Apple wireless keyboard suddenly failed for a while

For some ultra odd reason, the Apple wireless keyboard suddenly failed for a while today.  Eventually I got it reset up again.  But since it's frustrating.  I sure do not experience the similar thing with regular RF based wireless board.  Anyway, odd.

Spent most of my day to deal with iTune

Realizing that my New iPad started running out of space, I decided that it's time to sync up Apps with iTune.  Here's the problem: when you sync up your iPad with your iTune, you will be asked that have your iPad's Apps all wiped and let iTune repopulate your apps from iTune.  I think this is totally bullshit, particular in this post=PC era.  There should be an option to to exactly the opposite: allow me to wipe the setting on iTune (only for apps, and only for that particular iOS device) and populate it using content in my iPad.  But since Apple is stupid on this issue, I have to work around it. 

So first I right click on my device on iTune, and then choose "Transfer Purchase", that will make sure that iTune has all the apps that I have on my iPad.  This is critical, because if I don't do that, when iTune found that it doesn't have the apps I have on my iPad, it will REMOVE those apps on my iPad and ... here is the important part ... ALSO REMOVE DATA FOR THAT APP.  I can redownload the app, but hell nowhere I can redownload those data.  So make sure your do the "Transfer Purchase" step.

Next I did a Backup in order something goes wrong.  Again, this is mainly for backing up data associate with my apps.   Other than that, the backup doesn't do me much else, cause if you do the app sync, and then do the backup restore, you will roll back to before as if NO app sync was happened.  At first I was thinking of using the restore to "restore" my folder setting on Home Screens.  Well, it didn't work.

After the backup, I did the App sync.  And then the painful part:  putting all apps in the right folder because iTune will  NOT Preserve your folder setting.  Yes, this is so ultra stupid.  There is a reason why so many people hate iTunes.

Speaking of hating iTunes, I found that wireless sync is so unreliable.  I can spent tons of time organizing apps on iTunes, but when I then do a wireless sync, it will always fail.  Eventually I found out that the only way make sure that app sync works is use a sync cable.  Once again, stupid.

Cloud Drive - What for what

(Notice that this list ONLY MAKE SENSE TO ME because of the special restriction at my work place.)

With the release of Google Drive, cloud storage war is heating up.  Here's my decision tree on when to use what cloud drive.

Dropbox: Skip, because it's been blocked by my workplace

SkyDrive: Skip, because it's been blocked by my workplace

ZumoDrive:

• Only provide 1Gb  of space.  Not enough to do much useful stuff.
• Still it has a good audio player support on iPad, so maybe I can use it to host some audiobook.

Box.Net:

•  Good for hosting ebook, and documnet.
• Not so good for music since the music player on iPad isn't good.

SugarSync

• Has  a good iPad audio player, so great for hosting songs.

So I restored from backup

Since there's no WiFi sync for iOS 4.2.1 on my iPod Touch, I realized that eventually I need to connect to iTune to do sync, so I might as well do it now.  And then I was thinking, maybe I'll just give it a shot and see what the backup restore brings me.  Well, the backup restore gave me back my game status for the games I was playing so far, like PacMan Champion Edition and Space Invader Infinite, but I also lost some setting that I set up a while ago.  Well, give and take I guess.

Finally, time to upgrade my iPod Touch

Years ago, I had some bad experience running iOS 4 on my iPod Touch 2nd generation.  So I rolled back to iOS 3.1.x and also had it jail broken.  Since then iPad was released, and all my iOS needs was satisfied by that.  So I pretty much ignored my iPod Touch since then.

Recently, I dug up the device again, and found it still pretty usable.  The problem, though, was that there were a lot of stuff that I couldn't do on it, including:

• Not able to update software
• Not able to run a lot of apps (since most of them no longer support iOS 3.x

So I decided to give iOS 4.x one more try.  I updated the OS with iOS 4.2.1, which is the latest I can get, and probably the LAST OS that Apple will support 2nd gen iPod Touch on.  

So far the installation was pretty smooth, I even tried to backup, but later decided that I don't even want to restore since I don't want to accidentally restore some junk into the device.

I downloaded the firmware "iPad1,1_4.2.1_8C148_Restore.ipsw" and tried to do "Update" with iTune, but it kept giving me error message.  So I chose to do a resotre and everything seemed to work out EXCEPT at the very end, when it took forever to connect to iTune Store.  After a few trial, I finally got it working.

The user experience on the iPod Touch seemed pretty OK.  A lot of apps that didn't work on iOS 3.1.x works now.  All my saved game on PacMan Champion edition and Space Invader Infinite are all gone, but I don't even dare to restore anymore.  As long as Instacast, GoodReader, AudioGalaxy and Air Video work OK, I am good.  This is, after all, just one gizmo that I want to play with, and use it to get an experience of what it would be like to use iPhone.  And that's it.  Nothing more.

Why I am not buying Pages, Numbers and Keynote iOS apps

I wasn't particularly satisfy with other iOS Office apps, but Pages, Numbers and Keynote are definitely not in my list of purchase consideration because:

• They ONLY support Microsoft Office file importing and NO way to convert documents back to Microsoft Office file format.
• They ONLY support iCloud and iTune file export, while others apps all support Google Doc and Dropbox and more.
• Feature set isn't impressive as US9.99 apps.

The more I look around, the more I think I am stuck with chosing between QuickOffice Pro HD and Document To Go Premium.

Finding the best iPad Office app

I've been searching for a good all around Office app for my iPad.  And so far there's a lot of "good enough" apps, but none particularly good one.

QuickOffice Pro HD seems nice for it's strong online storage support, until I found out that the experience of inserting image in documents was pretty terrible.  It is still by far the best for format support, but the moment you put image into the picture, suddenly the app becomes less than stellar.

Document To Go Premium also seemed ok on the first galance, but then the UI seems clumsy compare with QuickOffice.  It has less cloud storage support, less Office file format support (no Excel 2010 for instance).  Someone in review said it right: Document To Go does better on PowerPoint, while QuickOffice does better on Word.

Office2 HD seems cheaper and have a OK set of feature, but reviews were terrible.  And again, doesn't support enough file formats.

So basically, I am now back to square one.  I need to take a look at Apple's Page, KeyNotes and Number and see if they are strong enough the candidates.

Finally it's time to upgrade iPad 1 to iOS 5.0.1

My iPad 1 was stuck at iOS 4 for quite a while.  Today I decided to finally move it to iOS 5 so that I can continue using it for jailbreak experiment, and at the same time able to levergae iCloud feature.

The whole process took me a whole night plus the next morning, and eventually I got my iPad 1 running in iOS 5.1 and jailbroken now.  Here's what I learned along the way.

• I tried my very best to jailbreak to iOS 5.0.1 since as of this moment iOS 5.1 unthethered is still RnD Stage.  Eventually I found out that I couldn't get it working as I wanted.  First of all,  it seems like that in order to make the iOS 5.0.1 restore success, I have to have tinyumbrella-5.10.14.exe running in order to block Apple from checking and validating.  I also watched this "How To Fix TinyUmbrella Error "System(PID:4) Must Be Killed!!"" to get TinyUmbrella running.  I also downloaded the firmware from here for iPad 1.  Still keep getting errors like 1604 error, and not even iREB can help bypassing the 16xx problems.  I was so fustrated, and eventually gave up, and just upgrade my iPad 1 to iOS 5.1, did the thethered jailbreak, thinking that I super rarely reboot my iPad anyway.
  
• I still have hope that someday I can do iPad 1 with iOS5 unthethered jailbreak.  Same, however, can't be say for my two A5 based iOS devices (iPad 2 and New iPad).  So as of now, they are still non-jailbreakable, which is why I keep my iPad 1.
  
• My stretegy of my iPad 1 is to keep it very very simple.  I will NOT install anything in it unless I must have them on it.  My experience of my iPad 2 and New iPad is that I installed too much crap in them, and always think like "maybe someday I will have time to enjoy these apps".  Such days rarely happen unless I really force it to happen.
  
• Once I have iOS 5.1 setup, I used redsn0w_win_0.9.10b7 to jailbreak, and the process was super easy.  Afteward I installed Installous, and then some JB apps, and found that all my settings are still there.  Awesome. 

iExplorer does required QuickTime

I need to backup some stuff from iExplorer (used to be called iPhone Explorer), so I installed it, ran it and found that it was not working.  After spending half an hour to diagnose, I eventually found out the reason: installing iTune doesn't automatically install QuickTime, and QuickTime was not on my machine.  So I went and download QuickTime, and I could successfully launch iExplorer then.

4G does have some advantage

Well finally the 4G plan is over.  I tried to use as much bandwidth as possible, and found that comparing with my home broadband and AT&T 3G, Verizon 4G does make video streaming a much better experience.  Too bad that also means that your 4G dataplan will cost you a fortune.  Better stay away from that for now, and use 4G only when I really need to use Personal Hotspot.

Data sucker

Since today is the last day of my Verizon LTE 4G data plan, I decided to try some funky experience.

First, video.  I tried playing Conan app to watch 15 minutes of the show, and it sucked up almost 200Mb+ data in such short amount of time.

Next, I tried connecting to company VPN to do a few regular business activities, including getting email, get lastest from subversion, and IM.  After a while (like 30 minutes), I checked data consumption.  100Mb data was used.  Fair.  I think as long as it's about 1Gb each day, for emergenecy business use, about $15 price is still acceptable.

So I actually do not need LTE Personal Hotspot

When I brought my New iPad, one of the biggest reason why I chose Verizon LTE version over the AT&T version was because of the personal hotspot feature.  I fact, I paid US$30 to try out 4G LTE in the last 29 days.

My verdict: I don't really need 4G, and I don't really need Personal Hotspot.  So far I didn't find the so called 4G speed any faster than the 3G speed on my iPad2.  And then, I almost never used Personal Hotspot expect one time I tried it with my HTC Desire phone, one time with my Nintendo 3DS and found it worked pertty well.  I tried using the WiFi feature on the Nintendo DS side, but found that the security setting didn't match.

So I went ahead and canceled the auto renew feature.  After that, I still have one more day tomorrow to use it.  In fact, I am planning on trying VPN to my office and do some work with it.  Let's see how it works out.

Finally, one album one cover in iTune

I was always frustrated by seeing songs treated as separate album in my iTune library.  Today I finally decided to do something about it.  So I looked into the internet, and found that the reason I got that problem is because these songs have different album artists.  Suddenly it becomes obvious, because a lot of these albums are by various artists.  So the solution is this:

• In iTune, select Album List.
• You will found that there are songs that are supposed to be in the same album, thus list together in album list, but then each has a album entry.  Select those songs, right click, and select "Get Info".
• Now change the "Album Artist" of all these songs to a same value.  I use "Various Artist".  Notice that it won't mess up the existing artist for the song.  It just give iTune the signal that "hey you can treat all these songs belonging to the same album, because one album has only one album artist.  Commit the change.
• If you found that nothing has been changed, that's mostly because (especially in Windows machine) the file is protected and thus cannot be changed by the system.  What I usually do is selecting my whole music folder in the file system, select property, select security, and apply all the right to "Users", and that usually solves the problem.
• The BEST part of this is that the change is made on the file level, direct on the ID3 Tag of the file, so that you put these songs files in another music management software or any mp3 music player, and they will recognize the setting you made.  Your hard work is being preserved and not stuck in the Apple world.

Odd, how come they all working OK now?

A few days ago I was trying to set up iTune so that Home Sharing and WiFi Sync would work between my Windows 7 (running on MacMini) my New iPad.  After rebooting both the OS and then rebooting my iPad, the setting still wasn't working right.  Eventually, I gave up.

So imagine how surprise I was this morning when I found that both Home Sharing and WiFi Sync were working on my New iPad this morning.  It seems like the iTune "need sometime to sort it out", and eventually got everything working ok.

Oh well.

Home Sharing the hell

I followed my own advice by turning off and then turning on the Home Sharing, and yet the iTune Home Sharing still didn't show up properly on my iPad(s).  You know what, screw it, there are tons of other ways for me to play music on my home network without going thru iTune ecosystem anyway, like using FileBrowser or AudioGalaxy.  Apple constantly fails to do network stuff right.

By the way, I am using Windows 7.  Yeah, blame Windows 7, Microsoft sucks.

On the other hand, WiFi Sync seemed to work OK.  It's just that it isn't as "automatic" as I want, and still involve me pressing the button in order to execute it.