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Hi! This is a St. Paul Pioneer Press blog. Click the bulldog for news with bite. Follow the pooch on Twitter @ PiPress.
I'm Julio Ojeda-Zapata. I run this joint. I cover consumer tech for the Pioneer Press. Click my mug for more info.
Holy cow, I wrote a book! It's about Twitter and how firms are embracing this service. Click the cover for more info.
See the latest "Joy of Tech!" panel by the famed Nitrozac. She's on Twitter at @nitrozac with her partner @snaggy.This blog has moved to its new St. Paul Pioneer Press home at TwinCities.com (the yourtechweblog.com address now points there).
This move makes sense since Your Tech Weblog is a TwinCities.com-affiliated blog. It's now in the same location as the other blogs by Pioneer Press staffers.
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This site will stay up for the foreseeable future as a Your Tech Weblog archive.
Graeme Thickins and I talk about our experiences at the State Fair edition of Social Media Breakfast and, in the picture above, show what we were wearing.
(No, I wasn't actually wearing that, but Graeme looks snappy in his cowboy getup, does he not? More pictures of it here.)
On the podcast (featuring Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Phil Wilson), we also talk about Apple's just-released Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X, among other tech topics.
As a hardcore user of the files-to-the-cloud service, which keeps all my most important files synced to multiple machines and also stored online, I'm delighted. This is long overdue.
Please forgive the blatantly self-serving post, but today was kind of a nice day -- and I want to tell you about it.
I live and breathe social media. I'm excited about this stuff, and use it daily at work and in my personal life.
I'm thrilled with Twitter, to which I am addicted, and I have harnessed everything from Facebook and Flickr to YouTube and Posterous in fun and fulfilling ways.
Writing about social media for the Pioneer Press is a delight. I dissected Social Media Breakfast Twin Cities in today's paper, and have a piece on Foursquare hitting very soon. In the process, I've met fascinating people using social media in powerful and ingenious ways.
Social media has been fantastic for "crowdsourcing" to find the people and information I need for my stories (Twitter is especially effective for this now that I have nearly 7,000 followers). This technique has put me in touch with even more folks I'm now honored to include in my source list.
Even with all of this, I was surprised and flattered to be included today on a list of 20 top Minnesota "social media innovators." Wow. I am humbled and grateful. Thank you.
End of commercial :-)
Tipped off by my Twitter pal Nick Coleman today about Apple's newly remodeled Mall of America retail store, I drove over and took these pictures.
The old theater with airport-style seating in the rear is no more, and the Genius Bar has been moved from the right side of the store to the rear. This and other layout tweaks have opened up a ton of room for additional tables in the middle of the store.
The new arrangement is simpler and more user-friendly with space for hands-on training without inconveniencing visitors who are just there to look around.
I snapped these and other photos with an iPhone 3GS. I then parked myself on one of the middle tables to upload them to this new Posterous blog via e-mail and the store's Wi-Fi.
Thanks, Nick.
I was on a beach outing with my family and my loaner iPhone 3GS the other day when I glanced at the phone’s display and saw the ominous message embedded here.
It was the first time I had seen that scary-looking screen. But, as it happened, I had left the handset in direct sunlight on a superhot day.
So, my reaction was, “Like, duh, of course the iPhone just overheated. Be more careful from now on.”
I tucked the iPhone into one of my backpack’s outer pockets to cool down and, when I checked on the device a half hour later, it was working just fine – and has worked perfectly ever since.
I wasn’t surprised, therefore, when Apple this week released an iPhone advisory about this very issue.
However, this has since seemingly been misconstrued by some to be an Apple admission of an iPhone-overheating problem. Nonsense, says CNET, in a piece titled, “iPhone heat issue much ado about nothing.”
I agree.
Update: Are iPhones burning up in the infernos of processor overtaxation, or is it all a big misunderstanding? (Engadget)
I am delighted with Apple’s just-released third-generation iPhone, and especially with one of its marquee features: an upgraded still camera that also shoots video.
This makes the iPhone 3GS one of the big reasons to spend extra moolah for an Apple handset instead of going for a deal; a version of the second-generation 3G version of the iPhone is still being sold for $99. (Read my iPhone 3GS review.)
I’ve been snapping lots of pictures and videos with my 3GS loaner and I generally like the results, especially compared with the much-crappier photos I have taken with the 3G’s camera.
Resolution has been upped from 2 to 3 megapixels, and still imagery looks nicer overall. And in a twist, settings such as focus and white balance can be adjusted with touch-screen taps. If you want to focus on something in the foreground, just touch that part of the screen. There’s even a macro feature for up-close shooting.
As for video, I am thrilled to have the option of capturing moving pictures on a moment's notice, with the device that is already in my pocket at all times. The quality of my iPhone clips is surprisingly decent. Parents in the market for an Apple phone should definitely go 3GS; I’ve taken lots of shots of my kid already.
See above and below for examples of still and moving images I've recorded. I uploaded the videos to YouTube directly from the iPhone, which is a terrific trick. Uploading videos and photos to Apple’s MobileMe is another option. I'd like to see more options -- especially uploading to the popular Flickr and Facebook.
Digital broadcast television is all about reception.
To get over-the-air channels in standard or high definition, you need a properly deployed antenna. Other factors, such as your geographical location and any physical obstructions in your vicinity, can affect your reception.
I’ve been lucky in this regard. In three locations in or near downtown St. Paul, I have been able to pull in most or all available digital channels using a low-cost indoor Radio Shack antenna hooked up to a low-cost digital-converter device or a plug-in computer tuner.
As a result, I’ve become a big fan of free high-def TV as an alternative to costly cable. (You can read about all my DTV adventures, among other DTV-transition topics, in articles and posts here or here.)
But not everyone sees such good results, as you would have gathered from this blog post and this related article. Some people may need fancier antennas and may still see issues, especially if they’re on the outer fringes of the Twin Cities.
Even in the heart of the Twin Cities, close to Shoreview television transmitters, many will have reception issues. This can be due to signals bouncing around in areas with lots of buildings close together. Those near hills can have reception interference, as well, with their direct line of sight to the transmitters blocked.
Stephen Margolis has seen this first-hand. The retired electrical engineer has spend a lot of time driving around with digital-television equipment in his trunk, just to see how DTV reception fairs in different places. I mentioned him in this article.
Margolis’ recent testing has revealed several problem areas in the east metro. He writes:
I suspect that the dead zones in St. Paul are:
Continue reading "St. Paul tech expert finds DTV “dead spots”" »
Hoo-boy. When I asked local antenna-TV users how they were coping with the digital-television transition, I got an earful.
These are all people with whom I’ve corresponded in the past about antennas, digital-converter boxes for old analog TVs, and the like.
The question I posed: Are you getting all your channels via over-the-air DTV since the June 12 transition occurred?
Many said they were having no problems. Many others said they were having issues.
Here’s a Pioneer Press article that quotes some viewers, but I had more material than I could use for the story. Here’s some of those extra e-mails:
Penny: No I'm not and I'm really annoyed. I live in Cathedral Hill if that makes a difference. I bought a new TV, I bought a new antenna that needs to be plugged in. I followed your sage instructions to add a longer cable. Yet when I get the "No Signal" display for a station that I could get perfectly the night before, I'm doing the antenna dance around my condo to find stations. Reception seems to correlate to the weather conditions (really bad with rain). As you mentioned, it's not unusual to be watching a show and the pixelation comes out of nowhere and then it's time to wave the antenna around searching (hoping) for a signal. My neighbor across the hall has the same complaints.
Continue reading "Readers give me an earful on digi-TV issues" »
The big event known as “Jesus Phone: The Third Coming” is now over, and I have a handset to play with for a while.
As I used the iPhone 3GS today, I was particularly interested in features specific to the device since I have already put the new iPhone 3.0 software through its paces on an iPod Touch.
The 3GS-exclusive features include:
Internal compass. Big whoop. It’s pretty, and it works. Next! All kidding aside, I look forward to apps that put this compass capability to creative use.
Voice control. I was initially befuddled about how to access the new iPhone’s much-ballyhooed voice-recognition features; a friend reminded me that I have to press down the phone’s one physical “home” button for a few seconds.
I promptly ran into a problem; the phone wouldn’t respond to my voice prompts.
Turns out the earbuds I was using, Atomic Bass models from Radius Products, flat-out would not work with the iPhone 3GS (for calls or anything else). The basic buds that ship with the iPhone, as well as a pair of fancier Apple In-Ear Models, did function just fine.
The iPhone was pretty good at understanding my requests to call people in my address book, but tended to mangle Latino surnames.
Just for the record, my surname is not pronounced Oh-JAY-dah-ZAP-ah-tah, and that of my high-school chum Julio Sanjurjo is not pronounced San-JOOR-joe. Trust me on this, Apple.
The voice that reads back the names sounds vee-eery familiar; that’s right, I’ve heard her before.
Also, as the esteemed Chris Breen of Macworld points out, voice-controlling iPod items doesn't work very well. This is disappointing since Apple's touch-screen handhelds have always struck me as clunkier-to-use than the ones with physical click wheels. I had hoped the voice features would remedy this; seemingly no.
Video camera. The iPhone now shoots video, and even lets you edit it before sharing it online. Apple has made all of this drop-dead simple. I was shooting video with just a few taps, and could trim my recorded footage via a couple of touch-controlled sliders.
Uploading to YouTube was then a breeze, and didn’t take very long at all. My attempts to publish video via Apple’s own MobileMe didn’t go as well. Upload attempts seem to work as intended, but the footage never showed up online.
E-mailing the footage did go fine. This is going to be a hoot; brace yourself for gazillions of kid vids, Mom.
The first iPhone release two years ago caused near-hysteria at local Apple Stores.
The iPhone 3G release last year also had long lines, along with horrendous technical problems for those buying and trying to set up their second-generation handsets.
This year?
Lines were much, much shorter (due in large part to those who were able to order their iPhones online, I'm sure), and there were apparently few technical problems for those activating their shiny new Apple phones.
I had no trouble getting going with an iPhone 3GS loaner I picked up at the Mall of America's Apple Store.
Fewer than 100 queued up at the megamall, but I'm told 200 or more were lined up at the Rosedale Apple Store. My pal Mark Fawcett snapped the picture above.
I took this sample video with my iPhone, uploaded to YouTube from the handset with absolutely no trouble:
Here's a Texas report from my Houston Chronicle counterpart Dwight Silverman. (He's boycotting the space between "3G" and "S" and I'm joining his revolution. ¡Que viva la revolución, carajo!)
Here are tweets from iPhone buyers at various locations around the Twin Cities a bit earlier this morning:
dmesserly: I arrived at 6:45 - probably 200 here already? No rioting so far. Concierges serving coffee to people in line.
dmesserly: My 3GS is setup and synced. *NO* problems or hitches buying, activating or syncing. Entire process = totally slick. AMAZING
joshlewis: In and out of the AT&T store in 8 minutes with my new white 32GB iPhone. Who's got two thumbs and is a happy boy? This guy!!
joshlewis: New white iPhone 3G S, I dub thee "Kubrick." You shall replace my 2G iPhone "Monolith." Also, I wonder how long I can keep that trend up.
Update: Getting more reports from local iPhone buyers via tweets, DMs and e-mail. They report short lines, smooth transactions, painless activations.
Update: My friend Mark Fawcett told that he lamented how quickly and smoothly iPhone purchases went this year.
He liked the long lines and endless waiting of past years because he could hang out with his fellow Apple fanatics during their little "tech Woodstocks." He bought pizzas to share, and passed out decks of playing cards.
This year, he took along a little projector for use with his iPhone so he could have a movie showing. Alas, there was no time.
Like other Apple fiends, I pounced on today’s iPhone 3.0 update as soon as it became available. The software adds features to existing iPhones and phone-less iPod Touch devices; I am using one of the latter and the new OS works well on it.
Cut/copy/paste is a delight. Global searching works like a dream. The new, wider landscape keyboard in the mail program is a huge relief. A YouTube-app update finally gives me mobile access to my saved faves featuring Obama, Leo Laporte, sumo wrestlers, singing hamsters and dancing Thai girls (SFW).
But I quickly ran into several problems.
One new feature, mobile downloads of movies and TV shows via the iTunes app, didn’t work properly for me. I could never fully download Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino,” and repeated attempts to finish the transfer generated an error message. As someone who loves iTunes-purchased movies, I found this hugely frustrating.
I also wanted to try a find-my-device feature for pinpointing the location of a lost iPhone or iPod Touch over the Internet. This requires use of Apple’s MobileMe service, which has to be set up on the device. The gizmo is then registered with MobileMe on a computer. The hitch? I couldn’t get access to it on my MacBook.
Argh.
Well, this week’s rollout of new iPhone software does appear to be going more smoothly than last year’s rocky deployment. But some users are complaining about error messages that keep them from accessing Apple’s activation server.
Today’s iPhone-software update is a prelude to Friday’s release of the iPhone 3G S, which incorporates all the new software features along with several exclusive goodies such as voice-control features, an internal compass and an improved camera with camcorder capability. It’s supposed to be much, much faster, too.
Update: See more reports of iPhone 3.0-updating issues here, here and here.
Update: Here are tips for working through the activation issues (via Mashable).
Update: My incomplete "Gran Torino" download now won't even respond to retry-attempt taps; it's frozen. Argh.
Update: I finally got that Find my iPhone feature to work. Once my iPod Touch was duly registered with MobileMe, I could request a location update on my Mac. Imprecise at first, placing my device well to the west of my Pioneer Press desk (see first map below), it went through a location-refinement routine and eventually nailed my spot (second map). Nice.
I then was able to send the Touch a message (“Yo, Adrian!”) and even to use a Remote Wipe feature to erase the device and restore it to factory settings. This comes in handy if an iPhone or Touch is stolen.
Update: Uh oh, did Remote Wipe just brick my Touch? It won't turn on, except to flash the white Apple logo for a couple of seconds. Alarmed.
Update: Ah, this got me back in business.
As expected, some Minnesotans aren’t too happy with the digital-TV transition.
For such people in and around the Twin Cities, reception is the key issue. They are trying to pull in all available digital channels using their antennas and digital converters hooked up to their older TVs, but having difficulties even after doing a required channel-rescan procedure.
Here are two such e-mails I’ve received since the DTV-transition late Friday night:
From Cindy: We were getting all the digital channels with our converter boxes prior to June 13th. Upon rescanning this weekend, we are unable to get KMSP at all. We are located between Somerset and Hudson, and have two different converters on two separate TVs, with two different antennas. Cannot get 9 now on either after the rescan.
We also rescanned my mother in laws, she got all the channels before. Now she cannot get nine on either of her TVs, one with digital converter, the other built in digital tuner. We also had trouble getting 11 to come in. She is in between Somerset and Osceola.
From Linda: I read your article in the Sunday Pioneer Press. I'm wondering how many people you interviewed and where do these people live?
I live in Western Wisconsin along the Mississippi River, a little south of Red Wing, MN. The digital conversion has been a nightmare for us. We have one HDTV. It does not work very well. We bought a new antenna, added an amplifier and bought converter boxes for the remaining TV's in the house. If the wind blows at all, we get no reception. We cannot get Channel 4 at all….Yes, TV as we knew it is over. The good old days were a vast improvement over the current digital system.
