<blockquote>
TUSCALOOSA, Alabama -- The on-going strife between the city of Tuscaloosa and the app-based ride-sharing service <a href="https://www.uber.com/">Uber</a> may come to a head this week after city officials said they'd begin Wednesday to arrest Uber drivers operating there.
Billy Guernier, the general manager for Uber Tuscaloosa, said more than a dozen city employees met with an Uber policy specialist Friday and drew a clear line in the sand, promising begin on Wednesday to arrest any Uber driver in the city and charge them with violating city codes that govern taxi services in Tuscaloosa.
</blockquote>
Oh yeah, this is the type of thing you would expect in a free society.
<blockquote>
Guernier said the ultimatum comes after a month of failing negotiations between the two parties. He said he personally flew to Tuscaloosa to meet its mayor Walt Maddox last month, but the meeting never materialized. Guernier said Sunday morning that Uber has come to the table willing to compromise and ready to cooperate with the city, but has been met with continued resistance and a 'my way or the highway' attitude from city officials.
In their defense, city employees said it's Uber that is unwilling to compromise even after it was made clear that the city was willing to be flexible to make Uber work in the Druid City.
</blockquote>
I don't even understand what compromise would look like. Where does this end? I have a car, my friend needs a ride to the airport. Do I need to have background checks and a commercial taxi license? This is complete and utter non-sense. Well, any regulations on any services is non-sense to begin with, and maybe that's the problem.
This is, by the way, not a failure of capitalism or free market. It is in fact a failure of our current society here in the U.S. to recognize the ridiculousness of some of these regulations and to adapt to changing economic conditions and innovations. Uber is an amazing service and an amazing idea. It saves money, takes advantage of modern technologies, and provides a service people want. And here's the thing — make no mistake — people are using this and people want it.
Last night, me and several friends at a conference near Washington, D.C. used the Uber app to get a ride downtown for food and drinks and to have some fun. It was cheap and worked great. We received better service and rates than we would have from a cab. The man driving was happy because he made some money, and we were happy because we were in D.C. without our own car and needed to get from point A to point B. This is basic, free market capitalism 101. The fact that this is even happening — that Uber is even under threat anywhere for any reason, is a painful reminder that we are not in fact in a free market capitalist society.
It's also a good reminder that the regulation that has been set up around transportation services lends itself to propping up old business models that need to naturally die out or evolve. When you allow the free market to work, all this is taken care of.

Stephen Dethrage — AL.com

I Have a Car, You Need a Ride

Nintendo recently pushed out an update to the Wii U that gives it a new ability: it can now display advertisements to you. Yeah, you heard me, it displays ads... on the Wii U Gamepad.
Let's start with the update though. One evening I had about 20 minutes to play some game or other before bed so I turned on the Wii U. I was greated with a screen that told me I needed to wait for an update to install, and under no circumstances should I turn off the power (I have often wondered what would happen if we experienced a power failure during such an update).
The update ended up taking almost 40 minutes. There was no way for me to cancel, no way for me to delay it, no options. I was simply forced to endure the update. I am (almost) sure there is a preference for me to disable auto updates, but I find Wii U's preferences a little hard to navigate — AND I'M A DEVELOPER. Settings should NEVER be that hard. And it's not even the point. This is a REALLY bad default. My gaming console is for my fun and enjoyment. Nintendo should NEVER get in between the user and the game they want to play. It's a really bad experience. I was not able to play the game that night because I ran out of time waiting for the update. It's. a. GAMING CONSOLE. No update is so important that you should disrupt the user experience. Ideally what should have happened is there should have been a dialog for the update: "would you like to install now, or later when you're sleeping?" Later would have been fine. A simple dialog would have been fine. But it seems Nintendo is not interested in user experience. They are apparently clueless.
This is actually not the first time this has happened to me with a Wii U update. It has happened at least twice before over the amount of time I have had the console.
So, getting back to the ads, I quickly discovered in the subsequent days that among some other new features that are fine, there was a new one that is decidedly not fine. The Gamepad will randomly display ads. Sure they're for Nintendo's own products (for now), but this is not okay with me. Once, the Gamepad even woke itself up (I'm not making this up) while I was in the room to display an ad.
Hear me well, this. is. not. okay! The Wii U is a premium product. Nintendo has always positioned themselves as makers of premium products and they charge a premium price. I paid a premium price for the console and the games that go with it. I did not buy a device that is ad supported. I have spent several hundred dollars for a premium experience. I don't think it's asking too much that my premium device not be plastered with ads, even ads only for products from the maker of the device.
Premium companies do not turn their premium devices into ad supported platforms. Period. This sort of behavior is way beneath Nintendo. Yes, Nintendo is not doing very well right now, but if they think turning their premium device into an ad business to try to sell more of their premium products is going to get them out of this hole, they are seriously deluded.
Can you imagine if Apple plastered an add on an iPhone or iPad screen that required you to click a button to acknowledge before you could use your device? No, the answer is you can not imagine it because Apple would never EVER do it. And if they did, the pundits would finally be right in declaring that Apple's demise was near.
This is the first time that I've seriously doubted that Nintendo can recover from the mess they've gotten themselves in. Because instead of doing the right things to get out of the mess, they're digging the grave deeper and it saddens me. I grew up with Nintendo and I've loved their products. I even, to a degree, love the Wii U. It's a great product that is not doing well because of Nintendo's continued, brazen stupidity. I'm on Nintendo's side. Now I want them to be on my side.

Ads on the Wii U Gamepad Upsets Me

So you see what it takes to get me to write. There have been many things I wanted to write about over the last little bit. But I've been so doggone busy. The Google Reader imminent shutdown really made me want to write. But this... this makes me write. You can see what's near and dear to my hard: Podcasts.
The internet is abuzz with the the news of Podcasts 1.2. <a href="http://www.macworld.com/article/2031574/hands-on-podcasts-1-2-is-the-one-apple-should-have-shipped.html">Chris Breen has a good rundown</a> of the new app. And I agree that this is the version that should have shipped in that it is far better than the previous app. But it still has some serious flaws that make it not worth using for me. Believe me, I want to use it, I want it to work. I was genuinely excited for the update. The addition of playlists stations is nice and brings it on par with Instacast in that way. And the stilly and quaint reel to reel playback screen is gone, for better or worse (I sort of liked it, but it was a wee bit hard to use).
Here is my biggest frustration. The reason I want this to work is because I spend as much time working at my Macintosh computer as I do out and about with my iOS device. iTunes, with which my phone syncs every night when I plug it in, has podcast subscription capabilities. But I rarely plug my phone directly into my computer. It syncs overnight and so podcasts could sync that way, but I might work at my computer for a couple hours, then head out in my car and want to pick up my podcasts where I left off. Without a physical sync this was impossible. And what if I subscribe to a new podcast on one of the devices? It's cable (or Wi-Fi sync) time to get everything on the same page.
Apple is touting full subscription sync for this version of the app, but here, as I have found, is the rub: that subscription syncing is only between iOS devices, NOT between iOS and it's sync master, iTunes (isn't that quite odd? iTunes syncs with the iOS, but only iOS devices can sync podcasts with each other over the air). This is growing beyond frustrating. Let me explain my experience.
Being excited as I was for this new version of the app, I went and downloaded it, and added a couple of my favorite podcasts to the app. I let the latest episodes download, then I fired up iTunes and waited, and waited, and waited. No podcasts were added to the podcasts section of iTunes. This must be some sort of mistake. So I closed iTunes, forced the podcasts app on the iPhone to refresh and tried again. Still nothing. So I manually subscribed to the podcasts in iTunes and played the latest episode for a few minutes. To my great delight (perhaps the only delightful part of this experience), even though the subscriptions don't sync over the air, the playback position does IF both devices have subscribed to the same podcast and downloaded the same episode. Yay.
So then I subscribed to a couple podcasts on iTunes. As expected from my experience trying it the other way, these podcasts did not automatically show up in the podcast app on iOS. A manual sync with a cable did make them show up. But here is the rub. THE SUBSCRIPTION SWITCH IN THE IOS APP DID NOT GET TURNED ON. You have to manually do that. So even though the podcast was synced over from the iTunes library, the podcast app does not consider that a subscription, it's just sort of parked there.
<img src="/images/uploads/IMG_9178.png" alt="">
LAME LAME LAME LAME LAME!
This does not seem that hard to get right. I don't understand why Apple is making this so painful? I don't get it. I want the features to work as advertised.
Here is what else I would be giving up to switch away from Instacast:
<ul>
<li>Push Notifications for new episodes</li>
<li>Show notes (why does Apple refuse to support this when this is such a standard now?)</li>
<li>More robust media management</li>
</ul>
I must admit that I am not thrilled with Instacast 3's slightly more dumbed down media management, but it is still way better than what Apple's app offers.
And I am excited because Instacast has teased that a Mac client is in the works with full sync. As a podcast geek and power user that will make me extremely happy. I will finally have what I have been longing for these many years.
But the real bottom line for me is that there are still not good and easy podcast solutions for the average person. Apple's app still adds complication by not working quite as advertised, and by trying to hard to make things easy. Sometimes trying to make things easy adds unexpected complication. And solutions like Instacast simple are not easy for mainstream consumers to grasp. Podcasts remain just out of reach for many average consumers in my opinion.
What is so maddening is that Apple could make this so easy and so good, but they just can't seem to manage it.
P.S. That icon is still hideous.
<hr>
Here is the orginal article I wrote about podcasts, and a quick follow up to that.
<ul>
<li><a href="/blog/2012/06/27/podcasts">Podcasts »</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/2012/06/28/podcasts-a-quick-follow-up">Podcasts - A Quick Follow Up »</a></li>
</ul>

Apple's Podcast App Revisited


<blockquote>
A $368.2 million verdict against Apple has been upheld in the Eastern District of Texas, putting patent holding company VirnetX in a position to collect both royalties and damages from Apple if it continues to use its VPN and FaceTime technologies. Judge Leonard Davis ruled late Tuesday on Apple's request for either a reduction in the damages or a new trial, denying both requests and ordering the two companies to work out a licensing deal on VirnetX's patents.
</blockquote>
This is why we can't have nice things.

Jacqui Cheng on Ars Technica

FaceTime Patent Troll

I am always on a quest to have specific aspects of the sites I build, both mine and the sites I build for others, behave in exactly the way I want. Sometimes I get obsessive over seemingly meaningless and small details. For a very long time I have been obsessed with URL control. I want my URLs to work in a specific way. For instance, on this site I want the year and the month to be in the permalink URLs. I like having that data in the URL when I glance at it. <a href="#fn:eeulrs1">1</a> Thankfully, though not common, ExpressionEngine does have the means for me to create a way for this to work. <a href="#fn:eeurls2">2</a>
Another aspect of the URL I like to control is to remove index.php from the URLs. You see, everything in ExpressionEngine runs through the index.php file. Without any server side modifications, a typical ExpressionEngine URL looks like this:
<pre><code>http://mysite.com/index.php/template_group/template_or_url_title
</code></pre>
Index.php is the door through which the entire front end of an ExpressionEngine site must go. Everything is called through index.php.
I don’t like it. I don’t want it. It makes my URLs look ugly, it’s unfriendly and uncouth. No one cares that ExpressionEngine uses PHP to work. It’s an unnecessary and irritating part of the URL. Thankfully, as with all CMSes of this type, we can remove the index.php from the URL by rewriting the URL. We do this on typical LAMP servers with htaccess. So in my typical .htaccess file, I have this:
<pre><code>## remove index.php
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
</code></pre>
Okay, so what is that? The first two lines are rewrite conditions. If the filename in the URL requested is not a file (!-f) and if it is not a folder/directory (!-d), then we apply the rewrite rule to transparently run the URL through index.php. So the URL demo from above can now be:
<pre><code>http://mysite.com/template_group/template_or_url_title
</code></pre>
No index.php needed or required and the URL looks much more pretty. This is a standard way of doing things. You can find a tutorial on this in 5 seconds flat on a Google search. But there is a problem with this method that I had not considered until I read <a href="http://kevinthompson.info/blog/2011/03/04/completely-remove-index-php-from-expressionengine-urls.html">this article</a> by Kevin Thompson:
<blockquote>
While there are a number of known solutions for removing index.php from ExpressionEngine URLs, few developers realize that although URLs now resolve without index.php, the previous URLs including index.php also still exist.
</blockquote>
Right, I had never considered that for a second. I want to fix that right away. I do not like, and Google does not like (in terms of SEO) duplicate URLs for content. If your content is available at two distinct URLs it hurts your SEO and not only that but it’s confusing and irritating. I want the content to be available at one URL and one only. But with my htaccess rule, both URLs would work to get to the content. Omitting index.php was only an option, not a hard fact.
Thankfully it only takes two lines added to my .htaccess file:
<pre><code>## Redirect requests that use index.php
 RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.*index\.php [NC]
 RewriteRule (.*?)index\.php/*(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,L]
</code></pre>
The condition is that if index.php is in the URL, rewrite the URL without and send a 301 code (permanent redirect). So for example, previously this URL would work to get to this article:
<pre><code>http://buzzingpixel.com/index.php/article/2013/02/completely-remove-index-php
</code></pre>
But now, if you try that, it redirects to the URL without index.php in it. It’s simple, but much to my chagrin, it’s something I never thought of before. I’m glad it’s fixed now!
<hr>
<ol>
<li>
Do you know how many people actually care about the URL? Hint, it’s not very many, only a geeky (nerdy?) few like me. <a href="#fnref:eeulrs1">↩</a>
</li>
<li>
Notice I did not say ExpressionEngine has this feature because I had to jump through a few hoops with the Channel Entries tag to make it work. I’m not doing anything hacky or undocumented, but it’s a little weird and not really the way it was intended to work. <a href="#fnref:eeurls2">↩</a>
</li>
</ol>

Completely Remove index.php

<blockquote>
A company called Personal Audio is claiming that it owns a <a href="https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/us8112504.pdf">patent</a> that covers podcasting technology and has send podcasters letters, demanding that they pay Personal Audio to use the technology. As with many patents, this one is dangerously broad and vague, allegedly covering, well, any and all podcasting. Just take a look at this language:
<blockquote>
Apparatus for disseminating a series of episodes represented by media files via the Internet as said episodes become available…
</blockquote>
Of course, as with most software patents, this one fails to explain how that “apparatus” would actually work, apparently letting its owner make the ridiculous claim that essentially _any_apparatus that disseminates episodes infringes its patent.
</blockquote>
I hate patent trolling so much!

Julie Samuels writing on EFF

Podcasting Patent Troll

<blockquote>
The company on Tuesday reported that the Monday after the game was its biggest sales day in company history. The company provided Mashable with the following stats that illustrate a big increase over the comparable day in 2012:
<ul>
<li>Hosting sales jumped 45%.</li>
<li>Dot-com domain sales rose 40%.</li>
<li>New mobile customers increased by 35%.</li>
<li>The company added 10,000 customers in total.</li>
</ul>
Go Daddy, a Super Bowl advertiser for the past nine years, ran two ads during the game, including "<a href="http://mashable.com/2013/02/01/bar-refaeli-makes-out-with-nerdy-guy-in-go-daddy-super-bowl-ad/">Perfect Match</a>," which featured supermodel Bar Refaeli making out with a nerdy-looking guy and "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&#x26;v=aE6ugHoIB_Q">YourBigIdea.co</a>," which showed entrepreneurs across the world coming up with ideas though only one acts fast and secures a .co domain name.
</blockquote>
What is wrong with people! I've already tried to minimize my business with that tasteless and horrible company. Their "Perfect Match" ad just made me want to go out and anti-evangelize GoDaddy. My word what is wrong with people?

Mashable

GoDaddy Sales Surge After Tasteless Super Bowl Ad

<blockquote>
The February issue of Consumer Reports will include the graphic above, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/consumer-reports-iphone-5-2013-1">clipped by Business Insider</a>, that ranks numerous Android devices above the <a href="http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=iphone+5">iPhone 5</a> in its “What’s Hot” February 2013 list. On every carrier, the Samsung Galaxy S3 ranks higher than the <a href="http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=iphone+5">iPhone 5</a>. Even the LG Optimus G and the Droid RAZRs top the iPhone on various carriers.
</blockquote>
Consumer Reports: Continuing their trend of irrelevance into 2013 and beyond. Meanwhile, Apple continues to sell the most popular and best selling and second best selling smartphones.
I think someone in power over there at Consumer Reports has a chip on their shoulder about Apple products.

9to5Mac

Consumer Reports Irrelevance

Those evil dangerous cell phones! They could all gang up one day and crash the plane you are on if you don't turn them off during take-off!!!
Well, maybe that's an exaggeration. It may be shocking for you to find out, but cell phones cannot crash planes. As usually, the FAA is behind the times with it's archaic rules.
You must watch this!

Airplanes and Phones

<blockquote>
Non-practicing entity WhitServe on Friday filed a complaint against Apple, claiming that the Quick Look function found in a number of OS X iterations infringes on its file viewing patent from 2011.
In its claim, filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, WhitServe alleges that Quick Look violates the company's U.S. Patent <a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&#x26;Sect2=HITOFF&#x26;p=1&#x26;u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&#x26;r=5&#x26;f=G&#x26;l=50&#x26;co1=AND&#x26;d=PTXT&#x26;s1=20110405.PD.&#x26;s2=%28CT.ASST.%29&#x26;OS=ISD/04/05/2011+AND+AS/CT&#x26;RS=ISD/04/05/2011+AND+AS/CT">No. 7,921,139</a> for a "System for sequentially opening and displaying files in a directory," which was applied for in 2006 and granted in April of 2011./p>
</blockquote>
This is why we can't have nice things. This is in a nutshell everything that is wrong with our patent and copyright system.

Apple Insider

Apple Sued over Quick Look

One of the more strange phenomenons that takes place is the "disappointment" surrounding iPhone events for the last couple versions of the iPhone. Consider.
<a href="http://www.zdnet.com/iphone-5-has-enterprise-potential-but-disappointing-overall-7000004202/">ZDNet - iPhone 5 has enterprise potential, but disappointing overall</a>:
<blockquote>
For consumers, though, the iPhone 5 will not be evolutionary like the iPhone 3 and iPhone 4 was in terms of form factor, user experience and software, Nath said, adding that the latest release is not very different in terms of the way it looks and behaves.
The new smartphone also had been "highly hyped" with many carrying high expectations, especially since they had expected the iPhone 5 to be unveiled last year but <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/analysts-disappointing-iphone-4s-could-be-fastest-selling-to-date/60175">got iPhone 4S instead</a>, he noted.
</blockquote>
Don't get me started about how utterly stupid that business about "they expected iPhone 5 but got 4S instead" is.
Extreme Tech, in an article with the link baity title, "<a href="http://www.extremetech.com/electronics/136100-the-iphone-5-less-innovation-than-android-and-wp8-in-a-bigger-package">The iPhone 5: Less innovation than Android and WP8, in a bigger package</a>," says:
<blockquote>
The rest of the hardware is nothing to really write home about. It has a <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/136085-whats-inside-the-iphone-5s-a6-soc">faster dual-core processor</a>, but lots of phones do. It has LTE, which is also commonplace. There’s no NFC, which I still think is a mistake even without a payment platform (sharing content with NFC is extremely handy). Instead of adding interesting hardware features, it seems like Apple spent its time making the phone very pretty.
There were plenty of rumors about what Apple was going to do with those extra pixels on the iPhone’s screen. Surely <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/computing/130797-apple-ios-6-vs-android-google-has-some-work-to-do">the previous iOS 6 announcement</a> wouldn’t have revealed everything, right? Actually, there was no grand plan to revolutionize the interface — the extra resolution went to another row of icons. This seems like the most boring use Apple could have come up with.
</blockquote>
Wired, again with the asinine title, "<a href="http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/09/the-iphone-5-is-boring-and-amazing/">The iPhone 5 Is Completely Amazing and Utterly Boring</a>" says:
<blockquote>
Yes, it’s better than the iPhone 4S or the iPhone 4 or just about any other phone you can buy. It’s faster with a bigger screen and an LTE antenna so you can suck up data from your carrier like Michael Phelps at a table full of pizza. But mostly it is the Toyota Prius of phone updates. It is an amazing triumph of technology that gets better and better, year after year, and yet somehow is every bit as exciting as a 25 mph drive through a sensible neighborhood at a reasonable time of day. It’s not going to change your life. It’s not even going to offer a radically different experience.
</blockquote>
I could go on, and on and on. There are a lot of articles and posts about how "disappointing" the iPhone 5 is. But as it turns out, perhaps the iPhone 5 wasn't as disappointing to consumers as it was to technology journalists with their head up… Ahem, anyway. <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443995604578001920943462306.html">The Wall Street Journal reports</a>:
<blockquote>
<a href="http://online.wsj.com/public/quotes/main.html?type=djn&#x26;symbol=T">Apple</a> Inc. said customers placed more than 2 million preorders for the iPhone 5 on the first day it was available, doubling previous results and exceeding initial supply of the smartphone.
</blockquote>
...
<blockquote>
The initial reception surpassed sales of the device's predecessor, the iPhone 4S, which received more than 1 million preorders during its first day of requests Oct. 7, and easily tops the 600,000 handsets preordered after the debut of the iPhone 4.
Apple executives have said that each new iPhone has outsold all of its predecessors combined as the smartphone reaches new markets and expands within existing ones.
</blockquote>
Huh. Well look at that. Consumers did not agree with the journalists and analysts. They thought the iPhone 5 was just dandy. What gives?
I think this disappointment is a direct result of the fact that Apple has sprung several leaks in it's normally tightly sealed ship. Secrecy has always been Apple's ally in the past, but as Apple gets bigger, sells more devices, and grabs more of the watching world's attention, it becomes very, very hard to keep secrets. Third party supply chains leak, unscrupulous employees let things slip out, and human mistakes are bound to happen.
When Apple announced the first iPhone and blew the world away with the undeniably sleek and awe inspiring device, no one knew anything about it. No one outside Apple had seen it, indeed few inside of Apple had seen the device in full. And it was completely revolutionary. Consider also that this was six months before the device began shipping, and before suppliers began ramping up production. Coupled with the fact that the world was not yet really watching Apple in this space, and you have a very well kept secret.
Now the problem is Apple has already revolutionized the space so they don't have anything as earth shattering as that first iPhone to announce. And supply chains just can't keep their big fat mouths shut. I, and all these tech journalists and analysts already knew pretty much everything there was to know about the iPhone 5. So the lack of anything new beyond what had leaked, let alone earth shatteringly revolutionary, was seen as a disappointment by certain people who do not represent the average consumer. When the pre-order gates opened, the average consumer was polled, and the vote is in. The people have spoken, and they like it.
In the end, Apple still makes the best smartphone by miles, and they keep pushing it forward. Disappointing? The best Smartphone on the market, disappointing? Whatever you say people.

Leaking Disappointment

<blockquote>
One glaring omission from the list of Apple upgrades is Siri, the iPhone’s speech recognition “assistant.” It appears that Siri will still be tied to the network, meaning slow response speeds and giving the edge to Android speech-to-text.
</blockquote>
I'm sorry, did someone expect Apple to move their Siri database to the phone locally? Was this a thing someone, somewhere thought Apple would do? Given the processing power limitations and storage space limitations today, I don't think it's possible to do what Apple is trying to do with Siri on a local database only.
<blockquote>
Apple also gave only fleeting attention to battery life, with 8 hours of 3G browsing and 8 hours of LTE browsing.
There was no word on 4G talk time, which may not be a good sign for the phone’s battery life. Or, that could mean it will switch to 3G for talk.
</blockquote>
Seriously, where do these "journalists"? There's actually no question that the iPhone will fall back to 3G technologies for talk since VoLTE (Voice over LTE) has not yet launched on any major carrier. All LTE phones on most carriers currently fall back to 3G and 2G technologies for talk. So the reason Apple didn't mention 4G talk time is because it does not currently exist.
"Journalist" indeed.

Posts tagged “Annoyances” from the blog