About robpegoraro

Freelance journalist who covers (and is often vexed by) computers, gadgets and other things that beep.

Weekly output: AR in academia, Yosemite in VR, messaging apps, mobile-app nags, municipal broadband

Posted on August 28, 2016 by robpegoraro

I haven’t traveled anywhere for work since the end of June, but tomorrow I depart for Berlin to cover the IFA trade show for my fifth year in a row. My passport has collected a lot more stamps since August 2012 and I know I won’t feel too lost when I emerge from a U-Bahn station, but the prospect of temporarily putting 4,000-plus miles between me and my family still leaves me with mixed emotions.

8/23/2016: Higher Ed’s Augmented-Reality Ambitions Highlight Infrastructure Requirements, EdTech

This short, technically-inclined piece allowed me to quiz an old Post colleague–Dan Pacheco, now a professor at Syracuse University’s journalism school–and follow up with a University of Maryland professor I met last winter.

8/25/2016: You can visit Yosemite National Park with Obama … in VR, Yahoo Finance

I got an advance look at this virtual-reality tour of Yosemite narrated by President Obama. Having myself immersed in a place I haven’t seen since 2001 filled me with an almost painful level of nostalgia, so I had no choice but to reference a certain Mad Men episode.

8/26/2016: Here’s why email is still the best messaging app, Yahoo Finance

Months after the idea landed in my head, I finally wrote this get-off-my-lawn post about the cognitive load of having too many messaging apps on my phone.

8/27/2016: Avoid downloading mobile apps with these iPhone tricks, USA Today

I spaced about marketing this Q&A item about getting mobile browsers to impersonate desktop browsers because the column went up on USAT’s site on Saturday, not the usual Sunday. Note to my editors: I’ll get into PR mode about it tomorrow morning, I promise.

8/27/2016: Municipal broadband, KGO

I talked to the San Francisco station’s Jason Middleton about the sorry state of broadband competition and the prospects of municipal broadband increasing our choices. Note to myself: The next time a radio host gets my last name wrong, correct that immediately instead of waiting for the right moment.

Unfinished summer business: updating my Flickr self

Posted on August 27, 2016 by robpegoraro

August is almost wrapped up, which makes it particularly sad that I still don’t have a Flickr album up for SXSW… as in, the schmoozefest of a conference that happens in March.

I didn’t mean to let things slide this badly. But with Easter coming only a week after my trip to Austin, it was too easy to let photo-sharing chores wait. And then I didn’t take care of this in the two weeks and change I had between Easter and jetting off to Hong Kong for the IFA Global Press Conference–at which point, my photo debt had begun compounding.

You would think that a photo-sharing service with mobile apps that automatically upload your photos would ease sharing them with the world. But one of my most frequent edits, straightening a photo so the horizon is level, turns out to be maddeningly difficult in a touchscreen interface–unless you lift your fingertip off the display at just the right instant, the image will yaw to the right or left for a moment more and skew your adjustment.

I also suffer from the disease of needing to caption every picture before exposing it to a world that usually has better things to do. So even though I no longer usually need to transfer images from a camera to a desktop app and then geotag and caption them before uploading them to a photo-album site (which itself still beats the picture-sharing options of the 1960s), I haven’t gotten any more efficient at presenting my photographic output.

Hell, I haven’t even remembered to post a newer profile photo at Flickr. If the blurry nature of that shot doesn’t make it clear, the photo in question dates to 2004.

(For anybody asking “Why Flickr?”: Instagram wasn’t an option on my series of Android phones until 2012–and it remains a bad fit for a dedicated camera. I settled on Flickr years before I had any thought of writing for a Yahoo site but continue to enjoy it, even as alternatives have arisen. I mean, Google Photos is pretty great, but don’t I give that company enough business already?)

Weekly output: MLB regional blackouts, Sprint and T-Mobile “unlimited” plans (x2), Tech Night Owl

Posted on August 21, 2016 by robpegoraro

This week brought the unusual experience of a story getting taken down a few hours after its appearance. The post in question covered the regional blackouts that prevent MLB.tv subscribers from watching their home team online and my use of an alternative domain-name service called Unlocator.com to work around them. I’ve expressed my annoyance at the fan-hostile nature of regional blackouts before, but this story was my first to document how to defeat them… and Yahoo Finance’s editor-in-chief thought it went too far in telling people just how to break the rules, so he decided to take it down.

Before you ask, I don’t know what Major League Baseball thinks of the story, as I haven’t heard anything from anybody there since the background conversation I had with a publicist Monday afternoon in which I recounted my Unlocator use. I do know that I’m nowhere near the first person to write a how-to about beating blackouts–see, for example, this April piece from the Los Angeles Times’ Chris Erskine. I’m going to chalk this up to my not reading my client correctly.

8/19/2016: T-Mobile and Sprint’s new unlimited plans aren’t exactly unlimited, Yahoo Finance

As part of August’s stubborn refusal to act like the slow news month it’s supposed to be, Sprint and T-Mobile each introduced new, cheaper “unlimited” data plans that each contain significant limits (like an absence of usable tethering at T-Mo). Most subscribers should avoid these offers, but many may find them tempting because their own phones make it difficult to track how much data they use.

8/20/2016: August 20, 2016 — Rob Pegoraro and Jeff Gamet, Tech Night Owl

I talked with host Gene Steinberg about those new price plans, the state of municipal broadband, and Windows 10’s first anniversary. I would have sounded less positive about Win 10 had I known before the recording of this podcast that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update broke many third-party webcams.

8/21/2016: Unlimited plans at Sprint, T-Mobile have limited appeal, USA Today

My editors at USAT wanted me to compare these two new offerings to the unlimited-data deals they replaced and to the other plans available at each carrier. Sprint’s all-you-can-browse deal came out of this exercise looking a good deal better than T-Mobile’s.

An iOS mystery: Where and when will Gboard not appear?

Posted on August 17, 2016 by robpegoraro

The fact that I own an Android phone has rarely been more obvious than when I use my iPad–and I try to “gesture type” as if I were using my smaller mobile device’s onscreen keyboard.

The arrival of iOS 8 and its support of third-party keyboards made tracing a path from letter to letter to enter text not just a pointless exercise but a possibility. And with iOS 9’s less buggy support, it’s become a less annoying possibility, but still not a sure thing.

That’s become clear to me since Google shipped its Gboard keyboard app in May and, after a satisfactory tryout, I made that free app the default keyboard on my iPad mini 4.

Most of the time, Gboard appears whenever I touch a text field. I can gesture-type with ease (except when I’m holding the tablet sideways), and I could season my prose with emojis and GIFs were I, you know, 20 years younger.

But Apple’s built-in keyboard keeps on surprising me by resurfacing on its own. To get a better sense of how often that happens, I tried taking notes on this behavior this week and reached three conclusions:

• The system works more often than I gave it credit for. The departures from the norm stick out, but keeping track of them made me realize how rare they are.

• In certain cases, the stock keyboard shows up because it’s supposed to. As an Apple tech-support note explains, iOS’s keyboard automatically takes over in secure data-entry fields like the password dialogs of the App Store and Amazon apps.

• In rare occasions, iOS does get confused about keyboards for no apparent reason. A tap of the address bar in Safari would sometimes invoke the stock keyboard instead of Gboard, while the Duolingo language-tutorial app proved itself capable of alternating between the iOS and Google keyboards in a single session.

It’s tempting to blame Apple, given the iffy quality of much of its software. But I can’t rule out this being Google’s fault. I mean, as good as Gboard is, I still had to do a copy-and-paste job from a Web site to enter the symbol that best captures my latest diagnosis of the situation:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Weekly output: Blendle, municipal broadband, OS X Calendar crashes

Posted on August 14, 2016 by robpegoraro

I spent last week on vacation, more or less, with my wife’s family in the Bay Area. I didn’t succeed in avoiding work completely, but I did manage to compress my laptop time to maybe a day and two-thirds of effort. To carve out a little more downtime, I also refrained from answering non-urgent e-mails; if yours was one of those, I should be able to answer it in the next few days.

8/10/2016: This ambitious new service wants to be the ‘Spotify of news’ — but falls short, Yahoo Finance

After a few months of trying out Blendle, a news app that lets you make micropayment for news stories, an otherwise slow news week meant it was time to review the service. After the story ran, Blendle spokesman Michaël Jarjour wrote in to say that about two dozen news sites in Germany and the Netherlands had added a special Blendle button that allows readers to pay for a story without leaving that site–a good way to make this app less invisible–and that the company was working to bring the same feature to U.S. publishers.

8/11/2016, We need more high-speed internet, but politicians are blocking the way, Yahoo Finance

I worried that the comments here would skew towards denouncing the socialist evil of collective ownership of the means of watching cat videos, but instead people lined up to complain about their Internet provider.

8/14/2016: Cure a calendar crash on Mac, USA Today

This column was curiously popular with people on my Facebook page–although my share of it only reached 348 people as of now, nine of them gave it a thumbs-up “Like” or the rarer, more coveted “Love” reaction. Was it something I said?

August lawns are the worst

Posted on August 13, 2016 by robpegoraro

April is when moderate temperatures and regular rain conspire to make me dare to dream of a perfected lawn. And then every August, weeks of inadequate rain and blast-furnace heat leave that dream withered.

It doesn’t even bug me much that most of the yard has turned a shade of greenish-brown. That should come back to life by late September, and in the meantime my lawn looks no worse than most of the rest on the block.

(The neighbors who had sprinkler systems installed, something we are too cheap to do, live farther down the street or around the corner.)

But I could do without seeing cracks spread across large expanses of the yard. Since these signs of drought happen in the same place, they represent my annual reminder that I didn’t do enough to cultivate a thicker lawn when I had the chance in the fall or spring.

The “hell strip” between the sidewalk and the street appears even worse, with more than half of it overrun by weeds anxious to demonstrate why yard grass should be selected out by this climate. (At least the heat and dryness seem to have taken some of the fight out of the Tree of Hell seedlings that invade the front lawn every July.) I should dig out the entirety of that strip and either re-seed it from scratch or put in some abuse-tolerant ground cover.

But as I type this, the thermometer on the front porch is showing about 94 degrees, and I just can’t be bothered. It’s August. All of this can wait.

Weekly output: social-media mimicry, T-Mobile’s network, Windows 10 and Android notifications, Windows 10’s reception

Posted on August 7, 2016 by robpegoraro

Last week, I had Bernie Sanders dead-enders and WikiLeaks zealots angry at me. This week, it’s Windows 7 users. I have to imagine that some of these embittered Microsoft customers also voted for Sanders and have WikiLeaks bookmarked, which I guess means they’re now shopping for voodoo dolls to name after me.

8/3/2016: 3 features that social networks should never, ever borrow from one another, Yahoo Finance

I had been sketching out an essay along these lines for a while when Instagram copied a Snapchat feature almost wholesale, giving me a news peg on which to hang this post.

8/4/2016: T-Mobile now has America’s second-best availability, new ranking says, Yahoo Finance

We changed the headline on this after AT&T PR complained about the use of the word “coverage” in it when OpenSignal takes care to say they only track LTE availability over time, not over geography. That struck me as a fair objection, so we revised the hed.

8/7/2016: Get Windows 10 in touch with your Android phone, USA Today

I was working on a different topic, which you may read next weekend or the week after, when I decided I could get this week’s column done quicker by devoting it to a walk-through of a nifty cross-platform notification system available in Windows 10’s new Anniversary Update, an upgrade I’d just installed with zero issues on two tablets I’m testing for an upcoming story.

8/7/2016: Windows 10 isn’t perfect — but it’s time to let go of Windows 7, Yahoo Finance

Reader reaction has been pretty negative to this piece. Some of it is fair–like objecting to Microsoft’s problem-monitoring telemetry or the company’s pushy presentation of this update–but to call the 2009-era Win 7 a better fit for the hardware and Internet of today strikes me as a serious reach. If you had an update to Windows 10 hobble your computer, I’m sorry for your loss. But I’ve heard that complaint about every single Windows release ever, and my own experience and the prior reader input I’ve seen suggests Win 10 is a less risky upgrade than its predecessors

Rob Pegoraro

Occasional shop talk about journalism, technology and a few other things

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