Another modern life problem

Spotify applicationHow many times these days do you have prob­lems get­ting sup­port for a prod­uct or ser­vice? Tons, I’d guess.

I joined Spo­tify Pre­mium a week or two ago. The con­cept is great — being able to have access to more music than is in iTunes and be able to have what­ever I want on my iPod (as long as I keep sub­scribed via the $10 a month subscription).

As I said, the con­cept is great. Real­ity? It doesn’t work. I was able to get only one album to sync to my iPod, and then no more music would sync.

Sup­port? I tried every avenue: Google search, their help pages, email help — nothing.

So I’m call­ing you, Spo­tify — help or I’ll quit.

(Updates 1. Spo­tify did respond by email, though their response did not totally solve the prob­lem. and 2. Thanks to a friend, I will maybe be able to get to the root of the prob­lem; see comments.)


A huge con­trast is 1and1 web host­ing. They are great! Real humans answer the phone, 24/7. I’ve called in a ton of times and almost every time, I get sat­is­fac­tion. Their rates are also among the best in the busi­ness. If you need to host your web­site or grab a web address of your very own, I’d highly rec­om­mend them. (Note that this is an affil­i­ate link; if you click through and sign up, I’ll get a few cents out of the deal.)

Advance?

MyLincoln Touch adLin­coln is mov­ing for­ward with their tech­nol­ogy. The on-board MyLin­coln Touch sys­tem has all kinds of things that your internet-connected home com­puter offers: the abil­ity to upload pho­tos, find music, and sync your contacts.

The prob­lem is that many of those things should only be done when you are parked. And they would all be done much eas­ier on an iPad. The $400 cost is not much less than an iPad, and you can use an iPad in far more places than your Touch system.

Park your car, queue up the songs you want, plug your iPad or iPod into your car stereo — and then drive. You don’t need pho­tos or con­tacts in your car’s com­puter anyhow.

If you’re in the mar­ket for a new Lin­coln MKX, maybe con­sider a used Acura MDX or Honda Pilot for a third of the price and an iPad for each mem­ber of your fam­ily (or for sev­eral of your friends).

This ad appeared on the back cover of the Sep­tem­ber 2011 Auto­mo­bile magazine.

The loss of something

As life moves for­ward, we lose some things.

When I was a kid, my fam­ily had ency­clo­pe­dias. I used to enjoy sit­ting down and read­ing them. Or skim­ming them to find inter­est­ing arti­cles. Hours and hours of my child­hood were spent learn­ing that way.

Today, kids have Wikipedia and Google. Both offer huge advan­tages over ency­clo­pe­dias. But some things are lost. I won­der how many kids spend hours comb­ing Wikipedia for inter­est­ing articles.

I have a Kin­dle, and I love it. But it’s far from perfect.

Recently, I learned of a high school not far away that is “paper­less.” No books, except eBooks. Again, some good things come with that — but some things are lost.

Big brother?

Audi’s new A6 uses GPS and Google Maps to antic­i­pate hills — so it knows when to upshift or down­shift the trans­mis­sion at just the right sec­ond. (Mil­lisec­ond.) This increases per­for­mance and efficiency.

So the inter­net is even creep­ing into your future car’s transmission!

I do not say this in an alarmist man­ner. Rather, I see it as an excit­ing thing. This is tech­nol­ogy being used well.

I think it’s even cooler when tech­nol­ogy like that is used to bring clean water to peo­ple who might oth­er­wise die. A friend of a friend, Erik Hers­man, is doing stuff like that for Africa.

(By the way, I do have a big brother, in real life. He’s great. And by the way, this ver­sion of the A6 will hit US show­rooms late in the sum­mer of 2011. Stand in line now... just kidding.)

Not fun but necessary

Dust accu­mu­lates in this cor­ner about once a week. Maybe there is some kind of a vor­tex of air and dust par­ti­cles that causes it to accu­mu­late at an unnat­ural rate. In any case, I know that I must sweep it up or even­tu­ally there will be a dust pile that will take over the house.

Sim­i­larly, there are tasks we need to do reg­u­larly or we may pay the price. One price that might be huge relates to your data. When was the last time you backed up your data? If it wasn’t this week, think of the time you would lose if your hard drive crashed.

Solu­tion? Easy. Buy an exter­nal hard drive.

Mac: Attach the drive and it will walk you through Time Machine, a built-in pro­gram. Apple has instruc­tions here, if you need help.

Win­dows? Just about any exter­nal hard drive comes with a pro­gram to do auto­matic backups.

My rec­om­men­da­tion is to leave the drive attached and let it do your back­ups regularly.

A word of cau­tion: if you think your com­puter is too new to require this pre­cau­tion, think again. My brother’s hard drive died last week after just 18 months.

Apple Design decisions

I’ve always thought it was strange that Apple went in oppo­site direc­tions for their iPad and iPhone lines.

Ver­sion 1 of the iPad has rec­tan­gu­lar edges. Ver­sion 2 has a clamshell design.

The iPhone? Ver­sion 3 has a clamshell design. Ver­sion 4 has rec­tan­gu­lar edges.

Apple is going diver­gent direc­tions with these two prod­uct lines.

Pref­er­ence for me? I like the clamshell.

Cool new technology

At the Den­ver Auto Show, the Saab dis­play was amaz­ing. Not for the cars (though I do like the new 9–5) but rather for the giant screen at the end of their rec­tan­gle. It was one giant TV. (Sadly, the top photo does not do it jus­tice.) It was made of LED pan­els that were assem­bled for the show. Think: one of those giant dis­plays at a big-city foot­ball field, only one that the road­ies can take apart and reassem­ble mul­ti­ple times.

The lower photo shows a closeup of the back­side of the dis­play. Each panel sec­tion was about 2 x 3 feet and was made of light­weight white plastic.

Excel­lent.

A way to speed up your Mac

Firewire 800 portThis post is only for Mac users. Sorry, rest of the world.

If you have a Mac with a Firewire 800 port (see pic), you can save some of that frus­trat­ing “spin-up” time when your exter­nal hard drive awakens.

This applies if you are using Time Machine. (If you are not, please start right away! It may save your day — as it has for me, many times.)

Any­how, do not use a USB 2.0 exter­nal drive for your Time Machine disk. Instead, buy a Firewire 800 drive, like the Iomega* I recently bought. It will save you maybe 2 min­utes a day of wait­ing on your hard drive. That’s 8 hours a year.

If your Time Machine backup drive is not plugged in all the time, this post won’t apply to you. But the ben­e­fits of hav­ing access to lost data makes always-on Time Machine worth it for me. Par­tic­u­larly with a FW 800 drive.

* Not an affil­i­ate link.

Netflix Changes

Net­flix is killing off cable and satel­lite TV, almost single-handed. It’s cheaper. There are more options on what to watch. You don’t have to watch ads.

And now you can stream movies and TV shows to your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. (The stream­ing to your com­puter option has been able for a while.) So they released a plan that is solely stream­ing with no DVDs by mail — for a mere $8 a month. Even­tu­ally, if Hol­ly­wood loosens its grip a lit­tle, I’m guess­ing all movies and TV shows will be stream­ing. Cur­rently only about 10–20% of Netflix’s library can be streamed.

So of course they’d up their prices. The $17 plan is now $20. Other plans went up too. If you have a monop­oly, why not raise your prices? (Yes, tech­ni­cally, there are other com­peti­tors, but Net­flix is the 1,000 pound gorilla in that marketplace.)

Note for my over­seas read­ers: Net­flix is not yet avail­able in other coun­tries except Canada, but I think it’s a mat­ter of time, if the country’s infra­struc­ture can sup­port it. I’m not expect­ing it in Afghanistan any­time soon.

Never seen this before