Category: Computing

Which Apple?

I got asked a rather odd question this afternoon as I moved my various Apple gadgets around on the breakfast bar. “If you could only have one Apple device, what would it be?”

This caught me by surprise. I fought back tears as I took turns in imagining life without just one of my devices. Alright, I didn’t fight back tears, but I had to buy some time.

“So where would I be that I couldn’t have all of them?”

“Say a desert island!”

“Well that’s easy then. I’d take the iPhone. I’d just call for help”

“There’d be no reception!”

“In that case, there’d be no electricity either!” I protested.

“Look just imagine you have electricity and no reception!”. My family were beginning to lose interest by this point.

I’ve thought about this a lot and I tend to cut the thought experiment short through strategic equivocation. An iPhone is what I’d call the greatest personal computing device ever invented. Mine never leaves my side and is the closest thing I have to a prosthetic. Given the choice between always having to have an insulin pump attached to my body and carrying an iPhone, well, the pump has already lost that battle.

As for the MacBook Air, an 11″ model from 2011, fully maxed out with the processor, RAM and SSD upgrades, well that’s the greatest personal computer I’ve ever owned.

Then there’s the iPad. It’s such a 55M-sold-in-a-year anomaly, that I still haven’t been able to classify it. Most everyone I know says the same thing – that they can’t think of why they’d need one. Then of course they get one and wonder how they got along without it. The iPad doesn’t quite inspire the same degree of love as does an iPhone or MacBook Air, and you wouldn’t type a novel on it (but how many people type novels anyway), but you end up using it for much more than you realise. (I’m writing this post on my iPad, lying down, comfortably. I’d not be able to do this using the MacBook Air.)

On the iPad I run my life with the best version of OmniFocus there is. I can’t run Xcode on it, which would be fantastic and make my life complete, but I have given many presentations off it, going straight into a projector. In fact, I have once written an entire presentation on a tube journey on it. Keynote on iPad is the best presentation software I’ve ever used on any platform.

I once had an hour to write a 30 slide presentation. I chose my iPad and got the job done.

I read books on the iPad. For technical books it beats my Kindle hands down, but granted, for novels it is simply too heavy. For short form reading, I still prefer Instapaper on iPad.

I’d use it for writing if iA Writer didn’t have that cursor positioning bug that the author never responds to queries on. Still, there’s SimpleNote, which I pay for.

There is no more convenient browser than Safari for iPad. It’s the first browser I reach for when I’m at home. For email, I’d rather use the iPad than the iPhone, and it’s often more immediate and therefore convenient than reaching for the laptop.

My favourite diary app is Day One. I like it best on the iPad.

I used to prefer TweetBot on iPhone to any other client on any other platform until TapBots made the iPad version.

I use a Cosmonaut pen by the guys who made the Glyf. I’m still waiting for them to send me a replacement tip, but whatever, I use it on Penultimate, which I use every single day for free form writing and ideas. I used to buy loads of notebooks and then I felt too much reverence for the paper to defile it with my writing. Now I can use page after page of virtual paper and never feel the twinge of regret that I did when I used to lay waste to trees with my ridiculous paper fetish. The iPad did that.

I think the best portable gaming device is the Vita. You might accuse me of bias, but I genuinely believe that. The iPad runs a close second. Right now, there are some fantastic games for iPad and I see only more time wasting brilliance coming this way. It’s better for games than either the Mac or the iPhone.

Then there’s music. I have a folder full of music apps that are absolutely brilliant.

I know that as a geek I should pick the MacBook Air. I know that as a rational time and motion study, the choice would be iPhone.

But if you ask me today, I’d have to take the iPad. I don’t love it as much as the other two, but it’s the one I’d have to take. It is worming its way into more and more areas of my life and nearly always does what I need it to do.

It’s loaded with my music and a couple of choice films (I’m presuming my life’s truncated music collection would be available via iTunes Match) and most importantly, with more books than I will ever be able to read in what’s left of my life.

I will be able to read, write, play, draw, make music, record my thoughts, blog, write Lua if I really want, scribble, access my personal archives, pretty much everything I could do with a MacBook Air bar making iPad apps. And I haven’t made an iPad app, so let’s be honest with ourselves. An iPad is all the machine I need, in a format that makes it a lot easier to use, a lot more immediate, a lot more friendly, a lot less buggy, a lot longer lasting and a lot more personal than a laptop computer. As a canvas, it excels and outs the iPhone into the shade. I can’t see this changing. I see the iPad occupying an ever-increasing portion if my life, and the lives of hundreds of millions of others and I don’t see Google, or almost anybody else, catching up for a decade in this space. The traditional computer is dead bar the shouting.

I just wish it would be a bit quicker, and have a retina display. Roll on March.

Why the Kindle is Better for Reading

Marco Arment writes about the benefits of e-reader displays. I’m on his side on every issue, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, but there is one important benefit he’s missed out on.

There is a pure ergonomic benefit to e-ink that LCDs will never be able to offer, and that is that like paper, they rely on ambient light. It might seem curious that I should point to a restriction as a benefit, but e-ink gives us more than just great battery life.

I recently spent 24 hours in a sleep centre, where I was monitored very closely by skilled professionals armed with some seriously heavy duty equipment. I went to sleep at night (kind of) wired up like some kind of pre-wakened Frankstein’s monster.

During the day, I was asked to try to go to sleep every two hours. For half an hour preceding my nap, I was told to stop using my iPad. I was surprised as I used the iPad to help me reach a soporific state, or so I thought. It turns out that emitted light falling on the retinas stimulates wakefulness. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

It appears that this problem with iPad displays causing insomnia is more common than I thought and for this reason, e-ink displays, such as the one on the Kindle I bought after my sleep centre session, should be popular for some time to come.

Disbelief in God, Belief in Santa

I’m probably about to commit the blogosphere equivalent of suicide by passing a slightly negative comment on one of Chairman Gruber’s recent posts.

In a slight variation on the cringeworthy “some of my friends are black” defence, I would just like to point out that some of my best friends are in fact atheists and agnostics, and I don’t take issue with Gruber’s apparent atheism. It’s just the quote he pulls out is of dubious quality. Science is actually held together by a bunch of theories. Many sciences have come and gone. So the course of science could have been dramatically different, what is important is not what science produces in the way of laws and theories, but the scientific process itself.

He (Jillette) should have said maths of course, but he’s also made the error of imagining that the social concepts that run through many of the world’s great religions can’t be separated from the times they were established in. You’d also have to suppose there was no God to come up with the logic that Penn Jillette, the quoted author does in the citation provided by Gruber for that conclusion to work. With a God in place, the idea that Messengers can come throughout history to call to His Unity, establishing laws suitable for the development of humanity for the time makes perfect sense. The idea also that the human race could reach a point beyond which we’d learned enough from His Messengers and we didn’t in fact need any more guidance, with the God of Islam urging us again and again to ponder, to reflect, to use our reason, is also not so radical or stupid, and Islam does in fact teach this.

Then you could also make the same point about art. Or literature. Or music. I’d argue that the popular music of today is as valueless and ugly as the militant atheism of Dawkins, but I can’t imagine that Jillette would argue that art or literature or music of the past was nonsense.

The reason Jillette has to imagine a reconstruction of religion in different forms each time is because he is presupposing that God didn’t send revelation to His Messengers. If you believe that order came from chaos, then of course a different re-run would produce different results.

A common failing of Western ideologues is that they completely ignore Islam and the reason for that is quite simple: They believe in their culture’s stereotypes of Islam and Muslims. I have been reading Anne Lamott’s brilliant “Bird by Bird” as recommended by Tim Ferriss. It’s taken me a while and I decided to go for the home stretch today. Written in 1994, thus predating 9/11 by quite a few years, it has until today for me been a book I’d recommend to anyone. Now I’m planning on using it for toilet paper because having taken my sweet time to read it, I came to the chapter headed “giving” today and found this distasteful tract. (The emphasis is mine.)

Your work as a writer, when you are giving everything you have to your characters and to your readers ,will periodically make you feel like the single parent of a three-year-old, who is, by turns, wonderful, wilful, terrible, crazed and adoring. Toddlers can make you feel as if you have violated some archaic law in their personal Koran and you should die, infidel.

On reading this, the intimacy that Lamott had developed with me during the course of her book drained out of me instantly. Like a wife who finds out that the man she has loved for several decades is in fact, a serial killer. It’s like finding out that Tony Benn has a Nazi memorabilia museum and that he salutes the German national anthem with tears of nostalgia welling up in his misty eyes. This kind of rubbish is used to bolster the views that start with mosque burnings and Breivik, but ultimately lead to wars of aggression and genocide.

So an important point gets missed. The Qur’an has not in fact changed one iota in 1400 years, unlike ever other religious text. We didn’t humanly have the technology to do that before. Science was developed hugely by Muslims (and Christians) who saw no conflict between their faith and reason and still don’t. It’s only a fashion to be militantly atheist and it’s shockingly easy to be an ignorant atheist too, simply because it’s so fashionable. I wonder if Jillette realises just how extraordinarily unprecedented this act of preservation is?

Some people accuse Gruber of being a fanboy. I think such people are irredeemably stupid. If he’s a fanboy (of Apple), then I’m screwed. If we’re fanboys, it’s of stuff that works really well and is designed for our needs. If something better comes along, we’ll take it. Our position is based on our reason, not on somebody else’s.

I do see a lot of atheism fanboyism going on though, a position taken without too much thought. I’m not going to accuse Gruber of that, because he rarely talks about the personal, but I do hope that he and others who have hung their hats on the Hitchens hook will at least have a look at Islam one day, having removed as far as possible, any of the prejudices they might unconsciously harbour against it.

Security, Sidestep and Google Accounts

In the wake of several crude hack attempts, ostensibly by members of the Qadiani Ahmadiyya cult, I decided to play it safe and up my email security. I now use two-step verification, which I recommend to anyone interested in keeping their digital identity protected. As more and more of our lives become digital (how many people no longer need to do their Christmas shopping anywhere other than on-line these days?) we need to take more precautions with our email addresses, google accounts and passwords.

I tend to use quite ridiculously strong passwords, sometimes opting for long pass phrases and at other times choosing random characters. I don’t remember them, I have 1Password for that, except for when I’m at work, but I tend to keep my private life and work life quite separate, so if there’s anything personal I need to do, I prefer to use my own machine from the comfort of a nearby coffee shop, and that’s where I run into a little snag.

You see, most coffee shops use open WiFi, with no WEP, never mind WPA or anything fancier, so unless you’re using https login for your gmail, pretty much everything you’re sending over the air can be captured by a person running Firesheep as a plugin in an older version of Firefox. Then you’re stuffed. So I use Sidestep to get me hooked up to a proxy server. I’ve also used it to connect to my VPN on an Amazon EC2. I really don’t consider myself an expert in any of these things, but I can do what I need to follow instructions. Sidestep automatically directs me to a proxy if I happen to be on an open line, and leaves things alone if I’m on an encrypted wireless network, as I often am at home.

Sadly, Sidestep interferes with Google’s 2-step verification and Mail’s GMail integration gets confused. At home then, I have to disable Sidestep rather than leave it running and at a coffee shop, I will just have to go to gmail through my browser, or leave it for the iPhone.