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

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.

Yahoo Finance Blendle review8/10/2016: 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?

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Weekly output: wireless-service pricing, Google Calendar notifications

I suppose I should be watching the Oscars now–but first there was dinner, cleaning up and then this little routine. For what it’s worth, I’ve watched a surprisingly high number of this year’s nominees given my father-of-a-toddler status. But aside from The Imitation Game, paying for a ticket at a movie theater wasn’t involved: I saw The Grand Budapest Hotel on a plane (appropriately enough, given all the travel in that flick), watched Unbroken at a Comcast-hosted Newseum screening, saw CitizenFour as part of a security conference, and caught Guardians of the Galaxy and The Lego Movie on DVD.

Maybe I’ll catch up on a few more Oscar-nominated movies during all the air travel I have coming up: Saturday, I depart for Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and then after a week at home I’m off to SXSW in Austin.

Yahoo Tech column on wireless prices2/17/2015: Why You Don’t Understand Wireless Rate Plan Prices, Yahoo Tech

This get-off-my-screen rant about confusing, contrived pricing schemes for wireless service–basically, I had to vent after the last few updates to the Wirecutter’s guide to wireless carriers–has already yielded some simplification. T-Mobile realized they hadn’t removed a description of an old rate plan from a chart (it’s been replaced with a prepaid plan that’s not nearly as attractive) and updated that. We, in turn, need to add a note about that to our story.

2/22/2015: How to limit Google Calendars notifications, USA Today

It took me writing this cheat sheet to finally go in and edit my own Google Calendar notification settings so I wouldn’t get pinged via e-mail, in-app and in-browser notifications for an event invitation I hadn’t even responded to, much less accepted.

Weekly output: Facebook and Twitter transparency (x2), cord cutting, TV technology, Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook

This week was looking super-productive until I had two fillings replaced during Wednesday’s visit to the dentist–and then the anesthetic and what looks like an adverse reaction to it had me out of commission for most of the rest of the day.

8/19/2014: Facebook, Twitter, and What a Social Network Owes Its Members, Yahoo Tech

This column followed up on extensive complaints about a perceived lack of visibility of news from Ferguson, Mo., on Facebook by suggesting how much Facebook and Twitter had to learn about being more transparent and accountable in how they filter and display information. The very day it ran, Twitter changed how it presents tweets to include those that had only been favorited by people you follow, plus others that it might deem interesting. And the sole announcement of this major shift was a revised tech-support note–not a blog post, not a tweet. Very funny, Twitter.

8/19/2014: How to Turn Off Facebook’s Algorithm … Temporarily, Yahoo Tech

This sidebar outlines a few ways to opt out of algorithmic filtering on Facebook and Twitter. With Twitter’s shift Tuesday, the post already looks out of date.

NowU cord-cutting post8/19/2014: How to untie yourself from cable TV, NowU

This long explainer is only about the 10th or 15th piece I’ve written about cord cutting, but it also benefits from a lot more experience with getting TV only via an antenna and various Internet sites, services and apps.

8/19/2014: The big picture: Choosing your next TV, NowU

The tl;dr version of this companion piece: Don’t worry too much, most TV sets are pretty good these days.

8/21/2014: Facebook and Twitter, Alice’s Coffee House With Johnny Molson

Listeners in the Springfield, Ill., market got to hear me talk about the transparency of these two social networks on Thursday morning with host Johnny Molson.

8/24/2014: How to get Google Calendar, Outlook to sync up, USA Today

This column–at least the third I’ve written about the changing state of sync between Google Calendar and third-party calendar apps–started with a message a reader sent to my Facebook page. See, I actually do read that stuff!

Weekly output: phone unlocking, iOS and Android video, Google Calendar sync, Tim Berners-Lee

Work finds me in Austin this weekend for the SXSW Interactive festival. I’ll have more about that over the next few days; for now, here’s what I have to show for myself, professionally speaking.

3/5/2013: Unlock And Load: White House Picks Phone Policy Fight, Disruptive Competition  Project

The White House surprised many people with its favorable response to a petition seeking the legalization of unlocking cell phones without carrier permission–it said “yes” and then endorsed the idea that carriers shouldn’t be denying service to unlocked phones from other operators. The latter is a somewhat novel idea in wireless but has been been the law in wired since the FCC’s underappreciated “Carterfone” ruling of 1968. But there are important caveats to the White House’s statement, and noting them helped push this post past 1,000 words.

3/9/2013: Work around video playback issues on your mobile device, USA Today

Like many of my USAT columns, this one started with a question from one of my relatives–my mother-in-law couldn’t watch a video of her grandson in her Yahoo Mail account on our iPad’s copy of Safari. The piece also has a tip updating advice I gave in November about sychronizing Google Calendar with an iOS device.

TBL BoingBoing post3/9/2013: Tim Berners-Lee: The Web needs to stay open, and Gopher’s still not cool., Boing Boing

The inventor of the Web had some interesting things to say in his talk at SXSW; after tweeting out highlights of the keynote, I pitched my editor at Boing Boing via Twitter direct message (making this my fastest salesmanship ever) and wrote up this recap later that afternoon.

On Sulia, you could have read me noting the White House’s phone-unlocking petition response (and, in retrospect, reading a little too much out of it) drawing a lesson for tech journalists from the outrage over EA’s botched SimCity launch, called out two still-absent features in Google’s updated Maps apps for iOS, and applaud the seemingly-impossible success of the free WiFi at SXSW.

Belated updates to this year’s stories

You don’t have to run a correction when a story changes after you’ve written about it–but it is polite to follow up. Here’s a not-so-short list of updates to stories I’ve done this year.

Old stories sepia toneWhen I wrote that Google’s new, unified privacy policy would almost certainly be recast to let users opt out of having the company assemble a detailed portrait of them based on their use of separate Google services, I was wrong; that has yet to happen.

Sonic.net’s groundbreaking fiber-to-the-home service–a steal at $69.95 a month for 1 billion bits per second–seems to be off to a fine start in Sonoma County, but the planned expansion to San Francisco’s Sunset District is still on the way. It hasn’t shown up as an advertised offering on this Santa Rosa, Calif., Internet provider’s home-services page either.

Remember when adjacent-friend-discovery apps were going to blow up after their moment in the sun at SXSW in March? Didn’t happen. Facebook bought Glancee (and has yet to do much publicly with its technology), while Highlight seems to have fallen off the map (maybe I’m not hanging out with the right crowd?).

The ethics of outsourced manufacturing, fortunately, have stayed in the headlines since I wrote about them in March for CEA. And we may even be seeing legitimate progress, to judge from the New York Times’ story earlier this week recounting upgrades in pay and working conditions at contract manufacturers Foxconn and Quanta’s Chinese factories.

I’m still waiting to see comparable progress in liberating e-books from “digital rights management.” The sci-fi publisher Tor/Forge–a subsidiary of Macmillan–went DRM-free in July, but other branches of the major publishing houses have clung to this self-defeating measure. 

After saying so many good things about the car2go car-sharing service–and seeing that story get picked up in a few other places–I have to confess that I, ahem, haven’t used the service since. Capital Bikeshare is even more convenient and cheaper for trips under two miles, plus I need to make my way into the District to jump into one of car2go’s Smart fortwo vehicles.

I tempered my praise for Sprint’s Evo 4G LTE by wondering how long its users would wait to get Google’s software updates. Answer: almost six months, the time it took HTC and Sprint to deliver the Android 4.1 release Google shipped in June.

I was pretty sure I’d buy a Nexus 7 tablet after liking it as much as I did in July. But now that I own an iPad mini, that purchase seems like it would be redundant. Am I making a mistake there?

After teeing off on Apple Maps in the first chapter of my iPhone 5 review for CNNMoney.com, I have to give Apple credit for fixing the two worst flaws I called out. It now lists the correct address for the Kennedy Center as its first search result and provides a route to Dulles Airport that don’t cross any runways. But it still doesn’t know about Yards Park or the new 11th Street Bridges across the Anacostia–and the latter omission means its directions will now send you on a closed stretch of freeway.

My upbeat review of Samsung’s $249 Google Chromebook noted some build-quality concerns, in the form of a loose corner of the screen bezel. I found out the hard way that it’s more delicate than that; its LCD is now broken, and I don’t even know how. (We do have a two-year-old at home, but it’s also possible that I dropped something on it.)

My advice about enabling multiple-calendar Google Calendar sync on an iOS device by setting up your Google account as a Microsoft Exchange account will soon be obsolete. Effective January 30, Google will no longer support Exchange syncing on new setups (although existing ones will still work). Fortunately, it’s also posted instructions to enable multiple-calendar sync without the Exchange workaround.

3/23/2013: Updated the link for the car2go review after the post vanished in a site redesign and, for CMS-driven reasons that escape me, could not be re-posted at the same address. 

Weekly output: Chromebook, newspapers and search engines, Amtrak, photo spheres, Google Calendar, Gmail

What’s not on this list? Any gift-guide pieces or reports about Black Friday sales. I can’t say I miss those two staples of Thanksgiving-week tech coverage… and yet I feel vaguely guilty about dodging them.

11/19/2012: Google’s cheaper Chromebook: enough of a computer, Boing Boing

Having this fall’s implementation by Samsung of Google’s Chromebook laptop concept priced for half of last summer’s made the results easier to like. But Samsung also gave this $249 model better battery life and faster performance, while Google contributed more offline-compatible Web apps. I’m tempted to pick up one to have as a backup computer, which was not the case a year ago.

11/19/2012: A Business Perspective on the Snippet Tax, Disruptive Competition Project

My second post for this tech-policy blog picked up where a 2009 rant over stupid newspaper publishers whining about news-search sites had left off. Now, it’s news organizations in other countries complaining that Google News and sites like it are taking away readers; I’m not any more persuaded by that logic three years later.

11/20/2012: Amtrak’s New App: Does It Actually Make Travel Easier?, The Atlantic Cities

I like trains, and I like smartphone apps that simplify my life a little. I wasn’t sure that Amtrak’s offering for iOS and Android would be worth keeping around, but after using it to book and manage a round-trip from D.C. to NYC, I see where the railroad is going with it.

On Wednesday, USA Today was kind enough to publish a condensed version of last weekend’s Q&A about adding a Start menu to Windows 8 in its print edition. That was the first time I’ve appeared in a newspaper of any kind since Roll Call ran a version of a post I did for the Consumer Electronics Association just over a year a ago , and my first spot in a general-interest paper since I logged off from the Post in April of 2011.

11/24/2012: Spherical Panoramas from a Phone, Discovery News

Writing about a feature confined to a new Android release that most users of Google’s operating system won’t see for months, or ever, seems unfair, but the 4.2 edition’s “photo sphere” option genuinely intrigued me. Alas, I initially neglected to note that the older iOS app Photosynth–from a Redmond, Wash.-based software developer called Microsoft you may have heard of–can also generate interactive spherical panoramas from a phone’s camera.

11/25/2012: How to sync your Google calendar with your iPad, USA Today

Credit for this Q&A item goes to my wife, who asked me about this problem on her iPad. Credit for the tip about a new Gmail search option goes to the Google Operating System blog, an old favorite of mine, which brought that change to my attention last week.

A CalendarAgent cure

A runaway, memory-eating process in Mac OS X Mountain Lion that I’ve whined about on Twitter and in last weekend’s USAToday.com column seems to have returned to sanity.

At first, this CalendarAgent program had been a mild-mannered citizen on both my MacBook Air and on my older iMac. But a day or two after Discovery News posted my generally positive review of Mountain Lion, the iMac started locking up as CalendarAgent devoured as much as three to four gigabytes until I force-quit it with OS X’s Activity Monitor app.

The problem went away long enough for a cautious endorsement of Activity Monitor in Sunday’s USAT piece, but then it resumed. After a few days of getting bored with killing off this process two or three times an hour, I was trying to remember how to yank its execute privileges when I thought to check the Console app.

The repeated errors listed in this troubleshooting tool indicated that CalendarAgent was choking on my wife’s shared Google Calendar feed. I’d subscribed to that in Lion’s iCal without any issues (parenthood requires a non-trivial coordination of schedules), but Mountain Lion apparently had other opinions. I deleted the subscription from ML’s Calendar app,  added it back in the BusySync software I use to publish my own set of calendars to Google, and was soon treated to the welcome and overdue sight of CalendarAgent’s memory allocation dropping back to normal levels.

I still don’t know what exactly went wrong on the iMac; the MacBook Air didn’t have this problem even after I subscribed directly to my wife’s schedule in its Calendar app. Adding it under the “delegation” option for the Google account I’d already configured in that copy of Mountain Lion–but which I hadn’t set up on the iMac–didn’t result in any memory leaks either.

But if you’re tired of seeing CalendarAgent hold up your Mac, try changing how Google calendars get to the computer. Instead of adding a direct .ics subscription via Calendar’s Edit menu, subscribe to that feed in your Google Calendar, add that Google account in System Preferences’ Mail, Contacts and Calendars pane and you should see the subscription when you click Calendar’s “Calendars” button look under “Delegates.” Or revert from the delegation approach to a direct subscription. Let me know if that yields any better results.