A long long time ago – I believe it was early 2009 – I was living in the far away land of Qatar.  I had just purchased a new HP desktop computer – a floor model with a scratched screen.  It was the last in the store, and the deal was too good to pass up, providing they committed to replace the screen, which they did.  Commit, that is.  They committed to replace it when they received new inventory.  However four months on I was still without a screen, so I took it back in a shopping cart and demanded they refund my money.  They did.  Note: Never underestimate the power of a loud, unhappy customer in full view of other potential customers.  This is the reason they put the Customer Service counters off to the side, or at the back.  It’s out of sight.  Don’t bitch there, as your powers of persuasion are greatly diminished.

I took my refund elsewhere, and (stupidly) bought another HP product.  This time, a laptop.  Not just any laptop, but a “desktop replacement”.  The thing was heavy as hell, but looked nice.  Interesting thing about Qatar and the Middle East in general – it seems to be on the tail of the supply chain for consumer electronics.  I remember that the iPhone 3GS wasn’t available in Saudi until late 2009 – 5 months behind its launch.  Computers – laptops in particular – tend to be “last year’s model”, or older.  And the one I bought was no exception.  But it was “top of the line” in the country, and I hadn’t learned my HP lesson yet, so I bought it. It didn’t take long for me to learn the HP lesson.  What a piece of shit.  I won’t regurgitate that story, but the turning point here was that I moved to Saudi shortly after I bought it, so returning it wasn’t immediately viable.  I was stuck with a lemon.  I made the most of it until disposable income got the better of me and I picked up a Mac.  Why a Mac?  Because we were using them at work and I was in the “on again” phase of my relationship with them at the time.  Particularly where build quality was concerned.  All I had to do was come home from work and put the Mac (Macbook Pro 15″, hardware version 5,1 to be specific) next to the HP, and start typing.  That’s it – I just put my hands on the thing and I would immediately gravitate towards using the Mac.

This wasn’t an OSX vs. Windows imbalance – it was simply about the build quality.  It was around this time that I developed my primary hardware build quality test – the Lid Lift Test. The concept behind the Lid Lift Test is pretty simple.  Apple puts so much “attention to detail” into the product that on the whole it simply becomes a more natural and stress-free experience.  The first time I noticed it on an Apple product was on one the first iMacs.  It was a half-ball base with a monitor on a swivel stick.  It looked a bit like a cross between a Star Trek computer terminal and a desk lamp.

I first saw it in a Future Shop I think, and I expected to have to hold onto the base while using some effort to adjust the monitor position.  You know, like any non-Apple desktop monitor.  I’m sure you know the type – even after wrestling with it, it’s still not quite in the right position, because after you let go, it moves a bit under its own weight.  The plastic creaks and the center of gravity is such that it just… kind of… wobbles a bit too.  But the iMac… didn’t.  In fact, with only one finger I could move the screen into any position, and didn’t have to steady the base with my other hand.  And it stayed right where you let go of it.  It was… amazing!  The attention to detail that went into that design has continued through other Apple products through the years, including the Macbook Pro I have in front of me.  When the lid is closed, I can open it with one finger, with one hand.  Seems simple enough – but try to do the same thing on the HP (or most other non-Apple laptops, with the exception of many from Sony).  Even though the HP weighs as much as a car, the design is so piss-poor that the hinge resistance exceeds the weight of the base.  Open the lid with one hand, and the base comes up off the table with it… until it gets high enough for the weight of the base to exceed the resistance of the hinge, and – BAM! – the base goes crashing down on the table.  I’m sorry, but who the fuck thought that was a good an acceptable design?

So I’ve been using the Mac, and loving every minute of it.  Except when it crashes.  Or doesn’t wake up from sleep properly.  Boy, those minutes sure are frustrating.  Those minutes I want to throw the frickin thing through a window, because it’s just so random and… and not supposed to happen.  Before this turns into a Windows stability vs. Mac stability contest, to be fair I don’t believe that Window’s reputation for the Blue Screen of Death has as much to do with Windows or Microsoft as it does with extraordinary fragmentation of devices and device quality.  In other words, the hardware makes all the difference in the world, as do the drivers written for it.  Frankly, given the sheer diversity of third parties injecting their crap into Windows, I’m surprised it (Windows) manages to pull things off as well as it does.  Anyway, let’s not jump the shark here… The Mac is predictable in terms of hardware and software, and by and large shouldn’t just randomly crash.

So I took it to the Apple store where they told me that my motherboard was hosed.  This fell in line with “predictable”, so I was happy.  The bad news was that I didn’t have AppleCare, so a replacement would cost $600.  At first this made me slightly less happy.  But after considering the options for a while now, I want to talk for a minute about why this isn’t so bad…

• First and foremost, this laptop would sell for $600 on eBay.  It’s what – 2 years old?  Lesson: Macs retain their market value.  PC’s don’t.  Try giving away a 2-year old HP.  I could, in theory, sell the Mac, and take the $600 I would have spent upgrading the motherboard, and buy a brand new one.  Of course, now everybody knows I have a flaky motherboard…
• Try getting your HP fixed when it’s randomly crashing.  Hold on a sec – I did exactly that (although it was a different symptom).  It was the most excruciating tech support experience of my life.  They didn’t resolve the problem.  They wouldn’t acknowledge the problem.  They couldn’t even give me a decent option for “hands-on” service.  And this is HP – the biggest (well, second biggest) desktop brand in the world.  Lesson: Access to support is more important than the cost of replacement.
• The only reason it would have cost me $600 for that motherboard is because I didn’t have AppleCare – an extended support plan.  The situation would have been exactly the same if it were an HP, although the part may have cost slightly less.  However in the HP scenario, the cost of the part would have likely exceed the market value of the laptop!  Lesson: These are laptops, not desktops.  If a part breaks, you can’t just swap it out – you need a support plan.  These are typically $300-$400 and cover you for 3 years.  In my experience, the only companies that even offer support plans are Apple, HP, and Dell.  In the case of HP, it would have been useless anyway.

Well the posts I get most animated over are the ones centered on my frustration with technology. Aptly, when modern technology goes ‘Boink’, I get rather ticked off about it and want to help others avoid the same pitfalls.

So I’m going to post less about big tech companies buying slightly-less-big tech companies, and less about engineering-level issues such as how to configure a web server (I have a wiki for that). More how-to’s and product reviews, and posts generally targetted at being helpful with a sprinkle of facetious frustration. I live and breathe tech – so when it frustrates me, I can imagine how frustrating it is for the non-geeks out there. Here’s hoping I can help from time to time…

Here’s a poll.  You can choose whatever you like, or suggest something I didn’t think of.  Feel free to choose something that relates to “why you come here”, or “what you’d rather see”, or whatever motivation drives you…

For any one that has a wireless network and has the menu bar item, you will no that the items on the drop down list are a bit limited. For example you can’t see signal strength or any other factors, if you have a choice of wireless networks this could be a problem. As a result you could install a piece of software to do this for you. There is a work around for this. For example the first image below show what the drop down list would normally look like.

But if you press Alt and then click the menu bar it will give you a lot of information about the network you are currently connected to. This is great. You can have all of this knowledge which you can use.

The first number in the list is you MAC address which the wireless network card is connected on. The channel, is you wireless channel, pretty standard. The RSSI is your signal strength. A perfect signal strength is 0. The lower this number the worse it is. As a result of lots of wall and metal my signal strength is pretty low. The final number is data transmit rate, this is problem in mbits per second although don’t quote me.

As a result of a quick button press you can get a lot more information, which should be included by default. Many people have commented on not being able to see this easily. It is there all along, like most Apple products these features are not very well advertised.

If you want to find information about networks you are not connect to, just press Alt again while clicking on the menu item and hover over any network. It will give you the RSSI and the encryption type is shown. You can then make a more informed decision to connect to any networks since you can easily find out the signal strength.

If you have any more tips or tricks, or just a general comment about his tip please leave one below. I know from now on that I will be using this tip every time I am at a wireless access point or want to find out some general information.

via View Wireless Network Info From The Menu Bar | Mac Tricks And Tips.

Ideally, in my world, you should be able to paste anything, anywhere, without the formatting. However most programs don’t give you another option. This is the real issue.

So here’s my message to software developers: For the sake of all that’s holy – include a “Paste without Formatting” option. Like Evernote. Evernote has this option, and it’s the greatest thing since the screensaver. EVERY program should have this, but few do.

If you know of a program that supports pasting without formatting, please drop a comment with the name of it!

How to Set Up a Fully Automated App and Settings Backup on Android

Whitson Gordon — In an ideal world, your Android’s apps, their settings, and your system settings would automatically back up to the cloud so that if you lost your phone, bought a new one, or installed a new custom ROM, setting up a fresh device with everything in place would be a piece of cake. The good news: This utopian Android backup actually is possible. Here’s how to set it up.

via How to Set Up a Fully Automated App and Settings Backup on Android.

Anyone have any experience with this? If it will backup and restore my Angry Birds progress, I may actually upgrade my phone again.

VMware has entered the cloud game by offering an open source package called Cloud Foundry, a platform as a service that should strike fear in the hearts of its competitors, especially the likes of Salesforce.com Microsoft and Rackspace. The platform will offer developers the tools to build out applications on public clouds, private clouds and anyplace else, whether the underlying server runs VMware or not. Like last week’s, Open Compute Project from Facebook or Rackspace’s OpenStack effort, Cloud Foundry is a pretty big deal.

via VMware Launches Open Source Cloud: Cloud Computing News «.

I know I said I would post less of this kind of stuff, but this kind of stuff is still fairly exciting.  To me.  Especially since it’s VMware, and I’m just such a huge fan of theirs.

To quote the dorky Microsoft commercial I mentioned earlier, “yay, cloud”

I think it was after the Brian/CaptainBabble exchange that I became quite agitated that HP has let us all down on this issue, so I decided to take the issue up with their CEO. I found a link to message him, where I sent him the following:

Just thought you should know that your consumers have taken to fixing your lemon laptops on their own because your support team can’t recognize an engineering issue and escalate a recall.

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware/HDX16-Quick-Launch-Button-Issue/m-p/592205#M43438

Your complete lack of response to this issue has left me with such a sour taste that you can not only count on me not replacing the 5 current HP laptops I own with more HP laptops, but you can also count on me spreading the story of my terrible experience to anyone who will listen.

@smd2008 on twitter.

Thanks anyway,

Mike

So I believe it was the next business day, I got a call from their Case Management Office, about an issue that I had raised to the CEO. I explained the issue to him, and then he tried to help me solve it. I stopped him midway and explained to him that it’s an engineering issue, it can’t be fixed over the phone, and I’ve fixed it, like many people, by dismantling the machine and pulling out components. He told me that it wouldn’t be covered under warranty then, to which I replied that it wasn’t under warranty anyway, and regardless, the warranty had been futile for those of us who have tried to get this issue resolved under it. I then explained that my message to the CEO was intended to be helpful to HP, not to me. That they might want to do something about this string of bad laptops rather than let their users take away a bad impression of their company.

But he just didn’t get it. In the end, the best he could offer me was a free extra year on a 2-year warranty on a new computer. I was baffled. Not because of the degree of offered compensation, but because of its ironic nature. He didn’t understand that I wasn’t going to be buying any more HP products, or that the warranty for the one I had was ineffective.

Companies like HP just aren’t going to be able to compete in the Thank You Economy.  They’ll survive – perhaps like IBM has, but thrive?  They just don’t get it, they don’t get their customers, and they’re going to lose brand equity because of it.

If you want to try your luck with the CEO, the link to his contact page is here: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/ceo/index.html

Feel free to quote what I sent him verbatim and sign your name to it.

Netflix is lowering the quality of its streaming movie service in Canada by default to deal with bandwidth caps introduced by ISPs there. the comapny said in a blog post Monday night. Ironically, this came just hours after Netflix gave Canadians more reasons to sign up, with the addition of new movie titles from Paramount Pictures.

via Bandwidth Caps Force Netflix to Cut Video Quality in Canada: Broadband News and Analysis

and…

Last night saw a pair of new developments in the ongoing saga that is usage-based billing. Firstly, Bell Canada announced it was sort of withdrawing its plan to implement UBB while, a little later in the evening, Netflix said it was implementing a new option that will let subscribers lower the quality of their video and thereby use less of their monthly internet limit.

via Netflix and Canada: hey brother, can you spare a gig?

Thanks Netflix. But we as Canadians need to be less content about these sorts of things. Netflix shouldn’t have to adjust its service levels just so it can operate in Canada. Netflix is the shit. The CRTC is bullshit.

Edmund Burke noted that all that was necessary for evil to triumph was for good men to do nothing. Canadians are certainly good and worthy folks, but they suffer an excess of civil obedience, politeness and lack of civic rage that could be harnessed to combat political atrophy. At a time when Arabs risk life and limb for political freedoms, Canadians seem largely apathetic about the erosion of their democracy.

via Canada watches its democracy erode

Okay, democracy and bandwidth caps are largely unrelated topics.  Or… are they?

From an email sent to me by openmedia.ca:

But will this new scheme stop usage fees, expensive rates, and overall horrible telecom service? No, we’re afraid not.
Here’s what we know:

1. Bell and other big telecom companies continue to impose usage fees on Canadians and they control 94% of the Internet access market.
2. Sources tell us the scheme was crafted between major industry players behind closed doors.
3. Big phone and cable companies do not want telecom price gouging to be an election issue.

Big telecom companies know that during an election, we have the ears of our representatives. They know that we have a unique opportunity to tell candidates that we want digital policy that will remove the Internet from the stranglehold of Big Telecom and stop price gouging, once and for all.

(original emphasis)

If you’re a Canadian and give a shit at all about fair competition in Canada, please keep an eye on these issues and make sure your voice is heard.  Sign up for email announcements from Openmedia.ca or follow them on Facebook to stay informed.

Rumblings of an iPhone version of BlackBerry messenger surfaced earlier this month from an unidentified source that provided a tip to BGR. Another unconfirmed source has stepped forward with additional information on the MacRumors forums that points to an April 26 debut of the BlackBerry Messenger app in the App Store.

via Rumor: BlackBerry Messenger to land in the App Store on April 26.

I know I said I’d be posting less of these, but this is very interesting and I’ll call it out now:  In a nod to the slow adoption of Big Media of the digital age, RIM realizes that the core value of its products are not in its mobile devices, but (at least in part) in its BBM service.  So in a very Amazon-like-but-UN-Apple-like move, it’s hedging its bets, and putting BBM on other devices.  Anyone disagree?  What’s your take?