Car navigation and audio system

I have a new car (as of October), a Subaru Legacy. The new car has a Pioneer AVIC-X930BT navigation/audio system (I mentioned its anti-theft mechanism last week). After years of using maps and printed directions, or relying on my BlackBerry for the GPS task — it’s effective, but small and hard to use while one is driving — it’s good to have the nav system, with a nice, large touch-screen (the next model up also does voice-command activation).

I’m mostly happy with it, and only find two annoying quirks in the navigation system. The more irritating of the two is that there’s a safety disclaimer that I have to touch OK to dismiss every time I start up the system:

Caution!

This Navi product is intended solely as a driving aid. Review instruction manual and select route before driving. Navi is not a substitute for your attentiveness, judgement, and care while driving or moving your vehicle. Always observe safe driving rules and driving laws, and follow road signs even if they contradict Navi’s instructions. By pressing OK key, you accept the license agreement in the instruction manual.

I get the issue here: there are a good many documented cases of people driving onto railroad tracks, going the wrong way on one-way roads, and other such because they blindly and stupidly followed (what they thought were) their GPS systems’ instructions. But, really, I ought to be able to accept that safety and license-agreement message once, and be done with it. Or if they must remind me periodically, how about once a month? Even weekly would be better than having to deal with it every time I start the car.

The other annoyance is that the positioning system doesn’t seem to understand reverse gear. When I pull up my driveway and into my garage, the system doesn’t know where I am with respect to the roads. When I start up again, back out, and head up the road, it thinks I’m on the next block, and remains confused about that for a few minutes, while it acquires the GPS satellites and sorts out its actual location. That’s mostly comical, because I don’t need the GPS location to be accurate when I’m near home. Still, it’s rather goofy.

The most interesting thing about the system is that it replaces the audio system in the car, and includes AM and FM radio, CD and DVD player (including video), bluetooth audio streaming from your smartphone, playing your iPod, playing Pandora or Aha from the Inernet via an iPhone app, and playing music or video files from a USB device or microSD card. It makes for quite the music system.

I had been streaming music from my BlackBerry, but there’s not really a need — microSD cards are very cheap these days. I got a new card and copied all my music onto it. Thousands of music files live with the car. Very nice.

But there’s a problem, caused by a combination of an odd software choice in the Pioneer system and what happens to the microSD card on my MacBook. When I first plugged the microSD card into the audio system and turned on random play, it played the first song, gave me a popup message saying that unplayable files would be skipped, picked a random next song, and turned the random-play feature off.

Unplayable files?

I investigated. There turn out to be three things causing this, all related to hidden files (files whose names begin with ., which are hidden by the Unix file system that’s used on the Mac):

1. iTunes, which manages my music library on the Mac (and whence I copied the files), keeps a hidden file associated with each song, to keep track of metadata. When I copied the music directories, I copied all those as well.
2. Spotlight, a Mac feature that helps you search for things, creates a hidden directory structure called .Spotlight-V100 when it indexes the drive. This happens just because you plugged the microSD card into the Mac.
3. The operating system and the MacOS Finder create various hidden files and directories, both in the root of the drive and in its subdirectories: .Trashes, .fseventsd, and .DS_Store (that last exists in every subdirectory that’s been touched by the Finder).

I configured Spotlight not to index the microSD drive (which you can only conveniently do after it’s already done it), and then wrote a shell script to delete every file and directory whose name begins with . (and one had best be very careful about writing and running such a script). Every time I plug it into my Mac, I have to run the script on it just before I eject it when I’m done.

Now everything works great. The audio system no longer complains about unplayable files, and the random-play feature doesn’t get turned off. I find that truly an odd programming choice: not only to display the message (which is odd enough), but then to stop random play. But it’s also bad that MacOS treats removable media that way... it should assume that removable media formatted with FAT(32) will be used on non-Mac platforms, and not pollute it with Mac-specific stuff.

Exercise while you work

I just got something new: a laptop desk that attaches to a treadmill. I tried it out yesterday, and it works great. It’s a little hard to type while I’m using it, but it works OK if I slow the treadmill down a bit. When I’m just reading, I can push it up to quite a brisk walking pace.

I gave it a go for an hour yesterday morning, and another hour yesterday afternoon, and I like it a lot. It’s a great way to avoid sitting in one place all day while I work. I may try some speech-recognition software as an alternative to typing, which, if it works well, might let me spend more time on it.

The treadmill might be a little noisy to use during conference calls, but those seem ideal times to get an extended period of walking in. I’ll have to try it, and see how that goes.

So far, with limited use, I can say that I really recommend it for anyone who works from home and sits at a desk all day!

Kindle and security

Wednesday, I talked about Amazon’s email-in service, which lets you send documents to your Kindle by email. The nicest part of it for me is the PDF conversion feature, but you can, in general, sent any personal documents you like, with or without conversion to AZW.

The way it works is this:

When you buy your Kindle, it’s automatically registered to your Amazon account, so ebooks that you buy there are pushed to the Kindle for you. You also get an email address at kindle.com (and also free.kindle.com), and documents you send there are sent on to your Kindle — free if they’re sent by WiFi, and for a small fee if they’re sent over 3G (if you want to make sure you’re not charged, you can send things only to the free.kindle.com address).

You can control who’s allowed to send stuff to your Kindle by listing the authorized email addresses at the Manage Your Kindle page, or through the settings on the Kindle itself, and the only address that’s authorized by default is the one you use for your Amazon account. Makes sense.

But here’s the thing: there’s no password or other security, other than the sender’s email address. You may or may not know this, but it’s trivial for anyone to send email using someone else’s email address. Anyone who knows my email address can guess that I might use that same address on Amazon, and the address to send to at kindle.com defaults to the left-hand side of that address. So it would not be hard for anyone to send stuff to my Kindle, whether I want them to to or not, and whether I want what they’re sending or not.

So what? If people want to send me free ebooks, why is that a problem?

It’s a problem we’re all aware of: spam. Because it’s not just ebooks that can be sent; PDFs, MS Word documents, and plain text can all be sent, as well as pictures and other images. Imagine getting a kindle-ful of advance-fee fraud scams, Viagra ads, and pornographic images. And then imagine paying for those, if you have a 3G Kindle (I don’t, so it’s all free over WiFi).

The good thing is that Amazon’s Manage Your Kindle page lets you do three things that help here:

1. set the maximum charge allowed for any one document sent to your Kindle,
2. change the email addresses that can send to your Kindle, and
3. change your Kindle’s email address.

Because I never want to accept any charges, I’ve set the maximum charge to zero. I’ve also removed the authorization for my regular email address, and authorized only an email address that no one knows. And, most importantly, I’ve changed the email address of my Kindle to something unguessable, essentially a strong password.

I recommend that everyone do the same (except perhaps for the maximum charge, if you want to be able to send things yourself that you’ll be charged for). At the least, everyone should change her Kindle’s email address to something that isn’t likely to be a target for spammers, and that means something long and relatively ugly.

I’m sure that Amazon does spam filtering on kindle.com, but we all know how much gets by the spam filters, in general. I can’t wait until Kindle spam joins email spam, Facebook spam, Twitter spam, and the rest.

More Kindle notes

Yesterday, Dadinck made a comment that showed me a faster way to enter numbers, by using the alt key on the keyboard instead of hitting the sym key and using the tedious symbol selector. He also pointed me to a good site for Kindle tips. Thanks!

Meanwhile, I discovered that Amazon has a PDF conversion service, which will let me email PDFs to it, convert them to AZW files for the Kindle, and push them to the Kindle through WiFi (it emails them back to me, as well). The pretty formatting is lost in the process, but it retains any images, and for almost all the PDFs I want to read the result is just what I need. Having them converted to Kindle format means that I control their display as text files and the text reflows as I change the font size, so the zooming problems go away.

I also found the troves of free books, and, despite my intent not to load the device up with books, I did snag a few of the free ones — about a dozen — including such wonders as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and what Alice Found There, James Joyce’s Dubliners, P.G. Wodehouses’s Jeeves books, and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.

OK, maybe I’ll keep it.

Very early user experience with a Kindle

I decided to try out one of the new Kindle e-readers. Only, I’m not planning to use it for the purpose that most buyers do — purchasing and reading books. I want to use it to read academic papers, articles, and IETF documents, which I will put on the device myself. These will generally be either plain text files or PDFs, and I decided to try the Kindle because it will read those types of files.

First, I’ll note that the new device is all it’s advertised to be: it’s small, it’s light, it’s crisp and easy to read, and it’s sleek and comfortable. I imagine it’s a really great device to read books on, when you don’t want to schlep a bunch of books around.

And, yet, I’m not sure that I’m going to keep it for the use I want to put it to.

First, there’s the wireless setup. It’s very smooth for fully open networks, but I haven’t yet tried it at, say, the local Panera, where one has to click through a login screen. It does have a web browser, though (more on that later), labeled as experimental, so it might be possible to use the browser to do the click-through. But if you want to use a closed network, you ned to enter the encryption key or WPA password, and you do that from the keyboard that’s below the Kindle’s screen. You can see from the picture on the Amazon site that it’s a full alphabetic keyboard, but that it has no punctuation other than the period, and no numbers. To get numbers, punctuation, and other symbols, you have to press a sym key, and then move left/right/up/down on an on-screen selector. That makes it very tedious to enter 26 hexadecimal characters for a WEP key.

One would think that not to be a problem, because it’s just one-time setup... but my first experiments seem to indicate that the device won’t remember the encryption keys for multiple networks. I have to spend more time with that before I’m sure, but I think this is a problem.

Only, it’s not really so much of a problem, because the wireless is only for downloading books (or using the web browser), and I don’t plan to do that, at least not much. In order to put my own document files on the device I have to connect it to my computer by wire (USB), and it appears as a drive on the computer. I can copy files to and fro. That works fine.

I’ve put about a dozen PDFs and a bunch of Internet Drafts on it, and they’re all just listed on the main page. Being the organized guy that I am, I want to organize them. Happily, the Kindle supports user-created collections, and each book can belong to zero, one, or multiple collections. Great. I created a collection, looked up how to add books to the collections (you’d never guess how, but the Kindle User’s Guide, one of the books pre-loaded on the Kindle, is easy to find things in), and added a few documents to the collection.

Then I plugged the device back into the computer to see what that did. It created a JSON file in the system directory, a file called collections.json, which enumerates the collections and their contents. I could edit that file, except that the list of documents in a collection is made using document IDs; it looks like this:

"IETF Drafts@en-US":{"items":["*cd80d00889290d128d26ba714e462b4d58445416",
"*08b4be751d627dd636ad0894cef0eaa2d0dac8b1"],
"lastAccess":1284403650511}

Your guess about how to figure out the document ID for each document is as good as mine. They look like hexadecimal representations of 20 bytes, 160 bits, so they could be SHA-1 hashes. But I tried computing SHA-1 hashes of both the files and the file names (with and without the extension), and didn’t get any matches. It’s clear that it’s not going to be easy for me to organize files into collections, and I’m just going to have to use the Kindle’s user interface to do it, one document at a time. That’s very tedious, when I want to add a lot of documents to the device at once.

All right, but I can cope with that, so let’s see how it is to read the documents.

The plain text files are good — reading Internet Drafts on the Kindle works nicely. Using the smallest font size and setting the font to condensed (as opposed to regular) allows me to read the drafts with the device held vertically, and most lines come out OK. The longest lines, though, do wrap the last word to the next line, chopping things up. But most lines don’t suffer from that, so the drafts are readable. If I rotate the display (through the settings — it doesn’t automatically rotate when you turn the device), I can use the smallest regular font and not have any lines wrapped, but then I can only see 26 lines on the screen at once. Using vertical orientation is better.

PDFs don’t fare as well. I’m using two classes of PDFs: ones that I’ve created myself (by printing web pages or e-mail discussion threads, for instance) and ones that I’ve gotten from other people (downloading the papers that researchers, conferences, or journals post). In the former case, I can control the font size in the PDF itself, and make sure I create the PDF that’s nicely readable on the Kindle. Cool.

In the latter case, though, I have no control over the text size in the document, and have to use the Kindle’s features to zoom the text so I can read it. Most PDFs of academic papers are not readable at the one-page-fills-the-screen size, and need to be zoomed. And this is where things fall apart.

You don’t get to pick the zoom amount arbitrarily, but you have to choose from among a few fixed choices: fit-to-screen, 150%, 200%, 300%, and actual size. If one of those fits things nicely, either in vertical or horizontal orientation, that’s great. Most often, it doesn’t, and side-to-side scrolling is necessary to read a column of text. And we get into the other problem with PDFs:

You don’t get to scroll arbitrarily either, at least not easily. If the document is arranged in two columns (or more), it’s often possible to find a comfortable zoom size that fits the left column readably, along with a part of the right column. As you press the next page button, the Kindle scrolls down and you can read down the left column. When you’re done with that, you have to press the previous page button once or twice to get back to the top of the PDF page, and then you scroll to the right to see the right column. But it scrolls too far, and you only see the part of the right column that you couldn’t see before. You can nudge the scroll using the shift key on the keyboard and the scroll button, but that’s also hard to make work, and it gets messed up every time you page down.

Even as you page down the PDF page, things aren’t great. The device scrolls a little less than the full visible text, so that there’s some overlap, but there’s no marker to show where you were. That means you have to find your place again. What’s worse is that if you need two scrolls to get from top to bottom, there where you were spot is likely to be in a different place each time. That also doesn’t work well.

They could fix this with three changes, all of them easy:

1. Allow entry of an arbitrary zoom percentage, allow repeated zooming-in (and out) by 5% or 10% at a time, or give some other way to be more granular in selecting how much you want the PDF page zoomed.
2. Allowing the user to lock in the horizontal scrolling, so it’s not reset by vertical scrolling. Even allow the user to set the scroll and zoom characteristics of a document, and remember those characteristics for each document (as it currently remembers where in the document you were reading, and the annotations you’ve made).
3. Place visible tick marks on the left and right of the screen, showing the limits of the previous view, so it’s easier for the user to see where to start reading on this page segment.

Then there’s the web browser. They say it’s experimental for now, so maybe it’ll get better, but it suffers from the same zoom and scroll problems that PDFs do, so unless they fix that problem I’m not sure what they can do to make the browser better. It would make the Kindle a great way to follow RSS feeds (using Google Reader) and read news and blogs, if they should get the browser to work well. It would also be a very nice use of the WiFi capability. For now, though, that’s just not on.

I’m very disappointed with the handling of PDFs, and that might make me give up on the Kindle for this purpose, and send it back. But I’ll give it a bit more time before I do that, and see if I can get used to it.

Getting a charge out of your batteries

Here’s another cute gadget, shown to us in the NY Times Gadgetwise blog: Size AA rechargeable batteries with built-in USB plugs, so you can plug the batteries directly into your computer to charge them. And here they are on Amazon.

They’re very cute. Only, they have several problems, some of which are pointed out in the user reviews on Amazon:

1. The USB plugs are on the flimsy side. Amazon users say they break easily.
2. They’re bulky and awkward as USB devices, and you’ll often not be able to fit two of them into two adjacent USB sockets.
3. Because the plug takes up some of the bulk of the battery, the battery itself has something shy of 2/3 the capacity of a typical AA.
4. You pay a lot for the novelty: it costs a great deal more than other rechargeable batteries.

It’s interesting how many of the favourable reviews, including the one in the Times, downplay the drawbacks, saying that they’re worth it because they’re rechargeable... ignoring that other kinds of rechargeable AA batteries are higher capacity, more reliable, and cheaper.

Amazon is selling these at two for nearly $20. For about $20 (including shipping), you can get a USB charger and four batteries. And then a pack of four more batteries costs $10. These guys just aren’t worth the cost.

Also, before you count on charging your batteries with your computer, remember that it can take several hours to get a full charge, and most computers don’t power the USB ports unless the computer is running. So you might have to leave your laptop running overnight in order to charge the batteries, regardless of which USB solution you go for.

You’re probably best off with something like this, a compact charger that packs easily, plugs into a wall socket, and works on both 110V and 240V power, so you can bring it with you anywhere.

Clever use of technology

Here’s an amusing little device that Eric Taub writes about in the New York Times:

All of this is why a new product from Zomm may wind up hitting a nerve. A small electronic disc that fits on a key ring, the product, also called the Zomm, connects to a phone via Bluetooth. Separate the two devices by more than 30 feet, and the Zomm first vibrates, then flashes and then screams.

Mr Taub notes that one disadvantage of the device is that there’s no way to alter the 30-foot distance before the alarm goes off; depending on where you are, 30 feet could be too far. Indeed, it could be... but there’s a good reason the distance can’t be controlled. 30 feet is a familiar number: it happens to be the nominal range of Bluetooth. That means the device is just detecting when the Bluetooth connection with your phone fails, and it then screams about the failure.

And that means that it won’t know the difference between a connection failure that happens because you left your phone in the bar and walked out, and one that happens for another reason — perhaps your phone’s battery is low and the Bluetooth shuts off automatically, or perhaps you turn the Bluetooth off yourself, forgetting the Zomm device’s dependency on it.

What’s more, the Bluetooth range can be drastically less than 30 feet if there are interfering factors, such as walls, machinery, and even people blocking the way. It can also drop because of radio-frequency interference. Lend your phone to a friend at a party and walk across the room to get another drink... and even if you’re only ten or fifteen feet away, you may find yourself loudly embarrassed (unless, perhaps, you can use it as an opportunity to brag about your slick toy).

It is a clever idea, but, as Mr Taub points out, it’s expensive and impractical. Still, I do have to give it points for the cleverness.

High tech solutions to low-tech problems

Yesterday, Eric Taub reviewed an interesting device in the Gadgetwise blog in the New York Times. It’s a pair of transceivers that help you locate your car even if you’re a half mile from it. You leave one transceiver in the car, take the other with you, and then use it to find your car as you’d use a Geiger counter to find a source of radiation.

It seems, from the review, that it’s pretty slick — Mr Taub says it works as advertised. But the real point, I think, is how he ends his review:

While the product will most likely solve your lost car problems, if you don’t want to spend $80 for one, or $100 for a deluxe version that includes a carrying case, there is a cheaper and easier solution: spend $1 for a pen, and write your location down before you walk away.

If a pen is too low-tech for you, make a note of it in your BlackBerry — you can even do it as a voice note, to bump up the technology a little more while still keeping it short of brain surgery.

We have a lot of that going around. I remember the first time I saw a game you could buy in the store to play Battleship, consisting of plastic peg-boards in which you could stick plastic pieces representing the different sizes of ships, plus the “hits” and “misses”. That’s fine, but we used to play it on paper, which was easy, and free; I had no interest in buying a plastic game that cost money, took up space, and didn’t help if it was at home and you weren’t. The paper version was available anywhere you could find paper and pencil.

Later, of course, we had computer versions, and I expect there are versions for the Game Boy and the iPhone. These do have an advantage over the paper ones: you can play against the computer, so they work if you don’t happen to have an opponent handy.

The point is that we often look for high-tech solutions when low-tech solutions are easy, cheap, and entirely adequate. The plastic Battleship game is one example, and the Auto-Finder is another. You might say that the latter will save your ass — or at least your pride — when you forgot to write the location down when you parked... but you still had to remember to bring the transceivers, leave one in the car and take one with you, and turn them on. If you can handle that setup, you can probably handle jotting the location down.

On the other hand, then you couldn’t show people what cool stuff you have.

Skylight?

What do you think?: should I get one of these when they’re available?

I’d been thinking about getting a small travel computer, even before I had the outage on my laptop. Now, afterward, the additional point of having a backup machine makes it all the more desirable. And the Lenovo Skylight’s $500 price is in the right range.

On the positive side:

1. It’s small and light.
2. It’s very slick, the screen is crisp, the keyboard is good.
3. It has great battery life.
4. It has built-in WiFi and 3G, and there doesn’t appear to be a carrier lock-in on the 3G (though there might be — they mention only AT&T in the announcement).

On the negative side:

1. It doesn’t have a real operating system, so...
2. ...it doesn’t have a real suite of applications. It really is assuming you’ll be online and get everything off the Internet.
3. It’s not clear what that means when one is offline. Can one work on some files offline, with some sort of text editor, spreadsheet program, and whatnot? Or does it really just turn into a music and video player, without the Internet behind it?

I think that last point will be the deciding factor. If I can do some basic work while I’m offline, and I can plug in some USB devices — disk drives and other memory devices, printers, scanners — then it’s appealing. If not, if it’s just a big, expensive iPod when it’s off the Internet, then I’ll give it a miss.

But it sure looks cool!

Stuff we don’t need

Every so often, I look through one of the “high-end” catalogues, seeing what places like Williams Sonoma or The Sharper Image have to offer those with far too much disposable income and far too little sense. Really, I mean: who needs a $3000 espresso machine at home? Who really wants to spend more than $25 a pound for Italian sausage?

But beyond the price, we get to the things that don’t have to exist at all. Whether or not one would spend $3000 on one, there is utility in an espresso machine, and, for a fifth the price, a nice piece of Italian sausage is a beautiful thing. But... well, here:

Many years ago, I was over at a friend’s house and he showed me something he’d just bought that day, a real find, as he saw it. It was a “fruit ripener”, he told me. You put fresh — but unripe — fruit in it, and in a day or two, it ripens nicely. Cool!

Hm. OK, so... it consisted of two plastic bowls. You put the fruit in the one with the flattened bottom. You up-turned the other and used it as a cover. And they didn’t seal, so they allowed some air to flow. The literature that came with the overpriced contraption said that it concentrates the natural gases that the fruits themselves produce, accelerating the ripening process.

Indeed, and so does a paper bag, loosely closed. Which is what we all used before someone figured out how to make big money selling cheap plastic bowls for far more than they’re worth.

I’ve recently run across two other things of that nature, things that made me scratch my head and say, “We need this why?”

The Avocado Pitter/Slicer

When it comes to pitting and slicing avocados, this is the perfect tool for the task. One end of the handy device deftly pits an avocado, while the opposite end creates perfect uniform slices of the fruit’s tender flesh.

Yes, just halve an avocado, and put this baby to work on it. It’ll have the pit removed and the avocado neatly sliced in a jif — assuming, of course, that the avocado’s still decently firm. And that it happens to be exactly the uniform size that the gadget is made for. The slices will also be “perfect” and “uniform” only until the blades get bent in the dishwasher or the drawer.

See, once I’ve got a nice, firmly ripe avocado halved, I can pit it and slice it in seconds without this. I use a magical device called (are you ready for this) a knife. I can even be flexible about it: a paring knife works, a slicing knife works, a chef’s knife works. Even a cleaver can do the job, if it must. Press the knife into the pit and twist it out. Peel the skin away. Slice up the flesh. Couldn’t be easier.

Of course, it’s not so easy to peel the skin away neatly if the fruit is over-ripe and softening. But, then, I don’t imagine this device works very well on such an avocado either.

The Corn Zipper

This tool quickly, safely strips an ear of corn: A pair of extra-sharp teeth slides between the kernals[sic] and cob to remove several rows of at a time.[sic] Simply grip the barrel handle, rake the corn from end to end and watch the kernels drop into a bowl.

This device at least appears to be a one-size-fits-all sort of thing, able to work equally well on different sized ears.

But this is basically a special-use knife, and, as with slicing avocados, I use a regular kitchen knife for this job as well. A paring knife works fine, but I prefer the heavier chef’s knife here. What I do is this: I simply grip the knife’s handle, rake the corn from end to end, and watch the kernels drop into a bowl. Sound familiar?
 

The main problem with these special devices is that they take the place of more general tools, yet they each only have one, specific purpose: you might be able to find something else to do with the avocado slicer, I suppose, but it won’t peel an apple, chop basil, slice an onion, or remove the corn from a cob. These guys soon wind up at the back of your kitchen drawer, unused.

Also, they don’t age well if you do use them. The avocado slicer’s blades will likely become bent, over time; the corn zipper’s blade will dull. When my knives get dull, I sharpen them. You usually can’t sharpen these kinds of things.

Learn how to use a knife well, and you can skip all these extra gadgets. And that’ll let you save up for that overpriced espresso machine you’ve been coveting.