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May 4, 2011 10:01 pm

Unlocking iPhone 4

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by    in mac,Technology

If you want to unlock your iPhone 4, try Gevey. This is what worked for me eventually. It is an ingenious hack where you hardware patch your SIM card.

The nice part of it is you don’t touch the s/w so it doesn’t void your warranty and doesn’t anger CuperGods.

he bad part of it is each time you reboot the phone, you have to do a 20 second song and dance to make it work. (See the instructional video). It is a minor irritant, but the upside is great.

My wife is using it on Airtel 3G in India and it works just fine.

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December 11, 2010 9:43 am

A day with the Google Chrome OS netbook, CR48.

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by    in Reviews,Technology

Prelude

After my switch to Android, almost all of my personal data is now stored in the cloud.  My emails, calendar, contacts and the works.  I have long preferred online tools such as 37Signals over native clients for most of the stuff I do.  In addition to this, being a web developer, I have a handful of personal software that is hosted by my servers that I use to do things like expense tracking.

Having said that, my demand for fast desktop computing is huge as well.  I am a heavy Lightroom and Photoshop user and being a programmer, I need all the programming tools needed for that – a *nix based OS that can handle both Adobe products as well as *nix based development tools, for which OSX fits the bill perfectly today.  My primary machine is an i5 MacBookPro, but I don’t use any of the built in OS software any more (AddressBook, Mail etc).

The most used software for me are Google Chrome, Adium, Terminal, Lightroom, RubyMine, Textmate and Photoshop.  About once a month, I use iMovie to transfer movies from my camcorder and do basic edits on that.

I know I didn’t mention MS Office.  I use MS Office about once every two weeks to open a work document that is a PPT or a Word doc.  But for my personal use, I have migrated to Google docs.  Most personal documents are generally collaborations with the spouse or others and Google docs work just well.  [And Google, you shouldn't have killed Wave.  I was using it.]

I was intrigued when ChromeOS was announced many months ago and was immediately skeptical about its limitations.  But as more and more of my data and managing it has moved online and accessed through my Android phone, I saw the use for it.  But I had to try it nonetheless.

I signed up for the Chrome OS Pilot Program the minute it was announced.  I was a bit bummed that I did not receive the netbook when many others started to receive it and was quite surprised that it showed up yesterday.  Turns out my pal at Google Sanjeev had nominated me for the Netbook :) .  This review and experience wouldn’t be possible without him, so my thanks to him.  I owe him for this one (amongst other things :) .

Chrome and its AppStore

I switched to Chrome as my primary browser almost instantly after it was launched for Mac OSX.  I was mainly attracted by its speed, but stayed because of its built in developer tools.  For someone who is Javascript and CSS challenged as I am, the developer debugging tools and code inspection is brilliantly done.  Yes, I know these are available in Firefox and Safari as well, but I find that these are extremely fast in Chrome and I like the overall experience.  I mean how often do you open a PDF and not realize that you are reading one?  I have opened PDFs and see  that this doesn’t look like HTML only to realize I am reading a PDF inline in the browser, PDF that opened instantly and behaves like a HTML document!

I also let Chrome manage my bookmarks and sync them to the cloud and I also let it manage and sync my extensions and themes as well.  That makes me a near perfect candidate for the ChromeOS.

As a person who naturally gravitates towards webapps, the new age HTML5 based webapps have been an eye opener.  I installed the Chrome WebStore as soon as it was installed and played around with Grooveshark, NyTimes, USA Today, NPR and the Amazon window shop apps – if you haven’t tried these yet, you should and see the difference for yourself.

My Chrome WebStore

As Mashable noted, the iPadification of WebApps seems like generally a good thing.  I see why iPad owners love their iPads.  Could this also mean that the underlying technology for these apps is HTML5, CSS and JS wrapped around by a thin Cocoa layer?  If that is the case, then we are in for a fun few years ahead when more and more webapps start using these technologies and change the way we interact.

At this point, I should add, I am sold for webapps as the future.  As I mention above, I would still have big beefy computers to run my Photoshop and code, but I expect almost everything else will be done online.

CR48

Engadget and AnandTech have great reviews of the CR-48 and hardware.  That covers almost all you need to know about the hardware and packaging.

The CR48 shipped with almost a fully charged battery.  I was up and running in less than 30 seconds.  I am still shocked by this experience.  Since I use Chrome and I enabled sync there, I got all my bookmarks, extensions and all my apps after login.  It is as if I never left my MacBookPro.  I didn’t expect anyone to top the user experience of setting up an Android phone and watch it sync all your data from the cloud, but the ChromeOS setup did it :) .

I am pleasantly surprised how elegant the hardware is.  It reminds me of the 13″ Black MacBook in many ways.  The chicklet keys, the fit and finish, the way the lid latches on.  They keyboard has been very well through through.  The “function” keys are acutally useful.  Having a dedicated key for back, forward, reload, full screen and switch tabs is brilliant.  Makes a lot of sense when the only app you are going to use is the browser.

It is instant

Between the SSD and the lightweight OS, CR 48 is FAST.  Cold boot is less than 20 seconds or so.  Wake from sleep is about a second or less.  Waking from sleep works flawlessly (I can’t believe I am saying about a linux based OS) and it takes less than a second.  BRILLIANT.

The browser

The webapps I tried on this so far have all worked very well.   Javascript execution seems pretty fast.  I can’t tell the difference between using an app like Grooveshark or picnik between my MBP and the CR-48.  SD videos play well.  HD video SUCKS since flash doesn’t do hardware acceleration.  Adobe says they are working on hardware acceleration on linux and it is a top priority.  I hope they do it soon since right now that is the big stumbling block.

That is quite an anti climax from a review point of view.  This is the full Chrome browser and it executes Javascript blazingly fast and renders HTML instantly.  It is as simple as that :) .

You can open multiple instances of the browser if you are not a tab guy by using Ctrl N.  You have to use Alt-Tab to switch between windows.  You can use Ctrl – tab or the switch tabs button to cycle through tabs.  The wrench at the top right pops you with a settings menu, where among other things, YOU CAN CHANGE THE SEARCH BUTTON TO CAPS LOCK, which I had to do since I was hitting the CAPS LOCK quite often and annoyed that it was launching a new tab all the time.

I mean that really is it.  Every webapp I tried works as well it works on Chrome on the MBP.  What else is there to say!  Google promised a browser as the OS, and it works :) .

Battery life seems to be GREAT.  I used the CR48 for about 6 hours yesterday and the battery was down to 35%.  This is totally usable without a recharge for a full day or more.

The OS

There is some basic stuff available in the OS.  Shift – Escape opens a task manager with a “stats for nerds” link :) .

Task Manager

Ctrl Switch Tabs takes a screen shot and Ctrl O opens the downloads folder that has the screenshots.  Incidentally, you can download files to your download folder and open it by using Ctrl O.

Downloads

But when I tried to upload an image from my WordPress web console editing this blog (this is written on the CR-48 of course), I get a full file manager instead of the downloads directory.  I am absolutely sure that non-geeks would be totally lost here.  I could navigate to ~chronos and find my way through, but this is something that should be addressed.

File manager!

Shell

One of the things I want to see is if I can use the CR 48 on the road for emergency coding.  Ctrl Alt T opens a basic shell with basic commands.

Thankfully crosh supports SSH and you can SSH into any other box.

Crosh

The other way to get to remote boxes is by using WebVNC.  If you can run a VNC server on the remote server, you can connect to it from the browser by using WebVNC app on the Chrome web store.

The OS itself does not allow you to compile or run stuff on it, you need to get out of the shell to another server to do your stuff.

Usable in a pinch.  I am headed on a roadtrip shortly and I plan to leave my MBP behind and take the CR 48 alone.  I expect the shell and SSH to come in handy for emergency fixes.

BTW, I could use some help with the font size of crosh.  If you are Chrome OS developer and you know how to push the font size of crosh up, please let me know.

And yes, you can open multiple crosh shells and you can switch to them by using alt-tab :) .

You can also enable developer mode by flipping the jailbreak switch and you get access to a better shell.  I tried that, but once you do that, the OS warns you every time you login that the image can’t be verified and you have to do a CTRL D to make it go away.  Not very non-geek friendly.  I have turned it off for the moment.  If I do need the full shell, I would do that for a short period.

A much discussed thread about using the CR 48 for development can be found here.

And yes, someone has already installed Windows on the CR 48 using the developer mode.

What else do I need?

This would also make a great movie player for the kids.  I need to figure out how to attach a USB thumb drive to the USB port and make it work, find out if there is a media player app to play videos off the thumb drive.  If that works, it would make an awesome addition for an already cool device.

Conclusion

As you can tell, I like it.  A lot.  But I buy into cloud based computing and I am ok with my data living in the cloud.  If you do that, you will like the ChromeOS.  If you are uncomfortable with that idea, then it will take a while for you to like ChromeOS :) .  But you’ve been warned – this, my friends, is the future.

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November 12, 2010 1:25 pm

Boxee box, a subjective review

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by    in Reviews,Technology

I got to spend some quality Wi-Fi free time at America’s tire company, so here is a review of Boxee, so far.

Update 1:

If you agree with the critique of Boxee’s GUI elements in this review, please chime in here at Boxee’s feature request page.

Update 2:

I am amazed that @Boxee's product manager wrote to me an hour after I wrote a boxee review. Thanks! I hope you guys succeed in a big way.
November 12, 2010 3:57 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

Update 3:

@boxee Any chance of getting pre 1.0 GUI elements for local media back? Too many clicks to get there and lack of genre filtering sucks.
November 12, 2010 7:41 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@boxee in twitter (Avner?) told me that they are addressing some of the GUI issues.

Prelude

As you might know, I am quite a fan of Boxee.  I have been using Boxee software on a Mac hooked to the TV whenever I have it available and it solved almost all my problems from my past HTPC attempts.

The Boxee Box has been the device I was waiting for almost an year now, from the day it was announced.  I have used it extensively for the past three days, here are my initial thoughts.

Hardware

I actually like the shape of the boxee box.  It has an attitude of its own.  You either like it or you hate it, which is what the designers intended.

I hooked the Boxee to my TV using HDMI and my Yamaha sound bar using Optical cable.  Works perfectly.  My Yamaha sound bar supports both DTS 5.1 and Dolby surround sound and from what I have heard so far, it is awesome. I am not an audiophile (hence the Yamaha sound bar), so take that with a pinch of salt.

Most of my personal video content is in M4V or MP4 files (thanks to AppleTV and Mac based video editing).  All my music is in MP3 and all photos in JPG.

All my files are hosted in a NetGear ReadyNAS which is hooked to a Gig-E enabled Apple Airport Extreme.  The boxee is hooked to the Airport Extreme using ethernet as well.

It has played all my local content well so far.  I read some nasty reviews in Amazon regarding how badly it plays .AVI files – I don’t have any first hand experience of this or Blu Ray .iso files.  I do plan to test DVD .iso files and will update the blog based on that.

A friend noticed a bug with .m4v files which I also saw after a bit more testing.  For most m4v files, the video shows up correctly.  For a few files, when the movie starts, you only hear audio, if you forward it by 10 seconds or so, it starts to play the content correctly.

There has been no lag whatsoever in the media streaming or music streaming.  Photo slideshows, however, were slow when I threw my 12 MP files, each about 10 MB at it, so I had to resize the images to 1600 x 1200 resolution and use those for the gallery.

The only time I have seen Boxee choke so far is when I added a single directory that had about 8000 resized photos in it.  It did slow down quite a bit and become unresponsive.  I had to force reboot the machine.  Other than that, this has been running very well.

My wife thinks that the Boxee box is snappier than the Boxee on MacBookPro we had earlier.  I think the file scrolling speeds are much faster in the boxee box and in general the GUI is snappier on the box, but I can’t tell for sure.

Startup is under a minute and I am amused people find that as a negative.

I don’t have much 1080p content.  So much so that I only have a 720p TV (I know).  To test how well it works, I hooked my boxee box to my primary photo editing monitor and played Revision3 videos as well as some YouTube videos through it.  It played them pretty well as well.  I have seen good reviews about Blu-Ray .iso performance in twitter.

Flash takes a while to get initialized in Boxee, but once it initializes, based on the server, the performance varies from “It is fantastic” to “Reasonably bad”.  Playing Jon Stewart from the dailyshow.com website through the Boxee browser, for instance, was awesome.  Once I maximized the player, the resolution dramatically improved and it was near perfect.  I have also watched a few TED show apps, seems to work well.  YouTube works fairly well as well.

Flash does seem to stress Boxee a bit during startup.  The video player takes a few seconds to initialize and to start playing the video, but once it does, it runs pretty well.

Oh the keyboard on the remote.  The keyboard is fantastic.  Qwerty on one side and minimal buttons on the other – PERFECT.  It is the best thing ever that happened to a HTPC.  Gone or the days arrowing up and down the soft keyboard on screen.  I think the Boxee Box remote will be the golden standard that others have to match.  Great job, Boxee and D-Link.

The only nit so far has been I accidentally hit the buttons on the other side when typing on the keyboard, so

I have trained myself to hold the remote by the edges and not on my palm.  Something I am willing to live with for the benefits of the keyboard.

All said and done, I am not the right person to review hardware.  Anandtech has promised to run it through their media test suite.

Initial setup

Initial setup was extremely easy, nearly as easy as setting up the AppleTV, which is saying a lot.  The only time I had a glitch was when the audio didn’t work and I had to reboot the machine.

Boxee recognized most of my movies.  Getting it to recognize TV shows was a bit of a chore.  Thankfully, Boxee’s help in twitter @boxee_help is awesome.  They redirected me to the naming guide.  I renamed the files based on what was suggested here and asked Boxee to rescan these images.  It picked up changes for some and it did not pick up the right show for many others.  I used FileBot, a Java (JNLP) application and it does a pretty good job in renaming these files.

I then manually did a “Identify video” for those shows that were not picked up.  Boxee failed for most of those with a “Unable to download movie details” error.  However, when I dropped the network source and added it again, it picked up almost all the shows accurately without any problems.  That certainly is a bug.  I have been working with @boxee_help on this.  I will update the review when I find out what is going on.

I had done all this work through iTunes for my AppleTV.  I am bummed that there is no industry standard sidecar files that can be reused across these media players.

Software

Almost all my gripes with Boxee are now with the software, which is ironic since I loved their beta software on the Mac.  It is best explained through my use cases of how I use this device and where it gets in my way.  This part of the review is primarily for Boxee’s consumption :) .  I hope you guys are reading this and using the feedback.

I received the boxee box a day before it was intended to be released, so I got to use the boxee box with the beta software on it and saw what happened to the GUI after 1.0 was released.

Here are my primary use cases in order of usage.  I wouldn’t prioritize these, but this is just an ordering of how often I use a certain feature.

1)  Music player with photo slideshows

The AppleTV (first generation) was my single most widely used gadget.  The primary use for it was as a music player.  When I started to play music on this, after the screensaver timeout kicks in, it would show the photos in my photo library in a beautiful rolling screen saver.  I can’t overstate how cool this is.

Often my family gets to see photos that we hadn’t seen in many years.  My kids go nuts when they see photos of themselves when they were toddlers.  Add a favorite music track they like in the background and that is THE killer app for this device.

AppleTV nailed this part.  It works beautifully and well, “magically”.

Boxee software on the Mac did this pretty well as well.  I used to set the screen saver to a slideshow directory and play music in the background.  The photo screensaver was not as cool as AppleTV’s, but with the normal Ken Burns effect slideshow, which was pretty nifty too.  Even better, I wasn’t limited to my local music content and run Pandora in the background.  Worked pretty well.

In the Boxee box, for whatever reason, I can’t choose my photo slideshows as a screensaver.  Yes, WTH.  Turns out it is omitted in the boxee box.  I have raised a feature request to handle this.

There is a workaround, however.  I start pandora, then navigate to my photo folder and start a slide show.  I had to rearrange my photos in multiple folders and I pick random folders to start playing.

This is not as convenient, but a workaround till the original issue is fixed.

Given that music and photos are one of my primary use cases, it irritates me endlessly that these two are not top level objects any more in the new GUI.  What.the.hell.  Now, I need to go to “Files” and browse to Music or Photos.  Why?  I understand the GUI was redesigned for first time users and is video centric, but this feels like bait and switch to me (and other beta users).  Very few companies get away with this, heck even Apple took a lot of flake with their iMovie fiasco.

Sorry Boxee, you dropped the ball on this one.  First user experience is great to focus on, but when you have loyal users of your software who have used your software for an year plus, you don’t do this to them.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love opinionated software.  I use 37Signals products and I think AppleTV’s GUI is the best thing out there for the limited set of things it does.  But you can’t make massive changes to your GUI like this.  I can get used to your re-arrangement of items to various screens, but mucking with top level constructs and primary access patterns is bad.

2)  Local content

I have quite a bit of local content (movies and TV shows in addition to music and photos).  Boxee nails this (wait for the GUI gotchas).  as I say in the hardware section, I haven’t found anything to fault in how the content is played once setup correctly.  Better still since the boxee box works stand alone without the need for a server and can talk directly to my NAS without having to plug a HDD, it is near perfect.

Why “near” perfect?  Again, thanks to the 1.0 GUI.  Earlier, when I clicked on TV Shows on Videos, I saw MY videos and MY TV Shows.  If I wanted videos on the internet, I went either to the Apps or to the Boxee browser.

With the 1.0 GUI, when I click on Videos or TV shows, it shows all the TV shows and Videos that Boxee discovered in the internet.  WTF.  I don’t care about random “B” grade movies and TV shows on the internet.  I primarily want to play my content.

So from a one click on videos and TV shows in the beta software, now I have to select Videos and see the noise, then use the down arrow to go the sub-menu and right arrow 4 more times to get to my content under “Files”.

W.T.F.

How can you take a one click operation and make it a 4-5 click operation?  And I have to do this EVERY time?  Can’t the software remember that the last time I visited Videos, I was in the “Files” section and take me there?

Boxee – either move the files as the first sub-tab and select it by default or remember where I was last.  This is nasty stuff.  I definitely expected better from you guys.

Also, under TV Shows -> Files, I saw a bunch of shows.  When I selected them, it launched a browser and took me to Nickelodeon’s website.  Why?  I consciously selected “Files” to see MY content.  I don’t want you guys to take me to a website when I don’t intend to.

I see what Boxee is trying to do here.  They want us users to not think about content as “local” or “internet” and make choices.  I see that.  I don’t know if this is in reaction to GoogleTV, but most random content on the internet is either boring or bad.  I would much prefer to look for internet content through an App instead of being in my face all the time.

And lastly, Boxee – if I want GoogleTV, I will get the Logitech Revue.  Seriously.

3) Netflix

Of course my other source of online media content is Netflix.  With my AppleTV, Netflix was delivered by Wii.  Once I moved to Boxee on Mac, it was fun to have Netflix on one device.

Currently Netflix is not supported.  Boxee says it will be fixed shortly.   I hope they do a good job of that.

4)  Apps

I didn’t watch much TV through Hulu using Boxee in the past.  If having Hulu is a must-have feature, at this moment, you have no choice other than running a full computer next to your TV.  Boxee will get Hulu Plus ($10 per month) by the end of this year.  That isn’t a deal breaker for me.

I tried a few other apps, YouTube works well, TED talks works well, The Big Picture app works well, Pandora works pretty neatly as well.  I was able to add a third party repository and tried xkcd app on it :) , works nice.

The Boxee browser is “adequate”.  I don’t know whats the deal with Bing being the home page for the browser.  Navigating the browser using the remote is a pain, but you can use it in a pinch.  However, I did see in twitter that you can use a USB wireless mouse hooked to the box if you need it :) .

I guess I will explore more with the Apps as the days go by.

In short, is this the killer HTPC box I was waiting for?  I am not too sure right now.  I used to think that was the case in the past.  I have no complaints about the hardware so far.  It is the software that needs tweaking and I hope that they fix it soon.  I think I am going to keep the Boxee box, but I guess I will know for sure in 27 days :) .

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