iPad mini 5 (2019)

I got the very first iPad years and years ago. I love it but I never bought any of the later iPads mainly because it's just too cumbersome. It's not as convenient as a smart phone that I can take any where and pick up any time, and no matter how much Apple promotes the Pro models, it's not as convenient as having an actual notebook. I kinda like the iPad mini, but I have a Kindle Paperwhite for the ebooks, and never really found any use for a tablet.

However, as I got older I found that I don't really want to stare at my notebook or phone so much any more, and sometimes I don't want to sit in front of the TV. So when the iPad Air 3 and iPad mini 5 came out, I decided to get one again. 10.5" screen on the iPad Air 3 is nice, but I feel a smaller tablet would be more convenient and I could carry it around with me. But my main reasons for getting an iPad: using Zwift when I'm at the gym, watch Netflix without squinting and getting a headache, and play tablet games (ha-ha).

Except for a brief time when I paid for Apple Music around three years ago, It's been more than seven years since I last looked at the App Store, and the first thing I noticed was that all the 99 cents apps have disappeared. Everything costs so much, and since I've used Android these times and paid little attention to the Apple side of things, it's filled with apps that I've never heard of. Some apps in the paid apps section offered me to download them though. I looked and realized I've bought many of them back when I had the first iPad. For example, one of the top paid apps that I already have is Notability for $9.99. I looked and I bought it in 2012 for $0.99.

I decided to check my email archives to re-discover all the stuff I bought back then. It's quite sad to see how many apps have gone dead. I had all these multi-service chat apps that have gone into disuse since everyone have moved onto LINE here in Asia. I even have a game called Starbase Orion that I don't even remember having. I searched and it came to me that it was a 4X game inspired by Master of Orion. The greatest surprise came when I downloaded Starbase Orion and it asked if I want to continue my game.

I looked at Starbase Orion's website and discovered that the single developer never managed to make an Android version, and Starbase Orion 2 is still unfinished due to lack of time. Even though I like to buy games mainly to support the developer but I could never find the time or patience to play them, so I understand how he feels. (Yeah, other bigger games I got for my Android phone include Uciana, another 4X game, and Stardew Valley, both of which I've started playing but got nowhere.)

Slave to PowerPoint

PowerPoint remotes are one the most ovepriced things on the planet. I could get a whole set of wireless keyboard and mouse for less than the price of a wireless remote with three buttons. Sure, I get an integrated laser pointer with the remote, but laser pointers are such cheap things they shouldn't bring up the price of hte remote.

I do quite a bit of presentation these days, and it's always a pain to hover over my notebook to advance to the next slide instead of being able to walk around and mesmerize the audience with my charisma and wit. Fortunately, a few weeks ago I discovered a Chinese-made wireless remote in a local shop that doesn't cost several arms and legs. Surely enough, the first one I got had stiff buttons with bad contacts that took several presses to register a single press. I took it back to the shop and got a second one. The second one still had stiff buttons (I realized then that's how it was designed), but at least each press would register correctly, so I was actually very happy with it. It's a really simple remote with just three buttons: PgUp, PgDn, and laser pointer. It doesn't even have a power switch, but the buttons are stiff enough to not be pressed accidentally. (Funnily enough, I discovered Amazon.com sells this particular remote here.)

However, PowerPoint remotes are like crack, so after using the cheapo remote for a while, I finally ended up with the Real Thing (tm). The Logitech Wireless Presenter R400. There is also a more expensive "Professional" Presenter R800 with Green Laser Pointer and vibrating alarm. But I tested some green laser pointers and they only proved to be a distraction.

Officially, the Logitech R400 (and R800 as well) don't work with Mac OS X. The reason is quite simple really. The presenter is seen by newer Macs as a regular keyboard, but the buttons on the remote are hard wired to send out F5/ESC (start/stop presentation), "." (blank screen), PgUp, and PgDn; which are the standard keys for PowerPoint for Windows. The remotes are not magically designed to work only with PowerPoint for Windows, they just happen to be mapped that way because those key presses are the de-facto standard, which is why they work fine for Windows and even Linux. But OS X people prefer different keyboard shortcuts, so for Keynote or whatever other OS X apps that don't follow the Windows style standard, you can either change the default shortcut keys using Keyboard Shortcuts from System Preferences, or re-map the remote to send the correct key presses. This post and KeyRemap4MacBook (great name!) teaches you how accomplish this.

In fact, even though I do use Windows and PowerPoint, I still need to remap the F5/ESC key since it's such a pain in the butt to accidentally press the start/stop button during a presentation, and then accidentally press it again to start my presentation all over from the beginning! (They should've at least made it Shift-F5 to resume presentation from the current slide.) The solution is to use HID macros, which can detect key presses originating from different keyboards (or really HID devices) and re-map them accordingly. So I can re-map the F5/ESC on my R400 to send out something besides F5 and ESC, without messing with my actual F5 and ESC keys.

Oh, while writing this, I discovered that Epson finally has 64-bit USB display drivers for their projectors. They used to only have 32-bit drivers. Using a USB cable to connect to the projector is far better than connecting using a regular VGA cable.

Red Friday

I never knew there's such a thing as Red Friday as opposed to Black Friday. But here it is.

Most things are roughly 10% off, equivalent to the Black Friday sale in countries that celebrate Thanksgiving.

RIP Steve

When I was growing up, the first computer I ever used was the Apple ][. (And yes, I have to write II like that.) Even though when I finally saved enough money to buy my own Apple ][, somehow I ended up with a Commodore 64, but the Apple ][ always had a special place in my heart, and I totally admired Apple's founders.

Of course, being the young geek and future engineer that I was, Steve Jobs was always "the other Steve" to me. Fast forward thirty years, I guess few people these days even know of Woz except for us engineer types and students of computer history. It's all about Steve Jobs and his Apple Empire. But I still totally admire the two Steves and what they have done.

Rest in peace.

Technical PDF on the iPad 2

After using my iPad for the past half year as my main reference tool, I discovered the biggest problem was that GoodReader is just not that fast for searching through files, and "flipping" is also quite slow with the page needing to refresh. (In fact, this was the original problem I had with attempting to use the Kindle as a reference tool.)

The slowness problem have been resolved with the iPad 2's faster A5 CPU. The iPad 2 is also lighter making it much easier to hold with a single hand, even for the 3G version. The iPad 2 is also much thinner and weighs much less than my Windows Server 2008 R2 Unleashed book. Besides the faster CPU and the cameras, there's really not that much difference for my uses, so I'll wait for the iPad 3.

Giant iPod touch

iPad 2 was released earlier today and it looks almost exactly like the leaked photos. I was one of the few people that thought the leaked iPad 2 photos were real, since it follows closely Apple's recent design paradigm: no more round backs. The iPad 2 looks almost exactly like the fourth generation iPod touch, which I really like.

But what I like most about the iPad 2 is that it's much lighter! I've had the iPad 3G for a few months and I no longer really notice the weight, but whenever I pick up iPads without 3G I notice how much lighter they are. The iPad 2 with or without 3G are both lighter than the original iPad. But I probably won't upgrade unless I can get one for free. Besides, my iPad is jailbroken.

Bye OS X

It might be funny to pick the day of the Intel Core 2011 Macbook Pro introduction to post this, but after two years of mostly enjoying OS X, and learning to program Objective-C, I'm going back to Windows. To be precise, I'm moving on to Windows 7, and not going back to Windows XP.

Oh, I love OS X and its Unixness, but there are just so many things that prevent me from being a happy and productive user. One of my biggest gripes is that I can't print to any of my networked printers except an older LaserJet that has a JetDirect card. But even with that printer, I have to manually select Tray 2 every single time, eventhough it's already set to Tray 2 by default both in Settings and in CUPS, but it doesn't work. Still, once in a while it would completely refuse to print, and I would just twiddle my thumbs until it would suddenly work again after a random number of hours, sometimes after days.

My MacBook is the early 2009 model upgraded with 4 GB of RAM and a 320 GB 7200 RPM hard drive, but it's just so unbearably slow. I try to avoid websites with Flash, since that just slows it down even more. I'm back to using an older ThinkPad X61 (the one I used to test all the Linux distributions). The X61 is 3.5 years old and only has 2 GB of RAM, but it's running circles around the MacBook. Oh, and the X61 is running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, while the MacBook is running OS X 10.6.6.

I'm also back to using Firefox. Firefox was unusably slow on the Mac, so I changed to Safari like a good OS X user should, until I ran into problems with non-English filenames, then I switched Chrome. Chrome is really really nice, but it doesn't support automatic downloading using a download manager, and again, Flash is unusably slow. Flash is really fast on Safari, and Safari works with download managers, so I ended up having two web browsers open all the time.

I really miss iCal though.

Technical PDF on the iPad

I've wanted an iPad since it was released to read my technical manuals in the PDF format (mostly because the Kindle didn't work so well). Unfortunately, I could find hundreds of iPad PDF viewer reviews online, but none of the reviews I found talk about the actual usability or display quality, and none of the iPad's I saw in real life have any PDF's loaded. I've walked up to strangers in public asking to see if they have technical PDF's in their iPad's, but all I've ever seen are games.

Since I couldn't find out the quality of iPad PDF displays and I didn't want to buy one blindly, so I gave up the idea of buying an iPad earlier this month. But of course, fate works in mysterious ways.

You need to click on the image to see the full size. The PDF's I loaded are Wrox's SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting that I've been digging into lately, and a "borrowed" copy of Wiley's Mastering AutoCAD 2011 and AutoCAD LT 2011 so I can see display quality of images inside PDF. It has already been deleted as I'm not an AutoCAD user.

iBooks is the ebook app and store frontend from Apple, but it also handles PDF files. The display quality is good. But like most Apple programs, there's no way to customize the program at all.

Stanza is probably the most well known ebook reading app and it's available for every device. It handles PDF really fast, and there are all kinds of customization settings that helps the "reading experience". However, maybe because the program is optimized for real ebook formats such as ePub, the PDF display quality is really really poor.

GoodReader is perhaps the best known PDF reader, having separate iPhone and iPad versions. There are tons of customizations, but none of them seem to be really useful. I also hate that it has page flipping animation if you swipe to turn the page, but no animation if you tap to turn. However, the PDF display quality is by far the best. As can be seen in the images below, the graphics in the PDF can be seen clearly without zooming, and the AutoCAD image is smooth without jaggies.

ReaddleDocs is probably the most famous PDF reader since I see glowing reviews for it all the time and it's promoted everywhere. In fact, it was the first I tried. But it turned out to be really bad. Both the controls and image quality can't compare with any of its competitors. There is also a separate iPhone version available.

Fast PDF is not fast.

iRead PDF is the free version of iAnnotate PDF without the annotation features. iAnnotate PDF was popular for a while for being the first iPad PDF app that allows annotation simply by writing and marking with your fingers, but most of the competitors have now added similar features, and it just doesn't stand out any more. Also, it seems to be geared toward annotation and not reading, so the "reading experience" is lacking. There's no capture of the AutoCAD book since I just didn't care about the program enough to keep going.

pdf-notes is a free app that allows annotation. But it's slow and doesn't handle PDF display that well at all. Once again, there's no capture from the AutoCAD book.

It's quite obvious that the display quality of embedded graphics is greatly enhanced by anti-aliasing the graphics. But I looked and none of the apps have a setting to toggle anti-aliasing. It's either there (iBooks and GoodReader) or it's not (the rest), which is why iBooks and GoodReader are the best choices for PDF with embedded graphics.

Finally, I have some photos taken with my iPad next to the SQL Book. The first photo is the book opened to the same page as the screenshots above, and the second photo is opened to a random page that shows some code. The iPad is running GoodReader.

Some moiré is visible on the iPad screen due to the low quality screen protector film. This is not a screen protector film review, but that particular film is so bad that after two days, I already have permanent markings on the film on frequently used areas such as the area where I tap to go to the next page! And I don't know where they get the "anti-reflection" from. Maybe it reflects so much light you get blinded so you don't see any more reflections.

GoodReader is by far the best of the PDF readers I tried. However, I really don't like not having page animation when tapping to turn the page. The program is highly customizable, but the things that can be customized just aren't useful. But the display quality and speed more than make up for the shortcomings.

As for Stanza, I've been using it for a long time on my iPod touch to read ebooks and I've customized it exactly the way I like it. I would continue to use Stanza to read PDF files that aren't technical books. Unfortunately, since GoodReader can't be customized as much as Stanza, I've had to "un-customize" some of my preferred Stanza settings so the two programs can behave in the same way so I don't keep confusing myself.

iBooks is also recommended if you prefer to use Apple's ebookstore and don't want to customize anything.

Happy reading!

redsn0w for iOS 4.1

This is the just released redsn0w 0.6.9b1 for for jailbreaking iOS 4.1 on iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2G only. This is the OS X version, Windows version coming soon. No warranties, of course.

Download from Rapidshare

Download from Hotfile

iOS 4.1 pwnage

SHAtter is such a great name for an exploit. Word has it that this exploit can jailbreak all current iOS devices including iPhone 4, iPod touch 4th generation, and iPad. Details still scarce, but I can't wait.

Apple special event

Steve is congratulating himself on all the new Apple stores (Shanghai one in the screen cap above). Bring on the new iPods!

The new iPod touch (4th generation) incorporates all the new features from the iPhone 4 such as the Retina display and gyroscope. More interestingly, it now has front and rear facing cameras, speaker grill, and microphone. These were necessary to enable FaceTime functionality for the iPod touch. The built-in microphone is a really great addition as it will enable applications such as Skype, Shazam, or Voice Recorder to work directly without having to plug in a headset or a microphone.

The rear facing camera is only 960x720 (0.7 megapixels), but that's good enough for video conferencing, and taking HD videos as an added bonus. But I imagine many people will complain that it's not 5 megapixels like the iPhone 4. One thing worries me though, the tech specs doesn't show it as having autofocus, but it's probably unimportant due to the low resolution anyway.

One other surprising thing is the cheapest iPod touch is now $229 instead of $199. But the $229 iPod touch is the 4th generation like the 16 GB and 32 GB models, unlike when the 3rd generation was released, the $199 8 GB model was actually a re-released 2nd generation.

Both the iPod shuffle and iPod nano were also updated, but how much can you really improve an MP3 player?

Slide to jailbreak

Just visit www.jailbreakme.com on your iDevice to jailbreak. Can't get any easier than this! (Yes, this works on the iPhone 4, and iOS 4 for all iPhones or iPod touches.)

iBooks and jailbreaking

iOS 4 was released yesterday, and it's already jailbroken. However, iBooks only works in iOS4 on devices jailbroken with PawnageTool 4.01 and redsn0w 0.9.5b5-4 or newer. For some reason I couldn't get PawnageTool to work so I used redsn0w.

The images below are captured from my iPod touch 2G.

The iPhone ebook in the image above is the iPhone SDK Development book in epub format that I bought from The Pragmatic Programmers that I also used in the Amazon Kindle review previously.

Mac OS X 10.6.4

Mac OS X 10.6.4 is released. Full details here. Combo update here.

10.6.4 just came out this morning and I quickly updated. The reason was that since installing 10.6.3 two months ago, I've had this really bad problem where when I resume from standby, the screen's back light doesn't turn on and I have to manually change screen brightness to make it light up. Sometimes though, even doing that doesn't work, and I have to close the lid and re-open, sometimes multiple times, until the screen works again.

After upgrading, the problem seems to have disappeared.

Spirit Jailbreak download

Spirit Jailbreak is out for current firmware versions of iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. (Requirements: 3.1.2, 3.1.3, 3.2). The server seems to be bogged down now so I'm mirroring the files on RapidShare. The files were downloaded directly from spiritjb.com, but no warranties of course.

Download Windows version.

Download Mac OS X version.

MacBook Pro 2010 pricing

I was away for a week with no access to the Internet of the free world, and a whole bunch of things get released. By now everyone's arguing whether the new 13" MacBook Pro should've gotten the Core i3/i5 or not, but to me, the bestest thing about this refresh is that they finally updated the local pricing to more accurately reflect the value of the Thai Baht.

The base $1,200 MacBook Pro now costs 40,900 Baht instead of the original 46,900 Baht. Now I can more easily talk my boss into buying it for me. Maybe when the iPad is released here sometime next month they will also use the new exchange rate, then maybe I can talk my boss into buying both the new MacBook Pro and the iPad for me.

Amazon Kindle for iPad

The Amazon Kindle app is now updated to be a universal app that works for both the iPhone and the iPad. I don't want a Kindle any more.

iPad apps are here

When I opened iTunes this morning, it updated some of my apps to iPad compatible versions, eventhough Thailand's App Store doesn't have an iPad section yet. Then I noticed eventhough there's no specific iPad section, I can still search for apps and then an iPad section will appear.

Unfortunately, it appears that many apps, especially games, aren't dual iPhone / iPad compatible but has an entirely separate iPad release that requires re-buying the app again.

iPad specific apps get their own section in iTunes

The reason I want an iPad: iBooks, a free download. Now where's my iPad?

iTunes 9.1 and iBooks

With the imminent release of iPad this weekend, iTunes has been updated to 9.1 and supports iBooks.

As mentioned on the Apple website, EPUB files can be dragged into the iTunes Library. The above shows my iPhone SDK Development ebook in the Library. Apparently this is for syncing to the iPad only, since iTunes doesn't provide a way to read the EPUB files.

Mac OS X 10.6.3

Mac OS X 10.6.3 is released. Full details here. Combo update here.

Just installed. I hope it would magically make my networked printers work. But probably not.

 And I lost my uptime, again.