to have the machine stay powered when the MagSafe gets disconnected.

I didn’t open the RAM or the battery packaging right away.  If the SSD surgery had gone south I probably would have sent them back.   So the next step was installing OS X.

I opted for Snow Leopard and simply installed from the DVD.  For a while I wasn’t sure it was going to install, some people reported having trouble getting OS X running after installing an SSD.   The install froze for a long long time, saying it had 28 minutes left.  I believe it said that for over twenty minutes before finally moving on and finishing the install.

I powered up the machine, ran through the first-time setup, and everything was fine.  In fact, it boots from powered off to a user desktop in about 24 seconds.  I installed my new RAM and battery, no issues.

Here are the instructions I followed, at iFixit.  As someone noted in the comments there’s a step where you’re told to disconnect the drive’s ribbon cable from the logic board, and it seems unnecessary.  I skipped that step, and see no reason to do it unless you have trouble freeing the drive.

Anyway, the upgraded machine is fantastic. So incredibly responsive.  I’m not pushing it really hard.  I’ll be using it for administrative tasks, not Photoshop or Final Cut.  I had to install Windows on it too.  I went with XP, and it’s running fine using Boot Camp.  I thought about using Fusion, but thought I’d suffer with only 4GB of RAM and no way to install more.

Windows doesn’t boot in 24 seconds, it’s more like 37 to the login screen.

Now I’ve got a 15″ laptop that’s over four years old, based on a model that’s five years old.  I can install Mountain Lion on it.   And it’s as snappy as can be.   Applications open in an instant.   The boot time is great.  It’s silent.   The battery, the SSD, the RAM – all for less than $225.

**Back to that MBP that Apple never got reassembled right:  this machine was a free replacement for that one.  The original’s fan went bad with only days left on the warranty.   Then there were a few trips back to the store:  the dull trackpad, the keyboard wouldn’t light, the case wasn’t reassembled correctly.  At this point it was no longer under warranty.  But Apple had started working on it while it was under warranty.   They honored that detail and handed me a brand new machine with a new warranty.  My original was a Core Duo.  The one they replaced it with was a Core 2 Duo, along with other upgrades.   

Sequence created with iPhone app Action Shot.

Some smart apps are pushing the limits of your iPhone
camera these days. Take a look at Action Shot. This free app creates an effect that would take me hours to bang out on my Mac.
Here’s how it works: You shoot a brief video of some action. The app presents you with a handful of frames. You drag to shade over your action-inducing subject in each frame and the app combines them into a still. A still with your subject displayed multiple times as it progresses across the frame.
Great sample here from Apple’N'Apps.
Even better, you don’t need a tripod. It would help, but the app can do its job if your hand is somewhat steady.  For best results hold the phone as steady as possible and let the subject move across the frame – rather than tracking the subject.

A track deleted from iCloud but still present in the local library.

Murphy’s obsessions come and go. Recently it was the wrong album art showing up on my iPhone. Fixing my Pretenders album art only to see it revert to the wrong image a few minutes later got frustrating quickly. Until I realized the cloud-based Match versions of my album art were coming down and overwriting my locally stored tracks.

If you don’t know how iTunes Match behaves you could run into some problems. Here’s what worked for me:

• Sign into a Mac or PC with a local user account that does not have your music collection stored locally in iTunes. You could create an additional user on your Mac (or PC) or do what I did: sign into a dummy  Windows account running on a virtual machine.
• Open iTunes. Ideally there won’t be any local music stored there.
• Sign into iTunes using the AppleID used for iTunes Match.
• You should see all your music that resides in the cloud. Delete the song that needs the artwork updated. This will delete the version stored on Apple’s servers.
• Once you’re done with the previous step you can sign off the dummy Mac or PC user account.
• Sign into your Mac or PC account where the local copy of your music resides.
• Fix the album artwork by selecting the track or tracks you want to update, then right-click the track(s) and select Get Info.
• You can delete the existing artwork on the Artwork tab and add a different image. Close the info panel.
• Right click the corrected track and select Add to iCloud.  Done.

Once the artwork has been fixed you can send the track back to iTunes Match.

Why do we need to use the dummy PC or Mac account? Because the process for deleting a cloud-based copy of a song presents a complication when there’s a local version of the track. ITunes forces you to delete the local copy of a song before it allows you to delete the cloud-based version. You might not want to delete the local version – doing so would wipe out meta information like the play count.  By deleting only the cloud version our local track and its meta data are preserved.

The obsession with album art has passed for now.  When I see some pixelated album covers on my phone again it’ll be back, but for now it’s forgotten.

The show outlined a plan where you could buy an aapl call option that expires in December for about $2500 and simultaneously sell two call option contracts for about $2600. Specifically, the contracts looked like this at the close on Friday:

Buy this for $2520 ($25.20×100):
Strike Symbol Last Chg Bid Ask
380.00 AAPL111217C00380000 25.20 3.60 25.40 25.80

Sell two of these for $2690($26.90×100):
Strike Symbol Last Chg Bid Ask
410.00 AAPL111217C00410000 13.45 1.35 13.15 13.65

You immediately pocket the $100 and hope Apple climbs – but not too far. Why ?

Because the two contracts you sell in their transaction are for a strike price of $410. The one you buy is for a strike price of $380. So the contract you bought will gain value as it rises above $380, but your gains will be capped when the underlying stock price reaches $410. And there’s more:

You sold TWO contracts. For each of those sales you’re obligated to sell 100 shares for $410 each if the contract is executed. That’s 200 shares. The good news is that 100 of those shares are provided by the call option you bought. Hopefully you were holding 100 shares of aapl outright when you entered into this transaction so you can deliver the other 100 shares. They do mention on the show that this example is for current stock-holders looking to tweak their position. If you find a way to exit the position by buying back your call you can keep your shares. But keep in mind the price of the contracts you sold will rise with the underlying shares.

Like they say on the show, you make your profit above the strike price of the option you bought, but your profits are capped because of the contract you sold. Essentially, you want aapl to rise to $410 but no further. As aapl goes past $410 the 100 shares you held outright aren’t going for the ride – because the option you sold called them away.

You can watch the show here, they start talking about this some time past the 8 minute mark. So – what about their claim? Are you getting paid to buy Apple? Maybe you could look at it that way, but the caveats are quite substantial.

Regardless, I have little interest in this play at this time of year. Apple has the potential to make a decent run between now and the end of the calendar year. Look at what’s coming up: new iPhone launch, iOS5, iCloud, Earnings in October, Christmas shoppers waiting in line, China… The last thing I want right now is a cap on my holdings. It’s not Apple that might hurt the share price between now and January. It’s everything else in the economy that I’m worried about.

Past performance is no indication of future results, but take a look at the last two years and how aapl has done between September and January. Then add a reality check by looking at 2008.

If you email portrait (vertically) – oriented photos from your iPhone your recipient is likely to view them sideways, especially if they open them using a browser-based mail service like Gmail.

The solution I was actually using: Email the files to myself first. My Mac would receive the photos and run an AppleScript triggered by the email subject. The script rotated the files, stripped out the exif tag that caused the problem, and mailed them back to me. I could then use that copy for sending to other people. It was relatively painless as I could email the photo right from the Camera app which kept the number of steps reasonable.

But a couple things aren’t working with Lion. The part of my AppleScript that pulls the attachments out and saves them to a folder in the Finder isn’t working. Others have the same problem. Further, the Automator action that sent the email back out isn’t working either. I’m not alone on that one either.

So, I looked at alternate solutions. Like uploading to Dropbox. Dropbox uploads a full res version of your photo. So I created a folder action script that handles the rotating and exif tweaking as soon as my Mac sees the file. That works fine. The problem is that the Dropbox app on my iPhone doesn’t download the full res version, it pulls down a version I consider too small.

I didn’t give up right away. The iOS Safari Dropbox DOES open a nice big version of the photo. From there I can save the photo to my camera roll and email it out. Recipients get a correctly oriented version of the photo, big enough to see.

So now the problem is the number of steps and apps involved. I could use something like Instagram but sometimes I just want to send a photo in an email, straight-up.

I don’t understand why Apple has made this an issue. iOS used to rotate a different way. Their own browser on the Mac isn’t going to display the photo correctly because of the way they’re handling the rotation, with a tag. Why browsers can’t read the tag – I don’t know.

Anyway, I’ve got a solution for when I need it, but I don’t see myself using it much. Too many steps.

11/2011 Update:  I have this working again.  My Automator workflow fails at the step where it sends the email.  So I’ve updated the AppleScript with a command to send it.  I’ll post the updated script shortly.

Try this: Switch to Finder and hit Command-Option-H. That hides all applications except Finder. Once they're hidden try hitting Command-H to hide the Finder itself. It doesn't work.

So here’s a workaround that’s acceptable to me: Our Applescript will hide the windows of all applications except the Finder. Then it will CLOSE all the Finder windows. The end result is a clean desktop with application windows that stay out of sight until you summon them back into view.
Optionally, you could include the 3 lines of the script after the line “Close every window” (commented out with dashes in the image below) to open up a single Finder window to a specified folder and use that as your starting point.

Once you’ve created the script you need a way to kick it off. I use TextExpander for a lot of these things. TexExpander is a fantastic text replacement utility that can also run Applescripts when you type certain characters. For example, Murphy might type dsktp or ddesk to make TextExpander run our script and display the clean desktop. There’s a lot more to TextExpander than running Applescripts, but I find it very handy in that capacity. Instead of memorizing somewhat arbitrary key combinations you can make up a code – so your shortcuts are more like keywords with meaning than shortcuts that generally only carry one letter. Murphy covered TexExpander here.
As an alternate check out FastScripts from Red Sweater Software. FastScripts lets you assign a script to a keyboard shortcut. And it has powerful features for helping you manage your script library. If you’re a heavy Applescripter you probably already know about it. If not, take a look at the features.

If you’re looking for more information on Applescript and Airfoil they’ve got some examples on their site.
Interesting: Initially I made a script that opened a Spotify playlist and didn’t include the line to commence playback. It stopped working after a day, I don’t know why. It would play the one track and then stop. The day before it jumped to whatever playlist had been set as the current playlist in the Spotify application and continued playback. Not sure what happened there.

If you go into your account in iTunes and look at your purchase history there’s a link to Report a Problem. If you know what month you made your purchase you’re all set. Otherwise prepare for frustration.

The interface lets you search by month and year. I can’t tell you the month and year when I purchased most of my music. That leaves you to page through the transactions a page at a time, eleven transactions per page. The worst part is the noticeable delay every time you click ‘Next’ and wait for the next page to populate. No exaggeration, 5-10 seconds per click. Further, every time you update an app you’re building more line items, creating page after page to sift through.

Customer service departments have been setting up obstacle courses in their phone systems for years. Now Apple is doing the same thing with their application’s interface. Amazon offers a search field that makes finding an order near instantaneous. They even let me run customized order reports.

I’m not naive, I know Amazon has something to gain by letting me search my orders: re-orders. But Apple doesn’t. I’m not going to buy a song or an app again, so why should Apple make it easy to find my order?

Apple is renowned for its expertise in interface design – making it obvious this lack of customer service is intentional. There’s no excuse for wasting people’s time intentionally.

Want to see for yourself? Visit the store in iTunes. Under your account name at the top right click Account. Then next to Purchases click on See All. You’ll see a button to report a problem.

Now we’ll show you how to do it in Automator, with enhancements.  First, the file name(s) of the attachments get added to your email’s subject line automatically.  Second, the sent files are placed in a Finder folder of sent items.  Murphy provided an Automator solution for this task before, but the email subject feature and the filing are new features.

Here’s a screencast that shows how it works.    When you want to send a file simply drag it to the folder and it’s sent.  No additional clicks.  You might create different versions of the Automator application.  For example, one might mail to a Flickr account and another might be used for sending a photo to four grandparents at once.

Feel free to suggest enhancements to the Automator workflow in the comments.  There’s a third party Automator action that can easily get file names without the full path name if that’s what you prefer.

You can see all the actions in the Automator workflow here.

Arthur S. Brisbane:  ”…my inquiry into it has led to a Times internal review and, as a consequence, Pogue is barred from making any more speeches like this one to public relations professionals.”

I don’t expect much to come of this.  Pogue is an extremely popular piece of New York Times content.  Personally, I find his videos over the top and not as funny or informative as his commenters find them.  Fans jumped to his defense in the July 6 comment thread, with excuses similar to those Pogue made on Leo’s show.  Which was that essentially all tech reporters are cozy with the tech companies.  If Mossberg can collect big paydays for speaking why shouldn’t Pogue?

We all know there will always be certain reporters who get special access.  According to the NYTPicker piece on the subject Pogue actually claims he’s pushed the New York Times to reveal his other endeavors, but failed.

The average New York Times reader and iPad buyer could care less about any of this.  Granted, Pogue isn’t the only one up to these kinds of shenanigans.  But he’s high-profile and with that comes the heat.  Am I turning to Pogue for truth in technology reporting?  No way.  I read him from time to time – but only so I know what everyone else is reading.

Leo Laporte’s interview with Pogue, from the TWiT network.  1:39:20h into the show.

David Pogue’s disclosure, undated, at the New York Times: A Note About Ethics and Disclosure.  You have to click through to his profile to find it, it’s not listed within his columns.