Category: Technology

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Business Life Technology

The March of Progress

New Ulm from Hermann

There is a mini-controversy brewing in New Ulm again, which shouldn’t be surprising. It seems that any change, no matter how small, is met by some amount of disagreement.

Verizon wants to add a new cell tower to replace the network equipment that is going down with the aging water tower nearby. The issue is that the residents don’t want it going up within sight of their backyard.

The funny thing is that they would support adding such a tower if it were in someone else’s backyard, more than likely. Either that or they wouldn’t care and just reap the benefits of better coverage and service when the new tower came online.

Someone’s backyard is going to be within “eyeshot” of any new tower. Someone’s property is going to be adjacent to any new tower. In any somewhat-developed area you are going to need to add towers as far inward as you can. You can’t avoid that. I don’t think anyone would complain if we could just blanket whole areas with a single tower and provide the sort of service that people want and expect.

Just read up on all of the complaints about AT&T and the iPhone when the 3G iPhone was released. Read about the network congestion and problems people had. The way you fix those issues is to build out the network by adding towers … or by getting fewer people to use the existing tower. One way to have that happen is to force people to move (I guess).

When I talk about wanting to bring better network infrastructure to rural Minnesota, I’m not even thinking of trying to bring new people into the area. I’m not worried about bringing the next Google, or Facebook, or Goofacetubtwipple. No, I’m thinking about the people who are already here with small businesses and jobs already here. I’m thinking of the small business owner who wants to finally add credit card processing using something like Square on an iPad. A LTE connection removes a barrier of entry for something like that to work well. No longer do you need to have a separate internet connection for your business, but an iPad with LTE and a Square reader gets you started.

There is a lot of opportunity to bring about minor, yet significant changes to rural areas by expanding and improving the network infrastructures in the area. The next time you are complaining about your property values going down with the addition of a tower nearby, think of how much your values would drop if a percentage of the population left instead.

I don’t want to trample all over correlation and causation, but there is a lot in play here. Let’s let go of the past just a little bit so that we might march into the future together.

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Technology

PC vs. Console vs. Tablet

Technology continues to forge ahead even as Christmas fades into the past and everyone just gets to the task of using all of the new gifts they just received this past year. This is the most exciting and most frustrating things about purchasing or just following technology … you are never going to have the “latest and greatest” for too long.

This goes for any sector of technology and a choruses I hear ever-increasing are the “end of PC gaming” and “end of console gaming” choruses from many different choirs.

  • Console gamers telling PC gamers that it is all over
  • PC gamers telling console gamers that they’re underpowered consoles just won’t cut it anymore with the latest X/Y/Z technology coming out
  • Tablet/mobile gamers telling PC and console gamers that they’re time is now done
  • Everyone agreeing that something is going to change (duh)

There are more permutations, but it’s getting pretty ridiculous … but it has also always been this way.

From where I sit as a slow gamer, not having tons of time to devote to just playing video games or the want/need to play most types of games, it all sounds so silly and petty. Why?

I hope that all types of gaming stick around. Isn’t that the idea? “Variety is the spice of life” some people say, but then we huddle around the idea that we need to have some sort of dominant technology type to fulfill everyone’s video gaming needs. It seems rather silly to me.

I play different games on different platforms, and I don’t think I’m alone.

On the PC I play real-time and turn-based strategy games. I also tend to keep my first-and-third-person shooters on the PC as well. A mouse and keyboard are just better for many of those actions. Fine control and a myriad of key combinations are almost requirements. I tried Mass Effect 3 on a console and I couldn’t do it. Dual-analog sticks are not the same as a mouse and keyboard.

On my Wii U or other home console I play platformers, adventure games, and other games that are tailored to the unique control schemes that Nintendo has supplied for me to use. I’m not going to play a Zelda game on anything but a console because that is what it was made for. That is where that game grew up. I’ve played emulators and it is not the same.

On the iPad I’m sticking with games that are quick and easy to pick up, play, and then set aside. The same thing with my iPhone. These are not games I am going to sit around and play for hours and hours because these devices haven’t been made to do that. They’re not contoured to be use as primary gaming devices, they have other, more important roles to play.

This doesn’t mean that there is not going to be overlap (many prefer Mass Effect 3 on the Xbox 360 for example), but I like to think that there is more than enough room for many different types of gaming machines. People are varied and we don’t need to go off and distill every key sector down to just a single player or two to be successful.

This nonsense needs to stop.

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Technology

TextMate Updates File Browser

I still use TextMate 2 as my editor-of-choice.

Recently the pace of the updates has increased and some semi-major changes are being released into the open.

Build r9345 has this in the release notes:

File browser has a new navigation bar. This is work in progress. You can find most actions of the old bar in the Go menu (where you can also see the key equivalents). Presently missing is “Show Hidden Items”, a toolbar below the file browser will soon appear.

And it’s true!

TM2 File Browser

It is nice to see some of the visual refreshes coming into the editor. I’m waiting to see what they decide to do with the toolbar at the bottom and whatever else they might have in store. TextMate 2 has been the beneficiary of opening up its source to the world on GitHub.

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Business Technology

A Case for a Strong Nintendo

Nintendo Logo

The first commentator on my post about the Wii U stated that he sees gaming moving more and more toward a tablet-centric world. This got me thinking about the future of Nintendo because they are really the last video game console centric company in the world. While Microsoft and Sony still carry on with their respective platforms, they are huge companies with their respective hands in many  honey pots.

That means Nintendo is the one company most in danger of being destroyed if the gaming world shifts.

But we really need to keep around a strong Nintendo for that very same reason. They are uniquely positioned to really push the envelope in video games and, more precisely, video game hardware because they need to keep ahead of everyone else in different ways. The Wii might not have been the most powerful system in the world, but their motion-control remotes pushed other companies to release their own motion-control peripherals. I have a feeling that the Kinect would have sat in the workshop for a much longer time had Nintendo not pushed things just a little bit in a different direction.

A software-only Nintendo, having shed its home and portable consoles a la Sega, will be boring and, really, quite useless. The software won’t be as “fun” anymore and will truly lose its luster. It will be a sad day.

Not just that, but I have a feeling that ideas will be slow. What will be next? I don’t know, but I DO know that Nintendo probably has dozens of crazy things just flying around in R&D right now waiting for the right time to head out into the world. Will they all work? Well, HELLLLLOOOO Virtual Boy … no. However, they ARE all valuable experiments in what MIGHT work and helps people get more ideas to grow into possible new interfaces, or products, or … who knows what!?

Nintendo is unique and needs to be strong because they NEED to push video games forward. That’s all they do. If they fail, we’ll lose too much.

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Review Technology

Review | iPad mini

I think it is finally time for me to write up my iPad mini review.

iPad Review Image

The iPad mini is 100% an iPad and I feel takes the place of a complementary computing device for those who already have a primary computing device that fits their needs. It does not replace the original iPad but will serve a different role for many.

Now that I have the 10,000 foot paragraph out the way, let’s dig in.

The iPad mini is an iPad

Quite simply, the iPad mini is the exact iPad I was waiting for from Apple … minus one thing (the screen, obviously, but more on that in a bit). It is 100% an iPad and if you would look at the specs between the iPad 2 and iPad mini you would be hard pressed to find a difference …

… besides the dimensions and weight.

Of course, that’s kind of the whole point, right? The iPad mini is implausibly smaller and lighter than the iPad 2, the former lightest iPad. The entire product also just FEELS better. I don’t own an iPhone 5, but the iPad mini feels, construction-wise, at least as good if not better than my iPhone 4S. It feels solid even though it is so light. It feels sturdy even though it is so thin. The unibody structure must make the difference, but it is still pretty remarkable.

Inside it sports an Apple A5 processor, the same one (with the corresponding die shrink) found in the slightly-updated iPad 2 which was released quietly along with the 3rd generation iPad earlier this year. It provides a similar experience to the iPad 2 and 3rd generation iPad (which had the A5X), but in a much smaller package.

The screen looks like an updated iPhone 3GS screen. It is brighter, has better colors, but is not a Retina display. Normally, it doesn’t bother me, but when looking at text you can see the edges which are just not there with a Retina display (as on the 3rd and 4th generation iPads). This is the one glaring weakness of the iPad mini but if you are not a person who noticed the Retina display … you are not going to see a difference.

I think that the screen is going to be the most impressive improvement for the future. I have to believe that Apple is already counting down the days when they will put a Retina display that is laminated to the glass on the iPad mini. The lamination process for the iPhone 4 and newer really makes a difference, but I’m sure that scaling that process up to a screen the size of an iPad mini is going to be difficult. That screen will be remarkable, but it is still a ways off (I would think).

There really isn’t much more to say. There are small tweaks to make the overall package that much better, but the iPad mini is as much an iPad as the original iPad.

How I Use the iPad mini

I think the more interesting part is how people are using the new device.

I owned an original iPad and used it pretty extensively, but really didn’t carry it with me very often. I used it a lot at home as the “couch computer” and also to have next to me at a desk for reading manuals of any sort. The Retina display definitely helps in this regard, but that is for the larger iPad.

The iPad mini is now my fully-mobile-personal-computer. It sits inside of a little sleeve and gets carried along on client trips, to my day job … wherever I might be going. That alone changes how I use it.

I’ve been able to offload almost all social networking usage onto the iPad mini, mostly Twitter and Facebook. I also do quite a bit of the reading I used to do on the iPhone on the iPad mini … just because I have it with me. I would probably do even more if the iPad mini had a Retina display.

I also use it to write up blog posts in the WordPress app. It works pretty well. I tend to add in any pictures and do any small edits on my Mac before I post, but most of the words (including these) are written on the iPad. I also tend to write longer-form stuff in iA Writer as well. iCloud syncing is awesome and works really well. I tend to then move anything worth keeping out of iCloud and into a more permanent archive on the Mac when it is complete, but the writing happens there.

I also do some sysadmin stuff from the iPad mini as well. Prompt is a wonderful app from Panic which just allows me to connect to my VPS and do any updates or make sure everything is running without needing to run and grab the full computer. I could make configuration changes and maybe even do some small editing if I had a keyboard, but it frees me to from needing to head down to my office to track down a larger computer to handle those minor emergencies that crop up every now-and-then.

With cellular access, it becomes even more freeing. I can sync, check, refresh, and … just use the iPad no matter where I am. It is quite freeing.

Needless to say, I spend a lot of time on the iPad mini, a lot more than the original iPad. It is my main mobile computer now and the Mac now stays tied to the desk. That is also really nice.

The End

Quite simply, the iPad mini is the best piece of Apple hardware I’ve ever owned. The screen is definitely a step down from the full-sized iPad, but the better weight, size, and “fit and finish” of the iPad mini outweigh that downside of a worse display.

However, it IS smaller, and I feel that the original-sized iPad is still a better replacement for a laptop or desktop while the iPad mini can fit into someone’s life who is already used to working with multiple machines. The iPad mini is more a companion device, but even then, it is still a complete iPad so it can do everything that the larger iPad can do.

Head over to the nearest Apple Store and pick one up for yourself.