Personal

Text Plus iPhone application review

We're trying Text Plus  out as an alternative to paying a carrier for a texting plan. This is a 1.99 iPhone application. It's basically group ware.We cancelled our texting plan so nobody can text us directly now. Text Plus fixes that indirectly but there is a catch.

Text Plus is built around communities. You can create a named community and then ask people to join it using either TEXTing (their phone number) or their text plus id if they have it. Community membership can be open or closed. You can indicate if only you as the creator can invite people or any member can invite someone or people can invite them selves.

Each community gets its own real phone number that looks like 60611XXXXX. If you invite someone with a TEXT capable phone then they receive the invite, do some registration, and then they are in the community. They should save the 60611XXX number so that they can later send messages to the community paired with that number. 

It's important to realize that ALL members of a community receive all TEXTs send using that communities 60611XXX number. If you want private texting between you and someone else, make a closed community with just that person as the other member. That private community has its own number like 60611YYYY and then they can text with you only using that number. This best maps to a traditional text operation. Your friends will use this specific number to text you like before rather than your phone number.

Communities with multiple members are handy to keep a bunch of people with phones in touch. It's a bit like a private facebook group or something but works with texting pretty seamlessly. Handy for lunch calls at the office and so on. A private twitter is comparable.

Your iPhone or iPod Touch receives notifications when someone in one of your communities sends a text. Thats basically all thats to it. The registration only has to be done once per phone so once someone registers with text plus then its very easy for them to join other communities.

People can find out about existing communities by texting the community name to 60611 and then it replies with options if any are available.

So far, it's ok. We made a group for family texting, one for myself and my friends and a couple of private ones for 1-1 texting with my wife and so on. I guess we'll see moving forward how it goes.

Apple 24" LED Cinema Display review

My new desktop is arriving and this display was first to arrive. This is a perfect display for someone with a laptop. It includes a magsafe connector, speakers/mic and an iSight camera. It attaches to my macbook with a mini display port connector and there is no DVI adapter in the box so if you have an older macbook then you'll need a DVI to MDP cable.

The display is very nice. My MacBook displays at 1920x1200, picture is very sharp. The magsafe adapter is pretty cool and makes attaching a MacBook about as easy as possible without a proper docking station which Apple doesn't sell.

I just plugin magsafe/USB and MDP to my MacBook and then press a key on my external keyboard and it starts right up. It's a pretty cool setup. I just might spring for one of these at home eventually.

There is no firewire ports on the monitor, just 3 USB 2.0 ports. The 30" Cinema display had FW and USB. All in all, it's a very nice setup.

I'm going to attach the 30" Cinema display to the Mac Pro when it arrives in the next couple of weeks or swap the 30" for a 20" from someone on my team and use the 20" with the MacPro.

Cutting the mobile monthly bill

Our monthly bill is around 250 bucks. I had a 2100 minute iPhone plan which is 100 bucks. My wifes iPhone is another 30 bucks for her data plan. Two extra lines for the kids are officially 10 each but end up at 20 because of FCC fees and so on. Unlimited texting is 30 so thats 100 + 30 + 30 + 20 + 20 or 200 then add in tax and the FCC things and boom 240. My rollup minutes rise every month by about a 1000 minutes. Basically, we're not using all our minutes. We only use about 1200.

So, whats the plan. We switched to the 1400 minute plan which is 80 a month. We dropped one kids line because she never even has the phone charged never mind on her. We killed texting and added a prohibit text feature to the plan otherwise we'd get charged 35c per incoming message whether you like it or not. That saves about 20 + 20 + 30 or 70 bucks plus taxes.

My biggest daughter does text a lot so we got her an iPod Touch with the TextPlus application which gives her texting from the iPod for 6 bucks a year. Yes, she needs a Wifi connection but that works fine at home and in some other places she hangs out.

This frees up her phone as a shared phone for both kids to use when needed and she still has her private texting on her iPod Touch.

Updated on failed MacBook Pro (A1226) Dead display but otherwise works

My dead MacBook isn't so dead. The display doesn't work but it does boot into snow leopard, there just isn't a display or external display. The volume buttons make the normal noise, I could eject a DVD, caps lock turns on and off. So, it does look like the infamous nvidia video failure.

This apparently is covered by a 3 year warranty when it's the nvidia chip. I'll visit the Apple Store and post an update on what happens.

UPDATE:

The 'genius' at the Apple Store bar plugged a USB drive into the MacBook and booted it. He then attached the drive to his laptop and pronounced it an NVidia defect which is a free repair. They took the MacBook and I just received via overnight Fedex the repaired MacBook Pro. Awesome service and great result. They even repaired my touch pad mouse button which didn't click that well anymore.

Drobo, just good for backups, giving up on online usage

My Drobo 2nd generation is just too slow. I have it hooked up with FW800 to my iMac and it's just painful. My daughter complained once again the other day that iMovie was not working. What she meant was it's too slow to be useful.

At that point, I decided to move iPhoto, iMovie and iTunes on to a 1Tb drive (USB 2.0). I'm using Drobo purely as a time machine drive now and for archiving stuff. I made a 2Tb limited bundle in to which I put the time machine backups. I copy the external USB drive and internal drives to time machine backups.

This should be and is a lot faster than before. To put it in perspective. A single external USB 2.0 drive is faster in all circumstances than a firewire 800 attached Drobo 2nd gen with 4 drives inside. So much for an array being quicker. It's a consumer device and they saved too much money by not putting enough processing power in the unit. The new Drobo S is 800 dollars instead of 400 but apparently, it's not much faster than the current unit even on eSATA.

Time machine cant resolve destination problem fixed

I use an external USB 1Tb drive for my time machine backups. I back up maybe 750Gb of data on this. It works when I do it first but then after a couple of days, it says that it can't resolve the time machine destination and the time machine backup fails.

I went googling this morning and discovered that if this happens then you just need to select the time machine disk again in time machine options and then it starts working again.

Need dual link DVI mini displayport cable for Cinema HD to work well

Looks like if you use a DVI mini displayport cable with a Cinema HD display then you are limited to native macbook resolution. The cable works fine with a 24" display, I get 1650x1080 with that. It also works with my 1080p TV at 1920 x 1080. But, all I can get with that cable and my Cinema HD (30") is 1280 x 800. I'll buy a dual link cable over christmas to try to see if I can get a 2560 x 1600 display working.

Virgin Mobile Broadband 2 Go on a MacBook

I have some trips coming up and connecting to the IBM VPN remotely is always a problem at customer sites. Hardly any of them have a visitor WiFi network I can use and none will allow me to connect to their network. IBM won't either but at least IBM has a visitor WiFi network.

So, I figured a 3G modem would be nice but I don't want a contract. I decided to try the Virgin MC760 USB modem first because it was 99 dollars instead of 250 for the Verizon one. They want $20 for 250MB of traffic. The first model I got wouldn't work on the Mac. It had software for the mac but after installation there was no Broad to go application. Two hours on the support phone later I gave up and returned the device to BestBuy where there was one with Mac Compatible on the box, same model.

That worked. I'd recommend activating somewhere you have WiFi though, it takes forever. I haven't found a 3G signal anywhere around where I live for now. It's just a 1x connection which is about 128kbits/sec. You can't browse at that speed BTW, most web pages are not optimised for such a slow connection.

The IBM Mobility client VPN can connect using this so sametime and notes work, albeit pretty slowly.

This also has me thinking about how much 250MB of transfer really is, it's almost nothing. I get 1MB/5MB emails. Just browsing some sites will burn through that in no time. They are really screwing you on this charge. The monthly contracts are 60 bucks a month for 5Gb which is most reasonable but now thats 700 bucks a year.

I'll try this out next week when I'm in Boston but if there is no 3G signal at the airport in Minneapolis or Boston or at the customer location then I'm tossing it.

UPDATE:

I tried it today at the office. It looks like you can plug it in to any USB port, I used the one on my Cinema Display today. It's a little chunky so you can't plug anything else in to the macbook if you want to use the USB modem. It's too wide to have a network cable, usb cable or displayport connection beside it so a USB extender cable or HUB would be a good idea.

I got a good EVDO Rev A connection at the office, almost all bars. Using speedtest.net I did a performance test and saw 183ms ping times with 0.78mbps for download and 0.43mbps for upload speeds which is lower than claimed but it's still pretty usable for email/IM/twitter and so on.

Mophie Juice Air Review

Lately while traveling in San Francisco and in Orlando, I noticed my battery life is very bad. I'm lucky to get 12 hours out of my iPhone 3Gs with occasional photo/movie taking/facebook/twitter checks during the day.

I was in the Apple Store in Orlando and saw they had a Mophie Juice Air battery case. This is like the incase slider pro case but includes a 1200mA lithium battery. The case is thicker than the normal case, maybe 3-5mm thicker but it's still not that bad.

It takes about 3 hours to charge it using a micro USB cable (like the one on the Kindle). It seems to double battery life. My phone in Orlando would run out of juice (<20%) around 5:30pm and it seems like the battery in the case runs out around the same time. Then the iPhone switches to its own battery and then you get more time.

I'm pretty happy with it. I'll post updates for this week back in Rochester to see how it works in a good reception area. I could get two days out of my 3Gs when home normally so I'm hoping for 4 with the mophie.