Marianne Schultz

the musings of a geeky girl

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I found a robot to keep an eye on my house

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When I was a kid, I watched the Jetsons and, while their robot, Rosie, annoyed the crap out of me with her whiny voice, I always wanted a robot of my own to take care of chores around the house. Who wouldn’t? The closest I’ve gotten is an iRobot Roomba, a lovely gift from my wonderful husband, who wasn’t quite sure why I had one on my Christmas list to begin with and who was very surprised by how excited I was when I unwrapped the present. At any rate, I’ve got my eye on a new robot. Unfortunately, it’s not advanced enough to do my dishes or anything like that, but it will be guaranteed to let me know what’s going on in my house and probably scare my dog to death. If you haven’t already guessed, I’ve got my eye on the Rovio Wi-Fi-enabled Robot Webcam.

I’ve actually been eying it for some time, but passed it off as too expensive and felt it would be a pain to set up on my Mac since the software it comes with is only for Windows. However, I Googled around for set-up instructions for the Mac and came across a related gem – there’s now an iPhone app to control your Rovio remotely. How sweet is that? As sweet as my neighbor’s delicious, home-made, honey-dipped Finikia cookies, I tell you! How can I pass this up?
So, the Rovio is now on my shiny-objects-I-must-have list, along with many other things. I just got my bonus and there are some tough decisions coming up. Should I get high-performance tires for my car for this autocross season? What about new curtains and area rugs for the house? Or a new snowboarding helmet with Bluetooth? Or should I save it all like a good girl? (Sigh.) Despite my angst, I’m sure you can already guess what I’ll end up buying…

Review of the DecalGirl skin for the iPhone 3G

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If you’re like me and can’t bear the thought of your iPhone completely naked, but still need some level of protection from scratches, a skin is an ideal accessory. I needed a skin to use while testing a slip case for my iPhone and decided I wanted something with a design versus a clear skin and I selected a skin from DecalGirl.com. At just $6.99 + shipping, their skins are priced very reasonably and they offer over 300 designs from which to choose. While their skins don’t offer full coverage, they are nice and get the job done. You can read my full review here.

I am a weak, weak geek who has been wooed by iPhone 3.0 beta 3

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I did it. I upgraded my iPhone 3G to the 3.0 beta 3 (thanks, Rick!). Yes, I said I wasn’t going to do it before. I know, I know. But how could I resist? Everything I was reading indicated that this beta was working really well, showing none of the lag or glitches present in the first beta. And, IT CAN DO MMS. Well, technically, anyway –  I haven’t been able to send or receive any yet thanks to the exertion of absolutely no effort whatsoever on my part to get it to work.

How is it, you ask? It’s been pretty good, with only 2 noticeable glitches and one mistake made by yours truly. The first glitch is a disappearing call button in the phone’s dial pad – see the screenshot below. Re-starting the iPhone fixes that, but it somehow reverts back after a little while. I’m not the only who’s seen this – Patrick over at JAIB has as well. I’ve gotten around it by using the keypad in the GV Dialer app and then choosing to make a Direct Call from there. If I didn’t have the GV Dialer app, I think I’d be far more put off by this glitch without a way to initiate a call to someone not in my contacts list.
What’s missing from this picture?
The second glitch is some battery meter inaccuracy during charging. I noticed this when I went to charge my iPhone on Saturday after forgetting to charge it overnight on Friday. When I set it in the dock, the battery meter immediately went to full even though it was at less than 50% when I put it in, and this full reading persisted when I removed it from the dock right away. I didn’t bother re-starting it, which might have fixed this issue, and just kept charging it since I knew it needed it anyway.
The aforementioned mistake was in relation to Notes. I was inordinately excited about the ability to sync Notes between my iPhone and the notes in the Mail application on my Mac, but when I had problems syncing my iPhone, I chose an “overwrite items on this iPhone with data on my Mac” option at some point that over-wrote all my notes on my iPhone. I’m a little bummed about this since I kept ongoing shopping lists and other minutiae there. They’re saved in the back-up file made before I upgraded to 3.0, so I might try to find a way to extract them and even re-create them if I have to. Despite this, I am very happy to be able to create and edit notes on my Mac and my iPhone and have them all stay in sync with each other. Why Apple didn’t do this from the beginning I’ll never understand.
I’m also happy to report that Google Maps works flawlessly, which was a concern of mine after reading reports of it not working well in the first beta.
I know there are supposedly over 100 new features (!) in 3.0 – there’s a good list of them here – but they don’t stand out to me extraordinarily in daily use unless I think about it. I like having landscape mode available when reading and writing emails, notes, and text messages. I’ve used copy and paste, though I find I activate it often when I don’t mean to when double-tapping to zoom. NetShare still seems to work (yay!) though very slowly. I don’t use the search function much but I like that it’s now an option. I am very pleased that I can now choose to open a link in a new page in Safari. 
There is one thing for which I am exceptionally grateful in 3.0 – the ability to turn off those damned repeat notifications for new text messages. I really only need one notification to let me know I’ve received a text message.  The additional ones made me think I’d received another message, causing me to check and then be immediately disappointed that I’m not nearly popular enough to have received more than one at a time.  Whose brilliant idea was that in the first place? I curse the engineer who thought this would be a good feature. A pox on you and yours!

Why my friends and family are afraid of the iPhone 3.0 firmware

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Well, they’re not exactly afraid of it now, but they will be. You want to know why? MMS. Yeah, that’s it. MMS. 

For the past year and a half, roughly, they’ve lived in relative peace, receiving only text messages from me to communicate my location, ask if anything is needed from the grocery store while I’m there, and other mundane things. I’m not sure why, but I’ve evolved (or de-volved, depending on your opinion on the state of human interaction relative to modern technology) into the type of girl who’d rather exchange texts than talk on the phone with someone when I’m not at home. I mean, I’ll do it if I get a call while I’m out and bored or I’m going to be in one spot for a little while to make a conversation feasible without interruptions or unduly disturbing others around me. But I’d much rather have my conversations in private, what with my potty mouth and all. It’s safer that way, particularly for the children around me whose parents clap their hands swiftly and firmly over their ears when they hear what I’m saying. (Actually, I’m not that bad in public – I do watch my mouth, I swear.)
Anyway, I’ve really missed not being able to send MMS messages, and I intend to make up for the recent past when this hasn’t been possible with my iPhones as soon as 3.0 is out. For starters, my husband will receive MMS pictures of every damn funny thing I see when he’s not with me. Unfortunately for him, I am easily amused. Very easily amused. 
Next, my friends will get numerous pictures of my dog doing silly things, which occurs often, though this is probably more a function of the fact that I’m very easily amused. If my mother remembers how to open the messaging application on the Samsung A747 I helped her pick out a couple of years ago, she’ll get videos of me assuring her that I am indeed alive and in one piece after I miss one of her phone calls and fail to call her back within 1.34642 seconds of receiving the voicemail she leaves. My dad will receive short instructional videos on how to navigate through the Macintosh operating system on the iBook I gave him for Christmas years ago in response to his infamously long voicemails asking me what the red, yellow, and green buttons do in the top left corner of every window he opens, or who this Sherlock character is and what else can he do besides show movie times.
Do I have your cell phone number? If I do, you should mentally prepare yourself now. If I don’t, well, count your lucky stars.

Wrong numbers, redacted

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It used to be that I’d get phone calls from people who had mistakenly dialed the wrong number. We’d do that awkward verbal dance – I would ask them again who they were trying to reach and they’d play along, only to apologize once the error was clear and then abruptly hang up. I’d occasionally get someone rude, demanding to know my name instead as if I had had the audacity to have this number instead of it belonging to one of their friends.

I rarely get wrong number phone calls anymore. What I do get are text messages from people I don’t know. Fortunately, these are usually far more entertaining than wrong number calls. Here’s an example of a wrong number text message exchange I recently had:
As you can see, I first attempted to ignore the message, thinking that the wrong number would be recognized and I would be spared further messages without any action required on my part. However, this was not to be and I felt I had to respond to be clear that I was not the intended recipient of these texts. 
I admit that I was puzzled by the question asked by my dear anonymous texter to explain what “You have the wrong number” means. How is that not clear? Did he (or she) think I meant that his own number was wrong in some way, that I was expecting a text from him from a different number? I was sorely tempted to ask him why my reply wasn’t understood, but I thought that would be tempting fate. What if he took that question as an insult to his intelligence – and he would be partially correct – and then attempted to call me to speak to me about said insult? Ye gods! Absolutely unacceptable. So, I replied more thoroughly and never received a response. I guess there’s no text messaging equivalent to the “abrupt apology and hang up” move. That’s okay, though – the entertainment value I got out of this outweighed the minor lack of courtesy endured and I can only imagine what kind of wrong number messages I’ll get when my iPhone can receive MMS messages with the 3.0 firmware release this summer. I’m sure more hilarity will ensue then.
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