Too many little plastic boxes connected to my TV

I’m pretty much out of ports on my TV. I’ve got a Motorola set-top box/DVR from ComcastXfinity (a crappy early model with hardly any disk space), a PlayStation 3, an Apple TV, and a Roku 2XS. I need the ATV for AirPlay from my iPad or MacBook Air, plus YouTube; I need the Roku because I watch a lot of Amazon streaming video. I can get Netflix and Hulu on any of the devices. For recent pay-per-view movies, I prefer Amazon to the alternatives (Comcast or Apple), simply because of price and variety. I’d love to dump one of these devices, which would have to be the Roku, but that would mean using the PS3 for Amazon Video, and the PS3 UI is utter crap.
So I’m stuck with this device setup. Unfortunately the Roku 2XS has been a disaster. I bought it 18 months ago to replace an original Roku which had fried, and it’s always been glitchy. It becomes catatonic about once a week, requiring a power cycle to fix it. But this evening the power cycle failed to produce the normal startup screen of bouncing purple letters. I unplugged and replugged it a couple of times, then tried a factory reset by sticking a paperclip in the “reset” hole for the officially-recommended 15 seconds (and then some). Nothing.
In frustration I grabbed my MBA and started to browse reviews on Amazon.com, looking for alternatives to the Roku. About 15 minutes later, the Roku 2XS suddenly came to life, and displayed a white (not purple) logo. I re-paired the remote, configured the Roku and all of my services (really strong passwords are great until you have to enter them repeatedly using an on-screen keyboard!), and I was back in business.
That weird 15 minute delay suggests to me that the Roku 2XS has some kind of hardware problem, probably heat-sensitive. Since it only has a 90-day warranty (what kind of nonsense is that?), I’m going to have to replace it. I wish I could find another device which would do the job, but I guess I’ll be going for a Roku 3. Hopefully we’ll be getting an official YouTube app for it soon.

Time to root – or dump – my AT&T Samsung Infuse 4G phone

Well, 2011 has given way to the New Year, and AT&T have failed to fulfill their promise to upgrade the Android software on all of the 4G phones which they sold in 2011. Back in the summer I embarked on an experiment to see what life outside Apple’s walled garden would be like. The results are in: it sucks. Battery life is awful, system freezes are common (often with the phone feeling dangerously hot), and app management is broken (somehow I have acquired two copies of several apps). I could go on, but why bother?
The main takeaway from this is that Samsung and AT&T (and probably other carriers and manufacturers) haven’t understood that Apple changed the rules with the iPhone, by bringing the PC (and Mac) upgrade model to mobile communications. Backward compatibility is mandatory. Software and hardware upgrades are decoupled. Bugs are fixed. OS and app features are delivered regularly. I’m sure Google hoped that the Android ecosystem would follow this path, but if so they’ve completely failed to convince their partners.
So what to do next? Yes, of course I can root the device, find and install a ROM image of unknown provenance, etc. But I resent the need to do this*, and I’m distinctly uncomfortable doing so on a device which is used for corporate communications. I could dump the Infuse and buy an iPhone 4S, but after only 6 months on the contract it’s a relatively expensive proposition. And the final insult is that most of the tools for hacking Android phones seem to be Windows based, and I don’t have any Windows machines lying around.
File under #FAIL.

* And that’s assuming that I don’t inadvertently brick the device. For those who haven’t explored this stuff, here’s the simple version of the instructions for a popular ROM:

  • Ensure you have both root and CWM. See the reference post if you do not have both of these.
  • Copy ROM .ZIP to SD card
  • Shut phone off. Hold Vol Up + Vol Down and Power on device
  • Wipe Data and Cache (Wiping data will remove your installed applications and settings. You have been warned!)
  • Flash CM7 zip
  • Reboot. You will get stuck at Samsung screen. This is normal.
  • Pull battery, and reboot into recovery (Hold: VOL+ VOL- Power)
  • You should now be in ORANGE -OR- BLUE CWM
  • Go to “mounts and storage”
  • Select format /system
  • Reflash CM7 zip
  • Don’t forget Google Apps as well. You can get the gapps easily using Rom Manger -> Download ROM -> Scroll down to Google Apps). Google Apps download link is also at the bottom of this post
  • Reboot into CM7 goodness, made possible by LinuxBozo

Quote of the day: on proportionality

The amazing thing about this crisis is the extent to which suffering and responsibility are completely out of proportion with one another. If you think about the people who are really suffering in the developed world today, none of them were executives at major banks, none of them were politicians involved in the construction of the euro, none of them were senior financial policymakers in any government, etc.

…via Matt Yglesias at ThinkProgress

When an online store collapses under the load….

Like many people, I decided to buy an HP TouchPad last weekend. In my case it was mostly nostalgia: my first mobile wireless data device was an HP-200LX with a RAM Data Modem. But I digress. So last Sunday I went to Best Buy, and struck out. Fry’s ditto. So I came home and decided to try the HP online store. To my amazement, I was able to buy a 32GB TouchPad for $149.
Or so I thought.
That was August 21. On August 22, I returned to the HP site, and the entire online store had vanished. There was no record of my order, my login at a different storefront wasn’t accepted….
On August 24, after receiving a cryptic transactional email from HP I went back to the HP site. Now there was a link to a special page for customers who had bought over the weekend. I logged in, and saw a line item for my order, which was shown as having been placed on August 22. Clicking on the line item brought up detailed order page, which showed that the item had been ordered on August 24, was due to ship on August 24, with an estimated delivery date of… August 24:

Of course the shipping information was blank. But it gets better. At the bottom of the page there was a link to Line item detail. This brought up the following gem, showing the estimated delivery date as August 26!

It is now August 28. None of the information concerning my order has changed since August 24. And (obviously) I haven’t received my TouchPad.
Anyone care to guess when it might arrive? I’m not holding my breath….
UPDATE: This just gets better and better. I tried to ask HP about the status of the order using their email tool, and got the following error:

UPDATE #2: Sunday on Labor Day weekend seems like the perfect time to update the order status – and someone at HP did exactly that! Apparently it’s being delivered today! (I’m not holding my breath.) Here’s the status:

T-shirts

In an uncharacteristic spasm of organization, I just piled up all of my t-shirts on the bed and sorted out the non-keepers. There were 33 of them. Quite a few passed the first test – “Do I like this shirt?” – but failed the second: “Am I really going to wear this in the future?”
I should probably go through the same exercise for the 411(!) iPhone/iPad apps on my computer. At the very least, I guess I should get rid of the iPhone versions of apps which I have in both formats (iPhone and iPad). But it’s hard for me to shake off the conviction that eventually I’m going to own an iPhone again. After the first few weeks of going Android, I feel that AT&T, Samsung and Google are going to have to work hard to keep me as a customer. (And maybe that’s the problem – all three of them have to get it right. Who is The Weakest Link?) Of course the current spate of lawsuits – Apple v. Samsung, Oracle v. Google, and LodSys v. everyone – may render the question moot. We’ll see. (I think that last sentence merits its own #FAIL tag.)

Clear evidence of a nation that has gone stark staring mad

Via Andrew, this graph shows the US Incarceration Rate from 1880 to 2008:
US Incarceration Rate, 1880-2008
As the CEPR report cited in the original post points out, the financial cost of this absurd policy is astronomical. “[A] reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate of non-violent offenders” would save U.S. state and local governments at least $14.8B/year, and would still leave the incarceration rate quite high in historical terms.
So what tipped the country into collective lunacy in 1980? Ronald Reagan? Or was he just a symptom?

Unintended consequences with my iPad

Here’s a weird unintended effect. Yesterday morning I was working on my iPad using the BlueTooth keyboard. When I was done, I chatted to a colleague while I turned off the iPad and put both iPad and keyboard in my shoulder bag. Suddenly music started playing from my bag! Then stopped. Then started again!
Eventually we realized that the media buttons on the keyboard were active, and were starting and stopping the iTunes app as the keyboard bumped around in my bag! The only way to fix this was to turn off BT on the iPad….

This is democracy?

More from James Fallows:

Counting the new Republican Senator Scott Brown from Massachusetts, the 41 Republicans in the Senate come from states representing just over 36.5 percent of the total US population. The 59 others (Democratic plus 2 Independent) represent just under 63.5 percent. (Taking 2009 state populations from here. If you count up the totals and split a state's population when it has a spit delegation, you end up with about 112.3 million Republican, 194.7 million Democratic + Indep. Before Brown’s election, it was about 198 million Democratic + Ind, 109 million Republican.)

Let’s round the figures to 63/37 and apply them to the health care debate. Senators representing 63 percent of the public vote for the bill; those representing 37 percent vote against it. The bill fails.

Makes me quite nostalgic for the three-line whip. And reinforces my long-held belief that the USA is simply too big to govern as a single country.

Electronics for the trip

I’m heading to China for 19 days, and so the big activity this weekend is packing. I found myself enumerating all of the electronics gear that I’ll be taking:

  1. Apple MacBook Air – my personal laptop
  2. Dell E6400 – my work laptop
  3. Power brick for the MacBook Air
  4. Power brick for the Dell
  5. Mouse – my Microsoft wireless mouse will have to do for both; I’m not bringing my new Apple Mouse
  6. Moshi combined SD card reader and USB hub
  7. Apple iPhone
  8. iPhone USB cable and transformer (the original one, which accepts Apple international plugs, not the cheesy little adaptor which they introduced with the iPhone 3)
  9. Android G1 – my international phone (which I hope to replace with an unlocked T-Mobile Pulse from Huawei)
  10. China Mobile SIM card
  11. G1 USB cable (incompatible with iPhone USB)
  12. Amazon Kindle 2 e-book reader
  13. Kindle USB cable (incompatible with iPhone and G1 – standards are wonderful)
  14. Sennheiser earbud headphones
  15. Panasonic DMC-TZ4 camera
  16. Battery charger and spare battery for DMC-TZ4
  17. Apple Airport Express (so I can create a WiFi access point if the hotel only has wired Internet)

There are definitely too many cables.