Does that sound odd? First of all, what’s a phone for if you don’t answer it? But second, who answers the phone any more, given the overwhelming volume of spam calls we receive every day?

You’re probably thinking “Why is he even asking this? When was the last time I answered a phone call?”

Why do I say I had to answer my phone? Well, I had called a US government agency in order to set up an appointment at that government office. First, I waited on hold for 50 minutes trying to reach them. They have no “local” phone number here in San Francisco, only a big national call center. So to make a local appointment, you have to reach the call center, which means waiting 50 minutes. Then talking with them, they agreed it made the best sense to go to the local office. “We’ll give you a callback to schedule that appointment.” Huh? I wait for 50 minutes and then they can’t make an appointment, they have to call me back?

“So what’s the best time to reach you?” “Well,” I answer, “Daytime. Nighttime. Anytime. I don’t care.” And they respond “We can’t do that. We need a one-hour window. We will attempt to call you during that one hour window some time during the next five days.” In other words, they pick a single hour during which I have to answer my phone for possibly five days in a row. Well how hard would it be for them to just call me whenever they have an agent available? Like maybe on Tuesday. Nope. Instead they have to use one single hour of the day, but any time in the next five days.

(This is worse than waiting for the cable company to fix my equipment. At least they tell me what day they’ll be here.)

OK, I thought that was bade enough, but… they won’t tell me what number they will call from. They’ll just call from some random phone number. Meaning that during my availability times I have to answer every call that comes in — something I never do because of the volume of spam calls.

So I tried it because I had no alternative. During my first day of availability, during my “best time to call me hour,” I got a call in the first 4 minutes. Spam. Of course. Then after 20 minutes, another. Spam again. And so forth. During the four hours I answered calls that day, I got a dozen calls. All spam. Yes 12 spam calls. No real people at all.

It occurred to me that actually I hardly ever answer my phone any more unless the caller is in my address book. And that in trying to schedule things, I actually never call people on my phone. Instead I email them or “text message” them. And, in fact, email is increasingly going unanswered by my friends. The only way to really reach someone is to message them. I know this has happened with the younger generation, but now I find it extending up into people in their 70s.

So my question is — and you can just think about this if you want to — no need to really answer: 1. Do you still answer your phone (if the caller isn’t in your address book); 2. When did you stop?

If you do answer, I probably won’t answer your call. Hahahah. Just think about how your own behavior has changed.

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First, I had to get the iPhone unlocked (by AT&T). Those of you in the US know how difficult this can be.

To begin, I was able to get a payoff quote ($325) to buy out my AT&T 24-month contract, and I immediately did that. Talked to AT&T as soon as my payment cleared (7 days) and they said the phone was mine. (It cost me basically $50 less than if I had bought an “unlocked” phone from Apple, which was not actually available at the time.) Just had to go through AT&T’s unlocking process to change carriers. “No, there is no way the rep on the phone can start the process” they said — I had to start it by going to a web page. So I did that on a Saturday. They said they’d send an email, to which I would respond, and then unlocking would begin. 48 hours later, no email had arrived. I checked online and it said “you didn’t respond to our email.” So I initiated the process again. 48 hours later, same thing, no message, no process, so I called them. “Ah, yes, I can start the unlock for you,” said the rep, and she did that. “You’ll be unlocked in 48 hours,” she said. So 72 hours later I called them to see how it was progressing. “Not unlocked yet.” I asked when it might happen, the new rep said “it takes 5 business days minimum, and it can take longer.” They had told me 48 hours. Well the rep promised something she had been promising hundreds of customers, but she wasn’t authorized to promise (according to the supervisor “They should know this.”).

Well there’s certainly no technical reason an unlock takes 5 business days. This is just how AT&T wants to play it. They want to hang onto your phone, and charge you, as long as they can. So I waited 5 business days (7 calendar days) and got an email saying “We can’t unlock your phone, sorry. Contact us when your contract finishes.” I called them and they said, “Your phone isn’t paid off, so we can’t unlock it.” Turns out that my payoff $325 was not treated as a payoff (even though they sent me an urgent notice to pay the “payoff” amount). So the rep got that credit processed correctly this time. Can I expect my phone to be unlocked right away? Well, no, “You have to wait 5 business days, minimum.” So I waited again, and this time it was unlocked on the 7th day.

I ported the phone to T-Mobile within an hour of receiving AT&T’s notification! Happy as a clam! I am now posting this article from my computer, sitting in a cafe, using data through my tethered iPhone 6 on T-Mobile. Works like a champ!

The post Unlocking + Tethering appeared first on Sky's Blog.

I have decided to call this ”fingerprint only” mode because you can touch the screen, but nothing happens.

I particularly need this for mapping and travel apps, where I want to keep the app open while I’m walking or hiking and holding the phone in my hand, but touching the screen could cause the app to fly off to different coordinates, or even to change mode or shut down. Great example is Everytrail where it tracks my movement and I frequently have it in my hand so I can watch as I walk along. Fascinating, but way too easy to touch the wrong thing and completely screw up the trip map.

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MY TOP APP PICKS FOR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION ON iPAD

• iSSH— gives you secure shell (SSH) access to your servers using name+password or digital certs. If you use a command-line editor on your server (I use vi), be aware that up-down-right-left arrows won’t really function if you use the onscreen keyboard, but from a bluetooth keyboard they do work! Recently I’ve also had trouble with ESC, and I’ve had to tap its onscreen “button” instead on the physical key. You can also configure iSSH to emit true function keys (which are needed for some configuration work—in htop, for instance).
• 1Password— what a great way to keep all those passwords in one place! And encrypted too. 1Password for iPad syncs with 1Password on my Mac through Dropbox. When I make a new password, or change one, it is always available on the iPad as soon as I need it. This way I can use those 20-character random passwords that I’d never remember if I had to commit them to memory.
• Dropbox— Well of course you already know I use Dropbox for sync’ing 1Password across devices. And you can do without it if you sync the two devices “locally” on wi-fi, but I would never remember to do it—Dropbox lets it happen more in real-time and effortlessly.
• DropDAV— (Not an iPad app, but essential nevertheless) I need DropDAV because I have a buddy who watches my back and serves as sysadmin when I’m on those long air flights or otherwise indisposed, and he and I need to share documents, which we do through DropBox. DropDAV isn’t an app, it’s a service. Sign up and it makes your DropBox documents available to Pages and Keynote through WebDAV services on DropDAV.
• WordPress app— HTML textboxes don’t scroll properly on Safari on the iPad. This is a really big problem if you’re trying to admin a WordPress blog in Safari. So the WordPress iPad app is a necessity, though you don’t really have access to all of the WP admin features (it’s designed for bloggers, not admins), which means I’m constantly back and forth between this app and Safari even when I’m working on a single blog. This needs improvement, but I can make it work well enough for now.

PROBLEMS WITH THE iPAD

• No Flash. This means I can’t fully utilize a lot of tools, like Cloudkick, when on the road because they use Flash extensively. (However, I can log in at CloudKick even with my Yubikey one-time-password USB device, as long as I have the iPad USB camera adapter with me. That’s a trick to be explained elsewhere.)
• There’s no PGP mail encryption/decryption for the iPad mail app. Although I have other ways of dealing with encrypted mail when I’m on the road, this is still a big problem. If you rely on encrypted mail, be sure you have an alternative available when you’re traveling with your pad.

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RSS feeds and news readers began to change that. (Thanks Dave[2. Dave Winer].) I use NetNewsWire’s standalone software on my Mac, and online services like Google Reader let you integrate feeds into your iGoogle home page. You can also sync your Google Reader settings across multiple programs and devices. But in the last couple of months, the scene is greatly changing is subtle ways I think people haven’t spotted yet…

With the advent of larger-screen mobile devices (like iPad) and reasonable mobile apps like reeder that sync with Google Reader lists, we’re now reading our news feeds everywhere, and the pace at which we flip through them has greatly accelerated.

We all know the Facebook stickiness phenomenon — you open facebook.com and just keep it open all day and night—news is there, feed is there, friends are there, chat is there, and everything is available on that one site. Same could be said, for some people, for iGoogle or gmail, which are all squished together in one big Google mashup of a “site.” Facebook and Google “have all the eyeballs” and now you don’t stand a chance of picking up very many eyeballs for your own web site. If you put a short URL into your Facebook status/feed pointing to a blog post you just wrote, any of your friends who click to open it will read your blog post on the Facebook page—they never need to leave Facebook, even to read your blog entry.

And since the arrival of  iPad apps like Flipboard [3. I love Flipboard, and I can zoom through dozens of pages on Flipboard by flicking a finger way faster than I can use a mouse and a computer screen, and this really hammers the web server that’s at the target end of the action! Flipboard picks up its clues and links solely from FB and Twitter feeds—you can’t even tell it to track a web site—it only tracks sites and pages that get significant social activity!] pick up FB status and Twitter streams, these apps are besieging web sites with requests for content, and then caching that content on their own sites for later reading. Yeah, you’ve usually got an option to read the full content on the original site, but it’s way at the bottom of whatever you’re reading, and since attention spans are short, you’re only going to read the original once in a while. Flipboard and its cousins are a reason why web site server performance occasionally suffers these days[4. Server performance suffers when searchbots spider a site more rapidly than the server can handle. I discovered Flipboard and other crawlers were impacting small server performance about a month ago, then I got an iPad and discovered why they’re crawling the sites, and I’m impressed with the net result, so I’m finding ways to improve server performance to handle the extra load, thinking that it’ll be worth it in the long run, and that this phenomenon is going to increase.]—they’re positively crawling all over small web sites proactively finding and caching content for their readers to look at later on.

The bottom line is that you have to make all impressions count, regardless of whether they’re on your own web site or on Facebook, Flipboard (or anywhere else). You can no longer count on eyeballs coming to your web site. You brand is wherever the readers’ eyeballs are, and no longer exclusively on your own web site. You’re not in control of this, and you’d better learn to take advantage of the situation and live with it.
— Sky

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The Washington Post reported last week that the Obama administration is seeking to modify the 1993 Electronic Communications Privacy Act so that Internet service providers must turn over transaction records on email communications and possibly web browsing records, upon receipt of a “national security letter” from the FBI. This particular legal process doesn’t require review by a judge—unlike search warrants.^[1]

The law does not allow access to the contents of those emails without judicial oversight…only the more externally-visible addressing information, and that does tend to be what email systems log and archive. On the other hand, the term “electronic communication transactional records” which is what the government could require ISPs to divulge, is not defined in federal statutes, according to the Washington Post.^[2] And so it could conceivably be extended to include other person-to-person communications, such as social media contacts

This is the same process the Bush administration used, in the early 2000s, to ask libraries to turn over the records of books checked out by patrons, which was strongly resisted by librarians at that time.

Phone companies keep records of all of the numbers you call, and these are subject to the same access rules. This has never been a question, and most people in the US are probably at least marginally aware of this.

The real question isn’t whether someone is reading your email addresses and headers—it’s how they are interpreting the titles, subjects, and names of the people you are corresponding with. In the McCarthy era here in the US, you could be blacklisted for associating with the wrong people.

If you have an inquiring mind, would you want someone to judge you based on the titles of the books or publications you’re reading? Or the subjects and addressees of your email?

[2] The New York Times 30 July, 2010 — secondary report and opinion

A whole nother ancillary question is whether your ISP actually keeps these records or not. If they do not, are they then exempt from having to turn over any records, or will the government require that they keep such records in the future? Some ISPs intentionally do not keep certain kinds of records, which helps keep your use of certain services anonymous. And, for instance, I’d guess that very few ISPs, if any, keep records of your browsing history, and this makes it prohibitively difficult to document all of the web sites you’ve visited.

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Media: A major benefit for all of us will be that embedding media (videos particularly) will become standardized and greatly simplified, so the web developer won’t have to worry so much about plug-ins, players and compatibility.

Geo-location: But more fun perhaps than that, there is a geo-location feature built into HTML5, and it’s available today on some browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). In this article Dive into HTML5 — You are here (and so is everybody else), there’s a cookbook for creating a web page that locates you and displays a Google map centered on your coordinates. My page will figure out where you are located and display the Google map — but only if you have an HTML5-compliant browser, sorry. Mobile browsers are particularly good for this because they know your location quite precisely.

I took an hour this morning to build the page, and subject to some debugging (and figuring out that the whole process is asynchronous), I had it working. Clearly if you’re at a wired location, Google is using your IP address and maybe some routing information to locate “approximately” where you are, but on my iPhone it gets much closer to the real location. I used the “You are here…” article, plus some advice from Google code.

And the interface asks you whether to reveal your location before it goes ahead and gives it to the web page to work with. Nice!

That bit about it being asynchronous is important. Anyone used to writing plain-vanilla javascript code knows that usually javascript statements are executed one after another, right down the page (as it were), and you’d think that making a function call to get the current location would actually complete the task and then return control when it finished, to execute the rest of the javascript statements. But this particular interface simply triggers the process of getting the location, and then when it has completed, it makes a callback to a javascript function where you can complete the rest of the work of putting the map up on the page (or any other thing you want to do with the location information).

This kind of asynchronous execution of statements and functions, with callback functions being given control later on when some action is completed, is common in most programming languages, but many javascript coders don’t use it very much. This is one case where you have to pay careful attention and plan ahead.

To get a better idea of how it works, look at the page I wrote and then view source to see how the javascript is written.

Now the InfoWorld article also mentions that HTML5 might not be a fully-adopted standard until 2022, which means that everyone will have blown by it long ago by then and we’ll have a hodgepodge of implementations none of which will completely match the eventual standard. Ahem! Things have to work faster than that in the online world!

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Now that Apple has announced that the reception measurement on the iPhone is incorrect (reading too high by about 2 bars in some cases), I no longer have an excuse. AT&T claims to have 10 towers within a 2-mile radius of my home office, but most of the time 2 or 3 of them are ”down” and besides, in San Francisco, over half of them are “behind a hill” from me so they do me no good. There are probably only 2 or 3 towers that actually give me any coverage in the office here.

But, Apple knew about the +2 bars problem a long time ago. It was reported in 2009. We were all seeing 2 or 3 bars, and then our software was upgraded and we were seeing 5 bars routinely (except when there were none). We customers knew that the iPhone was giving us more bars than it should have. So why did Apple not know this, or not see the change when this happened in the first place?

And Apple was surprised about this?

Any mobile phone is a mobile radio. And amateur radio operators, which we all are these days, know that if you touch (and thus “ground”) the antenna, you cause a change in signal strength.

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In Sci-Fi Channel’s series Caprica, portable computing has become “foldable” and takes the form of sheets of “paper” on which characters, symbols and other stuff light up so you can read them. The paper is touch-sensitive and you can move the characters around as well as tap them (read “keyboard”).

In Minority Report, John Anderton (senior investigator in the Department of Futurecrime) has his wall-size glass see-through display where he can touch, drag-and-drop, and call up data (and photos) from the archives. But nothing really portable, like a pad/tablet in that particular vision of the future. This theme has been picked up in numerous films over the years, most notably recently in James Cameron’s Avatar where displays are mostly glass or 3D. (Let alone that the ultimate in displays and projection is the “avatar” itself.)

And cyberpunk novels (William Gibson for sure) are campy and amusing because of their notion that data will be passed around on floppy disks. But at the same time you can “jack in” — meaning connect a computer or network into your brain directly. So there are direct computer-human interfaces, but we were still mostly using rotating disc storage of one sort or another for our real computers until just the last 2 years (SSD in the Apple Air being a primary example). Personally, I prefer this solid state or even (future) non-rotating optical storage and it’s clear that it already pervades the entire portable devices market. (The iPad has solid-state SDD storage, all phones do, cameras, etc.)

In Star Trek (the  2009 movie being the prime example) there are lots of glass-see-thru devices, and on some Trek series like DS9 (first illustration above) the portable devices look like an iPad, and you can tap on them, read data from the screen, but (interestingly and entirely the point here) the data stays with the device and one crew member will frequently hand off a device to another crew member (containing a task or assignment to be completed). This idea of “disposable” or at least “transient” devices somehow linked to the information they hold that aren’t in any sense owned by an individual, is I think not going to happen because of ubiquitous wireless, but it’s worth noting. It’s kind of like smart paper, isn’t it? And the same happens in Caprica’s vision of its parallel universe. Presumably the Trek pads talk to the mother ship and can receive assignments wirelessly, but like the economy of Star Trek (long past money and into “everyone is taken care of”) the devices just don’t have personal “ownership” like today’s phones and pads.

This kind of device handoff won’t happen for the iPad, of course, until its price reaches the disposable or discretionary level.

[1] My first table was a Toshiba Tablet PC, from around 2005, and although it required a stylus rather than finger touch, it had great handwriting recognition and operated smoothly once you got past the 5-minute MS Windows boot up time. (And sometimes even longer…)

[2] Apple is releasing the iPad in international markets today, and WSJ reported on the big frenzy on opening day in Japan!

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