Tech Stuff Archives - Page 6 of 22

RSS Reader for Torch

On my PC, I love using Google Reader to aggregate my RSS feeds. I used to have (it’s probably still current) a paid-for copy of “NewGator” and I’ve tried several other alternatives, but the one that just worked the way I do was the Google product.

When I started using my new Torch BlackBerry device I noted that it had a “Social Feeds” application that really isn’t up to the standard that I felt RIM’s other, similar applications are. i.e. Facebook, Twitter and BB/Enterprise Messenger – all of which I use and like. This integrated tool while sporting some of my criteria for a good RSS reader, fell quite short of the mark.

What I am looking for:

Syncs with Google Reader (I don’t want to have to figure out where I left off on a feed whenever I move to a different platform – It might not have to be Google’s product, but I want multiplatform synching)
Removes read articles (or at least hides them)
Notifies me when new articles are available
Caches the articles / information on the BlackBerry rather than making me wait for each article while I’m reading them. Or at least intelligently caches the next few while I’m reading the current one so I can zip through them at my speed, not AT&T’s.
Same as above for pictures associated with the articles – I have an unlimited data plan, *some* extra bandwidth consumption is an OK price to keep up the reading momentum.
Shows me an abstract and lets me easily open the full article if I decide to move forward.

I’ve had Viigo on my various BlackBerrys for a while now. It was OK but there were a lot of flaws that I finally grew weary of working around:

Every time I updated Viigo I would have to re-enter my credentials (they tend to update a lot)
Also it would lose my feed position and everything would show as unread again on each update
Before I got my “touch” device it was a pain navigating because they were unable to navigate a page at a time using the space bar like every other app on the BlackBerry
With my Torch I find that every article is just a little too big to view on the screen and I have to “pinch” EVERY ONE OF THEM before reading – even in landscape mode
If I follow any link in a Viigo article, I can not get back to the article, I have to close it, and open a previous one, *then* open the original one. And I’m not where I left off but back at the top (needing to pinch it again)
Viigo never seemed to actually do anything in the background even though that’s how I had it configured so feeds only updated when I re-opened the app
There were far too many layers in Viigo, most of which I never used but had to navigate through and I can’t get rid of them. I think there were a lot of plans to expand that never really took off.

So Viigo is not really very efficient for RSS reading.

So I downloaded the latest version of BerryReader. I heard good things about this app’s ability to sync with Google Reader. But I found the interface absolutely useless – certainly no touch ability – but I found it really didn’t work for me at all. It *did* seem to sync with Google so I’ll give it that much.

I went to try out “Feeds” but they have no free trial, so even though I have heard good things about it I don’t try ANYTHING on my BlackBerry anymore without a trial. Too many apps are designed to work only in very niche ways that you either love or hate. That’s kind of why there are so many apps out there for all these devices.

I then tried “Unread” (cute play on current zombie craze I believe) and it was certainly better than BerryReader, but took a long time to load up (I only have 118 subscriptions). It actually nicely mirrored the subscriptions (folders/labels) of my Google Reader, but it was cumbersome in that it can’t hide stuff you’ve already seen. So each time I open it I end up wading through a bunch of stuff I’ve already read before. I had other issues with it but I was basically just frustrated by this point

So I opened the Google Reader URL and, now that I have the new Web Kit Browser that comes with OS 6, it’s actually pretty good. It automatically figures out that you’re on a mobile so no need to figure out a special URL for it. One really nice thing is, besides being 100% synchronized with Google Reader (because it *is* Google Reader) most of the features that I am looking for are part of this package. Of course I’d still prefer to have a dedicated app that integrated with my message application so that I can see when new items become available, and I still have to retrieve everything live, but so far no other app has stepped up and distinguished itself as being superior to Google’s free offering.

So color me satisfied. I’ll check again in another 6 months or so to see if anything has improved, but this seems to be a vastly underrepresented corner of the app market.

Playing with my new BlackBerry Torch

I’ve had my BlackBerry Bold (9000) for a few years now and it was starting to show some signs of age (besides its rather beat up case), dropping calls more and more often and rebooting spontaneously during the day.

So I put in for the new AT&T BlackBerry Torch (9800), being the BlackBerry administrator for your company does have a few perks and occasionally testing cool equipment for use at the company is one of them.

A while ago I had the Storm 2 in my hands for about 1/2 hour when I gave it back saying there is no way I’d recommend that device in our organization and I kept my venerable Bold. Of course some poor souls went ahead and ordered the Storm 2 anyway. I think it was one of the more “swapped” devices in our company as people quickly realized that it was a miserable end user experience unless you spend your entire day consuming “Youtube” videos.

I had the chance to briefly play with a Torch device early last month when a RIM rep came by the office to introduce himself and I was suitably impressed. Having the keyboard as a fallback is ideal because I create a reasonable amount of content with my device and my emails are not just one liners but often span a couple of paragraphs of detail. Not something lightly undertaken with a screen keyboard.

I’ve had the device for a little over a day now and my opinion of it is mostly positive. The Bold is sitting mere inches away from me in case I should change my mind, but the Torch is winning me over.

I had a couple of hiccoughs getting the device set up. After the device transfer wizard and enterprise activation were completed I noticed that none of my email filters had come across. I ended up calling RIM and working with them. Eventually a battery pull and a slow synch resolved that issue for me. Probably the biggest mini nuisance is the fact that OS 6 changed out all the sounds. My beloved “Sonar” was gone and all the dings and tones to which I’d become accustomed were replaced with new ones. While I’ve kept some of these new tones I was able to find a zip file that lets me get many of my favorites back. “Sonar” is short and poignant and has yet to be rivaled as an alert that one of my servers is in distress.

Something that surprised me – and this seems to be OS related rather than anything else – is that all the sounds are initially VERY muted. This can be remedied by going into your profiles and raising them from the “inaudible in a business environment” 2 (which was what “low” seems to have been translated to) up to a 6 or 7. Then things are fine. But I thought my alarms must be failing at first because I was not hearing them above the every day hubbub of my co-workers.

The large screen is really nice. I’ve been using FaceBook and Twitter for a while now and was singularly unimpressed with that experience on my Bold. On the Torch the same apps have much more breathing room and they really lend themselves to the touch screen.

And even over the same network and with a reportedly lackluster processor, moving through posts in either of those apps is very satisfying. I used to just forward any posts that contained links to my email account because reading the linked-to items was annoying. The zoom of the Bold browser (this was with the 4.5 OS – the 5 OS was *just* released this past week by AT&T for the Bold 9000 – laggards) invariably ended up making the text a little too wide to be seen on the screen without swinging the cursor from side to side to see the ends of the sentences. The OS6 browser (combined with the length / width of the Torch screen) AND the infinitely controllable pinch zoom makes that a thing of the past.

And the rendering of web pages appears to be much better as claimed. “Nearly Perky” would be my characterization. In spite of the purportedly overloaded AT&T network and the commoditized processor, the web experience is satisfactory.

The only places where this unit does not shine are:

1) Periodic lapses in performance in the screen interface handling. Sometimes you press a dialog button with your finger and nothing will happen – no feedback, nothing – and then several seconds later that buffered input plus the several other attempts to hit the button will manifest – to your displeasure. And flicking the menus screens with your fingers is often a little sluggish. Not a show stopper but definitely a point on which I will agree with reviews that I have seen that is a low-light in an otherwise satisfactory product.

2) The Keyboard is actually a little hard to slide open. There is no notch or any readily apparent place to easily slide the screen to reveal the keyboard. Maybe I’ll figure out a technique for this but I use Google Voice and HAVE to press 1,2,3 or 4 to acknowledge a call before I can talk to the other party. I’ve set my phone to answer on sliding out the keyboard which speeds up the process but opening the phone with one hand is not an easy prospect. I somehow think a slight notch just below the trackpad would simplify this, but then I’m not a usability expert.

Overall still very happy with this unit and I believe I’ll be recommending it as our “Go To” device (as much as my folks will listen to their technical support services folks…). The acid test will be next week in the business environment. Can I use it as handily as my old unit? I’m confident that it will be up to the task.

Setting Windows 7 Login Background Screen

I picked this info up from “The Winhelpline Blog” and am documenting it here so that I’ll be able to find it the next time I want to change this. The following subset of directions is lifted unabashadly by me for my own edification. If you want the whole story go to the Winhelpline link. I also used the reference below to “Rafael’s” site to determine the correct size for my image.

For my purposes I used the Windows 7 policy editor technique and it worked just fine.

I also took a favored picture and downsized it to 1900 x 1200 pixels and reduced the resolution so that the final JPEG file size would be less than 256 KBytes. In Photoshop Elements 8 that meant going for a quality of “3”. My original picture was 3872 x 2592 at weighed in at a hefty 2.74 MegaBytes. So rather than the standard background I now sport a picture of my lovely wife in front of one of the ruins of tulum.

Use the following Group Policy setting in Windows 7

1. Start the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)

2. Go to the following branch:

Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | System | Logon

3. Set the following option to Enabled

Always use custom logon background

4. Close the Group Policy Editor.

Step II – Include the Wallpaper Image (JPG)

Next step is to place the background wallpaper (JPEG file) in the following folder:

C:\Windows\System32\oobe\info\backgrounds

Note that the info folder doesn’t exist by default. You need to create the info and backgrounds folders manually.

Place the background image file (name it as backgroundDefault.jpg) into the above folder.

As for the file naming info and maximum supported file size, check out Rafael’s post Windows 7 to officially support logon UI background customization. Be sure to check out Rafael’s blog for more information and screenshots!

Beware Amazon Price Watch

I love Amazon.com. I do a LOT of my shopping there. Anything from my TV to my rowing machine to filters for my furnace I purchase through Amazon.

Anybody who has dealt with Amazon knows that prices tend to fluctuate rather a lot.

Recently I was opining that Amazon’s kindle book prices should not be greater than those for new hardcopy books. So I set about looking for some kind of price watch tool that could alert me when ANY Amazon price changes, I was specifically interested in finding a tool that could track Kindle book prices as well.

This turns out to be pretty hard to find.

In my travels I elected to install a piece of [expletive deleted] software from nukeprice.com called “Amazon Price Watcher”. I found the software on CNet which is usually a pretty reliable source of safe software.

Right away, after installing it, I wasn’t impressed with the interface. It really wasn’t clear how it did what it was supposed to do and there was no useful help at all.

The clincher is that the uninstall – when you find it in the program files folder – doesn’t really uninstall everything. I ended up manually going through the registry to get this hunk of junk off my system.

I had already pointed it to my wish list (public wishlist) so it had already absorbed some of my current items of interest. So for the past week I’ve been receiving daily emails from nukeprice.com telling me about one item that seems to drop by about 2 cents a day.

The *only* way, according to the email, to stop the emails is to reinstall the software and then change my watches. There is an intimation that the watch my expire on July 21 so that may ultimately stop the messages.

Of course I don’t feel comfortable with that software so it’s not going back on my machine so I’ll be spamming the incoming emails in the interim.

I just wanted to post this in case anybody is smarter than I am and searches teh intertubes for some opinions on Amazon Price Watch before installing.

I’ll say it again to be clear. I do not like “Amazon Price Watch” by nukeprice.com, the interface is confusing, the help is terrible and it doesn’t uninstall right.

Yech.

Replacing Task Manager with Process Explorer in Windows 7 (64-Bit)

*** Updated June 14, 2010 ***

It turns out that the Procexp64.exe exists ONLY while Process explorer is running. Don’t ask me why. So my registry entry instead now shows:

C:\Bin\Procexp.exe.

Otherwise you still get the “cannot find” message.

*** End June 14, 2010 Update ***

I recently was introduced to Windows’ Process Explorer and liked it enough to want to replace Window’s native task manager with it.

It *should* be as simple as clicking “Options > Replace Task Manager” in the Process Explorer window but then, when you try to invoke the Task Manager (now supposedly Process Explorer) you get a message indicating that

“Windows cannot find ‘C:\Window\System32\taskmgr.exe’. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again.”

For me, going back in Process Explorer to uncheck the above option shows that it’s not checked, and clicking it again doesn’t do anything at all.

Not sure exactly why but what’s happened is that a registry key for task manager has now been created with a debugger key that has a garbage value. Mine showed something like ” ^ $ ^”.

Check it out under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\taskmgr.exe

To go back the way things were you just need to remove the “Debugger” key. Or, if you want to go forward and actually replace the task manager, then set the value of the debug key with the location of your process explorer executable. In my case it looks like “C:\bin\Procexp64.exe” “C:\bin\Procexp.exe”.

Funny, I deleted the debug key and then went back to process explorer and try “Options > Replace Task Manager” again and it works just fine now. Must be an initialization issue.

Tidying up the songs in my Music Library

I woke up this morning with this song in my head but wanted to have a version of it that I could listen to any time either on my home stereo (via iTunes through SoundBridge) or on my iPod.

A quick search turned up ListenToYouTube.com where all I needed to do was provide the YouTube URL for the video and they’ll rip it and provide you with an MP3 file of it, no charge(!). The resulting file is encoded at 128 bps but, for the quality on the YouTube video that’s more than enough for my purposes.

But there was a lead-in section explaining the purpose for the video which is nice in the video context but was a bit distracting for just straight listening. So another search yielded MP3Trim which is a freeware version of the software that can handle files of up to about 9.7 MBytes. The software nicely trims leading and trailing stuff off of MP3s and so was perfect for removing the distracting piece.

Using iTunes’ seek bar I figure out at what point I want the trim to take place, decide if I need it to be abrupt or a fast or slow fade in/out and *presto*. New MP3 with only the parts that I want.

So I’m walking through my collection now removing annoying guitar solos, that annoying guy at the end of the Fugee’s “Killing Me Softly” song and Dolly Parton (yes I have a couple of Dolly Parton songs) yakking away at the end of “Star Spangled Banner”.

I’ve only stumbled so far trying to trim Guns N’ Roses “Knockin’ on Heavean’s Door”. At 10.2 MBytes it’s about 5% too big for the Freeware MP3Trim to handle. Registering the software would resolve this for me. But it’s a little pricey for the use that I would make of it. I’ll just get something that can split the file grossly near where I want to trim and *then* trim it. And if that doesn’t work I don’t think I’ll worry about it.

Of course, if I were only listening to this music on my iTunes or my iPod platforms I could just alter the properties so that the portions of the song that I don’t want are simply not played, but this ONLY works on those platforms. Playing through my Soundbridge or directly off of an SD card on my BlackBerry or car stereo would still have the annoying bits.

My BlackBerry Software

I was exchanging messages with King and thought I’d post my thoughts on the software that I currently use on the BlackBerry.

Hey King,

I don’t use a lot of apps on my 9000 Bold BlackBerry, but I swear by Pocket Informant. It’s great for getting tasks on your calendar and I like its presentation for contacts as well.

I haven’t used the “keyboardless” version of it yet. I used to use it on my iPaq and the BlackBerry version is up to par.

I don’t have any recommendation for a calculator as I pretty much use only the 4 functions these days, but other software I use frequently:

– BerryWeather – my favorite feature is setting my “home” screen to my GPS coordinates so it is always showing me the current and forecast weather for wherever I happen to be. I keep 3 other permanent locations set as well so I can always check home, Toronto and my airport’s weather.

– Profile Scheduler – I use profiles heavily (along with filters) and the scheduler automatically puts it into phone only mode for night time. So I don’t get woken up when a friend sends me some funny message at 1 in the morning…

– I often have used google maps on my device – haven’t had much cause to lately since I’m always near a computer or my gps.

– Something that has potential but IMHO isn’t quite there yet is drivesafe.ly (yep that’s spelled correctly). It can detect when you’re driving (by gps speed) and will auto respond to email and text if you wish and will read you your incoming email and texts. Pretty cool to know whether or not that new incoming message is something to deal with at the next light or not.

– Besides those products I regularly use the Blackberry Facebook App, Enterprise Messenger (with our corporate SameTime IM system), Viigo and UberTwitter. All are OK but none are drop dead gorgeous apps.

I synch wirelessly via BlackBerry Enterprise Server to my Lotus Notes for mail, calendar and journal/memo/notebook. But I synch manually to Lotus Notes at work and to Outlook at Home (outlook is my master) and am able to take advantage of outlook’s superior print and formatting capabilities with no major issues.

I have tried several flavors of synching contacts, calendars, etc. with google-centric products but I have found all of them lacking.

There is a product that you can search for that you would pay some modest monthly fee for that will wirelessly synch your outlook with the BlackBerry that I researched somewhat for one of our SLT folks who was leaving the company and I would definitely give it a try over any of the other solutions I’ve seen to date if I didn’t have a work-provided wireless solution.

Marc

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 7:43 PM, King wrote:

I have taken the plunge, and gone for the BB Storm 2.

Any recommendations for ‘must have’ software?
Particularly…..

a Calculator? The one that comes with it is just basic +-*/ and I use the
more ‘impressive’ functions a fair bit on my treo.

A contact list? I was able to import the contacts from my trio, but it
has not converted as cleanly as I would like.

Also, what do you use on the desktop to sync to, Outlook? Google service,
Lotus notes? What I would really like is a full address book, from which
I could print mailing labels on the PC side as well as maintain all
contact info.

King

On Access Scanners Killing App Performance

At work I’m wrestling with McAfee’s on access scanner absolutely crippling Lotus Notes latest client R8.5.1. By killing the mcshield process you can realize a dramatic improvement in the startup time and overall performance of the Lotus client. A side benefit is that the omnipresent crashes I was facing have virtually disappeared.

Also, if you use the designer client you will see at least one order of magnitude increase in performance. I went from being amazed that such a terrible designer client had been released to being horrified that a relatively capable designer client had been so crippled by on access anti malware software as to render it useless.

Obviously our security folks are not going to be satisfied with simply disabling the scanner so the challenge is now to find some way to make these crappy security products ignore the right files so that the business applications can get on with being useful.

Today I was working at home with Quicken 2010 and I was miffed by how sluggishly it was behaving. I’ve got an i7-920 computer chip overclocked to 3 GHz, 12 Gigabytes of RAM and 64-Bit Windows 7 Professional pushing Quicken along. In theory it should be screaming. Pulling up the task manager, what do I see but for pretty much every mouse click the MsMpEng executable (Microsoft Security Essentials Anti Malware scanner) is sucking up 10-30 percent of my CPU.

I’ve tried configuring the scanner to ignore my executable (C:\Program Files (x86)\Quicken\qw.exe), the Quicken QDF data file type (QDF extension) and even the entire dedicated drive on which the Quicken data files reside. But nothing has any effect. I’m pretty sure that those options are provided for the same reason as “Close” buttons on elevators exist: to give you something to do while things proceed at their normal pace.

Now killing the MsMpEng process absolutely fixes the issue. Quicken takes off like there is no tomorrow. Again, this is not an appropriate answer. You need to have rather sophisticated protections in place to work in today’s sophisticated cyber world. But it does point a finger directly at the resource hogging culprit.

So tell me, why does our protection software have to be so crude and bloated that this is even an issue? Does anybody have any suggestions or alternatives that you are happy with? Until this issue I thought I was VERY happy with Microsoft Security Essentials. But I’ve never needed to tweak it before. Now I want something effective. Symantec’s products have proven themselves to be monstrous resource hogs in the past. My McAfee experience at work is leading me away from that direction. Suggestions are very welcome and even more so if you’ve worked with Quicken in a Windows 7 64 bit environment!

Staying Abreast of Latest Books

My taste in books spans from the serious (such as “The God Delusion”) through to the fantastic (pick anything by “Peter F Hamilton” or “John Scalzi”) through to comics (such as Dilbert, FoxTrot and XKCD).

An issue I’m facing right now is how to easily stay on top of new releases by authors that I favor.

For news and most notifications these days I can take advantage of RSS feeds and aggregate them in a single place – I use Google Reader – this lets me stay on top of the latest and greatest from a wide variety of sources without having to constantly be visiting and revisiting sites checking for changes.

I believe I now own every one of the non-anthology Dilbert books available (the anthologies IMHO are just a waste of time since they just rehash comics but collect them together in a theme). So I went to Amazon expecting to find some kind of Dilbert or Scott Adams RSS feed that I could just plug into my aggregator and when a new book becomes available it would pop up for me and then I could choose whether it was something I wanted to pick up or not.

Imagine my surprise to find that this kind of service is remarkably rarer than I thought. Amazon doesn’t appear to offer anything like this, although some older message board postings I saw indicate that you used to be able to subscribe to email alerts for new Author publications.

In the case of Dilbert, I went specifically to the website to see if something was available there. Scott Adam’s is a tech savvy kind of guy – he was publishing his email address and not-so-regular newsletters at a time when most authors were still viewing the internet with fear and suspicion. But even he doesn’t seem to have this seemingly obvious sales tool available.

Has anybody found a solution to this issue? I’d prefer to have some kind of consistent centralized solution rather than having to track down every individual author’s web site and then try to fashion something from the content therein.

I *did* find this tracker based off the Amazon site which is exactly what I want but it doesn’t appear to be functional. Probably the API on which it depends is no longer functional / available? It’s a great idea though. Free for you and me, the provider gets a modest kickback from Amazon for directing book purchasing traffic to them.

Any ideas or suggestions would be welcome!

iTunes 9.1 – Playlist Sort order fix

This solution was posted by Doug Hellmann and worked perfectly for me, even when I reintroduced using “Sort Artist” to more finely control my podcast play order.

To recap the issue check out this posting.

A little more detail on the solution:

Plug your iPod (presumably iPhone and any other iXXXX device) into your computer with iTunes running.

Click on it under “Devices”

Go to the “Podcasts” Tab

Make sure “Sync Podcasts” is checked

Make sure “Automatically Include” is checked

The default here is to include “All Unplayed” podcasts. Change this to “All”

Click “Apply” at the bottom and then check the results on your device.

This worked perfectly for me.