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Sublime Sherlock

The BBC’s sublime Sherlock brings an exciting, fully modern Sherlock Holmes and John Watson to 21st Century London, all the while retaining the essence of Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most popular and enduring characters in all of English literature. In addition to the 60 original stories and novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there are dozens and dozens of additional takes on the Sherlock mythos by successful authors–among them Laurie R. King, Michael Chabon, Nicholas Meyer, and Carole Nelson Douglas–with further adventures, alternative perspectives, and interesting new interpretations. More than 200 movies and TV shows (with 75 different actors portraying Holmes), radio episodes, and so on. To write that Holmes is beloved by many is a serious understatement.

The vast majority of the presentations, across all media, preserve the Victorian setting of the original stories, or at most advance the setting and the age of the detective. This Fall brought something new, a thoroughly modernized Sherlock Holmes who texts, blogs, and hacks into other people’s computers. And even up against modern CSI techniques, he still makes those around him look dim with his brilliant observations, deductions, and leaps of logic. (Some police call him “Freak.” To his face.)

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Five Bars at Home with the AT&T 3G MicroCell

The AT&T 3G MicroCell is a very good, not-too-expensive solution for getting a great wireless signal in your own home. Even if it’s not available online yet, your local AT&T Wireless store probably has them in stock. Recommended, with minor caveats.

AT&T is the exclusive wireless provider for the Apple iPhone here in the United States, and has at least partially earned a reputation for providing poor wireless phone coverage. In my own travels, I’ve had great reception in Portland, Austin, Palm Springs, and Chicago, among other places, four or five bars, consistently. I don’t recall ever having poor 3G reception anywhere — except here in my home city of San Francisco.

Now, San Francisco presents some unique challenges, such has high-rises and famously steep hills. But solving those reasonably straightforward RF challenges is what AT&T gets paid the big bucks to do. After almost four years there has been some improvement, but reception is still a major issue, with some parts of SF being almost completely dead zones. (I believe this has more to do with the tinfoil hat crowd than AT&T’s lack of effort and investment, but that’s a post for another day.)

AT&T reception in our house, while not awful, has been spotty, and seems oddly worse since we gave up our land line in January. It has definitely been an issue, with dropped and “one-way” (you can hear someone but they can’t hear you, or vice versa) calls being a regular occurrence.

AT&T has a solution for that problem. It’s called the AT&T 3G MicroCell, which puts a mini cell phone tower called a “femtocell” in your house, and no less a personage than the NYTimes has written about it. Their first article, Bringing You a Signal You’re Already Paying For, is a bit snarky, but does a good job of covering the details of the technology, and why you might want it. Their second article, Dead Zone Doldrums Test Skills of iPhone Customers, is more pragmatic, focused on usable ways to improve your reception, including the MicroCell.

Ultimately, finding a usable solution is more productive than pointing fingers. While the 3G MicroCell does cost $150, there are no monthly fees, and I can attest to getting at least three, and mostly five bars everywhere in my ~1400 square foot house. The MicroCell hands off smoothly to a standard AT&T tower when I move to my back deck, where reception was already excellent. Call quality has been excellent. Once set up, there is nothing to do. It Just Works.

There were two tricks to getting the MicroCell working. The first was actually getting one. They are not yet available for ordering online, at least not in San Francisco. But, after reading a tweet that AT&T Wireless retail stores were selling them in Santa Rosa, I stopped by a store in downtown San Francisco. Yes, they had them in stock, and so did the second store I visited. So, if you want a MicroCell today, you may need to visit your nearest AT&T Wireless store. For me, this was only 10 minutes out of my way, not a big deal.

My second issue was activating the MicroCell. It needs to have a reliable two-way connection to the Internet. For you to receive calls, the AT&T network needs to be able to reach the MicroCell, that is, connect from the Internet to inside your home network. This is something that a good firewall will normally prevent. I assume that the MicroCell uses UPnP or NAT-PMP to attempt to automatically open appropriate holes for itself, but my decidedly non-standard firewall software and even more unusual hardware don’t support either. So, I had to put the MicroCell outside the firewall, which is easy enough if you have a simple home network…and a pain in the ass if you have a fully wired house. For most people, this won’t be an issue, but I would appreciate a way to manually configure my MicroCell, or at least the technical information to open the right holes. Currently AT&T wants the 3G MicroCell to be a black box that requires no direct configuration by the customer.

In the end, I’m pretty happy with the 3G MicroCell. It’s set up, it works as advertised, and I didn’t need to wait for AT&T to put a new cell tower nearer my house, or for Apple to launch a Verizon iPhone.

Four quick iPad thoughts

I just watched the full video from yesterday’s introduction of the Apple iPad, and had a few thoughts.

If you have seen other Apple product introductions, the format is familiar, and they are never less than well executed. Of the intros I’ve seen, nothing has come close to the introduction of the iPhone. (I saw the original Mac intro years too late to fully appreciate its true impact.) But what the introduction of the iPad may have lacked in shock and awe, it made up for in the completeness of the story. The iPhone was on stage by itself, just the software that came on the phone. The iPad arrives with an entire ecosystem, of new and existing applications, third party developers, accessories, etc.
People who were expecting to get the stomach drop of excitement that the iPhone intro produced (at least in me) were certainly disappointed. But that’s misplaced, the iPad is a far more advanced product and story than the iPhone was when introduced. It’s like the difference between the excitement of crushing hard on someone new, versus the comfort and trust and love that comes after many years of marriage. One’s more exciting, but the other is richer and more fulfilling.
Another disappointment, or fear, that people have expressed is the lack of “openness” or “freedom.” I’ve got a different word for that concept: “complexity.” You can call that spin if you like, but I’ve spent 20+ years showing people how to use computers, and they’ve never been easy to use. Even today, 25 years after the concept of clicking and double-clicking hit the mass market, I see people confuse the two, and that is the most trivial of examples. It’s easy to come up with dozens more serious.
What Apple is doing, first with the iPhone and now with the iPad, is offering a new model for computing, one that allows more direct interaction with objects on the screen, while at the same time simplifying away huge amounts of complexity, things that most people will never care about.
Those of us who are “computer sophisticates” think those things are important, but when the iPad arrives, and normal people love them, and rave about the user interface, and buy them by the millions, we’ll see what’s really important, and it’s not the “freedom” to fuck around in the file system, or the “openness” to go out onto the Wild Internet and download and install random software.
Try this exercise: every time you hear an expert say the iPad isn’t open, change “open” to “complicated.” Every time they write the iPad is “locked down” subsitute “simplified.” When the gurus get detailed about “important” three letter acronyms or random tech talk, hear “blah blah blah,” because that’s all it matters.
Gruber put it best, it’s the arrival of the automatic transmission for computers. Those of us who are enthusiasts and experts will have access to manual transmissions for decades — regular computers are not going away. But for those folks who only care about getting to their destination, it just got a lot easier.
Update: Here are some terrific articles that tackle this topic in depth, and in different, complementary ways:
- “Future Shock” by Frasier Speirs suggests that existing computer experts are suffering from future shock.
- “The iPad Is For Everyone But Us” by Mike Rundle argues that “Most people who … are now writing about the iPad are misunderstanding its intended audience because they’re not in it.”
- “On iPads, Grandmas and
  Game-changing” by Rob Foster illustrates the reaction normal people are having to the iPad.
- “iPad Snivelers: Put Up or Shut Up” by Joel Johnson calls the whiners out on the bogus parts of their arguments, and suggests they compete with Apple, instead of just complaining.
If you want to really understand this, and get an idea of just how much Apple is leading by example, watch the segment where Phil Schiller demonstrates the iPad versions of the iWork suite (a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation tool). Apple has completely re-thought the way that you interact with these tools, and except for the on screen virtual keyboard, it surpasses the desktop experience in every way. Really quite extraordinary, it was here that I got genuinely excited about what is new in the iPad, and what it means. A small taste of The Future.
Scott Forstall offered developers a big incentive to build apps specifically for the iPad: separate, prominent placement in the iPad App Store. The phrase “a new gold rush” was used. Is that sound in the distance the clatter of Android and web OS and Blackberry phones being dropped by developers? Maybe not, but Apple is certainly building tremendous momentum for their platform. Competitors will not be catching up for years.

At $500, the iPad will be $100 cheaper than the original iPhone I lined up to buy. I may not line up for an iPad, but I’ll certainly be buying one. Yes, the 2nd generation will be even better. That’s always true. So what. I don’t think the iPad is the grand slam home run I wrote that the iPhone was, but it’s most definitely a hit that will score runs. I want one.

Improved Audiobook Builder

Just a quick note to mention that Audiobook Builder, my preferred solution for creating audiobooks on Mac OS X, was recently updated to version 1.1. The improvements include:

Longer audiobook parts, 18 hours instead of the prior 12 hour limit.
New options for where to break an audiobook into parts; for me, this means no more chapters split across separate parts.
A number of new build options that allow you to change the settings right before you build the audiobook.

There’s other changes and fixes. A nice (free) update to an already very good audiobook tool.

Barack Obama for President

I’ve had 3-4 anti-McCain blog posts in draft status for weeks now, and have wanted to pull the trigger and publish them, sometimes coming within a button press of doing so. But I kept hesitating, and finally tonight decided to dump them, including those already published.

Partly because it’s too late, I doubt there are many true undecideds on the Internet, and none of them visiting here. But mostly because it’s just not Senator Obama’s message. While the other side can only speak terrible untruths, the Obama campaign has been about change, progress, and hope. It’s a message that is deeply patriotic, and for me personally, deeply moving. Getting off that train to take shots at the other guys is just about being sad. Mr. Obama is more positive, and that’s where I want to be.

iPhone 2.0 and iPhone 3G

I upgraded my original iPhone to the 2.0 firmware release on Thursday night (before all the activation problems started), and have been using it for a couple days now. As others have written at length elsewhere, the 2.0 software release has a ton of improvements. While those are nice, I barely notice them. The real breakthrough (for me) is in the App Store, and having third-party applications on my phone.

Although individual applications are mostly $10 or less, buying a bunch of them adds up. Since everything is so new, there’s not a lot of reviews, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on some of the applications I like.

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Complete set of Harry Potter audiobooks at Amazon.com

I’m still waiting for a deluxe boxed set of all the audiobooks, like the ::amazon(“0545044251”, deluxe print books set)::, but if you’re just looking for a great deal on a complete set, packaging be damned, here’s ::amazon(“0739352245”, all seven Harry Potter audiobooks at Amazon.com)::, at a 40% discount from full retail.

It’s still $275, but considering what they cost individually, if you want to own all seven, this is the way to go. The total running time is almost five days — at under $2.50/hour, it’s hard to imagine a better value for your entertainment dollar. Enjoy!

What’s happening in your neighborhood? EveryBlock.com can tell you!

There’s a new web site launched this week, EveryBlock, that aggregates together all of the “news” and makes it available on a very geographically-specific basis — that is, specifically for your block. They launched covering only three cities, but San Francisco is one of them.

Want crime reports for your neighborhood? Got ’em. Want restaurant inspection reports? Got ’em. Want reviews of local establishments on Yelp? Got ’em. They compile standard news outlets, public records, other local sites, and even geo-tagged Flickr photos.

Go to the site, type in your street address, and then spend the next hour (or more) browsing the different pieces of information available. This is seriously interesting. I think in the long run it’ll be as influential as craigslist.

(I have no affiliation with EveryBlock, I just figure that everyone has an interest in what’s happening in their neighborhood, and this looks like a compelling way to find out.)

MacHeist II: 11 great Mac apps for $49

This year’s MacHeist includes 11 applications in the bundle, which individually would sell for $368.75. When bought as part of the MacHeist promotion, the whole collection is under $50.

Now, it’s a rare person who would want and use every single one of these applications; there’s just too much variety to have everything fit perfectly. But if even half of them would be useful, then you’re way, way ahead.

For me, the big winners are 1password, TaskPaper, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro, and Pixelmator. Pixelmator alone costs $10 more than the bundle, and I’d been meaning to buy it for over a month, since this terrific review of Pixelmator appeared in Macworld magazine. So buying the bundle was an easy decision.

Maybe it will be for you as well.

Deathly Hallows not coming to iTunes Store

I’m a bit late to have stumbled across this information, but it would appear that the final novel in the Harry Potter series will not be coming to the iTunes Store:

*HEARING HARRY*
You may have the seen the avalanche of press coverage about the new “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” hardcover selling 8.3 million U.S. copies in its first 24 hours of release. […] More than 225,000 audiobook cassette or compact disc copies were [also] sold the first weekend. Those were the best two-day results in audiobook history, according to Random House. […] What’s not available is an iTunes download for your iPod. The first six Potter books are available through iTunes at prices ranging from $33 to $50. But a Random House spokeswoman said no iTunes date has been announced for “Deathly Hallows” and that she has no other information about download plans.

So if you’re still waiting, I suggest running out to Costco and getting the CD version, which had the lowest price I’ve seen by $10, and then buying a copy of Audiobook Builder to make importing it into iTunes more pleasurable. The two together will still cost less than Deathly Hallows would have cost through the iTunes Store, and you’ll be able to use Audiobook Builder on other books in the future.

One week with an iPhone

Last Friday I bought an 8 gigabyte iPhone at an Apple store. I’ve been using the phone for a week now, and overall, while there are certainly flaws and omissions, it is a spectacular synthesis of hardware and software excellence. No other handheld device I’ve used even comes close, including the seven previous iPods I’ve owned. It’s a major advance in mobile phones, and in computing generally, and while I certainly look forward to getting the 2nd generation product, I’m going to love this 1st generation device all on its own.

Beyond that general impression, I have a few specific things I thought would be worth writing about.

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The Overlook by Michael Connelly

The latest Harry Bosch novel was released in print and audiobook formats earlier this week. The Overlook was originally published as a serial in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, but the novel has been expanded and revised. It’s still a lot shorter than most of Connelly’s works; the audiobook version clocks in at just over six hours, instead of the usual 10+.

Michael Connelly and Harry Bosch are who introduced me to the amazing pleasure that is listening to audiobooks. Rochelle and I began listening to Lost Light, the ninth Harry Bosch novel, on a drive back from LA. When we got home we parked the car, threw our stuff in the house, and climbed into bed to continue listening. It remains my favorite audiobook so far.

One of the truly terrific things about the Harry Bosch books is that the entire series is available in unabridged form. The Overlook is the thirteenth book so far, and all told there is more than 125 hours of listening pleasure. If you want to start at the beginning, here’s the full series to date:

::amazon(“1593352549”, “The Black Echo”):: [Formats: ::amazon(“1593352549”, “MP3 CD”)::, ::amazon(“1593356307”, “Audio CD”)::]
::amazon(“159335259X”, “The Black Ice”):: [Formats: ::amazon(“159335259X”, “MP3 CD”)::, ::amazon(“1593356390”, “Audio CD”)::]
::amazon(“1596009225”, “The Concrete Blonde”):: [Formats: ::amazon(“1596009225”, “MP3 CD”)::, ::amazon(“1596009209”, “Audio CD”)::]
::amazon(“1596009292”, “The Last Coyote”):: [Formats: ::amazon(“1596009292”, “MP3 CD”)::, ::amazon(“1596009276”, “Audio CD”)::]
::amazon(“159335312X”, “Trunk Music”):: [Formats: ::amazon(“159335312X”, “MP3 CD”)::]
::amazon(“1597376876”, “Angels Flight”):: [Formats: ::amazon(“1597376876”, “MP3 CD”)::, ::amazon(“159737685X”, “Audio CD”)::]
A Darkness More Than Night
City of Bones
Lost Light
The Narrows
The Closers
Echo Park
The Overlook