July 2008 Archives

I’ve been calling various banks, mobile companies, insurance agencies and other businesses that I’m a customer of. Here’s one thing that I don’t understand: all of them have an IVR before you actually reach a person. Which is fine. So you call the number and you have to key in or say things about yourself to a woman robot (why is it always a woman robot? I haven’t heard a man robot yet) before they put you through to an actual person.

But: why do those woman robots have such crappy voice quality? It’s extremely bad. She’s like talking through three pillows or something, and I can very barely understand what she is saying even though I’m in a quiet room and have a good device (Skype or iPhone) myself. Sounds like it’s sampled at like 4 KHz or something else low-frequency and there just aren’t high frequencies. Yes, I know that a lot of it is simply due to the phone system not being able to put through HiFi voice (phone network is limited to 300-3000 Hz or something like that). But in the 21st century, it doesn’t have to be that way.

I wonder what it will take for major businesses to upgrade their woman robots sitting in their IVR systems to a decent quality that goes to the high end of what current phone systems can provide? Or better yet, split the voice experience into “hi-fi” and “lo-fi”? I know that you need to always have backwards compatibility with legacy phones, but if you can detect that the remote caller is on some HiFi capable network, like Skype or some mobile equivalent that I’m sure will be invented and pushed by mobile companies soon, then you can provide a voice experience that’s actually enjoyable, instead of forcing your customers to talk to a robot woman who sits behind three pillows.

Just noticed this in the RSS for my Facebook friend updates. These posts came right after one another and these are three completely unrelated people that probably don’t know each other at all. Yet I know all of them and keep seeing this iPhone nerdness. I don’t know if I should be happy or sad.

I downloaded iPhone 2.0 software the day it came out, and I’ve been using it for a week now. And yesterday I finally got the iPhone 3G as well. Although the online widget said there aren’t any 16GB models in Pittsburgh (because that’s what I wanted), I just walked in the store and got one anyway. No line, no fuss, no problems, 5 minutes in and out. And I had to activate it in the store as well.

Here are some random ideas. Many of them apply to the 2.0 software, not just the 3G hardware.

• The color temperature has definitely changed. I’m not sure I like it, but I can’t change it either. My iPhone wallpaper is black-and-white, and with the new 3G hardware, it has some weird yellowish tint to it. I’d definitely want some sort of advanced preference for is.
• The new hardware is a bit wider, meaning an increased bezel between screen and the software edge. Many people say it’s a bad thing because bigger is worse, but I actually like it because in the old hardware, it was kind of hard to type characters like Q on the keyboard that were “too close” to the edge, especially if your device has some sort of sleeve so there is a ridge. Now there is enough space to tap on any part of the screen, including the edges.
• Most of the settings were nicely restored from backup of the old iPhone, but one exception was e-mail configuration. I have three custom IMAP/SMTP servers, and while inbound IMAP worked fine, outbound SMTP configuration was broken. There is in mail settings a place where you can select outgoing IMAP servers for each account, but it’s ugly and I don’t really understand it.

Here’s the screen I mean. (Which among other things shows nice screencapture capability of the 2.0 software, just click Home and then Sleep buttons.) First of all, there’s no way to rename the SMTP servers, so if you have several accounts against the same server (very often the case for Gmail), they appear the same. Secondly, I don’t understand how the Primary server is determined, and what do the On and Off settings really do. And you can delete some of these servers, but not others.

In the end, the only way I could make my email accounts work again on the iPhone was to fully remove the accounts and then add them again from scratch, because at adding time, you just specify the IMAP and SMTP servers you want, and everything works again. (I don’t use mail account syncing from Mail in OS X because I don’t use Mail as my e-mail client.)

• Super Monkey Ball is a scam and a waste of money. The controls are unusable and it does not save progress, so you have to start from scratch every time. They better release an update soon which fixes at least the saving part, if not the controls too.
• GPS works nicely for walking. It does not work so well when in a car or bus, because it needs line of sight with the satellites, which kinda sometimes works when you sit near a window, but not really. But I use it for walking in unknown places, which is really nice in conjunction with Google Maps and address finding and all that jazz. No nonsense, just works and takes you to places.
• The 3G network is nice and fast and a cool escape from the EDGE slowness.

Flickr Downloadr is one of my little fun side projects. It was originally a throwaway code kind of thing, but I’m glad some people have actually find it useful. I plan to keep it up and maintain in its current state, as its pretty stable.

There was an annoying bug there where sometimes it would tell you something about “missing originalsecret” instead of downloading images. I think that this happenened if either of the following is true:

• the user posting the images does not have a Flickr Pro account
• the user posting the images has disabled downloading original images

I now published a new version that just downloads smaller images if the originals are not available. Get it at the wiki page.

Dear consumer electronics manufacturers:

can you please stop putting stupid annoying blue LED-s into every god damn product that you make?

Right now I have sitting on my desk:

• AT&T 3G card for my laptop
• USB hub
• 2 USB thumb drives
• an Iomega external hard drive

All of them have a blue LED that keeps blinking when the thing is turned on. And I like to work in a darkened room and at nights. Which means that if I left all these things turned on, there would be a whole lot of blinking going on and it would be even more annoying than it is in daylight.

But being such a blink-antagonist, I have gone to great lengths to eliminate this blinking. Some stuff like the hard drive I can position strategically behind my laptop so that I don’t see the led. Some others like the USB hub I can turn upside down so that the LED is facing the table surface and not me. And so on. But I think this is stupid.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have built some electronics myself too. LED-s are really great… as debugging devices. When you test a circuit, it is really great to stick a LED there and observe little electrons merrily passing through and making the LED blink like there’s no tomorrow. It gives you this special warm fuzzy feeling. BUT: we’re talking consumer electronics here, not your goddamn first prototype, eh? These LED-s are maybe cool for some other kind of people who think that having blinking stuff all over the place is really cool and high-tech.

Well, I’m beyond that. I can tell if my stuff is working without the LED-s. For example, most of the devices that I listed above are often connected to this thing that is called THE COMPUTER and that these things called, you know, graphical interfaces that can tell the user anything you need to tell about the device. For example, the AT&T 3G card has a very nice coverage meter in software. I imagine if the seven coverage bars were instead seven blue LED-s on the device… and I close my eyes in horror. It’s too terrible of a thought. And I’m thankful it never happened.

Apple is one company who understands that blinking LED-s are annoying. They don’t have any blinking LED-s, especially not blue ones. Well, on their laptops in sleep mode they have this white LED that actually IS kind of annoying if you are in a dark hotel room and this thing is to your face on the desk… but it’s smooth and not blinking and not blue.

Now, there is one LED that I sometimes miss on my MBP: the hard disk activity one. Often, the computer just sits around and I’d like to know if it’s actually busy with the hard drive, loading up something, or did it just ignore my click. But again, I can get much richer feedback in the software, and out of the two evils (having a LED which is useful 10% of time and annoying 90%, vs having no LED and thus less information), I pick the lesser evil of having no LED and if I really need to have HDD activity info, I have all these wonderful programs smartly put inside the computer for exactly this purpose, that I can open and close at will, instead of having the LED to my face all the time.

So, again, dear manufacturers: please, no more blue LED-s, kthxbai? Ok, well, now I found this post. Maybe these LED-s are part of a conspiracy to keep us all awake. Sounds kinda neat, but no thanks.

I figured I need a 3G/mobile data connection for my MacBok Pro, so I got the card that AT&T offers. As an aside, the terms said “free after rebate”, but free in America doesn’t mean free — it means that you send in the rebate and then after a while you get some AT&T promotional card or something that you can use on future AT&T stuff. So it’s kind of like prepayment for future purchases while meanwhile giving them an interest-free loan. The wonders of business…

So anyway, back to the card. Getting it to work under Mac OS X needs some work, but not too much, once you know where to look. First, as the instructions say, you need to go to this site and download and install the software which is standard Mac OS X application. What you don’t find anywhere, though, is what you do after that. You start the software, but nothing happens and you can’t connect.

Googling helps. Turns out you have to put some settings into the software’s preferences. I found many forum threads such as this one. Turns out you have to configure the thing in Preferences like this.

Password may or may not be necessary. After you do this, it connects and works fine. And 3G is mighty fast, yay! I’m already looking forward to next Friday and the new 3G iPhone

I seem to have some incompatibility with new hip’n’cool headsets. Previously there was the Freetalk affair. Which ended fine, btw — I shipped it back and got most of my money back (minus some restocking fee or whatever). No harm done. Try again some other time.

But now, I thought I’d give the new Jawbone a try.

It started out very well. The packaging is super super nice. As good as Apple I’d say. Typical problem with consumer electronics is that they’re packaged in some sort of plastics that is welded together and you have to somehow cut and tear it open and almost kill yourself in the process, cutting yourself to pieces and spilling blood all over the place. Not a good way to start the product relation. Not so with Jawbone, though. Their packaging is high-quality plastic that you can keep around, and the documentation is also very nice.

But, but, but… I connected it to my Mac as a Bluetooth headset. And the sound quality was simply crap. I don’t know if it’s something that I did, but I have a very low tolerance for things not working out of the box and don’t think that I should debug them extensively. Either they work for me or they don’t. Jawbone didn’t.