Gmail pitches Priority Inbox as a way to skim the cream off of your e-mail and let you get to the important stuff faster — like a reverse spam filter.
I have not seen any publicity surrounding one very useful feature of priority inbox — the ability to filter mail into distinct categories right on the main inbox screen. By default, Gmail shows you important-and-unread items first, then starred items, then everything else.
But you can customize the first two sections by clicking on the disclosure triangle next to the section’s name. I like to have all important items (whether read or not) first, then all unread items, then everything else. I don’t use stars much, and I never use stars on unread e-mail, so I did not see the point of having starred items called out. As I read my unread-and-unimportant items, they move from the middle section to the bottom section, but my important items remain in one place.
These filters only work with items in your inbox; once you archive an item, it only shows up in a search of “all mail.”
Now that Skype’s iOS4 app will work in the background, you could plausibly use an iPod Touch and a MiFi (or some other portable WiFi hotspot) to reproduce just about all of the functionality of an iPhone. If you don’t use the phone much anyway, and you want to use the MiFi with other devices (like an iPad) this could make a lot of sense. You would have to figure out how to keep the MiFi charged and under any bandwidth caps, but it seems doable. Not sure if a Bluetooth headset will work, though.
Adam Engst has written an extensive article for Tidbits on multitasking for the iPhone and iPad. He mostly focused on the operating system and hardware aspects of multitasking, namely, how can the device divvy up its CPU cycles among several apps so that the user experience isn’t reduced to pleading for the machine to work?
Readers of this blog know that the iPhone OS already seems to have support for running third party apps in the background. Apple just doesn’t allow it. The question is why. The traditional answer is that multiple apps will suck the battery dry and slow the machine to a crawl.
Another part of the answer may be the user interface. How should a user indicate to an iPhone OS device that it would like to send one app to the background and bring another to the foreground? On the iPad this seems simple; if you can see both apps, you just touch the one you want in front. But this begs another question. Suppose the apps are side by side. How do you indicate which app is frontmost? Maybe a big yellow border. Maybe you dim the interface of the background app. Seems soluble, though.
On an iPhone, you probably wouldn’t be able to see more than one app at a time, so how do you switch apps? A special gesture? What if you coincidentally make that gesture during a game? Morse code with the buttons? Apple already does that with the iPod controls and half the time it doesn’t work. Maybe there needs to be a “switch” icon, but that would take up precious screen space. Whatever it is, it needs to bring up a menu so that you can pick which app to switch to because you always have several apps running at once whether you know it or not (Phone and Mail are always running).
Secondarily, if you are not required to quit an app to go to another app, how do you tell the device to quit the current app when that is, in fact, what you want? This seems to be such a huge problem with Android that one of the most popular third party apps is an app that quits other apps.
Backups serve two purposes. If you accidentally delete a file, you can recover it. And if your original is lost, stolen or destroyed, you can get your life back. It’s easy to forget that the second category includes things like your house burning down or being picked clean by burglars.
Time Machine is a terrific first line of defense for backups. It is totally automatic, so you don’t have to remember whether it’s “backup day” and you generally don’t have to fiddle with it once it is set up. But it leaves you vulnerable to fires, floods, tornadoes, wanton destruction of your home, and theft. All kidding aside, you need an offsite backup, and Time Machine isn’t really made for that.
But it works. Here’s how I do it:
You could buy two external drives, but I prefer to use internal drives with a hard drive docking station. The main reason is that I got tired of keeping track of which power supply plugs into which external hard drive. When you take an external drive offsite, you also need to transport all the paraphernalia to make it work. If you use a docking station, you only need to take the drive mechanism, which will fit into any compatible dock. Whichever method you choose, each drive needs to be at least as big as the drive (or drives) that you will be backing up.
If you are using the docking station method and are starting with brand new drives, unpack them carefully. Try to minimize any cutting of the the anti-static bags they come in so you can re-use those bags for storage and transport. Label each drive distinctly (or use a Sharpie). For this example I will call them Offsite A and Offsite B.
Plug Offsite B into the dock and format it. In Disk Utility, name the disk something like “Data Backup.” Eject Offsite B, and mount and format Offsite A. Name the disk the same thing that you named the disk that is on Offsite B. It is not necessary to partition the drives, and that may even make things more difficult later.
If you do your backups through a Time Capsule, plug your dock into the Time Capsule’s USB port and power it up with Offsite A installed. Make sure it connects to your Time Capsule and you can see the drive. If you already use the Time Capsule’s USB port, get a USB hub to expand the number of USB slots to 4 or 7. It really works; I run three printers and two hard drives attached to my Time Capsule. You also might want to connect the computer to the Time Capsule via an Ethernet cable to speed up the first backup.
This step could take several hours to complete, so you might want to do this right before you go to bed. Make a fresh Time Machine backup to Offsite A by going to your Time Machine Preferences and clicking on “Select Disk…” Note that the name of the disk will be (in our example) “Data Backup,” not “Offsite A.” Once you do that, a backup should start within two minutes. You can manually start the backup using the Time Machine menu (if you have that option enabled in the Time Machine preferences).
Once the backup to Offsite A is completed, eject that drive. Time Capsule users should use the Airport Utility and click on “Manual Setup,” then “Disks” in the toolbar, and then “Disconnect All Users…”. Then power down the dock and remove Offsite A from the dock.
Put Offsite A back in its baggie and take it to your office, a safe deposit box, a friend’s house (preferably in a different neighborhood), etc. The idea is for the drive to survive if disaster befalls your house. If you are in an area where there are tornadoes or floods, for instance, your immediate neighbors will probably have the same problems as you. Put as much distance between where you use the computer and where you keep the backup as possible. Put a sticky note on the drive with the date that you dropped it off. Put a similar note on Offsite B.
Insert Offsite B in the dock and power up the dock. Make sure Time Machine is set to make backup to Offsite B (which, again, should have the same disk name as Offsite A). Make another fresh Time Machine backup, but this time leave the drive in place so it continues to make periodic backups.
After a month or so, eject Offsite B and swap it with Offsite A. Record the date on the sticky note. Then use Offsite A as you backup drive. Note that it may take many hours (possibly 8 hours or more) for Time Machine to index the backup drive and make the first incremental backup after the switch. Just leave the machine on and let it do its thing. It should eventually figure it out and start making incremental backups to Offsite A again.
A huge advantage of this approach over backup services like Mozy and Carbonite is speed. You can backup gigabytes of your iTunes music and movies in a matter of hours with these steps. With internet-based services you are at the mercy of your connection speed, and your first backup could take weeks. Yes, the swapping does require you to think about it, but not too often. I swap my drives monthly, but if I this were data for my business I would rotate much more frequently — perhaps even daily.
PC Magazine’s list of the top 20 free Android apps is topped by Advanced Task Killer Free 1.5.1, which quits other programs you might have running on your device. “It’s surprisingly difficult to close an Android app,” the review says.
This seems like Android’s version of the iPhone cut-and-paste problem. Apple solved that one after ruminating for many moons, presumably over the best way to implement the user interface. WWGD?
For the past several years, merchants have “masked” most of the numbers in a credit card account on receipts. You’ll see something like “VISA XXXXXXXXXXXX6723″. The idea is that this hides almost all of your credit card number — enough to thwart thieves — but (probably) allows you to figure out which of your many credit cards you used.
I shred my credit card receipts, but I toyed with the idea of stopping because everyone masks the credit card number these days. As I thought about it, I realized that thieves can make a pretty good guess at the first 12 digits, because most of those digits identify your bank, and there are only so many of those. In other words, the receipt still solves the hardest part of a thief’s job. Better to shred it.
This problem could be solved, though. Most people only have one card (or at least, one card of each type) from a particular institution, so you could get the benefit of knowing which card you used AND masking most of your number if merchants would mask the end of the credit number, rather than the beginning.
Which is exactly what they are starting to do. Unfortunately, some of them still mask the beginning. So you could end up with two receipts like this in your trash can:
VISA 2345 6789 1xxx xxxx
VISA XXXX XXXX XXXX 6723
Which narrows the uncertainty to 1,000 numbers. Who knows, maybe somebody will have the bright idea to mask the beginning and the end, leaving the middle numbers exposed.
The only way to standardize this — and make masking even halfway useful — is legislation. It would be helpful if those legislatures who mandated masking also specified how that masking should be done, preferably leaving only a few numbers at the beginning unmasked.
On the other hand, really good credit card thieves don’t dive into dumpsters for receipts. They steal millions of numbers from merchants’ computer systems.
If you use Quicken 2007 on the Mac, you may have encountered a bank or broker that allows you to download Quicken data, but is not listed in Quicken’s list of financial institutions. That data presumably would load into the PC version of Quicken, but if you try to open it with Quicken for Mac, it may get paired with the wrong financial institution or not work at all. That’s because Quicken seems to charge institutions extra to license downloads for the Mac; many institutions are PC only.
Fortunately, the files are readable by Quicken for Mac and I have been successful at adding a financial institution of my own. You only have to go through this process once. After that, you simply download and open your data files like usual. I think this is an improvement on the prior art for this hack, which involved changing the downloaded file every time (possibly with the help of a script).
Here is how to set it up.
Backup your Quicken data file. Maybe twice. We are going to do some minor surgery on it later, and it would truly suck if we lost the patient.
Create a new Quicken data file for experimentation purposes. Choose New from Quicken’s File menu. Quicken will warn you about creating a new file, but confirm that you want to do that. Quicken will immediately want to create an account, but cancel that.
Update the financial institutions list by choosing Financial Institutions from the Online menu, then clicking Update List. If your institution appears on the list after the update, that’s great news. You should open your original data file, update the financial institutions list there, and proceed as normal for creating a Quicken download account.
Assuming no joy yet, quit Quicken and find the new data file in the Finder. Right-click on it and choose Show Package Contents. Open the Contents folder and then the FIDir folder, and then open fidir.txt in a text editor like TextEdit.
Now download a Quicken data file from your institution. The download should have a .qfx extension. Find that file in your downloads folder and open it — and this is important — in your text editor, NOT Quicken. The easiest way to do this is to drag the file to the TextEdit icon in the dock.
The Quicken download is in a format called XML, which uses “tags” enclosed in angle brackets. Search for the ORG and FID tags, which should be about 20 lines from the beginning of the file. Make a note of the “official” institution name and ID number.
Switch to fidir.txt. Make the window fairly wide. You will notice that the data is in roughly columnar format. The first column corresponds to the FID, and the next column is the ORG.
Now comes a tricky part. You need to find a financial institution that offers similar downloads to the one you just downloaded from your institution. The download types are in the third-to-last “column” of data. For my checking account, I looked for “BANKING&WEBONLY”. Also, make sure the word “ACTIVE” precedes “BANKING&WEBONLY”. You may need to try a few different download types before you get one that works.
Copy the entire line for the similar institution. You must copy exactly one line of text.
Determine where your institution should be on the financial institutions list alphabetically and paste the line you just copied. Replace the ID number and institution name with the FID and ORG name in your downloaded file. If the FID is less than five digits, type a zero first. You do not have to worry about the other data on the line, like the web address and phone number.
Close both files in the text editor and open the experimental data file in Quicken.
Find the .qfx file in the Finder and double-click on it. Quicken should offer to set up an account for you.
Assuming all that worked, perform steps 3-12 on your actual Quicken data file.
One of the comments to my earlier post on using Google maps for cue sheets asked why I don’t use Map My Ride. Map My Ride has a lot of potential, but overall I see a lot of negatives.
Incredibly obnoxious ads. Ads take up at least one-third of the mapping space when you start mapping.
The cues are sometimes incomplete.
Buggy user interface. It is constantly thinking that I clicked when I dragged, which re-routes the whole ride sometimes. Yes, there is undo, but that does not make up for the fact that the interface is not responsive and too busy. It feels like they decided to add a ton of features without getting the basics right first.
No Street View.
You have to pay $2 to print your route.
I do plan to check out their iPhone app to see if it makes up for these problems.
If you ride a bike, particularly with groups or on routes from books or bike clubs, you know about cue sheets — succinct lists of the turns you should make on a given ride. Better cue sheets also include information about convenience stores and other rest stop possibilities, as well as any road hazards or tricky sections.
Google isn’t perfect, but it is a great tool to get a perfectly serviceable cue sheet quickly. Even if you don’t print it straight off of Google, it is a great way to measure the distances between turns. Here’s how I do it.
1. Look at a Google map of the area around your route. If you are making an out-and-back or circular route, you’ll need to know either the exact address of the start/end point, or at least a nearby intersection. You will also need two additional points. It is best if your three points are as far apart as possible, but still on the route you are planning. If you are planning a one-way route, you simply need to know the start and end locations, as precisely as possible (street addresses are best).
For this example, I’ll start at the Laytons Village Shopping Center, a popular ride start location in Maryland.
We’ll ride north through Etchison and then northwest to Damascus. Then we’ll sweep east toward Woodbine before snaking our way back south to Laytonsville.
2. Go to the standard Google Maps page and click on “Get Directions.” Enter the ride start location. We’ll use “6848 Olney Laytonsville Rd, MD” for this example. The “MD” is just a hint to help Google find the place we want. It is probably unnecessary in this case, but if you start at 1st and Main, you might need to specify a town or a postal code so that Google zeroes in on the place you want.
If you end up with your start address in the “To” field, just click on the swap button (the one with two arrows) to move it to the “From” field, which is marked with an “A.”
3. Enter the first of your extra points in the form of intersections. In this case, we are going to type “MD-80 & Penn Shop Rd, MD” in the text field for “B.”
4. Now do the same for the second extra point. Click “Add Destination” and, for this example, type “Old Frederick Rd & Morgan Station Rd, MD” in the text field for “C.”
5. Next, click “Add Destination” again and enter your end point. In this case, it is the same as the start point, so we can copy “A” to “D.” Your screen should look like this:
Set up the directions as pictured.
6. Make sure “By car” is the type of directions and then click “Get Directions.” Google sometimes gets confused at this point if any of the information you provided is ambiguous (as far as Google is concerned, that is). For instance, two roads could cross each other more than once, and you would have to specify which intersection you meant. Also, sometimes Google is a stickler for a particular format. It seems to prefer “Maryland 80″ instead of “MD-80″ sometimes. Resolve all the ambiguities before moving on.
7. You’ll now get a rough approximation of your route, but cyclists rarely take the most direct route from one place to another. Fortunately, you can simply drag the line representing your route to the correct place. For instance, we don’t want to bicycle on Interstate 70, so I’ll drag the line from anywhere it is on I-70 to a convenient point on my route — say, Long Corner Road. Google will magically re-route you through the point where your mouse is as you drag. When you see the line following the route you want, let go of the mouse button.
Note: Try to stop dragging in the middle of a block, and especially try to avoid picking a point at place where you will have to turn (for example, an intersection or traffic circle). The directions Google eventually gives will be more straightforward if you follow this tip.
8. Repeat as necessary, going in the order you will ride the route. If you need to remove one of your points, right-click on it and select “Remove this destination.”
But the directions are chopped up into segments based on our initial three points. When you are out on the road on your bike and comparing your odometer to the cue sheet, you want miles from the start point, not miles from some arbitrary point in the middle.
We can solve that problem and make the route one continuous list with a little editing. You might want to click on “View Larger Map” on the map above to follow along.
Click on the “Link” link and copy the entire first text field.
Paste it into any text editor. You will see a really long web address. Within the address, find the word “via” towards the end. You should see something like
Notice that via is following by an equal sign, and then a list of numbers. The numbers refer to the points that you dragged to. Google lays out the route “via” those points, but without stopping at those points.
Notice also that the list is more or less sequential, but missing the numbers 1 and 5. Add each of those numbers to the sequence, followed by a comma. There is no comma before the first number or after the last number. Do not type any spaces. You should end up with this:
Now copy the entire, gigantic edited link and go back to your web browser. Paste the link in the web address field and press return. You should get something like this:
10. On this particular route, Google got a little confused around MD-80 & Penn Shop Road and the new route backtracks where it shouldn’t. I fixed this by dragging one point from MD-80 to Penn Shop Road, and then deleting the original point at the intersection of MD-80 & Penn Shop Road. This also cleans up the list of directions.
11. Click on the Print link and you’ll get a nice list of turns.
Every other turn is shaded to help guide your eye while riding.
For smaller roads, you’ll get big symbols indicating which way to turn (and even how sharp the turn is). For roads with route numbers, you’ll get the route number in a big circle.
The route list also shows the distance to the next turn and the cumulative distance traveled at the next turn. (If we had skipped step 9, we would have gotten cumulative distance since the beginning of the trip segment, which is a lot less useful.)
You can add a small map or a Google Street View picture to any turn (or all turns, if you prefer). You can customize a map’s zoom level and drag the map if you need to make sure an important feature shows up. You can even rotate a Street View picture left and right by dragging. Don’t overdo it with the maps and Street Views — clutter can be a problem, too.
You can add some notes in the box at the top.
Finally, you can add an overall route map by clicking “Include large map.” You will probably have to adjust the zoom level and drag the map so it covers the whole route. If you prefer, you can use the large map to show only the trickiest segment of the route.
12. You can save the route by bookmarking it in your browser (you might want to change the name of the link — I find it useful to include the mileage in the name) or by saving it to Google’s My Maps feature (available if you are logged in to your Google account). You also could print the route to a PDF.
13. You can find places to buy snacks along the way by right-clicking on a point on the route and selecting “What’s here” and then clicking on “Search nearby.” A search for “convenience stores” or “food” can be really helpful.
Unfortunately, Google won’t let you add notes to individual turns or for hazards that are between turns. Also, Google’s print layout is not terribly compact. A true cue sheet artist might find those problems to be too much to bear, but I can live with them, given the time and effort Google saves.
