The Brooks Review

Year: 2012

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  • ‘Instapaper 4.2.2 with Background Update Locations’

    Marco Arment:

    >Simply add up to 10 locations that you enter and leave often, and Instapaper will frequently update without manually launching it.

    What a clever hack, this should make an already great app even better. I had never heard of this, but Arment says this idea is from News.me — credit where credit is due.

    I also love this little privacy note:

    >Instapaper stores these locations only within the app itself, only for this purpose, and does not share them or send them to any web service (not even its own servers). I respect your privacy.

  • Quote of the Day: Christopher Elliott

    “The problems of airport security don’t rise to the level of becoming an election-year issue, but this isn’t about airport security anymore. This is about getting scanned and frisked at a ballgame, the train station, and outside Congress.”

  • Shiny Things Software

    My thanks to Shiny Things Software for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed to promote their new game: [Sudoku Touch](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sudoku-touch+/id512397454?ls=1&mt=8). Before I was contacted about this game I had never, not once, played a game of Sudoku. I didn’t even know how to play, so I am about as rough a use case as you can get to test a Sudoku game on.

    I caught on in about five minutes flat — an hour later I was still playing Sudoku Touch. For this beginner I loved having the app tell me when I misplace a number because it is a great way to get a hang of the game without getting frustrated. Now I just love how fast I can play numbers by drawing them on the screen.

    I honestly don’t keep many games on my iPhone, but this game will stay on there for a long time.

  • “Personal”

    Nick Bergus on the dangers of clicking a “like” button in the name of humor:
    >Amused, I posted it to Facebook with the line “A 55-gallon drum of lube on Amazon. For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.” And then I went on with my life.
    >A week later, a friend posts a screen capture and tells me that my post has been showing up next to his news feed as a sponsored story, meaning Amazon is paying Facebook to highlight my link to a giant tub of personal lubricant.

    I don’t know what Bergus is thinking here — he didn’t use an affiliate code on his link to the lube. So I have taken the time to do so, [buy it from Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B005MR3IVO/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20) and I will post a link to your site if you use my affiliate code — you just need to provide me with a short 100-word review of the product. ((No, really, I will.))

    [Hurry](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B005MR3IVO/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20), only 10 left as of this writing.

  • ‘Intel Ultrabooks Will Mooch Free Wi-Fi’

    David Zax on new technology to be a part of Intel’s, soon-to-be-doomed, ultrabook initiative:
    >Basically, it lets a device automatically join a free Wi-Fi network, even if that network typically requires some sort of manual input to join. It achieves this feat by sending a specially-formatted DNS query that can worm its way past any Wi-Fi router that’s not hyper-fortified. The query then heads to Devicescape’s servers, bearing details of the Wi-Fi point; then Devicescape’s servers send back tailored instructions on how to gain access to that Wi-Fi point. Devicescape’s software on your device is then able to link you–automatically.

    The article goes on to make it sound like the WiFi access points have to opt-in to the service, but there’s a lot of potential for — well — things to go badly. For example, what’s to stop a hacker from registering his WiFi hotspot and skimming all your data when you connect — since the connection can be made while the laptop is still in your bag?

    This entire idea makes me very uncomfortable.

  • Little Thing: Device Chargers

    This is one of my favorite *[Little Things](https://brooksreview.net/2012/05/little-things-2/)* tips: just buy more chargers for your devices. I know that you have probably heard this before, but I really do hope that you do this.

    In case you don’t know what I am talking about I want to walk you through a typical day of mine back in 2006 (which was right before I started deploying this tip in my life).

    ### 2006 Ben

    I was using a 15” MacBook Pro and I only had one charger for it. Keep in mind I used this Mac for *everything* — no iPhone was around yet. In a typical day during this time I would have to unplug and relocate my MacBook Pro charger no less than five times.

    That isn’t a shockingly high number, until you think about the fact that outlets are not conveniently placed. They are placed low on the wall and often in spots where you want to block them with furniture. It’s not hard, per se, to move a laptop charger from room to room — but it *is* very annoying.

    ### Present Day Ben

    Now I own several MacBook Air chargers. I keep one at my desk at work. One at my desk at home. I keep the third one in my cord bag so that I can easily toss it in my bag if I need to. (Before I switched to the MacBook Air, with its long battery life, I used to keep a fourth laptop charger in the living room routed between the couch cushion that I normally sat on.)

    I can’t remember the last time that I bothered with toting chargers around with me in my day-to-day life. That’s not only less weight and stuff to carry, but it’s a lot less of the fiddling with placing chargers.

    ### Why You Need to Do This

    How many times have you been working on your device (any battery powered device) only to have the battery start to die and instead of plugging in the device to keep working, you decide to just go plug it in to the charger — wherever that charger maybe?

    If you do that even once a week, you know how big of a pain that can be. Doesn’t matter if it is your iPad, iPhone, or Mac — having to stop working to go charge it somewhere that you don’t want to work is annoying.

    So by buying yourself an extra charger (or three) you can quickly eliminate this annoyance.

    I think to most of you the laptop charger scenario will make a ton of sense — the chargers are heavy and we like to route the wires nicely on our desks.

    What about iPhone though?

    I think any avid iPhone owner will agree that the battery life could be much better. In a typical day my iPhone will be sitting at about 20% left when I get home around 5p. That’s not great — I made it through the work day — but it won’t last me the night.

    I actually have iPhone chargers everywhere.

    – Living room
    – Home office
    – Car
    – Office, office
    – Bedroom
    – Two extra chargers in my cable bag

    Here’s the thing with my iPhone: I don’t like to not be near it, ever. It bugs me — yeah call me OCD, or odd — fact is I like my iPhone close to me at all times. I also realize that the battery will die if I don’t charge it at some point during the day, thus all the chargers scattered throughout my life.

    It’s even to the point where I am going to go put an iPhone charger in our guest room, just so our guests don’t have to mess with plugging in (and forgetting) their chargers.

    ### The Exception

    There is only one exception to my “buy a ton of extra chargers” rule: my iPad. The iPad has proven to me that it’s battery life, and the amount per day that I use it, don’t warrant having chargers anywhere but in the bedroom. ((Of course this is helped by the fact that I can, in a pinch, charge off of iPhone chargers.))

    As battery life in my devices improve this will likely reduce the amount of chargers I have to carry.

    ### But Until Then

    I am going to keep strategically placing chargers throughout my life for two reasons:

    1. I hate having to move chargers.
    2. I love knowing that I don’t need to worry about battery life because it is either good enough, or a charger *will* be near.

    Ok, go buy some chargers.

    #### Buying Advice

    Obviously with Mac laptops you need to buy Apple chargers, but for your iPhone here are a couple of chargers you may want to consider:

    – [Belkin Mini Surge](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0015DYMVO/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20): I love to take this traveling or to coffee shops. You get three power ports and two USB chargers. It won’t charge your iPad at full speed, but it’s a great travel companion.
    – [Griffin Car Charger](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0042B9U8Q/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20): The best part is that this charger has two ports. One for you and one for your wife.
    – [Monoprice External Battery Pack](http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=108&cp_id=10833&cs_id=1083110&p_id=9282&seq=1&format=2): I personally have not used this, but I do have this version that [they no longer make](http://minimalmac.com/post/9551851629/monoprice-powerocks-universal-external-backup-battery) and have nothing but good things to say. What’s great about this power pack is that it can charge an iPad at full speed, which means I just bought one for myself.

  • ‘A Room So Quiet No One Can Stand It for More Than 45 Minutes’

    Bill Ward on a room that is 99.9 percent sound proof:

    >Besides being able to hear one’s own heart, stomach and even inner ear, or the sounds emitted by a cellphone’s display, first-timers in the quiet room find their other senses discombobulated by “cross-modal” perceptual effects.

    >“Your eyes don’t feel as comfortable in this room,” Orfield pointed out, adding that some visitors have had hallucinations during or after a spell in there. “You lose your touchstones.”

    You have no idea how badly I want to see how long I could last in this room.

  • The B&B Podcast #63: Blanc and Beard

    Pat Dryburgh filled in for me this week and talked about iPhone and Apple TV rumors with Shawn.

  • Change Your Desktop Background Based on Time of Day, or Application Open, Using Keyboard Maestro

    Tapping the link is just going to download the zipped file for my Keyboard Maestro macro, so let me explain what you are getting.

    First, credit where credit is due, a big thanks to [Greg Pierce for getting me a working AppleScript for this](https://twitter.com/agiletortoise/status/207954077345267712) (I was using an Automator action before, which was pretty slow).

    All you have to do to make this work is to grab the path to your image and plug it in to the AppleScript and you are done. From there you can adjust the time and days that your image changes.

    I use this to change the image:

    – In the morning when I get up.
    – Mid-morning
    – Evening
    – Late night
    – When I launch iA Writer

    The first four are pretty simple, I just trigger with the time and have a new macro for each desktop image and time that I want it to change the background. I set it so the late night image is very dark, and the morning is bright, therefore slowly moving from bright to dark throughout the day.

    *(Bonus tip: save the images as something like `morning.jpg` all in the same directory so that you only need to type the path once. Another bonus to this is that if you ever want to change the image you only need to replace the image with a new one of the same name — no touching the macro.)*

    For the iA Writer background change I have the macro set to activate when I launch iA Writer and another set to switch back to a predetermined background when I quit iA Writer.

    One final note: you will notice that I assigned a hotkey to this macro as well, that’s because this script changes the background of your *current* main display. Therefore if you hook a laptop to a monitor, the image will not change on your laptop — the hotkey is so that I can manually change the image if I please.

  • ‘The Politics of WiFi Names’

    What a great way to look at the popularity of politics: your WiFi SSID. ((Fun fact: my WiFi is still “Comcast is Probably Down”. Which I find to be comical when a Comcast rep shows up to work on my Internet service.))

  • It’s the Little Things

    I assume that I had a similar experience as most college kids in the U.S. — that experience goes something like this:

    – I don’t have much money.
    – I need/want XYZ
    – I am going to settle on ABC because I don’t want to try and (or can’t) shell out the money for XYZ
    – ABC is not as good as XYZ, but *I* have ABC

    I couldn’t afford anything other than a base model 12” Powerbook G4 and even though it was dog slow with only 256mb of RAM, well, it was *my* dog slow Powerbook G4. I could have worked at getting more RAM quickly, because I did use the machine all the time, but at that time this concept so succinctly put by Marco Arment was largely a mystery to me:

    >If you sit on, sleep on, stare at, or touch something for more than an hour a day, spend whatever it takes to get the best. -[@marcoarment](http://twitter.com/marcoarment/statuses/13642753090)

    It’s a statement that makes so much sense once you have done just that, spend whatever it takes, but a concept that is foreign to many as they are starting out in life.

    I used to think: “A bed is a bed” and now I know “all beds are not equal”.

    Luckily I found this out long before Marco tweeted it, but it’s something that is an ongoing pursuit in my life: to get the best X that I can get.

    That doesn’t always mean the most expensive, just the best for *me*. I started this with the things that I use, or interact with, the most each day. That means I started with my bed and the difference was amazing.

    What I have found is that by doing this I am incrementally making my life more enjoyable each and everyday. It really is the little things that count, because if you improve enough of the little things (and the big things don’t suck) then pretty soon you are going to have a lot of great things going for you and thus you *will* be happier.

    This is the reason I often write about recurring topics on this site — it’s a documentation of my pursuit to find the perfect thing for me.

    It’s why I have over 18 bottles of partially consumed whiskey in my house.

    Why I constantly am trying weather and note taking apps.

    The reason behind my obsession with finding a perfect bag and now my obsession with talking about my perfect bag.

    Or why I endlessly write about knives, much to the annoyance of many readers.

    This is the reason why I bought a BMW when I owned a perfectly good car (that I owed no money on).

    You can get by with less than great all you want, but you can’t be happy with less than great — at least I don’t know many people that can be.

    ‘Great’ is subjective and highly personal.

    What is great for me may not be great for you. For *my* great thing to be great for you, we must hold similar values and live a similar life.

    This post marks the start of an ongoing series about those little things that I have found to be great for me. It may be a nice light switch, a new Keyboard Maestro macro, or even a really great shirt. I am not going to just talk about the products that I chose, but I am going to try to focus a bit on both: how I chose the item, and why I chose to make this item a priority in my life.

    *Stay tuned*. ((I am going to title each of these posts starting with “Little Thing:”, so that you know what you are getting into when I post it.))

  • Google to Use Paid Inclusion Model

    Danny Sullivan:
    >Eight years ago, Google viewed paid inclusion in general as some type of evil the company should avoid and in particular something that could cause shopping search to have poor relevancy or be biased.

    >What happened to cause such a change?

    Oh, me, me, me! Google changed the definition of paid inclusion. Clever.

    I don’t really care about this because my ‘shopping search engine’ is Amazon.com, but this is just another change (among many) from the Google that we all *used* to know and love.

  • Dark Sky Version 1.3

    New update for Dark Sky is out and it adds 24-hour forecasts. I was worried they might be cluttering up the UI too much, but it was done very well. A nice slide up or to the side depending on your device and you get the 24-hour forecast nicely broken down. A really nice addition to the app.

  • ‘Tim Cook at D10: In His Own Words’

    Tim Cook on Apple:
    >It’s my oxygen.

    Nice reporting by Macworld.

  • Coda 2 Themes

    Neat site with a lot of Coda 2 themes. I particularly like that the site’s design switches to the coloring of the selected theme so that you can preview it.

    Also, [here is a link to another site](http://justinhileman.info/coda-colors/) with Coda 2 themes — this one has the excellent Solarized themes.

  • ‘Best Standing Desks’

    Mark Lukach takes a look at standing desks for *The Wirecutter* and points out the [Kangaroo Pro Junior](http://www.ergodesktop.com/content/kangaroo-pro-junior). I had never heard of this desk that modifies any desk and converts it to a stand/sit desk. I think I am going to order one, but would like to hear from you guys if you have one first — looks neat to me.

  • Amazon Item of the Week: Nerf N-Strike Maverick

    This isn’t the best Nerf gun in the world, but I just use it to shoot at my cat when he starts scratching the furniture. It’s an effective deterrent (though it only has an effective range of about 15 feet) and shoots accurately.

    Oh, and it’s less than $9 with Prime shipping. If you own a cat, get this.

  • It’s Like Instapaper, but for Ads… People Will Love It

    Ki Mae Heussner for GigaOm on the AdKeeper site that allows web readers to save an ad for later (yeah, I know):
    >But they’re finding that consumer behavior isn’t changing as fast as they’d hoped.

    Well, color me surprised.

    >[…]they’ve decided to spread some of the $40 million they’ve raised on other ways of connecting consumers and brands.

    Woah, woah, woah, Heussner, you just toss that out there like it should be obvious what clown put up $40 million to back a service for users to save ads for later — the same ads that users actively try to ignore and block — oh wait, just saw this at the bottom of the post:

    >Disclosure: True Ventures, which invested in AdKeeper, is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

    Cool beans, now I know it’s not just AdKeeper that is drinking the Kool-AID.

    Here’s what the president of the AdKeeper parent company thinks of the product:

    >“I believe it will be a behavior that we all know and love in the future,” she said. “It will just take time.”

    Don’t hold your breath on that one.

    Lastly:

    >Keep Holdings also recently launched Swizzle, an email-based service that lets consumers manage all brand-related messages from a consolidated location. The service ports all of a consumer’s brand-related content out of their normal inbox, lets them unsubscribe from the ones they no longer wish to receive and organize the ones they do care about.

    In case you missed what that was saying, the best I can tell, they created a service for you to organize your SPAM. No, like, really.

    >Last week it opened in beta to its first few thousand users.

    I bet people were lined up for days. DAYS.

  • ‘Apple’s Crystal Prison’

    Micah Lee and Peter Eckersley writing for EFF.org on the ‘crystal prison’ that is a locked os (like iOS) and the excuses given by companies that do this:

    >When technology and phone companies defend the restrictions that they are imposing on their customers, the most frequent defense they offer is that it’s actually in their customers’ interest to be deprived of liberty: “If we let people do what they want with their pocket computers, they will do stupid things with them. You will be safer and happier in our walled compound than you would be outside.”

    This is an over simplification of the problem. The EFF calls for a ‘bill of rights’ that would allow users to choose to have an open device. There’s three important things I want to say here:

    1. One of the best reasons for a closed system is privacy and security. I don’t know about you but my iPhone contains massive amounts of very private data. From bank passwords, credit card numbers, and access to all my bank accounts. If the system were open I would have no guarantee that that data was still safe — hell even with Apple my address book is occasionally uploaded for no reason. If Apple has a hard time policing every app when they go through the approval process, how would I as an individual approve an app to make sure it was on the up and up?
    2. The EFF doesn’t lay out why a closed system *is* bad for a user. The best argument is that it makes it hard for apps under the GNU to be posted (think VLC), but even then that’s hardly a downside when compared to what I lay out in point one.
    3. Using iOS is not forced on people, it is a choice. If you want open you choose Android, if you want closed you choose iOS. It’s not something people bully you into using (well maybe Android is if you go to a cell carrier store), you are actively choosing to use a platform knowing the downsides. So how is it the responsibility of Apple to go open, when the user is saying: “I’m fine with closed”? The EFF isn’t fighting the good fight, they are just fighting to fight. Using iOS at all is a privilege, not a right — that alone gives Apple the right to do with it as they please.

    >Microsoft, like Apple, is moving toward a dangerous future where users have less freedom to do what they want with their computers, where developers are restricted in what they can accomplish, and where competition and innovation is stifled.

    Less freedom? I’m sorry is Microsoft and Apple now asking to approve what website I visit? Is linux suddenly gone? I mean, come on.