Hardware on Much Ado About IT

Apple iOS 5 and iCloud, The verdict

Julian Knight — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 21:12:25 +0000

So I’ve been using iOS 5 on both iPad 1 and iPhone 4 for a couple of days now and I thought I’d follow up on my previous post about what I thought would impact me.

The first thing to note is that it took two days to update the two devices. That’s due to how long it takes to download over a relatively slow link, and how long it takes to re-flash the OS followed by a very long, slow restore of all data – around 30GB on each of my devices.

Likes

I love the ability to fire up the camera without needing to unlock the phone. Though why Apple require a double-click of the home button I’ll never know! Why not just always make it available? Double clicking home also gives access to iPod controls on the same screen again without unlocking which is also useful. It may be just me but the camera seems to start up faster now too. Using the volume button to take a photo really is so much better and results in a lot less camera shake. The notifications system will take a while to tweak to the best settings I think but is vastly better than the previous version. Photo Stream is certainly useful but somewhat confusing as it effectively seems to be a copy of photos from whichever device takes them. See also my dislike below. Not part of iOS itself, but the ability to synchonise iWork files (Pages, Numbers & Keynote) between devices is good though I really hope the extend this capability to the iCloud desktop client as well. Keeping track of expenses, kids pocket money, holiday allowance, etc. is now much easier.

Dislikes

5GB of free iCloud space is useless for backups, don’t even bother. Even worse when you have more than one device on a single account as of course you will as you want to share information between them. Just my iPad filled up 5GB with backup even after turning off the backups for most of the apps. Even worse, if you enable iCloud backups, you don’t get local backups! Like I really want to restore a 32GB device from the internet! Taking photos on the iPhone 4 with the phone in the logical position to use the volume button – e.g. landscape with the buttons top-right – results in the images being upside-down in Windows!! Is no testing done by Apple!! I noticed this is one of the iPhone picture sharing apps too. Photo Stream is not an album! That means that many photo management apps cannot see the pictures, you have to copy them to an album before you can do anything with them unless you are in the native Photos app or another Apple app that recognises the Stream. Ugh! You seem to have to “Save to Saved Photos”, then switch to Albums then to Saved Photos, then click the share button, then select the photos, then click “Add To…”, then click “Add to Existing Album”, then choose the album. Fantastic! 8 clicks and changes of screen just to copy photos out of the Photo Stream to an album – ARGHHHH… Memory management on the iPad one is still poor with far too many apps crashing, even Pages. Is it just me or does the camera seem to take much darker photos sometimes now? I notice that in a number of cases, where I would previously have expected the camera to take a flawless outdoor picture, that I couldn’t get the auto-exposure to get it right and the HDR pictures were coming out quite dark. Again, not directly iOS or iCloud related but the latest version of Pages is still rubbish. Too much stuff just silently disappears without warning – such as fields and inter-document links. Also too much formatting is still lost such as lists within table cells. I’m also getting lots of crashes on the iPad 1.

Indifferent

iCloud contact sharing means that contacts previously only stored locally on my device are now shared between all devices which is better. But why can’t I move contacts to one of my already shared contact stores such as Gmail (uses Exchange sync)? Rubbish. I can’t even export from iCloud.com. Also strange is that I can now create contact groups on iCloud.com but NOT on my local devices!! Why doesn’t iCloud sync everything to my desktop? I can’t understand this unless Apple are going to have some kind of “premium” offering later. iCloud bookmark syncing, while useful to keep devices in sync, doesn’t allow changes from iCloud.com which would be very useful. The update process for iOS 5 was not entirely seemless, on my iPad I ended up with quite a mess with icons scattered all over and not restored to where they were before. OK, I’m bored now so that’ll do. I’ll try and add some more another time.

Hope you find this useful.

Apple iOS 5, What does it change for me?

Julian Knight — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 09:22:07 +0000

There are some really nice looking changes on the way for Apple mobile users lucky enough to have a device that can be upgraded to iOS 5. I thought I’d throw together a quick look at how this will change things on a practical level for me as I use an iPhone and an iPad for work and personal use. Update: 2011-10-13. I’ve added some more details.

Perhaps the biggest change will come from the inclusion of the new iCloud service free with 5GB+ of space. Apps, books, and music purchased via Apple don’t count towards the 5GB and neither do synchronised pictures which is handy given the size of pictures now. In the future then, apps that are iCloud enabled (Numbers, Pages and Keynote for example) can be set to automatically synchronise between your Apple devices – this is great because I wont have to think about whether my expenses spreadsheet is more up-to-date on the iPhone or the iPad. Annoyingly though, this doesn’t extend to the PC/Mac where you have to copy documents using the web interface to iCloud. Pictures and videos taken on the iPhone will be automatically synchronised to iCloud and then to both the iPad and the laptop. iCloud keeps the latest 1,000 photos for 30 days, a connected PC (or Mac) will keep them permanently. Update: Synchronising Mobile Safari Bookmarks will certainly be useful. Having a single set of bookmarks on both iPhone and iPad without having to sync via Internet Explorer (which picks up loads of irrelevant IE bookmarks) will be very nice and will be a quick way of being able to start looking something up on the iPhone then carrying on at leisure on the iPad. Update: Music, of course, can also be synchronised via iCloud and songs purchased from Apple will not count towards your space allocation. However, this isn’t a lot of use to me as I don’t like to be restricted by ridiculous, costly DRM; nearly all of my music comes from CD’s. The same applies to books; in fact, the economics are even worse generally for books since most sources of eBooks are stupidly expensive given the restrictions on them. The iPhone and iPad will be backed up to iCloud too so I no longer have to worry about traipsing up to the office to back them up using iTunes. There are other iCloud features of course but I won’t be using them as they are too little, too late. Google already provides me with synchronisation of calendars and contacts and allows sharing with non-Apple devices as well. ToodleDo gives me synchronisation of tasks. Dropbox, box.net and Google Docs gives me sharing and synchronisation of documents. Find My Phone is useful of course, I already have that, but Find My Friends wont be as many of them don’t have Apple devices. Update: One exception to the above is that I will be using the Notes synchronisation as using Exchange based mail for synchronisation of Notes is pretty bad. Update: One warning about iCloud. You can backup your iDevices to iCloud but, if like me, you have say 2 32GB devices this could get very expensive. I have a map application for example which can have many GB of data, if I back this up to iCloud, I’ll be paying a lot for the convenience (US$2 per GB per year). So the bottom line is that we are not PC/Mac free just yet. The second warning is that you will need to be careful if you connect to the Internet over 3G not just WiFi; with all of this automatic synchronisation going on, things could get even more expensive when you go over your data limit! (Thankfully, my iPhone at least is on the UK’s Three network with unlimited, uncapped data) In addition to iCloud, Apple claim over 200 other improvements in iOS 5. The ones that will impact me are:

Notification Centre

Notifications are a pain at the moment, the changes in iOS 5 should make them usable again.

Update: Better still, you can change the settings for each app so you can have some apps with no notifications, some with the new banner style and some with the old alert format. You can also control whether the alerts for an app will appear in the lock screen.
Email Improvements

At last! Email gets the capability for some simple formatting. You can also add a flag. Not much but at least a start. Apple’s understanding of heavy email use is still an awful long way from a useful reality.

Update: You can also mark multiple emails as read which can save some time.
Lock Screen Changes

You can now take photos, listen to answer phone messages and see multiple notifications without having to unlock the phone.
WiFi iTunes Sync

Long overdue and maybe a lot less relavent if iCloud backup and sync works well. Of course, 3rd party apps have taken over a lot of cases where iTunes was needed – podcasts for example, currently you have to connect a wire to get podcast updates automatically so I use a 3rd party app that deals with podcasts much better and auto-updates directly. Annoyingly, WiFi sync only happens when you connect to a power source.
Update: Keyboard Improvements

The new split keyboard will be useful on the iPad when using it on the go (typing with thumbs).
Update: Custom Alert Tones

The constant bleeping of iPhones gets painful, you can now make this slightly better by assigning custom tones to many alert types so you are more likely to be able to know what the phone is trying to tell you.
Twitter Integration

This is not terribly significant but will probably encourage me to use Twitter more (not sure that is really a good thing though!).
Camera Improvements

You can now take a picture without unlocking & by using the volume + button, both nice features. You also get a positioning grid and manual focus/exposure hold. Of course 3rd party apps have had all this for ages and much more. Simple photo enhancements are also baked in to the camera app.

Update: You can swipe left/right in the camera app to get straight to the photo albums. You can also finally create new albums.
Safari Improvements

Like the camera app, Safari is playing a bit of catch-up with 3rd party apps. I’ll still be doing serious browsing in iCab though. The internals have also been updated and HTML5 support is now closer to desktop Safari.
Update: Map Improvements

Directions now show alternative routes which can be very useful.
Update: Built-in Dictionary

You can now look up many words in the built-in dictionary. Not sure if there is any control here though and not sure how many languages are covered or how many words.
Update: Keyboard Shortcuts

Hooray! You can define simple keyboard expansions. E.g type “e-” and get your email address. Not a replacement for Text Expander but it is available to every app.

Diigo Bookmarks 03/31/2011

Julian Knight — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 12:26:48 +0000

<p class="diigo-description">
Good iPad review of how real people (rather than geeks) are using it and getting on well with real-world use.
</p>
<p class="diigo-tags">
<span>tags:</span> <a href="http://www.diigo.com/user/knightnet/ipad">ipad</a> <a href="http://www.diigo.com/user/knightnet/hardware">hardware</a> <a href="http://www.diigo.com/user/knightnet/reviews">reviews</a>
</p>

Monitoring a Broadband Router

Julian Knight — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:00:59 +0000

Just been asked this question by an ex-colleague so I thought it would be good to do a write up.

How do I monitor my broadband router?

There are a number of measurements that you can do to see the health of your router.

External Monitoring

Firstly, you can measure whether the outside world can “see” your router. This does mean that you have to allow “pings” from the Internet which does slightly reduce your router security and so this feature is often turned off by default. I use some external services to monitor the availability of both my web sites and my router:

[basicstate.com][1]
[mon.itor.us][2]
[servermojo.com][3] Each of these have both free and paid services. It is [servermojo.com][3] that I mainly use to ping my router.

Internal Monitoring

Secondly, you may be able to turn on something called SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) in your router. This is a standard that allows monitoring of all sorts of information regarding servers, routers, etc. You will need to give the router an IP address of a PC within your network that will receive the information. There are a number of free tools that allow you to monitor SNMP To monitor from within your home network, you can use [PRTG][4] or the free version of [Kiwi Syslog Server][5]. SNMP will allow you not only to see that the router is alive but whether it is connected to the outside world (the WAN port), what speed communications it is using, how long since the connection came alive and many other parameters.

The key parameters to measure are:

When the WAN connection went up and down
What the download speed is
The Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR)
The Attenuation If you are having intermittent router problems, these tools will give you the kind of ammunition you need to take to your ISP to encourage them to take you seriously and get the fault resolved. [1]: http://basicstate.com/ [2]: http://mon.itor.us/ [3]: http://servermojo.com/ [4]: http://www.paessler.com/prtg/ [5]: http://www.kiwisyslog.com/

Flashing the BIOS from Linux (OpenSUSE 11.0)

Julian Knight — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:28:00 +0000

I’ve been a bit quiet here recently because I’ve mainly been working with my business laptop currently running Windows 7. You can see more about this on my other blog – [Much Ado about IT][1]. However, the power supply on that died recently so I’m back to my trusty desktop which runs OpenSUSE 11.0 24×7. I managed to get hold of an upgraded CPU for this a while back but I’ve not really had an incentive to upgrade till now. The new CPU supports hardware virtualisation but I need to enable this in the BIOS. Of course, this machine (based on an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard) has an old BIOS that doesn’t allow me to turn on these features so I needed to upgrade to the latest (v1805). But, I only run Windows under VirtualBox on this computer and I don’t have a floppy drive so updating a BIOS is no trivial matter! After some Googling, here is the answer:

Install the coreboot-utils package
As root, at a command prompt, run “flashrom” to check that your chipset is supported for writing
Extract the .bin file from the archive containing the updated BIOS image
Make a backup of the existing BIOS with “flashrom -r backup-bios.bin”
For the paranoid, try writing that backup back to the BIOS with “flashrom -wv backup-bios.bin” to ensure there are no errors. Reboot at this point for the really paranoid
Now flash the new BIOS with a similar command to step 5
Reboot and check that the new BIOS is OK If you get an error from flashrom saying that the new BIOS is the wrong size, you may have had a problem unpacking the bin file from the archive as I did. Unpack the whole archive to a folder. If flashrom doesn’t work for you, there are lots of other ways – I like using GRUB to boot from a floppy disk .img file – very “Linuxy”. [1]: http://it.knightnet.org.uk/

More on the GRUB bug (with mixed PATA and SATA drives)

Julian Knight — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 03:14:00 +0000

I’ve mentioned this one a couple of times so I’ll give a bit more detail because it is a nightmare to solve if you don’t know what is going on. If you have both a parallel ATA (PATA, this is the way most hard drives were connected on desktops and laptops until around 18 months ago) and a serial ATA (SATA) hard disk controller on your PC (as many do) and hard drives connected to both controllers, you are going to get hit by the GRUB PATA/SATA bug. When you boot from a CD/DVD drive (generally connected to the PATA controller) to install Linux, GRUB will see your hard drives in a specific order. It lists them as (hd0,0) etc. and this numbering is mapped onto the actual devices (e.g. /dev/hda for PATA or /dev/sda for SATA) using a mapping file in the grub folder. The problem is that when you re-boot from a hard drive rather than the removable drive, it is likely that the order of the drives will change and GRUB can’t currently handle this. You have a couple of choices now. You could install openSUSE 10.3 which treats all drives as though they were SCSI (e.g. /dev/sda etc.), no problems there. If you want to use another distro though (e.g. Ubuntu), try this: After installation from CD/DVD, reboot without the CD/DVD and see if GRUB works. If it fails to find the boot loader, you can edit the grub menu manually from within GRUB itself, see the [documentation][1] for details. Now you can play with the default drive (the “root (hd0,0)” bit) until you find the right one. Hint: you can type “(hd” and press tab to get a valid list of drives and partitions. Once you have found the correct drive to use you can now boot normally. Next, find the location of the grub install files (should be in /boot/grub). As root, edit the device.map file and reset the device map to how the devices look when you are NOT booted from a CD – you should be able to work this out from your currently mounted devices. Alternatively, edit the GRUB menu.list file to correct the “root” statements to the correct drives. Yes, it’s a mess and has been that way for at least two years. I first noticed it when Knoppix (the first of the really good live distros) stopped working on my desktop PC though I didn’t know what the problem was then. Here are some links to more information:

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3081671.0
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows?action=show&redirect=RestoreGrub
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GrubHowto?highlight=%28grub%29 While I’m at it, here are some quick instructions for rebuilding GRUB:

sudo -i (or su)
grub (runs grub shell)
find /boot/grub/stage1 (if it doesnt work, try without /boot) => should return installation drive, e.g. (hdx,y)
root (hdx,y)
setup (hd0) (for installation on MBR of disk 0. Alt: (hdx,y) to install on boot partition, etc.)
quit On Ubuntu, try update-grub to rebuild grub menu and reinstall

On all distros, grub-install /dev/hdx [1]: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/index.html