James's Weblog

Earlier this year, I switched my mom from a Sprint plan to a Page Plus prepaid plan. She’s the type who uses an average of about 20 minutes per month on her cell phone, which was a waste of the $30/month that I was paying for her line. Switching her to a prepaid plan seemed like an obvious choice, but even then, most prepaid plans don’t fit well to such limited usage. Typical prepaid plans ask for tens of dollars per month for hundreds of minutes that expire after 30 days. Not a huge improvement.

(That’s not to say that my mom doesn’t spend a lot of time using a phone. However, we have unreliable cell phone reception in our house, so she normally uses a landline. The landline is cheap since we get service through Ooma.)

Page Plus is a prepaid MVNO, a virtual carrier that resells airtime from another one (in Page Plus’s case, Verizon). Unlike the prepaid plans from every other provider, Page Plus’s minutes last for 120 days, and the minimum purchase is $10 for 100 minutes. This means that I now can pay about $30 per year instead of per month.

It’s been about 8 months since I switched her, and so far she’s been on track.

I was satisfied enough with Page Plus that a couple of months ago, I decided to switch myself, and I bought a contractless, unused Verizon Palm Pre 2 for cheap. I too use very few voice minutes, and over the past year, I’ve used an average of about 100 MB of data per month, peaking at about 200 MB in a month. Page Plus doesn’t have good data plans, however: their standard pay-as-you-go plan charges a whopping $0.99/MB, and their cheapest monthly plan ($12) includes a meager 10 MB. However, overages on their monthly plans cost $0.20/MB, so my average usage should cost about $32/month, still significantly cheaper than the $60/month that I was paying Sprint (normally $70/month without the VMware discount).

I figure that I can cut back on the data usage and use WiFi most of the time to bring that down to $22/month. (Thank goodness for webOS patches that allow me to turn 3G data usage on and off easily.) Discouraging me from checking email constantly is probably a good thing anyway. The biggest thing that I’ll miss is Sprint Navigation; the webOS app was implemented pretty well, and it was handy to have GPS navigation readily available with up-to-date maps. Unfortunately there’s no good offline GPS navigation software (or even online, carrier-agnostic software). I’ll also miss the Sprint Airave femtocell (from Chelmsford!) that I got only a few months ago. Verizon’s coverage seems better, but it still seems unreliable where I live.

(And yes, this means that we’re back on the Verizon network without having to deal with Verizon.)

Other notes:

• The phones that Page Plus officially supports are very limited. I initially bought my mom one of the supported ones since it was my first experience, and they only offered one basic phone (a Kyocera Luno S2100). We were not impressed with it; the font size is small and is not adjustable, and the lanyard attachment point is not a solid construction, instead using the battery cover to hold a lanyard in pace. Tugging on the lanyard in the wrong way could pull the battery cover off and drop the phone.
• Page Plus, however, does allow almost any Verizon phone to be activated on its service. The main requirements are that the phone isn’t blacklisted as being stolen or as a retail prepaid phone. (Ironically, prepaid phones that you see in retail stores such as Walmart are still subsidized.) Eventually I bought my mom a contractless Samsung Gusto 2 off of eBay instead.
• By default, outgoing calls from Page Plus have an outgoing message that tells you what your balance is. This is kind of annoying and can’t be configured through the website, but you can turn it off by contacting customer service.
• Page Plus’s website sucks, to put it kindly. It looks old, is buggy, and on numerous occasions has been down when I’ve tried to access my account. This doesn’t inspire confidence. I haven’t actually figured out how to account for my data usage through their website since they show up as calls measured in “minutes”.
• If you want to activate a smartphone, watch out if it wants to restore data from the cloud before allowing you to set up WiFi.
• There’s a $0.50 monthly service charge that’s mentioned in the fine print that surprised me.

Last month the transmission failed in our 1994 Ford Taurus station wagon, and we finally got rid of it. This was my primary car for about 9 of the past 12 years. Everyone I knew—myself included—made fun of it. It was a refugee from the island of misfit cars.

By far the goofiest design decision was that it used a separate key for the tailgate. A separate trunk key for a station wagon! To avoid having to carry two keys around all the time, I usually left the trunk key in the coin compartment, but it was still weird and inconvenient.

Another oddity was that the locks for the front doors were different from the locks for the rear doors. The front door locks were pegs that were pushed in to become almost flush with the door panel. The rear door locks, however, were pegs that were pushed in to look almost like the unlocked state of the front door locks. Unsurprisingly, this inconsistency usually confused people who rode in this car, and they often couldn’t tell whether doors were locked or unlocked. Since we didn’t get power locks with this car, I consequently had to go around the car to lock all the doors.

The cupholders were almost useless. They could hold cans okay, but large cups from fast food restaurants usually had trouble clearing the overhang above and required being tilted at an angle that often would spill their contents. (And the mostly(?) defunct supersized cups were completely out of the question.) Additionally, drinks in the cupholder obstructed the radio, and at some point soda probably spilled onto it, because some of the radio buttons sometimes would stick. Ford added limited radio controls to the dashboard in an apparent attempt to address the obstruction problem, but they didn’t work with the aftermarket car stereo that my dad installed (the original one had no CD player).

This station wagon also had the feature of including two spare tires: a full-sized one under the cargo area and a compact one in a side compartment. In retrospect, I probably should have taken one (or both) of them out to try to reduce fuel consumption.

Goodbye, 1994 Ford Taurus station wagon. I’m glad to be finally rid of you.

Getting rid of this car was kind of painful too, but not in the emotional sense. In the days before its transmission failed, I had spent a few hundred dollars replacing its battery, a couple of tires, and getting its oil changed. Donating it was more trouble since the car was in my dad’s name and went into a trust when he passed. I had forgotten that I wasn’t a trustee when I contacted the donation service, which complicated the paperwork.

I recently bought an IOGear GKM571R mini keyboard. Copied and pasted from my Amazon review:

I really like this keyboard for HTPC use. I also have the Lenovo N5901 multimedia remote/keyboard, and while the IOGear GKM571 is quite a bit more expensive, it’s also much better.

Things that I like:

• It’s backlit. This is the single biggest flaw in the Lenovo N5901.
• It has a scroll wheel. Scrolling without one is a chore because it’s not easy to accurately grab and move a scrollbar thumb with a mini-trackball, and it’s not easy to press arrow keys on a small keyboard by touch alone.
• It uses standard batteries. Li-ion batteries have a higher charge density, but like all batteries, they eventually wear out, and replacing them is usually a pain. I much prefer replaceable, standard batteries (especially low-self-discharge NiMH ones).
• It’s the right size. It’s larger than the Lenovo N5901, but it’s still compact. The larger size allows it to have more spacing between the keys, so it’s easier to type without accidentally pressing adjacent keys.
• It has a full set of keys, including F1-F12.
• Its power switch is intuitive. It turns on when you open the lid and off when you close it.
• It’s easy to set up (at least on Windows). It was instantly recognized when I plugged it in, and no configuration was necessary.

Things that I don’t like:

• It occasionally drops out. This might be because I plugged the RF dongle into a rear USB port, but I didn’t encounter any such issues with the Lenovo one.
• The keys are mushy. Unlike with the Lenovo one, there is no distinctive click when the key registers.
• There are no dedicated arrow keys or escape key. They require using the Fn modifier key.
• I’m not sure how I’ll clean the trackball if it gets gummed up.
• The scroll wheel can’t be pressed, so there’s no native middle-click.
• I wish it used Bluetooth instead of requiring its own RF dongle. Oh well. The RF dongle is unobtrusive, at least, and RF contributes to the ease of setup.
• I’ve occasionally had a little bit of trouble reading some of the keys when lit. Maybe it’d be better if IOGear used a green or red backlight instead of blue; humans have poor visual acuity for blue.

Things that I’m (mostly) neutral about:

• The Lenovo N5901 trackball can be used with one hand (although dragging requires two hands and then becomes awkward) whereas the IOGear one is designed for two-handed use. I prefer the two-handed design though; if I’m going to type anything, I need two hands anyway.

Another year, another movie outing with my (mostly) teenage cousins on New Year’s Eve. This time we saw Tron: Legacy in IMAX 3D, even though none of my cousins had seen the original Tron or were even aware that the new film was a sequel. My impressions:

• It was visually awesome.
• Daft Punk’s soundtrack was great. It was a bit overpowering, but…
• … I wonder if the film wouldn’t have been better as a feature-length music video with no dialogue, letting the audience piece together their own plot (a la Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555). The actual plot was ridiculous.
• I think it would have been better as a reboot instead of as a sequel. You can’t build a solid story on top of an awful foundation. The first Tron film is almost 30 years old, so most people probably don’t remember it very well anyway, especially since its plot is best left forgotten. A reboot also would have provided an opportunity to give the “Tron” name to the world instead of to a character. (It’s a little telling when the film’s titular character isn’t even significant to the story. I don’t remember if Tron: Legacy even explained who Tron was.)

Some people might think that I’m crazy for complaining about free services, but squeaky wheels get grease, and I truly believe that these wheels need greasing.

Most free Wi-Fi hotspots require accepting a EULA before they can be used, and they usually accomplish this by intercepting a user’s first attempt to view a web page and by showing a web page with their EULA form instead. This isn’t so unreasonable, but pretty much every EULA page that I’ve seen sucks.

• EULA requirements disrupt service. While most Internet traffic involves the web, there are still other protocols that aren’t uncommon. Some Wi-Fi hotspots block all traffic until the EULA is accepted, but this means that things such as email and instant messaging applications can fail without providing any explanation why. Admittedly, I don’t think that this is fully the fault of the hotspots themselves since they can’t control the error messages (or the lack of them) in the individual applications. Perhaps some standardization effort is warranted here.
• Most EULA pages are not designed for mobile devices with small screens. Free Wi-Fi hotspots might have been predominantly used by laptops not so long ago, but smartphones with Wi-Fi are becoming increasingly prevalent. At least on my Palm Pre, I almost always have to zoom in and to do a lot of scrolling to find the checkbox or button to accept the EULA, and then I have to zoom in some more so that it’s big enough to tap on.
• Most EULA pages don’t automatically redirect to the original destination. If I go through the effort to type out a web page address on my tiny keyboard only to be redirected to a EULA page, at least redirect me to my original destination after I accept the EULA. Don’t make me type out the address again.

In some cases, free Wi-Fi hotspots actually do me more harm than good. Since I have an unlimited data service through Sprint, if my phone suddenly decides to use a free Wi-Fi hotspot instead of my cellular data service, I suddenly have to deal with all of the EULA nonsense (or, as mentioned before, things just start mysteriously failing).

Unfortunately, there aren’t strong economic incentives to fix issues with free things. Alas.

In recent years, Adobe Flash has been a prime target for malicious hackers in which to find security exploits. (Don’t even get me started on the security vulnerability of the week in Adobe Reader.) Additionally, in the era of the zombie PC apocalypse, compromised computers hurt everybody.

It’s therefore crucial that users update Flash on their systems to patch known exploits, yet Adobe strangely makes it harder than necessary to update Flash.

Upon booting my computer, an automatic Flash update tool notices that my installed version is out-of-date. (It’s no longer a good time to check for updates on boot; many people reboot very seldomly these days.)

Clicking the “Install” button then shows:

This is even worse on Vista or Windows 7 since they will require an additional UAC prompt. There are three prompts asking the user the same thing. When you ask someone a question, then ask again, “Are you sure?”, and yet again, “Are you really sure?”, some people are liable to change their minds.

I admit it’s unfair for me to complain about the UAC prompt since that’s outside of Adobe’s control, but their own, second installation prompt is simply goofy. Moreover, all the EULA nonsense gets in the way too. They should avoid introducing reasons for people to change their mind.

Thankfully, it does seem that Adobe again lets people download the Flash installer manually without using their silly Adobe Download Manager browser plug-in.

So I finally bought an Xbox 360, pretty much just to see if Limbo is as good as I’ve been hearing. (My verdict is that is that it is a really good physics-based puzzle game, but it’s not mind-bending like Braid, which I like much better. And anyone who hasn’t played Braid yet must do so.)

Getting the Xbox 360 set up was surprisingly difficult. When I went to set up my new Xbox 360, I had the choice between creating a new “Gamertag” (a.k.a. a unique user name for their online Xbox Live service) or signing in using an existing one. I chose to create a new one, having completely forgotten that I had bought a Windows game last year that already associated a Gamertag with my existing Windows Live/MSDN account.

The Gamertag creation screen on the Xbox 360 asked me for an email address and a password so it could log-in to (or create) a Windows Live account. Entering the credentials to my Windows Live account showed an error message saying that my account already had a Gamertag associated with it, but it neither switched to it automatically nor told me what my existing Gamertag was. It instead suggested that I use a different Windows Live account. (Really? I need to use a different email address?)

Signing in with an existing Gamertag (which kind of confusingly is under “Recover Gamertag”) requires that I know my Gamertag first.

I went to a PC to log in to my Windows Live account to see if I could determine my Gamertag there. None of the account settings or information pages listed it. Eventually I stumbled onto the Xbox Live website itself, which (because I was still signed in to Windows Live) prominently showed my Gamertag.

• Gamertag creation and Gamertag “recovery” should be merged into a single sign-in flow. It should ask for a Gamertag or an email address, each along with a password. It then should sign-in to an existing account or should create a new account if one doesn’t already exist. (The Xbox Live website already lets people sign in with an email address and a password; why doesn’t the console?) This also would avoid the misleading “Gamertag recovery” name.
• Windows Live should make it easier to see Microsoft services associated with the account, and in this case, it should clearly indicate the account’s Gamertag in the account information screen.

At least it’s only a one-time pain, and admittedly most users wouldn’t run into that.

One of things I lamented when I replaced my Treo with a Pre was that since the Pre uses a capacitive touchscreen, it doesn’t use a stylus, so I no longer had my Treo’s combination stylus/ballpoint pen wherever I went. There have been numerous times where the pen came in handy, and after I switched to the Pre, there have been numerous times where I’ve found myself not having a pen when I needed one. I’ve been looking for a good wallet pen as a substitute but haven’t found anything appealing:

• The Wallet Pen—the one recommended by Oprah—is $50 (a 3-pack costs a staggering $125). I think Oprah must be one of the few people who thinks it’s affordable. If I put that in my wallet, it’d be the most valuable thing in it.
• The Derringer Pen is much cheaper at $8 (a 5-pack costs $32), although that still seems expensive to my inner miser.
• The FoldzFlat pen is a cheap plastic pen for $2 (or $25 for a stainless version) that folds into the form factor of a thick credit card. This is the right price, but my wallet has enough credit card-sized things in it already.

Last week the obvious occurred to me: I could carry the stylus/pen from my Treo in my wallet. Duh. It’s thin, it has a sturdy metal barrel, and it even has a cap. It doesn’t have a clip, but I think that’s okay since a clip would add to the bulk. I think it’s thinner than either the Wallet Pen or the Derringer pen. It fits easily but snugly into the bill compartment of my wallet.

The price is reasonable: it’s effectively free for me since I bought a 3-pack of them years ago, but normally a 3-pack costs around $10–15. It’s a third-party accessory, and there are various companies that produce and sell different versions for different PDAs, so it’s possible to shop around too.

I saw Avatar in 3-D on New Year’s Eve with a bunch of my cousins. Impressions (spoilers ahead):

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I admit that I hate Comic Sans partially as an attempt to be an elitist snob. Being on the bandwagon is amusing. But mostly I hate it because I think it’s an ugly font. It feels strange; it looks too mechanical to be mistaken for handwriting, but it’s not as neat, clean, and formal as a normal typewritten font. It’s in the uncanny valley of typefaces.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, its creator, Vincent Connare, said:

If you love it, you don’t know much about typography… if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.

I’m only a wanna-be typographer and typophile, but I think Comic Sans doesn’t offend me as much as a typeface enthusiast as it does as a comic book reader. Connare designed it to mimic comic book lettering, but it doesn’t look like real lettering from comic books. Let’s look at some samples from some prolific comic book letterers:

• Artie Simek (from The Amazing Spider-Man, volume 1, issue 121 (1973)):
  
• Tom Orzechowski (from The Uncanny X-Men, volume 1, issue 137 (1980)):
  
• Janice Chiang (from Conan the Barbarian, volume 1, issue 155 (1984)):
  
• Rick Parker (from The Amazing Spider-Man, volume 1, issue 300 (1988)):
  

And now compare to Comic Sans:

Even Dave Gibbons, the artist whose work from Watchmen partially inspired Comic Sans, calls it “a real mess”. An obvious difference is that normal comic book lettering uses only uppercase characters, making Comic Sans’s lowercase characters feel even more unnatural. Even uppercase Comic Sans doesn’t look much better, however.

The weight is wrong; comic book lettering traditionally uses a heavier weight for legibility. Comic Sans’s bold variant looks a bit better, although I think it still looks a bit too mechanical.

Comic book lettering often is slightly tilted (Tom Orzechowski’s work is a notable exception). I will concede that Comic Sans in all uppercase, bold, italics is not completely horrible. (Blasphemy, I know.)

If only that were the default look.