Airport Extreme

This year for Xmas I asked for and received an Airport Extreme. Some of you may recall my struggles with the numerous Airport Expresses I own. This is because of the way my home network has evolved over the years, which is to say, completely piecemeal and haphazardly.

A Piecemeal Network

My home network, like many, started simply with a wired router. It then progressed to wireless with my first Airport Express, which, at the time was plenty for me, living alone in my small studio apartment. My next apartment, however, was a duplex, so I extended my network with an additional Airport Express, one capable of 802.11n. Then, as wireless networks in the city exploded and frequencies grew more congested, causing problems with the wireless Netflix streaming I started doing a good deal of, I added yet another Airport Express and built out my network, creating one 5GHz network for my heaviest use-cases, and a 2.4GHz network for my phones and gadgets.

When all was said and done I had a wired router feeding three Airport Expresses, two of which were supplying wireless on 5GHz and one of which provided separate wireless access on the 2.4GHz frequency. It was a total mess: it took forever to set up (like when we recently moved to a new house); it broke often and was horrible to troubleshoot.

Cut To The Present Day

So this year one of my presents was an Airport Extreme. I just wanted to simplify everything. I suppose I could've gotten some LinkSys dealio that would've been faster, but frankly, this is about laziness, and the Airport Extreme is, for me, the easiest option available, if for no other reason than the fact that I already use and am quite familiar with the Airport ecosystem.

And easy it was! In fact, I was able to set it up and completely replace my existing network — a router and three Airport Expresses — in about ten minutes. That's right, what used to take me hours to set up and get working just so took ten minutes with an Airport Extreme. And now, all those boxes are gone, replaced with a single — and quite attractive, I might add — wireless router. It's fantastic!

I have to say, setting up my Airport Extreme was one of the best user experiences I've had in a very, very long time. I'm not used to calling network setup easy, but that's exactly what it was. I entered my settings and it simply Just Worked.

Clearly a lot has changed since I first began building my home network. It's nice to finally be using some current gear, and the Airport Extreme is a great box. Super simple to set up and use. Oh, and it's fast too!

If you're looking to upgrade an aging wireless network, want simplicity and ease-of-use, and don't need a ton of tweakable settings, I highly recommend the Airport Extreme.

So Bucking Fuggy

If there's one thing that drives me crazy about Lion, it's the bugginess of the Finder. I'd mentioned the problem where Spaces clears the Desktop of icons in my initial review. But I've since found additional problems.

For years now I've kept my Desktop organized by file type. I like this because it groups all my files in a way that I find logical and easy to visually parse. One glance at the Desktop and I can find all the PDFs, for instance, and these will be ordered alphabetically. It's a personal preference, and it's worked well for me for years. But it's broken in Lion.

In Lion, sometimes items of the same type group together, but sometimes they don't. The other day, for instance, I downloaded four PNGs to my Desktop. Three of them were grouped together, but one was just put somewhere random. Restarting the Finder caused all the items to group properly. This little trick was repeatable on both my system and on other Lion systems in my facility.

Moreover, eventually the items will group properly, and I'll see, out of the corner of my eye, my Desktop suddenly rearrange itself for no apparent reason.

But here's the thing: without consistency, the feature that allows you to arrange your Desktop by file type is essentially useless. If I can't rely on it to present me with accurate information all the time, then there's no real point in using it anymore.

So I've switched to manually arranging items on my Desktop. That's right, I've now abandoned the method of Desktop organization I've used for years because Lion has broken it. But here's the kicker: manual organization doesn't always work either. Even manually arranged items get disordered from time to time after, say, a logout.

Another thing that happens — less annoying, for sure, but indicative of the sad state of the Lion Finder — is that when I log in there is often one item on the Desktop that's missing an icon. Again, restarting the Finder fixes the issue. But still...

And then there's this:

From an item on my Desktop. Jesus.

At this point, for me, the Desktop is essentially completely broken; it's nearly unusable. I'm not sure how the folks in Cupertino even use this OS without driving themselves up a wall. And I don't know how they can allow these basic and obvious bugs to persist.

The sad state of Lion's Finder really shows Apple's level of commitment to the desktop version of their once great OS. It's just tiresome to have to be wrestling, after ten years, with the most basic piece of Mac OS software: The Finder. But that's where we are today.

Siri Fail

What percentage of attempts at doing a thing must be failures until that thing is deemed unreliable by a user and abandoned for another more effective method? I don't know the answer, but whatever it is, Siri has passed it.

Siri's great when it works, it just so seldom does. The most common thing I want to do with Siri is make calls to restaurants to order food. But restaurants, particularly ones in this town, tend to have odd names. Siri doesn't work well with odd names and it usually fails when I try to use it to call, say, Kouzan. It also fails if I try to call Café Viva by reversing the words of the name and saying, "Call Viva Café." But this sort of intelligence — the ability to parse natural language, even mistakes to some extent — is just what Siri's billed as being great at.

I've pretty much given up calling restaurants with Siri. And since I don't really make many other calls, Siri phone functionality is mostly useless to me. So what else can Siri do?

Well, Siri's great at dictation. I mean really great. So this morning I attempted to jot down an idea for a blog post using the dictation feature. After finishing the input the note was empty. Completely blank. Siri just completely gave up the ghost. Turns out there was a network related problem, and Siri famously fails when it has any problem connecting to Apple's network. Let's be clear: I had connectivity three ways to Sunday; the problem was Apple-side. I think it might be good for Siri to do some network checking before taking requests, because, though it can save you quite a bit of time when it works, when it doesn't, it's a huge time waster. And that just adds to my steadily increasing level of gunshy-ness.

So far Siri's pretty good about setting reminders. Hasn't failed me there yet; I'll keep trying to use it. But I'm pretty close to giving up. I don't know. Maybe the giving-up threshold is simply determined by a loose calculation of how much time you've wasted on a new technology. Maybe once your brain realizes that this thing that's supposed to be saving you time is instead stealing it away, maybe that's when you stop playing guinea pig and get back to work.

Whatever the case, Siri has proven, over the longer haul, to be not particularly useful in real world use cases, at least not yet.

Don't believe the hype. Or at least not all of it.

Siri's Abortion Stance

There are two things that the controversy surrounding Siri's apparent stance on abortion demonstrates.

1. Siri is a believable and convincing enough piece of software to make people react to it as though it is a real person, with real thoughts and opinions.
2. Most people either just have no clue how technology works, or no interest in understanding it. Or both.

Sometimes, ya just gotta laugh.

iOS Camera Roll Bug

I recently mentioned a bug in the Photos app in iOS 5. What was happening to me was this:

1. Open Camera app.
2. Take photos.
3. Look at Camera Roll from Camera app and verify that photos are there.
4. Quit Camera app.
5. Open Photos app.
6. Navigate to Camera Roll.
7. Photos app crashes.
8. Open it again, and navigate to Camera Roll again.
9. Camera Roll appears empty.
10. Look again from Camera app, and the Camera Roll shows the recent photos.

Clearly, the photos are in my Camera Roll, but they're just not appearing when viewed from the Photos app. So WTF?

After a good deal of research I was able to track the problem down to what would seem to be a corrupt database. The solution is kind of a pain, but it works and seem to keep the problem from happening ever again. So here it is, the fix:

1. Plug in and back up your iPhone, for good measure.
2. Download and install either iExplorer (formerly iPhone Explorer) or any app that lets you view the file system of your iPhone.
3. With iPhone still connected, launch iExplorer.
4. In iExplorer navigate to the Your_iPhone->Media->PhotoData folder.
5. If you're at all concerned or paranoid (like I am) back this entire folder up to your computer by simply dragging it from iExplorer to your Desktop.
6. Delete the following three files:
• com.apple.photos.caches_metadata.plist
• PhotosAux.sqlite
• Photos.sqlite
7. Reboot your iPhone.

When the iPhone returns to service the Photos app should show your Camera Roll repopulated with your recent photos. If you don't have any other albums, you're done. Otherwise, any other albums you had — particularly ones that you'd been syncing from iPhoto — will need to be resynced. Simply open up iTunes and perform a sync operation.

That's it! You're done. From here on out your iPhone should behave properly when taking new photos; the Camera Roll should always display recent photos from inside the Photos app.