cellio | Entries tagged with tech

Dear LJ Brain Trust,

A member of our minyan has a degenerative vision problem and can no longer use even a very-large-print prayer book. (She was absent for a while and returned this week with a guide dog.) She realized that she didn't know as many of the prayers by heart as she thought she did, so I'm spending some time with her to teach her by ear and we'll scare up some recordings for her, but memorization isn't really the ideal solution. Sure, people can and do memorize the core, common prayers, but it's hard to memorize everything, and sometimes there are seasonal changes, so you really want to be able to read the prayer book.

I once saw somebody who used a Braille prayer book, but at the time I didn't ask him how that worked and he's since passed away. Braille is, as I understand it, a letter-by-letter notation system with an extra layer (called "condensed", I've heard) where common words have their own symbols instead of being spelled out. (Like American Sign Language, except I have the impression that the balance between spelled-out and condensed is different. I may be wrong about that.) But -- all of that kind of assumes a particular alphabet, right? So how would Hebrew be rendered in Braille -- do they transliterate it and then Braille-encode that, or does the reader have to learn a different Braille language to match the different alphabet, or what?

I'd like to be able to help her get a prayer book she can read. I don't think she's ready to learn a second Braille language (she's still working on the first).

And a related question: she has an iPad; are there Braille peripherals for that like (I understand) there are for desktop computers? Is "digital copy of the book + iPad + peripheral" a practical alternative to the massive paper tome? (She would use technology on Shabbat for that purpose.)

My T-Mobile Galaxy 4S has, for a few weeks, been intermittently telling me that it has a software update ready but I need to take it over WiFi. (The first one came at Pennsic, I think.) This morning I got the notification while I was actually home and could connect to WiFi, so I said "yeah, sure".

Note to self: if the phone wants to use WiFi that's probably because it's a large download. That idea you had that it could do its work while you were feeding the cats and checking email? Um, no. It wasn't clear what would happen if I left before it was finished, so I let it have its half-hour.

It was only at the end that I found out what it was (though I guessed from the file size): OS update. I got a popup with words to the effect that some settings might change and I should back up my data, and would I like to install now or postpone? Yeah, that has an obvious answer.

Note to T-Mobile/Samsung/Google: you could improve the user experience there by, in that message, providing a link to a description of the differences between the current and new versions. Just sayin'. They didn't, so I found a report of this upgrade on this phone on my own. It sounds safe. I can't help noticing that that article is dated November 2013 and I'm only receiving this now. The article is silent about settings changing.

I'm also not clear (and this is not the upgrade's fault) on what data I might need to back up. Anybody know? I use my phone to take pictures which are automatically backed up already. I don't think I do any other content creation, aside from text messages I've sent I guess. Do I need to worry about application settings, like Gmail configuration, browser bookmarks, and stuff like that?

It's funny to see (well, hear) my phone's navigator app react to parking garages. "Do X... oh ok you're going north so do Y... oh you're going west so do Z... oh you're going south do A... oh you're going east do X which I'll pretend I haven't said before..." -- iterate until you reach the exit. It doesn't respond to elevation, only latitude/longitude.

I can think of three possible reasons for this, and I wonder which it is (or if it's something else I haven't thought of):

1. The GPS in the phone doesn't detect altitude.

2. The map data (Google's, in this case) doesn't record elevation. It does you no good to know that the GPS is at a certain elevation if the app can't tell that that's 200 feet above the road, after all.

3. The GPS and map data are available, but the app isn't programmed to take it into account. How often does this really come up, after all?

I learned a lesson about customer service in the 21st century this week. If you call a place like, say, Verizon to complain about misleading sales practices, they make some token offer like a few months of a movie channel (that you better remember to cancel later). And you'll wait on hold for a long time to get there. If, on the other hand, you tweet about it, you get a helpful response leading to something more significant within minutes. Nice to know.

So I now have HD signal coming in (yay), which my TV understands just fine but I'd like to be able to record in HD too. I currently have an ancient TiVo -- version 1, I think before they had version numbers. Obviously that doesn't speak HD, nor can it act as a tuner (I have to set the channel on the FiOS box). New TiVo boxes are pricy and then you have to add the lifetime subscription fee (up to $500 now!) because that's "lifetime of the box", not "your lifetime" so your old one doesn't transfer. This all suggests that I should be looking for a used TiVo that's newer than mine but older than the current offerings, one that already has a lifetime subscription that the seller can transfer.

It looks like the TiVo Premiere HD DVR was their first HD box and is a few years old at this point (sample offer on eBay, TiVoPedia page). I'm a little confused about FiOS integration; this takes "cable in" but I've read that FiOS or cable + HD + DVR means you need a "cable card" (rented from your service provider). How does that work? And is it user-installable? Or are cards "new" and older DVRs use the cable box?

I'd like to be able to record, in HD, and be able to program (time and channel) the DVR directly (not set the channel on a different device). I don't need to be able to record two different shows at once, or record one and watch another, or anything fancy like that. I don't need a huge hard drive. I want to keep costs down but want something that works pretty much out of the box, not "get a spare PC and...". I prefer to minimize ongoing fees (subscriptions) in favor of up-front purchases.

Please guide me, oh LJ brain trust. Most of you are way ahead of me on TV tech.

Two items seen in rapid succession today:

Here's why you're not hiring the best and brightest: (Jeff Atwood) talks about making telecommuting work so that you really can hire the best employees, as opposed to the best employees willing to live in a particular location. I once applied for a telecommuting position at a company that seems to get it as far as that's concerned, and a lot of the stuff they do is reflected in this article.
What do programmers care about? (20-minute video): Joel Spolsky (Stack Exchange, Fog Creek) talks to recruiters about how to recruit programmers. If you've read Joel On Software you already know a lot of what he has to say here, but I still found it interesting to watch.

Can you help? Somebody asked a question recently on Writers about guidelines and heuristics for when to use screen shots in technical documentation. The question isn't looking for opinions or what you, personally, do but, rather, formal guidelines along the lines of what GNOME does for its documentation. So far it's only attracting opinion answers. I, too, have opinions and practices that I follow, but I can't source them either and I'd like to see the question get a good answer.

Speaking of Writers, I wrote a little something about writing good API reference documentation (like Javadoc), based on advice I've given informally over and over again -- finally wrote some of it down in a public place. Feedback welcome.

I recently saw an article with interesting-seeming observations and analysis of Modern Orthodox Judaism. I'm not all that tuned into the MO community and can't evaluate its credibility from inside, but I found it an interesting read. If any of y'all would care to tell me where on the spectrum from "yup" to "WTF?!" this is from your perspective, I'd be interested.

Finally, a little something for those who use the text editor vim (which I gather is related to vi?):

As part of a system upgrade at my shell provider, I'm now using Alpine to read mail instead of Pine. Pine showed me plain old dates/times in the list of messages, but Alpine tries to be clever and I haven't yet figured out how to turn it off. So instead of a date it'll say "Yesterday", or "Monday", etc. Very annoying, but it did produce a laugh:

I was unprepared for Alpine's treatment of the message I just got from somebody more than halfway around the world: "Tomorrow". Yes, tomorrow's mail today! Sadly, tomorrow's mail, so far, has not reported usable lottery numbers.

When I returned to my car tonight with groceries (on the way home from work), my car didn't respond to the key fob. No light -- presumably a dead fob battery, with no warning signs beforehand. (I've never had this happen before.) As I was calling Dani to ask him to bring the spare from home, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn't need to. Oh yes, that's what that projecting metal piece is for -- it's not just an ignition key! Right...

I spent way longer owning cars with plain old keys than owning ones with fobs, but I guess the memories of How Things Used To Be fade quickly. Except when talking to young'uns about how we did things in "our day", of course. :-)

I wonder if replacing the battery in one of these fobs is relatively painless. (It appears I can't do it myself, or, at least, there's no obvious way to open the case.) I know that if you lose one of these a replacement costs something like $150 (!), but I hope repair is cheaper. If it's not, I won't bother -- if the second one also dies while I still own the car I'll just use it the old-fashioned way.

What do Prius owners do, I wonder?

Recently while driving somewhere unfamiliar I made a wrong turn and wasn't sure how to recover. My new phone's search widget has a voice-input option, so on a whim I pulled the phone out and said "navigate to (location)", and it did the right thing: it correctly understood my speech, launched the navigator app, queued up my destination... and did not put the navigator app in "talk to me" mode.

So close, and yet so far. So I had to find a place to pull over so I could fiddle with the phone.

On the other hand, this is still way better than paper maps. :-)

1. Google+ won't load on my Android tablet using the default browser. (Also fails in Firefox.) I don't know how to tell them...

2. (What I was actually going to say there:) Apparently the keyboard for my ASUS tablet drains battery way faster than the tablet itself. Not what I expected! If any leeching is happening I thought the keyboard would draw from the tablet, and if there's no leeching, I expected the keyboard to be the less-demanding device. Now I wonder what's really going on. (The two weigh about the same, and I assume battery is a significant part of the weight.)

In the last two weeks we lost both

merle_ and

pedropadrao. I will miss them both. :-(

And there's no good transition from that to, well, miscellany, so this paragraph will have to serve.

I suppose, technically, if you're not sure if a TV show has jumped the shark, then it hasn't. But, that said, I doubt I'll be back for the next season of "Once Upon a Time", a show that got off to a good start in season one, carried it through part of season two, and then started going farther and farther afield of its original context. In addition to links to "the enchanted forest", the land of fairy tales, they mixed in an Arthurian knight (short-lived), Captain Hook, I think a couple other odd ones, and now, in the season finale, it's clear that Never-Never Land is going to be a major factor. If they were doing the work to tell a Gaiman-style story about all these realms being intertwined or some such I'd be on board for that, but it sure feels like they're just making things up as they go along now. Oh well.

Links:

Full moon silhouettes, a really gorgeous video of the full moon rising over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, NZ. (Link from Dani.)

Best court sanctions... ever! from osewalrus. As Ose says, best use of the term "Red Shirt" in a legal decision. And you thought court decisions had to be dull...

This is great (given that such idiots exist, which is not great). Bill Walsh was riding his bike and happened to be running a helmet-cam when a cab made an illegal U-turn across the bike lane, after being warned that it was illegal, and promptly got pulled over by an oncoming police officer. The video is short and cuts out before we get to see the expression on the cabbie's face, alas.

Feast of the ravens, a photo with an interesting story behind it. What do you expect to find when a large group of ravens congregates? Not this. From shewhomust.

siderea posted an excerpt from (and link to) an essay about libraries, mandatory internet use, and the very poor that is well worth a read. As more and more stuff moves to "online only", whom are we leaving out in the cold? The ones who can least cope, it seems.

I hadn't realized that 3D printing was advanced enough to make medical implants... a year and a half ago. Ok, this was an airpipe splint, but are plastic organs in our future?

Sad cat diary, a video in the general style of Henri (but not just one cat), from Talvin over at DW.

We went to

alaricmacconnal's and Elsbeth's yesterday for a New Year's Day party, which meant more gaming. I had fun playing more Dixit (

blackpaladin, which expansions were in there?), and Dani played Constantinopolis, a resource-management game that sounded similar to Puerto Rico but is twice as long (or thereabouts). I haven't played it yet.

2013 was getting off to a great start but then I had to go back to work. Powerball, you have failed me. :-) (Ok, I've never actually bought my own lottery ticket, but when a group is forming at work I always buy in because I'd sure feel stupid if I didn't and half the company won buckets of money and left.)

Resolution? 1280x1024, but maybe I'll get a new monitor this year. (I think it was merle_ who inspired that idea.) Though I'd rather keep the aspect ratio I have now (i.e. I'm not so thrilled with the widescreen monitors that are all the rage these days).

Orlando is currently chasing his tail. I thought that was a dog thing. (He's got one white pixel on the end of it, but I don't think it's that in particular that he's chasing.) More generally, he and Giovanni seem to be settling in, though I still can't pick either up for more than a few seconds and I had only 50% success on last week's vet visit. Giovanni has gained a pound in the last month, so I guess Orlando isn't being as pushy about the food dishes as I thought.

Netflix only gives you about a week's notice when something is going to disappear from their streaming service. Last week I noticed that Farscape, which had been languishing there for a while, was slated to disappear, so I watched the first eight episodes to decide if I want to queue up DVDs. It looked to me like interesting characters and underwhelming plots, but I'm mindful that some good shows (like B5) took a while to settle in. To those who've seen it: does it get better?

Apparently I can't post comments on LJ tonight, so some of you will probably get some belated comments when that changes. Let's see if I can post an entry.

I'm typing this from my new Android tablet -- an ASUS Transformer with keyboard dock. It's quite spiffy! (And a well-timed gift, as I was still cogitating over my dead iBook.)

It works well as a tablet -- nice display, the apps work the way I expect, and it didn't take too long to figure out some of the interface quirks (which may be real or may be signs that I've used an iPad). The on-screen keyboard is "fat"; I don't know how else to describe it, but it works (and, not surprisingly, with better accuracy than my phone). The hardware keyboard is of course smaller than a conventional one, so currently I'm making lots of typos but I'm touch-typing. The keys are closer together than I'm used to and it feels like I'm hitting them harder than I'm used to, particularly the keys toward the edges (that are less likely to be struck "straight on"). I'm still faster with the hardware keyboard than the on-screen one, though, and it doesn't take up half the screen. So, bottom line, when I want to do extensive typing I can slip it into the dock, and otherwise its a nice 10" tablet.

Please feel free to tell me about all your favorite Android apps. I have an Android phone so I know a few, but tablets and phones are different.

Good news: somebody has ported emacs to Android and it's in the store (free). Bad news: it seg-faults for me on start. It's a known problem but the suggested work-around didn't for me. I've contacted the author.

The dock provides a USB port and there's a file-browser app. This is very promising.

How in the world do I get the Google+ web site to let me use the regular, not mobile, site? I know there's an app but I don't like it; the web site is just fine with the real-estate available on a tablet. But when I try to use it it forces me into the mobile version, which isn't as good. (Not as bad as the app, but not as good as it could be.)

The previous paragraph might describe a specific symptom of a more-general problem. General solutions also welcome. :-) (Stack Exchange, by way of contrast, uses the mobile site on my phone but the regular one on the tablet, so it's not as simple as checking for mobile devices.)

There are two browsers pre-installed, "browser" and Chrome. I wonder why. I wonder what "browser" is.

LJ oddity: I'm typing this using the (regular) web site, not an app, and when typing this text is a smaller variable-width font. When focus is elsewhere (like when I typed the tags), it changes to a larger fixed-width font (Courier, I assume). I want that all the time! (This is the HTML editor, not the rich-text one.)

I'm not very good at finger-based cursor placement yet. I wonder what typos Ive introduced while editing. :-)

More to come as I use it more, I'm sure.

The trip home from Pennsic involved detours at both ends, so I decided to turn on the GPS app on my phone (Android, Navigator, came pre-loaded) for a running commentary. (Good thing, too; the obvious path out of Cooper's Lake wasn't.) This experience reminded me of some things I really want a GPS to do for me. It's possible that it already does some of these; I'm an infrequent GPS user and was fiddling with it at the side of a rural road.

I want to constrain a route without spelling it out: "Go home from here, taking Route 422 rather than staying on 19 and, in Pittsburgh, detouring through downtown instead of via Liberty Bridge". I can, of course, just do that and let it recalculate, as I did, but I would like it to take that information into account in case there's a better way to execute that plan.

I want it to learn from its recalculations. In an ideal world I would be able to turn it on in "observer" mode while I drive, and then later tell it to navigate as close to my usual habits as possible. My GPS should be able to learn that I don't like the eastbound 376 entrance in Squirrel Hill, or the West End Bridge, or Carson Street during rush hours.

I want to be able to tell it take current conditions into account. My phone knows that it's currently pouring rain or dark; I should be able to tell it "prefer local roads over highways during heavy rain" or "try not to take Business 22 at night" or even "check conditions up ahead and advise me on when to take a rest stop" (for longer trips).

That's just until the self-driving cars are ready, of course.

More from that parlor game: Comment to this post and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

unique_name_123 gave me: computer, spirituality, laurel, rules, games, travel, artichoke.

( Read more... )

A very helpful (yes, really!) technician at Verizon diagnosed our network problems as a flaky router, so he sent us a new one and we swapped it in today. The old router had two features that I found useful: I could name devices on the network, and the "my network" list showed me everything that had connected since the last router restart, not just the currently-connected devices. These, particularly in combination, were useful for monitoring my network. (Why yes, since I can be punished for anything done from my IP address even if I didn't do or authorize it, and since no security that is still usable is perfect, I do care.)

The new router lacks both of these features; it shows currently-connected devices by MAC address (and IP address), but short of my maintaining the name-MAC mappings externally, that's of limited utility. And it doesn't tell me if a neighbor found his way onto my network while I wasn't watching. Now my neighbors seem like decent folks, and in a different legal environment I'd rather be the sort of person who shares my spare bandwidth with anybody who needs it, but that's not the point.

Oh well. I guess I am now relying more strongly on decent neighbors and passwords, as I haven't found anything like router logs that tell me this stuff.

I know that some of my readers are pretty security-conscious. How do you handle this?

Dear brain trust,

I have some vision-related problems with my computer setup at work and our IT and HR departments are ill-equipped to help. I've got a configuration -- a combination of OS settings (Windows), monitor settings, application settings, and lighting -- that kind-of sort-of works, but it's all stuff I figured out on my own. There may be better ways to solve my problems, and some of my problems are currently unsolved and getting in my way. Meanwhile, IT really wants to push me to newer versions that seem to be worse for me.

I would like to find a consultant who is knowledgable in both vision stuff and tech stuff, someone who can sit with me for a few hours and give me informed advice about changes to make. My ophthalmologist of course knows the vision stuff but is not a techie; the techies I know don't grok the vision stuff. I need to find someone who can hear "photo-sensitive" and "restricted focal distance" and "astigmatism" and the rest, understand what that means, and suggest approaches that have not occurred to me from walking the application menus and Windows control panel and Firefox extensions. Technical areas will include the gamut of Windows display settings including custom color themes, CSS overrides in Firefox, configuration of Office and (if possible) Adobe reader, and monitor settings, among things. (Bonus points if this person can make Eclipse suck less.) Once I find this person, I intend to push my employer to hire that person for a consultation. I don't expect to have to push very hard, but I also don't expect to get multiple chances on the corporate dime.

The problem is I haven't been able to find that person. My Google searches have turned up many many consultants who will help employers comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act -- they're compliance people, not usability people. (Also, most of them are about mobility issues.) And I've found folks who will build you accessible web sites (they say). This does not help. Clearly I'm going about this wrong.

So, dear brain trust, can you help me figure out how to search for help with this? And in the "hey, I might get lucky" department, do you, dear reader, know someone who could provide this service in Pittsburgh?

How companies learn your secrets is a long but interesting article on commercial data-mining. The case studied here is Target, leading with a bit of a fumble where they showed they knew a high-school student was pregnant before her family did, but practically everybody analyzes their customers like this. This article explains some of what they're doing and why it works.

"We have the capacity to send every customer an ad booklet, specifically designed for them, that says, 'Here's everything you bought last week and a coupon for it,' " one Target executive told me. "We do that for grocery products all the time." But for pregnant women, Target's goal was selling them baby items they didn't even know they needed yet.
"With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly," the executive said. "Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We'd put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We'd put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
"And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don't spook her, it works."

I know someone who used to get together with friends every now and then to randomly redistribute store affinity cards to mess up the data mining. I don't know how long hat will keep working (if indeed it still does) -- unless you also pay with cash. Personally, I just assume that any transaction I make that involves a credit card, affinity card, or disclosure of an address or phone number is not really private.

Last night my four-month-old phone (my first smartphone) died -- wouldn't power on and didn't light up when plugged into a charger. This said "dead battery" to me; I briefly considered popping and replacing the battery on the theory that that's probably the control-alt-delete of the phone world, but I was stymied by the case.

A word about the case: I didn't get the phone with a case and wasn't looking for one. I'm pretty careful with my portable electronics and don't expect to be using a phone in situations where I'm likely to drop or crush it. A month after I got the phone the screen-protector peeled off and they replaced it since those are supposed to last a year or more. (So maybe the initial application was faulty, I figured.) A month after that the second one peeled off, despite my being very careful in how I handled the phone. I carry my phone in an otherwise-empty pocket, same as bunches of other people; this should not happen. So that time the guy suggested that a case would help hold it down; the price of the case was comparable to the price of a two-pack of protectors, so I grudgingly bought a case and he put it on for me.

I've not had cause to try to remove the case since then, until last night when I found I wasn't sure how to do it without damaging something. And this "pop the battery" idea was just a theory anyway. So today I visited the T-Mobile store and spoke with Matt.

Matt's first guess was "confused phone", not "dead battery", and he took the case off, popped the battery, put it back in, and plugged the phone into a charger. This time it responded. I asked him to show me how he'd taken the case off and he said that it's very fussy. He then went to put it back on so he could show me, and discovered that it wouldn't go -- something had cracked or bent or something. He apologized for breaking the case and replaced it with a new one. I decided at that point that if somebody who probably does this dozens of times a week couldn't succeed, there's no hope of me doing it -- next time I need to access the battery I'll take it back to the store.

From Matt's point of view this is probably "stupid-customer 101" stuff, but he never said anything that implied that I was anything less than a smart person in an unfamiliar situation. He was very friendly and helpful and not at all condescending. While we were waiting to confirm that my battery could hold a charge, I overheard as he helped someone with questions even more basic than mine -- a customer trying to learn how to use a new "plain old phone". He was just as courteous and patient with that customer.

The salesperson told us when we bought the phones that we could come in any time for help; this wasn't just a sell-and-forget operation. Today they delivered on that, and I'll be asking specifically for Matt if I need to go back there again.

A normal "save and exit" with no signs of things gone awry should not result in my saved tabs being gone on restart. Bah. I guess the lesson is to always bookmark all tabs first and clean it up later. What a stupid requirement.

I had several LJ entries open with intent to comment, but I don't know how I would reconstruct that state now. So I'm not ignoring you; I just don't know how to get that state back without doing a lot of digging, which I probably won't do.

Bill Walsh writes about an episode of the Amazing Race in which teams were required to use a manual typewriter to type a supplied passage. The passage contained the number "1". Sadly, Bill notes, the token old people had already been eliminated. Apparently hilarity ensued. (I presume there were no remaining middle-aged people either. I assume that most people of my generation would have known what to do.)

And the title of Bill's post? "LOL 101". :-)

Dear LJ brain trust,

Upgrading a browser is a dangerous thing because you never know what'll happen to your add-ons (or UI experience in general, really) until you get there, and rolling back isn't always smooth. In the past I've used my iBook to test-drive new versions of Firefox before committing on the machine where it really matters, but apparently OS 10.4 is no longer good enough for Firefox (and the iBook isn't good enough for newer operating systems, which I knew when I bought it).

I was hoping that I could just visit the pages at the Mozilla add-ons page for the add-ons I care about to find out the latest versions of Firefox on which they're supported. No dice. I can apply Google one at a time to look for evidence one way or the other -- for example, I found a Stylish user script to change something in the Firefox 8 UI, which suggests it works with Firefox 8 -- but is there a better way?

I know some of you are already using Firefox 7 or 8, so just in case there's overlap in our add-ons, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know if you have direct knowledge (and for which versions of Firefox) for any of the following: AddBlock Plus, Flashblock, Ghostery, Greasemonkey (I assume, but...), HTTPS-Everywhere, Image Zoom, NoScript, Stylish. I use others, but these are the important ones.

Thanks.

PS: I'd also appreciate hints about major UI changes.

To get my TiVo to shift out of DST I reboot it? Is that what I did last time and I managed to forget? There's no way to manually set the time, and apparently no less-invasive way to ask whomever it asks about the time to go do that. Weird.

Lately I've been having to reboot the TiVo once or twice a week to get it to stop losing part of the signal (sometimes it freezes video; other times it drops sound). So I guess I would have noticed this before too much longer. I don't know what the reduction in reliable uptime means -- aging hardware, dropped support for older models, gremlins, or what. But now I can stop adding an hour to recordings because of clock error, which is handy.

We have joined the ranks of the smartphone-enabled. We had been Verizon customers and the Droid Bionic looked tempting on specs, but we ended up going across the street to T-Mobile (it seems safe now that AT&T is unlikely to buy them), where they're selling an all-you-can-eat plan for less than Verizon's metered plans and the staff were very helpful besides. (By comparison, I was only able to use a dummy Bionic at Verizon and the sales guy didn't seem to understand my need to use the phone before deciding.)

We were both having trouble with the touch keyboard; I assume that's something you just have to learn to do. So we both chose the MyTouch Slide (4G), which also has a physical keyboard that we were both able to use easily. I'll try to transition more to the touch keyboard, but meanwhile I can still complete a Google search or type a text message or the like on the first try when I need to.

(In case you're wondering, Dani decided that if he really really wants the iPhone 5 when it eventually comes out, he can buy an unlocked one and switch over to it.)

So what apps are must-haves? (Android 2.3.)

Edit: How do y'all post to LJ from your phones? I downloaded both "Livejournal" and "LJ Beetle"; in both cases I could figure out how to compose a post just fine, but could not find anything like a "post" or "send" button. Once I've got a buffer to send, what then?

I'm posting this to both LJ and G+.

When I joined LJ there were three levels of publicity for posts: public, friends-only, and private. Years later they introduced filters, so you could group your friends into buckets for both reading and access. Either you could not at the time put a post in multiple filters or I did not know that you could, so I ended up creating some hierarchical security filters. For example, some posts would be restricted to the "best buddies" filter, others to the "know pretty well" filter, and others to the "know" filter. A "best buddy" was therefore in all three groups. This is a royal pain to administer on LJ (you can't put a group in a group), and I've been moving to another model now that I can. I may never get around to correcting the older entries, though.

I would like to not have such a mess with G+. I note that G+ (unlike LJ) tells you right there on a person's page what group (er, circle) you've put that person in. I haven't put anybody in multiples, but I assume that if I did they would all show up.

So I'm thinking that what I want to do is to put everybody in exactly one security filter, and then make posts visible to all applicable filters. Instead of having a person in multiple filters, I would have a post in multiple filters. Does this seem right to y'all? Are there other factors I should be thinking about?

On LJ I post almost everything publicly, but it looks like G+, with its ability to make posts to specific individuals, is likely to involve more non-public posting. I can't tell yet. By the time I know, it will be too late to go back and fix my circles if I get this wrong. So I'd like to hear people's thoughts now, while everybody is in one big "acqaintances" bucket awaiting sorting.

Note that I am not talking about reading filters here, and I don't intend to mingle them. I might trust somebody deeply but not want to give his 20 posts per day high priority, y'know? Reading filters can help manage that.

Edit: To clarify, my current thinking is to put each person in exactly one security filter and in one or more reading filters.

Someone sent me an invitation to Google+ last Friday, which didn't work after repeated tries. Yesterday two other people sent me invitations, which arrived tonight (so a one-day delay). This time it worked.

First I had to get a newer version of Firefox. I'd been meaning to move from 3.0 to 3.6 but an extension I like wasn't going to be supported, it said. Turns out they built it into the baseline, so all is fine there. (Rendering in 3.6 looks...different. Can't pinpoint it.) Google and Mozilla are both strongly pushing me to move to Firefox 4, but I remember hearing rumblings of problems there, including problems using LJ. If you're using FF4, please comment about any diminished usability you've encountered. For critical functionality -- operating systems, cars, browsers, etc -- I am not an early adopter.

So ok, I have a G+ account. If you're there and care to let me know you exist, please do. If you've figured out useful patterns, please share that. One I figured out right away (so tell me if there's a reason this is wrong): since you can share a post with any number of circles, stay away from any notions of nested circles or hierarchical circles: given the existence of acquaintances, friends, and best-buddies, put somebody in exactly one of those. Of course, there may be orthogonal circles too; that's different. (E.g. I don't currently see the need to have an SCA circle, but if I did it would include some friends, some best-buddies, and some people who aren't in any other circle.)

Yes, I acknowledge the irony of posting on LJ to discuss G+ best practices. :-)

Edited to add: FF 3.6 annoyingly changed how new tabs are placed. New tabs should go to the far right, not immediately after the current tab, thank you very much. This page has some rather colorful language, but it did tell me how to fix it. (I assume I will have to do that with FF4 and 5, too.)

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