hardware- gnegg

After seven years, the Apple Watch experience still is a mess

Seven years ago, in 2015, the Apple Watch was released and quickly switched focus from a personal communication device with some fitness support to a personal fitness device with anciliary functionality.

Every year since then, Apple released a new version of its watchOS operating system, adding some new features, but most of the time, what was added felt like how Software and Hardware development was done up until the early 2000s where features were made to fill bullets lists, not to actually be used.

To this day, the Apple Watch is a device that nearly gets there but even the basic functionality is hampered by bugs, inconsistencies and features which exist on paper but just plain don’t work in reality.

I am a heavy user of the Apple Watch, and daily I stumble over some 100% reproducible issue that I don’t expect to stumble over in an Apple product, much less one with such a pinpoint focus on a specific use case.

My “user story” matches exactly what the Watch was designed for: I’m wearing the watch all-day to know the time, to get silent notifications and the silent alarm clock. And once a day, I’m going on a running workout while listening to podcasts without taking my phone with me.

I’m a nerd, so I tend to be hung up in a case of XKCD 1172, but none of this user-story feels off what the watch was designed for.

But now, let me guide you through my day of 100% reproducible annoyances which have been present since the respective feature was added to the Watch (multiple years ago) and which to this day have not been addressed and which start to drive me up the wall to the point that I’m now sitting down and writing a long-form article.

First, let me give you context about the Apps and Hardware involved in my setup:

I’m using Overcast as my Podcast app. It has a hard-time syncing podcasts due to 3rd party API restrictions, but it’s still better than the built-in Podcasts app because that one cannot even sync the playback order of playlists (native podcasts was a feature added to the watch in 2018) and most of the time, syncing episodes did not work, worked only partially (some episodes downloaded, some not), or appeared to work (progress bar shown in the watch app on the phone but not moving). Streaming over LTE works (at the understandable huge cost of battery life), but even then, I have to manually select the next episode to play because it does not sync playback order of playlists (called “Station” in Apple Podcasts terms)
I’m using AirPods Pro as my headphones.
I’m tracking my runs using the built-in Workouts app (because that one is more equal than others with regards to what features it can have compared to third-parties) not because it’s better in general.

That’s all.

The trouble starts before I start my workout: Sometimes I want to add a specific podcast to the playlist I’m listening to. Because Overcast (see above for the reasoning why Overcast) only allows to sync one playlist, this means it will have to download that episode.

So I open Overcast and watch it start downloading.

Which is very slow because watchOS decides to use my phone as a proxy over a Bluetooth connection (this was the case since 2015).

I have WiFi enabled, but the Watch doesn’t auto-join my UniFi based Wifi (it works at home, but not at the COVID-related “home-office” location). All other Apple devices join fine. Wifi is a Watch feature since 2015.

But even if I manually join the WiFi (which works fine), watchOS will not stop using Bluetooth, so that won’t improve download speeds (this too was the case since 2015).

Also, because I switched to the settings app, Overcast was force-quit by the OS due to resource constraints, so when I go back to it, the download will be marked as “Failed” and I have to start it again.

So my daily routine before a run when I want to listen to a specific episode of a podcast that has not yet been downloaded for whatever reason, is as follows:

go into settings
disable bluetooth
manually join wifi
open Overcast and start the download.
Continously tap the screen in order to make sure the app is not terminated while the download is ongoing

You could list this as Overcast’s fault, but other Podcast players on the platform, most notable Apple’s native one also have similar to identical problems (with Apple’s offering being spectacularly bad in that it doesn’t work right even aside of the connectivity problems).

OK. Now I’m ready to run. So I select my episode on Overcast and hit play. But all I get is a prompt to chose an output device. Of course I forgot to re-enable Bluetooth which I fix and after a very long wait time, finally, one the AirPod in my right ear connects to the watch and starts playing the podcast. The left one remains silent until I take it out of my ear and put it back in (this doesn’t happen every time, but it does happen regularly enough for me to write it down here).

As I sit down again at my office chair to put on my running shoes, I accidentally bump the table which causes the mouse to move and the computer to wake up again. Thanks to automatic device switching (a feature added in 2020), the mac immediately grabs the AirPods back from my Watch to play the silence it’s currently playing (this one happens every. single. time).

So I go back to the watch and press play. Another 20s of waiting while the Watch negotiates the handover with my mac and I’m back to my podcast.

Finally it’s time to leave.

I’m in the very privileged position to work right next to where I’m running, so as I start to run, I’m initially going in and out of WiFi range. Every time the watch connects and disconnects of the WiFi, the audio stutters and sometimes breaks off completely (bug present since 2015).

So I stop and disable WiFi.

But now I’m running. Finally.

The workout itself is fine (with the exception of the display issue that if the workout is auto-paused due to me stopping to tie my shoelaces and then resumed, the screen will say “paused” in the top left, but the running animation and timer will still be running – this is a regression in watchOS 8, released in 2021) until the point that I’m getting a notification from a message I want to reply to.

I bought a Series 7 Watch based on their presentation of the new QWERTY keyboard feature for right this purpose.

Unfortunately, the message I got is in German (I live in the german speaking parts of Switzerland after all) and I want to reply in German. The new signature feature of the Series 7 Watch is not available in any language but English though which nobody told me beforehand, so it’s back to either scribble and only being sporadically able to type umlauts or dictation where I can watch the device in real-time bungling my speech into a ridiculous word salad it wants me to send off. The watch is much worse at dictation than the phone.

There’s no reason for the QWERTY keyboard to be Series 7 exclusive but to make more money for Apple which is also why they touted it as a signature feature of this new hardware generation.

They could at least have bothered to make it useable for the majority of the people on this planet (which speak a language other than English).

Anyways – back to the run. It starts to rain and after having had a half-marathon cancelled unbeknownst to me by a wet shirt hitting the touch screen in the past (why not warn me over my headphones if you detect I’m still moving? Ah right. There’s no weather in California, so this problem doesn’t happen), I enable the key lock feature.

After I reach the destination of my run, I want to stop the workout, so I turn to crown to disable the key lock. As that feature was invented for swimming, the loudspeaker of the watch starts playing a sound to eject water that entered the speaker.

All well and good, but also, while playing that sound over the built-in speaker, Bluetooth audio stops. Why? I don’t know, but this misfeature has been present since key lock was introduced in 2016. Sometimes, the audio starts again, sometimes it doesn’t.

But that doesn’t matter anyways, because the moment I’m back in WiFi or Blueooth range with my phone, clearly what needs to happen is that audio needs to stop and Bluetooh needs to be transferred back to my phone which is currently playing… nothing. Also, while transferring audio from phone to the watch takes multiple tens of seconds, the way back is instant.

This always happended here and then before the automatic switching was added in 2020, but since then, it happens every time.

So here you have it. Bug after bug after annoyance every single day. Many of the features I was talking about were added after the initial release of the Watch and were used to coax me into spending money to upgrade to new hardware.

But none of these features work correctly. Some of them just don’t work at all, some of them only work sometimes.

Over the last seven years, the underlying hardware has gotten better and better. The CPU is multiple times faster than it was in 2015. There’s mutliple times more memory available. The battery is larger, there’s more storage available. Marketing has graduated the watch from being a companion of the phone to being a mostly self-sufficient internet-connected device.

Why are apps still being killed after mere milliseconds in the background? Why are apps only awoken rarely to do actions in the background? Apps I have installed manually and I’m using all the time. Why are data transfers from the watch to the phone still basically a crapshoot and if they do work, slow as molasses? Why is Bluetooth audio still hit and miss 6 years after the last iPhone with an audio jack has been released? Why did Series 7 launch with a signature feature only available for a small portion of the planet when there’s no regulatory needs to do so?

The product is supposed to delight and all it does is frustrate me with reproducible and 100% avoidable issues every single day.

This isn’t about wishing for 3rd party apps to have more capabilities. This isn’t about wishing the hardware to do things it’s not advertised to be doing. This isn’t about the frustrating development experience for 3rd parties. This isn’t about sometimes having to reset the watch completely because a feature stopped working suddenly – that happens too, but rarely enough for me to not mind.

This is about first-party features advertized for nearly a decade working only partially or not working at all when all I’m doing is using the product exactly as the marketing copy is telling me I should be using it.

Apple, please allocate the resources the watchOS platform so desperately needs and finally make it so your excellent hardware product can live up to its promise.

Apple Watch starting to be useful

Even after the Time for Coffee app has been updated for WatchOS 2.0 support last year and my Apple Watch has become significantly more useful, the fact that the complication didn’t get a chance to update very often and the fact that launching the app took an eternity kind of detracted from the experience.

Which lead to me not really using the watch most of the time. I’m not a watch person. Never was. And while the temptation of playing with a new gadget lead to me wearing it on and off, I was still waiting for the killer feature to come around.

This summer, this has changed a lot.

I’m in the developer program, so I’m running this summer’s beta versions and Apple has also launched Apple Pay here in Switzerland.

So suddenly, by wearing the watch, I get access to a lot of very nice features that present themselves as huge user experience improvements:

While «Time for Coffee»’s complication currently is flaky at best, I can easily attribute this to WatchOSes current Beta state. But that doesn’t matter anyways, because the Watch now keeps apps running, so whenever I need public transport departure information and when the complication is flaky, I can just launch the app which now comes up instantly and loads the information within less than a second.
Speaking of leaving apps running: The watch can now be configured to revert to the clock face only after more than 8 minutes have passed since the last use. This is perfect for the Bring shopping list app which now suddenly is useful. No more taking the phone out while shopping.
Auto-Unlocking the Mac by the presence of an unlocked and worn watch has gone from not working at all, to working rarely, to working most of the time as the beta releases have progressed (and since Beta 4 we also got the explanation that WiFi needs to be enabled on the to-be-unlocked mac, so now it works on all machines). This is very convenient.
While most of the banks here in Switzerland boycott Apple Pay (a topic for another blog entry – both the banks and Apple are in the wrong), I did get a Cornèrcard which does work with Apple Pay. Being able to pay contactless with the watch even for amounts larger than CHF 50 (which is the limit for passive cards) is amazing.

Between all these features, I think there’s finally enough justification for me to actually wear the watch. It still happens that I forget to put it on here and then, but overall, this has totally put new life into this gadget, to the point where I’m inclined to say that it’s a totally new and actually very good experience now.

If you were on the fence before, give it a try come next autumn. It’s really great now.

the new (2013) MacPro

Like many others, I couldn’t wait for Apple to finally upgrade their MacPro and like many others, when they could finally be ordered, I queued up to get mine.

Last Monday, after two months of wait, the package finally arrived and I could start playing with it. I have to say: The thing is very impressive.

The hardware itself is very lightweight and compact. Compared to the old aluminium MacPro it was replacing, it felt even smaller than it is. Also, the box is nearly silent – so silent in fact, that now the hum of the dimmed background light in my old 30” Cinema Display is louder than the machine itself.

Speaking of that 30” display: It’s using a dual-link DVI port. That means a special adapter is required to connect it to the new Thunderbolt ports – at least if you want to use a higher resolution than 1280×800 (which you definitely do).

The adapter is kinda difficult to get, especially as I totally forgot about it and I reall wanted to migrate to the new machine, so I had to look through local retail (only the one from Apple even remotely available) as opposed to Amazon (three other models available, some cheaper).

The device is huge by the way. I’m sure there’s some electronics in there (especially when you consider that you have to plug it into a USB port for power), probably to split the full 2560×1600 pixels sent over Thunderbolt into two images of 1280×800, only to be reassembled in the display I guess.

The fact that there obviously is processing going on leaves a bit of a bad taste as it’s one more component that could now break and, of course, there might be display lag or quality degradation.

At some time, there was for sure, if the adapters reviews are to be believed, but so far, I wasn’t able to notice bad quality nor lag, but the fact that now there’s one more active component involved in bringing me a picture makes me just a tad bit nervous.

Anyways – let’s talk about some more pleasant things.

One is the WiFi: With the old MacPro I had peak transfer of about 3 MBytes/s which was just barely good enough for me to not wanting to go through the trouble of laying cable, even though it really pissed me off at times.

On the new Pro, I reached 18 MBytes/s over the exact same WiFi yesterday which removes any need for ever considering installing a physial cable. Very handy. Remember: It’s not a file server, it doesn’t run a torrent client, it doesn’t serve movies to my home network. The really large bulk transfers it does are mainly caused by Steam which clearly is the bottleneck here (it never manages to saturate my 150MBit/s downstream).

Another thing that really surprises me is the sleeping behavior of the box. Well, actually, the waking up behavior: When asleep, the thing wakes up instantly (less than a second) – never in my live have I seen such a quick waking up from sleep in a computer.

Yes. I’m waiting for the fan to spin down and all audible noise to go away, but still. Hit any key on the keyboard and the machine’s back. We’re talking “waking an iphone from sleep” speeds here.

It might be that the machine has multiple levels of sleep states, but the instant wake-up also happens after sleeping for over 12 hours at which point a deeper sleep would totally make sense if there was any.

What is strange though: I seem to be able to wake the machine by pinging it. Yes. I know about the bonjour proxy, but in this case, I’m pinging it directly by IP and it wakes up (the first ping has a roundtrip time for 500ish ms – yes. it wakes THAT quickly).

This leads me to believe that the machine might not actually be sleeping for real though because waking from a direct ping requires quite a bit more technology than waking from a WOL packet.

Somdeday, I’ll play with tcpdump to learn what’s going on here.

Performance-wise, I haven’t done that much testing, but replaying a test Postgres database dump that takes 5ish minutes on a 2012 retina MacBook Pro completes in 1:12 minutes on the pro – pretty impressive.

And one last thing: When you get a machine as powerful as this, there’s of course also the wish of playing a game or two on it. As I had one SSD dedicated to Bootcamp in the old Pro, I was curious whether I might be able to keep this setup: The built-in flash drive dedicated to MacOS and Windows on its own (the old one) dedicated SSD.

Now that we don’t have internal drive bays any more, this might seem tricky, but yesterday, I managed to install Windows 8 nicely on that SSD after connecting it via Thunderbolt using this adapter (no affiliate code – I got the link straight from google).

I guess the fact that it’s using Thunderbolt makes Windows think it’s a built-in hard drive which is what makes this work: You’re not allowed to install Windows on a portable drive due to licensing issues.

The adapter is not actually intended for use with arbitrary drives (it’s an accessory to some Seagate portable drives), but it works totally well and is (physically) stable enough. I’ll have to do a bit of benchmarking to see how much performance I lose compared to the old built-in solution, but it certainly doesn’t feel any slower.

Overall, I’m really happy with my new toy. Yes, it’s ~~probably~~ overpowered for my needs, but it’s also cool has hell, it is the first MacPro I own where sleep works reliably (though I’m inclined to say that it works suspiciously well – it might be cheating) and the fact that bootcamp still works with a dedicated external drive makes me really happy too.

Sticking to the iPhone

Recently, I got a chance to play around with a Nexus One phone and I was using it as my main phone with the intent to use it as my new main phone. I had enough of the lack of background apps and the closedness of the iPhone, so I thought, I should really go through with this.

Unfortunately though, this didn’t work out so well.

People who haven’t tried both devices would probably never understand this, but the Nexus One touch screen is really, really bad. The bit of squigglyness you see on the picture in the linked article seems like no big deal, but after one week of Nexus One and then going back to the iPhone, you can’t imagine how smooth it feels to use the iPhone again.

It’s like being in a very noisy environment and then stepping back into a quiet one.

Why did I try the iPhone again?

While I got Podcast listening to work correctly on the Android phone, I noticed that a lot of my commuting time is not just spent by listening to podcasts, but that some games (currently Doodle Jump and Plants vs. Zombies) play a huge role too and the supply of games on the Android plattform is really, really bad.

And don’t get me started on the keyboard: Neither the built-in one nor the one I had switched to even comes close to what the iPhone provides. I’m about 5 times as fast on the iPhone than on the Android. Worse: After switching to the Nexus One, I again began dreading having to write SMSes which usually spells death to any phone for me.

Speaking of keyboard: The built-in one is completely unusable for multilingual people: The text I write on a phone is about 50% english and 50% german. The Android keyboard doesn’t allow switching the language on the fly (while the english and german keyboards are quite alike, the keyboard language also determines the auto correction language), and it couples the keyboard language to the phone UI language.

This is really bad, as over the years I bacame so accustomed to english UIs that I frankly cannot work with german UIs any more – also because of the usually really bad translations. Eek.

So, let’s tally.

	iPhone	Android Device
Advantages	Working touch screen Smoother graphics and thus more fluent usage. Never crashes Apps I learned to depend on are available (Wemlin, Doodle Jump […]) No background noise in the headphones	Background-Applications (I wanted this for working IM as the notification based solutions on the iPhone never seemed to work) Built-in applications can be replaced at will Ability to buzz pictures (yeah. I know. Who needs this?) On-the-fly podcast download.
Disadvantages	Can’t replace internal apps by better ones Needs iTunes to download podcasts No background apps No buzzing of pictures (at least not if you want a location attached to your buzz)	Really bad touch screen (jumpy, inaccurate, sometimes losing calibration until I reboot it) Very mediocre applications available UI sometimes slow Very bad battery life (doesn’t make it through one day even when not heavily used) Crashes about once a day Did I already write “really bad touch screen” – I guess I did, but: “really bad touch screen” Sometimes really bad, sometimes just bad background noise in the headphones. According to HTC, this can be fixed by periodically turning off the phone and removing the battery(!). No audible support (I know I could probably remove the DRM, but why bother at the moment?)

While I thought I could live with the touch screen, the moment I turned on the iPhone again to play a round of “Plants vs. Zombies” that just came out for the i-Devices, I’ve seen how a touch screen is supposed to work and I could not bring myself around to going back, but I still wanted some of the one big iPhone disadvantage, which is lack of non-SMS-based messaging fixed for me, so here’s what I’ve done:

WhatsApp on the iPhone works really well as an SMS replacement (something I was after for a very long time)
meebo so far never disconnected me on the iPhone which is something all other iPhone IM clients have done for me – and even on the android, meebo tended to disconnect and not reconnect.

For me, that’s it. No more experiments. What ever I tried to get away from Apple’s dictate, it always failed. The N900 is a geeks heaven but doesn’t support my expensive in-ear iPhone headset and doesn’t provide any halfway interesting games. Android has a bad touchscreen, next to no battery life, is slow and crashy.

It’s really hard to admit for me as a geek and strong believer in freedom to use something I bought for whatever purpose I want to use it for, but Apple, even after two years, still rules the phone market in usability and hardware build quality.

Can’t wait to see what the next iteration of the iPhone will be, though they don’t have to change anything as long as their competition still thinks it’s ok to save $2 on each phone by using a crappy touchscreen and a crappy battery.

Of all the hardware that can break…

… it has to be the one that’s most difficult to replace.

Today, my Gefen HDMI over Cat5 adapter died. Well. It didn’t die completely, it just lost its ability to produce a stable image. What is transmitted is very intermittent and in the few seconds the image is available, it’s heavily distorted.

Also, it’s not the obvious issue (faulty cabling) as the problems did not go away after using two very short (1m) cat 5 cables to test.

Now this is really bad for a variety of reasons:

Only just last Saturday I bought Star Ocean and Tales of Vesperia for my 360, giving me a total play time of 1.5 hours so far.
Yesterday I noticed that Worms: Armageddon was released for Xbox arcade and I have already invited Ebi after the huge success that was our earlier Worms evening on the 360.
My setup is totally dependent on the two extenders as I am covering more than 20 meters of distance between receiver and projector. No extender, no Xbox, no Wii, no projector.
Last time I waited around six weeks for the extender to arrive

Of all the hardware I’m having at home, the HDMI extender is the worst to break. Not only is it very hard to replace (see above), it’s so deeply integrated into my home cinema setup that just debugging what was going on took a ladder, a screwdriver, a hex-wrench and unwinding an ungodly heap of cables.

All of that in an apartment whose temperature is currently at 30°C (86 °F) and with a hell of a headache.

I’d take anything else going down. Anything but that Gefen extender. My XBox? Sure. Shion? It’d suck, but sure if it has to be, go ahead. My reciever? That would hurt as it was very expensive, but at least it’s easily replaced.

Why did it have to be that Gefen extender? Why??

iPhone works for me

A year ago, I was comparing mobile phones, I bought a Touch Diamond and regretted it and then I bought an iPhone 3G which I used for a year and now I even upgraded to the 3GS. Now that I just got yet another comment to my post about the Touch Diamond, I thought I should recycle that comparison table from a year ago, but this time I’ll compare my assumptions about the iPhone back then with how it actually turned out.

So, here’s the table:

Phone usage
	assumed	actually
Quick dialing of arbitrary numbers		actually, using the favorites list, and even using the touch keypad with its very large buttons, I never had a problem dialing a number.
Acceptable battery life (more than two days)	?	meh – two to three days, but as I’m syncing podcasts every day, I get to charge the phone every day as well, so this doesn’t matter as much
usable as modem	probably not	it is now (using a little help for my Swisscom contract). As I was bound to my old contract with sunrise until may, I would have been able to use my old phone in an emergency, but that thankfully didn’t happen.
usable while not looking at the device		I got really dependent upon the small button on my headset plus the volume hardware buttons on the side of the device, both allowing me to do 90% of the stuff I was able to do on the old phone without looking at it.
quick writing of SMS messages		actually, I’m nearly as fast as with the T9 – having all keys at my disposal eliminates the need to select the right word in the menus, but not having the physical keys lets me wrestle with typos or auto correction which removes a bit of the advantage. It’s not nearly as bad as I have imagined though.
Sending and receiving of MMS messages		works now. I missed the feature about once or twice in the 2.0 days, but usually sending a picture via email worked just as well (and was cheaper).
PIM usage
synchronizes with google calendar/contacts	maybe	yes. Since the beginning of the year, this works really well because Google just pretends to be Exchange
synchronizes with Outlook	maybe	yes, directly via ActiveSync – but since February, our company went the Google Apps route, so this has become irrelevant.
usable calendar	yes	yes
usable todo list
media player usage
integrates into current iTunes based podcast workflow	yes	yes
straight forward audio playing interface	yes	yes (see my note about the button on the headset above)
straight forward video playing interface		actually, the interface is perfectly fine
acceptable video player	limited	kinda yes. Using my 8 core Mac Pro, it’s quick and easy to convert a video, but lately I’m using my home cinema equipment for the real movies/tv series and the iPhone for video podcasts which already come in the native format. Still, it’s no generic video player capable of playing video in the most common formats and it doesn’t really support playing from any server in my home network.
hackability
ssh client	maybe	yes. TouchTerm works very well – much better than any of the mobile Putty variants (Symbian an Winmob)
skype client	maybe	note quite. Actually usable with the speakerphone or headset, but not as useful in general use due to the inability to run in the background
OperaMini (browser usable on GSM)		not needed any more due to UMTS and near-flat rates.
WLAN-Browser	yes	yes

Nearly all my gripes about the iPhone have either become irrelevant or turned out not to be a problem after all.

Combine the very acceptable performance as a phone with the perfect performance as a podcast player, music player, acceptable gaming platform and perfect mobile internet device, then it becomes clear that the iPhone has become the perfect phone for me.

I upgraded to the 3GS mainly because of the larger capacity, but now that I have it, the speed improvement actually matters much more than the capacity increase as 32 GB still is not enough to fit all my audio books, so I’m still limited to all my music, all unlistened podcasts and a selection of audio books.

But the speed improvement from the 3G to the 3GS is so incredible, that I’m still very happy I made the purchase. All the other features are either not quite ready for prime time (voice control) or not really interesting to me (video recording, compass).

Still. After looking for the perfect phone for 8 years now, I finally found the hardware in the iPhone.

No more hard drives for me!

Last week I noticed that the hardware store of my choice had these fancy new (and fast) Intel SSDs in stock – reason enough for me to go ahead and buy two to try them out in my two MacPro desktop machines. Kos-Mos, my home mac was the first to be converted.

But before that, there was this hardware problem to overcome. See: The SSDs are 2.5 inch drives whereas the MacPro has 3.5 inch slots. While the connectors (SATA) are compatible, the smaller form factor of the Intel drives prevents the usual drive sliders of the MacPro from working.

The solution was to buy one of these adapters for the SSDs. Before doing that, I read about other solutions, some of them involving duct tape, but this felt like it was the cleanest way and it was: The kits fit perfectly, so installing the drive was a real piece of cake.

The next problem was about logistics:

pilif@kosmos /Volumes/Macintosh HD
 % df -h | grep Macintosh
/dev/disk2s2   365Gi  319Gi   46Gi    88%    /Volumes/Macintosh HD

Whereas the largest Intel SSD available to date has just 160GB of capacity (149 “really usable”), so at least some kind of reorganization had to be done.

Seeing that the installation running on the traditional drive was ages old anyways (dating back to the last quarter of 2006), I decided that the sanest way to proceed was to just install another copy of Leopard to the new drive and use that as the boot device, coping over the applications and parts of the user profile I really needed.

Been there, done that.

I didn’t do any real benchmark, but boot-time is now sub 10 seconds. Eclipse starts up in sub 5 seconds. The installation of all the updates since the pristine 10.5.1 that was on the DVDs that came with the machine took less than three minutes – including the reboots (I’ve installed the 10.5.7 update this morning and it took around 10 minutes on the same machine).

And to make things even better: The machine is significantly quieter than before – at least once the old hard drive powers down.

I will never, ever, again use non-SSD drives in any machine I’m working at from now on.

The perceived speedup was as significant as going from 8MB or RAM to 32MB back in the days. The machine basically feels like a new computer.

Of course I ran into one really bad issue:

The idea was to symlink ~/Music to my old drive because my iTunes Library (mostly due to Podcasts and audio books) was too large to conveniently copy to the SSD. I renamed ~/Music to ~/Music.old, created the symlink and started iTunes for the first time, only to get screwed with an empty library.

According to the preferences though, iTunes did correctly follow the symlink and was pointing to the right path (WTF?). I tried to manually re-add the library folder which did kind of work, but screwed over all my podcasts – completely.

This is where I noticed that somehow iTunes still found ~/Music.old and used that one. A quick ps turned out my best friend, the iTunes helper was running, so I shut that one down and moved ~/Music.old away to /, just to be sure.

Restarted iTunes just to run into the very same problems again (now, this is a serious WTF).

The only way to get this to work was to quit iTunes (that includes killing the helper) and to completely remove all traces of that Music folder.

Now iTunes is finally using the Music folder on my traditional hard drive. This kind of work should not be needed and I seriously wonder what kind of magic was going on behind the scenes there – after killing the helper and renaming the folder, it should not have used it any more.

Still: SSDs are fun. And I would never again want to miss the kind of speed I’m now enjoying.

celes in the office is next :-)

Managed switch

Yesterday I’ve talked about configuring a VLAN in my home network.

VLAN is a technology using some bits in Ethernet frames to create virtual network segments on the same physical network, but just go ahead and read the linked Wikipedia article as it’s more detailed than what I would want to go into.

To really make use of VLANs, you are going to need at least one managed switch (two in my case). I knew this and I was looking around for something useful.

In the end, I ended up with two HP ProCurve 1800-8G’s: I wanted something that has at least 8 ports and was Gigabit capable as I was feeling the bandwidth cap on the previous 100M connection between shion and my media center when streaming 1080p content.

That’s something I hope to solve with the 1G connection, though the drobo may still be the limiting factor here, but theoretical 480Mbit is better (where are the MacMinis with the Firewire800 interface?) than the 100MBit I was constrained to with the old setup.

The ProCurves are fanless, provide 8 ports and have a really nice web interface which is very easy to use and works on all browsers (as opposed to some linksys things which only work with IE6 (not even IE7 does the trick)). Also, the interface is very responsive and it even comes with an excellent online help.

With only 10 minutes of thought going into the setup and another 5 minutes to configure the two switches I was ready to hook them up and got instant satisfaction: In my server-room I plugged a test machine to any of the ports 2-7 and got onto VLAN1 (the internal network). Then I plugged it into port 8 and promptly was on VLAN2 (as evidenced by the public IP I got).

I have only three minor issues with the configuration of the two switches so far:

They come with an empty administration password by default and don’t force you to change it. Now granted, on a switch you cannot do as many mischief as on a router or worse, a NAS or access point, but it’s still not a good thing.
They come preconfigured with the address 192.168.2.10 and DHCP disabled, practically forcing you to configure them locally before plugging them. I would have hoped for either DHCP enabled or, even better, the possibility of configuring them using RARP. Or they could provide a serial interface which they do not.
To reset them, you have to unplug them, connect port 1 with port 2 and restart them. While this prevents you from accidentally resetting them, the procedure is a pain to do and when the time comes that I will have to do this, I’ll probably have forgotten the procedure.

But these are minor issues. The quick web interface, the excellent online help and the small fanless design make this the optimal switch once you have advanced requirements to fulfill despite not needing more than 8 ports.

There’s a larger 24 port cousin of the 1800-8G, but that one has a fan, so it was no option in my case – especially not in the sideboard where I’m now at the end of the 8 port capacity.

Sonos news

Today, Sonos announced their new 2.7 software version for their home appliances with some additional web radio features in which I’m not particularly interested as I’m more or less only listening to one web radio station. What they’ve also announced though was much more interesting: An iPhone Version of their Controller application (iTunes Link).

The thing doesn’t just look nice, it also works perfectly well and provides all the functionality you are used to have in your sonos controller, but without the controllers bulkyness (the thing is heavy and quite large). I’m constantly carrying my iPhone around anyways and it’s constantly connected to the WiFi network in my home, so it’s the perfect fit to be a sonos controller.

The application starts up quite instantly: It does show a splash screen for around three seconds, but that is still way shorter than a controller booting up from deep sleep, which you have to put it into if you want it to last longer than a day or so.

Functionality-wise the iPhone application provides everything a real controller does – well… nearly everything. I truly miss the alarm functionality, but I’m quite sure that’ll come soon enough.

Aside of that, I’m inclined to say that this little application more or less obsoletes the original controller. And in every case but the 32GB iPod Touch, it’s always cheaper to buy any Apple device and install the application than it is to buy the original Sonos controller (here in Switzerland, you can get an 8 GB touch for half the price of a Sonos controller) – if you can live with setting up alarms in the desktop software. It’s certainly possible (and thankfully much quicker than with the original controller) to cancel a running alarm in the iPhone controller.

Very nice indeed.

On related news: I have updated my ogg to mp3 stream converter to stop looking at the url to decide whether the url to play is a stream itself or a playlist, but instead to fetch the information from the HTTP response header themselves, thus making the script to continue to work with Rainwave despite them having changed the URL for the tune in link.

Which phone for me?

I’m a quite happy user of my Sony Ericsson W880i / iPod Touch combo: The touch is for listening to podcasts and watching video, the W880i is for SMSing and making a phone call here and then, though it’s mostly for getting called these days. Skype exists and works well.

Now with all the new toysinteresting devices coming out all over the place, maybe it’s time to reevaluate the different options. 3G iPhone? Something Windows Mobile based (though the touch diamond seems to be the way to go)? My old phone? Or a combination of any of them?

I tried to make a tabular comparison, where I’m listing the phones by use cases. And I’m only listening features interesting for me. Your points may differ from the ones presented here. This is, after all, a guide I used to pick a solution.

Phone usage
	iPhone	Touch Diamond	W880i
Quick dialing of arbitrary numbers			yes
Acceptable battery life (more than two days)	?	?	yes
usable as modem	probably not	yes	yes
usable while not looking at the device		limited	yes
quick writing of SMS messages			yes
Sending and receiving of MMS messages¹		yes	yes
PIM usage
synchronizes with google calendar/contacts²	maybe		yes. Contacts limited
synchronizes with Outlook	maybe	yes	not reliably
usable calendar	yes	yes
usable todo list		yes
media player usage
integrates into current iTunes based podcast workflow³	yes
straight forward audio playing interface	yes
straight forward video playing interface⁴
acceptable video player⁵	limited	yes
hackability
ssh client	maybe	yes
skype client⁶	maybe	yes
OperaMini (browser usable on GSM)		yes	yes
WLAN-Browser	yes	yes

Notes:

While I’m not using it often, here and then I come across something funny which I want to share with my parents or my girlfriend. MMS is the optimal medium for that. I send about one MMS per two months and I receive around 2 MMS per month, so this is probably not as important.
Using Services like GooSync it is possible to synchronize the W880i with the Google services, though Google’s Contact API currently isn’t in a state where it would be useful for actually using it to synchronize contacts with the pone – mainly due to not providing an option to synchronize only certain matching contacts.
iTunes not only downloads Podcasts but also keeps track of playback position and the new/not new state across devices and computers. I’m subscribed to more than 20 podcasts, so such features are essential for me.
Neither the iPhone nor the WinMob devices provide an user experience for playing video that even comes close to match the one the iPhone would provide for Audio files.
The Video player on the iPhone is limited to MP4-packaged H.264 files, whereas there are Media Players for WinMob that can handle whatever you throw at them.
Skype is available as a JavaME application, but in addition to the (horrendous) GPRS charge, Skype also charges you, whether you make or receive calls. This is why I listed skype support as missing on the W880i

What’s missing in the comparison table is one of the upcoming large Windows Mobile devices with built-in keyboards like the Sony Ericcson XPERIA or the Touch Diamond pro. This class of devices does provide more convenient typing, but their usability still doesn’t even come close to matching a pure phones one. You’d still have to browse through menus, search special keys (like umlauts) and stuff. It’s just that typing has become a bit easier.

These little usability benefits do not even come close to offset the weight and especially thickness of these devices which is why I’m not listening them in the table above.

But let’s discuss the tables content for now:

First the obvious: The best phone in the list is… well… the phone. Neither of the two smart phones is capable of bringing a pure phone user experience that comes even close to what a real phone with a real keyboard can provide.

In case you wonder: I’m a heavy user of T9. Typing with a 10-key keypad assisted by T9 feels completely natural to me and the W880i provides really nice T9 functionality with quick access to suggestions and other shortcuts, so I’m actually inclined to say that I’m quicker to type on that phone than I would even be with one of the larger keyboard-based smart phones, mainly due to shorter distances to travel with the finger(s). With my ~100 SMS per month, I consider myself to be a heavy user of SMS, so quick and easy SMS writing and reception is a key feature for me.

Aside of that, the phone is more or less just that: A phone. It doesn’t really shine in every other aspect. Music kind-of works, but is unusable for Podcasts due to not saving playback position between launches of the media application, let alone synchronizing the playback position across devices.

Video, applications and even just browsing beyond the means of what OperaMini can provide are out of the question.

As such, the W880i basically is like grep. Or sort. Or uniq. Or like any other of these little UNIX utilities: It does one thing and it does it well.

The WinMob phones provide not much better media support (they do play video, but for Podcasts they are still not as good as iTunes), but they shine in the realm of hackability and, of course, the PIM synchronization, though there they more or less only work with Exchange. Also, the larger screen provides the user with a lot more possibilities UI-wise.

So while the W880i is the better phone, the WinMob devices are the better PIM solution and better platform to hack on which appeals the geek in me quite more – obviously.

The iPhone is limited in its capabilities as a phone, provides next to no hackability and will probably come with some enforced phone contract here in Switzerland. It does shine in the media department though, but that part is also perfectly well handled by my current iPod Touch to which I can easily (at the cost of $10) add the limited hackability the iPhone is going to get – should I need it.

Looking at this, the iPhone certainly looks like an uninteresting solution: All it would provide I currently have in the touch, aside of the phone, for which I currently have a better solution anyways.

Replacing the W880i/touch combo with either an iPhone or a WinMob solution seems like a stupid thing to do as I’d lose the good usability of the phone and/or the nice Media capabilities of the touch.

So in the end, I have only a couple of options which would work for me:

Replace my W880i/touch combo with a W880i/iPhone combo and use the iPhone as an always-connected surf station with limited hackability. This, frankly, is just too expensive to be of any value as it would mean to get a second mobile contract just for surfing here and then, while still forcing me to keep the data option for my W880i because the iPhone is not usable as a modem in case I need to emergency-repair a server or something.
Replace the W880i in my combo with the Touch Diamond: With every earlier model of WinMob devices, this would have been completely un-doable due to the thickness of the devices. The Diamond is not much thicker than the W880i, so the Diamond and the iPod Touch would still fit the same pocket in my trousers. I would lose the kick-ass usability of the W880i, but I would gain a real in-bed media player (without transcoding), an emergency SSH client and a completely working PIM with totally working synchronization.
Keep my solution as it currently is, while keeping in mind that ever since I got the touch, it provides all the features I would ever need: A kick-ass phone, an acceptable video player, a kick-ass music player and two browsers – one for each type of usage: The OperaMini when I’m forced to use the slow GSM and Safari on the Touch when I have WLAN (you would not want to use Safari over GSM – I tried).

It’s funny: I’m so much in love with technology and gadgets. I’m always on the lookout for new stuff, always trying out new, so called revolutionary technology. I’ve tried to many phone solutions in my life (just look at this blog), but I finally think that I have found a solution I’m willing to stick with.

The current W880i/Touch combo works so well that I don’t see any other solution that would only provide me with advantages. Each and every other new device comes with inherent drawbacks.

I guess, for once, I pass. I’ll stick around with my outdated solution and I’ll wait for the next revolution. What I currently have just works too well.