Richard Mondello : Tech

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Mac Users, Don’t Buy from CyberPower Inc.

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3 days, 9 hours ago

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Please digg this story.

I recently purchased an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) from CyberPower Inc. It’s the CP550SL, and it looked pretty good in the store. The box said it was PC and Mac compatible, had a comfortable number of outlets, and had standard shutdown features that worked out-of-the-box with Mac OS X. Great!

For anyone who doesn’t know, a UPS is a glorified power strip, a device that takes one electrical outlet and makes several. In addition, it has a built-in battery to power attached devices in the event of a power failure. Using a usb cable, a UPS connects to a computer so the computer can shut itself down before the UPS runs out of electricity.

I plugged in all of my devices, attached the USB cable from the UPS to my Mac, and plugged the UPS in. After cycling the power on all of my devices, I booted my Mac. Excited to configure the automatic shutdown options (the real reason anyone buys a UPS), I went to the Energy Saver prefpane of System Preferences.

Much to my surprise, all of the UPS options were grayed out. I couldn’t configure anything!

From here, I did the technical thing. I cleared out the user and system caches on my MacBook Pro, rebooted, and tried again. No luck.

At this point, I did the responsible thing - contacted tech support. I sent this email:

I just took the UPS out of the box and installed it with my Mac by plugging the USB cable into my Mac’s USB port. In the System Preferences panel, Energy Saver, I can see the UPS under the drop-down “Settings for:”. When I click that and go to the UPS tab below, I can see the battery level and model, but all of the UPS options (what make the UPS useful, like shutting down the computer after a certain period of time) are grayed out! The UPS is useless unless those options work. I’m an administrative user and the panel is unlocked.

I’m a poweruser, and I’m puzzled as to what the problem could be. Normally these things “just work”. Any help would be appreciated before I have to take this unit back.

This morning, I got this two-sentence response:

The grayed out option is a bug in the latest version of Mac. You can check for an update from Mac.

This response is unacceptable. First and foremost, “the latest version of Mac” doesn’t make sense. The Mac is a computer, the Operating System it runs is Mac OS X, and the company that ships both of those products is Apple Inc. A tech support person would never say,

The grayed out option is a bug in the latest version of Windows. You can check for an update from Windows.

Obviously, he or she would recommend that I check for an update from Microsoft or from Windows Update.

Moving on, there’s no update available from Apple! I’m running the latest version of the Mac OS; the next version, 10.5.5, isn’t expected for some time (more than two weeks). A responsible tech support agent would have told me that CyberPower Inc. is working with Apple to correct the problem and I should expect a fix on a certain date or time-frame. Due to his or her lack of detail, I will likely return this product to the store I purchased it.

The Apple market-share is a small fraction of the computer market. However, we’re a vocal fraction. Until this is resolved, I unequivocally urge Mac users not to purchase any products from CyberPower Inc.

aim buddy updates beta

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Richard Mondello

6 days, 21 hours ago

in Social Media and Tech

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I rarely put post titles in all lower-case, but since this is an article about web 2.0, peer pressure kicked in. I figured I’d try to fit in - you know, be hip? Lower-case letters are “hip”, right?

My Relationship with AOL

I’m weird when it comes to social networking and online presence. In my crowd of “real life” friends, I’m one of very few people with a twitter account. In that respect, I suppose I’m forward-thinking. However, it wasn’t until very recently that I set up a myspace account. My “protest” wasn’t all that visionary, I admit. I needed to suck it up, it being my loathing of poor design, obnoxious advertising, and Rupert Murdoch.

In my computing history, the last five years, I’ve had one constant - AOL Instant Messenger, AIM. From the very beginning, AOL has been in my computing life. My family used AOL as our ISP for a few months before moving up to high-speed Internet access. In that time, AOL’s stronghold on the dial-up market established them as the instant messenger of choice for all of my born-in-the-90’s friends. Although I’ve long since dumped the official AIM client in favor of Pidgin or Adium, you’ll almost always find me on AOL’s network.

AIM Buddy Updates

AOL made a very interesting play that just came to my attention. The company launched a service called Buddy Updates, a status (away) message and buddy profile archiving feature. For someone used to having all content (away messages, buddy profiles) lost forever after alteration, this is a game-changer.

Although I feel ridiculous writing this, some people (rather foolishly) feel that AIM status messages are the last place they can quickly create content that won’t come back to bite them. With the default configuration of AIM Buddy Updates, this is no longer true. Before panicking, note that this feature is opt-out. Just go to the Buddy Updates website and login with your AIM username and password. From that interface, you’ll be able to shut the service off, but AOL’s hoping you’ll browse your friend’s recent activity (everyone), look at your content (just me), or setup the service (setup).

Impact?

AOL, a company that’s hemorrhaging money, is still making plays into Web 2.0. The idea of archived microblogging will be new to many users of AIM, but Buddy Updates still targets the more advanced social media user. That is, at the setup screen, users can add other web services, a la FriendFeed. Big names include Twitter, Blogger, LiveJournal, Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube, and MySpace. Yes, the omission of Facebook eludes me, too.

I have few complaints about FriendFeed, but competition is almost always good. Even if it’s just another redundant web 2.0 service, I think AOL is welcome to the party of content aggregation.

Bitten by DRM on iPhone Applications

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Richard Mondello

1 week, 1 day ago

in Apple and Tech

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Although this is a very bitter blog post, I won’t make it angry. I’m just disappointed in one of my favorite companies. Continue reading ‘Bitten by DRM on iPhone Applications’

MobileFail

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Richard Mondello

2 weeks, 4 days ago

in Apple, Productivity, Rants and Tech

. 0 Comments

A week ago from today, I bought my first cell phone. Using the money I worked for this summer at the Computer Academy, I was able to justify buying, arguably, one of the greatest cell phones on the market. While putting down the cash for the iPhone, I decided to buy a one year subscription to MobileMe. My justification was off-site backup for my precious college work; everything else was a bonus.

I hate MobileMe for one reason and one reason only. Although it’s a great service that I’m finding useful, I’ve had to readjust my entire workflow and calendaring system to accommodate its greatest flaw. While using an iPhone or iPod touch without MobileMe, the user may choose individual iCal calendars to sync to the device. While using MobileMe, in great contrast, calendar sync is all-or-nothing.

I depend on my calendaring system to keep me alive. It’s the hub of my events and small reminders of things I need to do. I use one main calendar, “Events”, to remind me of places I need to be or deadlines I need to meet. Then, I use one called “Alarms”, to remind me to do my Getting Things Done Weekly Review or to do household chores like checking up a water softener. Those calendar events are set up with an alarm that I’d like to see while sitting at my Mac - not while I’m on-the-go with my iPhone.

MobileMe’s system of forcing users to sync all calendars without any way to stop it makes the calendaring feature useless for me. It ruins one of the most important aspects of Getting Things Done (GTD), contexts. In Getting Things Done, David Allen writes that grouping tasks by context (often location) is more appropriate than priority. Having my phone vibrate to remind me to do my weekly review is useless while I’m away from my computer. I’d much rather just have the notification sitting on my Mac for when I return.

Apple, please fix this.

Image credit to the One More Thing blog at CNET.

Job

Published

Richard Mondello

1 month ago

in Computer Academy and Tech

. 3 Comments

I love my job.

The Computer Academy is a four-week program broken into two sections of two weeks. Over the last two weeks, I was a Teaching Assistant in a computer hardware class and a video production class. In the hardware class, the teacher and I helped a few talented young people build computers from scratch. In the video production class, another teacher and I guided similarly talented young people from brainstorming to shooting to editing a short film.

For the next two weeks, I’ll be a Teaching Assistant in another round of the video production class in the morning. An awesome change, though, is that I’m finally teaching a class in the afternoon - web design, something I enjoy. I’m certain that I’ll be learning a lot over the next two weeks, likely more than my students.

We’ll see what happens.

Finder Version 10.5.4

Published

Richard Mondello

2 months, 2 weeks ago

in Apple and Tech

. 2 Comments

Apple released Leopard update 10.5.3 earlier this week. Interestingly, Finder.app reports that it is version 10.5.4, which has yet to be released. Very interesting.