Browser | The Habitation of Justice

Lessons learned from vacationing with an iPod

Lincoln Adams | October 17, 2009 @ 6:06 pm

I’m on the last leg of my vacation trip, and finally have some time to sit down and reflect on my experiences so far, especially when it comes to blogging about it all.

Rather than use an iPhone (which are not hearing aid compatible and relies on the crappy AT&T network), I went with the next best thing, an iPod Touch that I tether to my PDA Phone using Verizon’s Broadband Connect. This way I have the advantage of using a faux iPhone on the Verizon network, as well as access to the Internet wherever I had a signal. I didn’t have to worry about motels or restaurants not offering wifi for my laptop either, since I could tether my laptop to my phone instead.

As far as connections go, Verizon gets an A here. There were times when I completely lost the signal, but I was so far high up in the mountains that it was to be expected. If I had to guess, I’d say I had a signal and access to the Internet virtually 99 percent of the time. Total WIN there. It makes liveblogging or livetweeting my experiences as they happen as easy as pie. Mmmmmm, pie…

Many of the apps on my iPod relies on geolocation to work ideally, especially Google Maps, and as long as I was in New York this wasn’t a problem. It was amazingly accurate in pegging my location, despite the fact that the iPod had no GPS chip.

That is, until I wound up in Massachusetts. Then the iPod went from thinking I was in Martha’s Vineyard, to thinking I was in Seattle. :blink:

Despite being unable to track me, I could still use Google Maps manually instead of having to rely on paper maps, except that it incessantly flashed popups telling me it could not locate me, even though I was not using the geolocation feature, and I couldn’t find any way to disable it either. I already know you can’t locate me, there’s no need to tell me that a hundred times a minute. Yeesh.

The net result of all this was a ton of wrong turns, missed exits, and complete absurdity when I came across a street in Google maps that simply did not exist in real life. FAIL

So it looks like I will have to supplement my iPod with a bonafide GPS device now. The TomTom is working on an iPod dock for the future, though I don’t know how reliable it will be, and I hear Garmin is better for the USA. A speakerphone would also be a bonus, as it would negate the need to get a headset (I’ve been thinking about getting one, but the only time I would really need it is for when I’m driving.) Something to research for the future, for sure. In the meantime, if any of you use GPS devices, I could use some advice on what you think worked the best.

Other than that, the iPod was very useful for finding points of interest, though it tended to be a hit or miss thing. Some things worth checking out wouldn’t be listed, so I always had the feeling that I was missing something right under my nose. As far as locating highly rated hotels in the area, the Simultravel app I was using for that gets an F for EPIC FAIL. It only listed a fraction of the hotels within the area I was in, making the effort of locating a good place to stay for the night on the fly a monumentally hair tearing experience. I ended up going back and forth from using Google Local to surfing TripAdvisor all on my iPod’s Safari browser, and since TripAdvisor is a slow and bloated site to begin with, just trying to find a place to stay on the go proved to be more ridiculously frustrating than it should have been. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon Hotels.com’s tailored made site for the iPhone that finding a place to stay finally became more of a pleasure than a horror. It’s how I found Best Western in Ticonderoga, New York, easily the best hotel I’ve stayed at by far, and while chatting with a friend on Google Talk on lodging ideas and checking my email, I booked a reservation there while I was pulled off the road somewhere south of Burlington, Vermont, doing it all on my iPod. Technology can be truly beautiful sometimes. :wub:

As for finding points of interest and dining, I used a combination of Yelp!, Where to? and Google Local to find places worthy of checking out. It made such an impromptu vacation as mine all the more pleasurable and easier to manage.

Finally, I noticed when entering a dining establishment that the first thing I would check for was an electrical outlet to plug my laptop in. LOL My laptop’s battery gives out after only 40 minutes, so it certainly does create a handicap when I’m lugging it around. That MacBook with its 7 hour long battery life can’t come soon enough for me.

As far as the digital/internet side of my vacation goes, I certainly learned a few things that will better prepare me for next time. Another thing I need to get a handle on is how to manage my blogging/social media time. I noticed I spent far too much time responding to tweets and comments when I should have been driving and getting to wherever I was getting. And once the day was spent, I found myself too exhausted to blog about the day’s events while it was still fresh on my mind. Ironically, when I finally had time to recap my vacation experiences so far, I ended up blogging about my third day of vacation, rather than the first day, so my chronology was all out of sorts. I was also using BrightKite to tweet/blog my latest movements, but I only used it intermittently, and there were times when it didn’t go through at all. It made for a disjointed way of getting the crux of my vacation experiences out there for all to read, but since this is all new to me, I’m sure I’ll eventually find my mojo and liveblog my experiences in a more consistent manner. :shades:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go light my fireplace. :whistle:

Tags: battery, blogging, browser, driving, experiences, geolocation, google, google maps, gps, hotels, internet, iphone, ipod touch, laptop, new york, PDA, phone, social media, technology, travel, tweet, vacation, verizon, wifi
Categories: Lincoln's Personal Log

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Banking on Xerobank

Lincoln Adams | May 31, 2007 @ 1:02 am

I’ve been using the Torrify Browser at my job for a few weeks now, and man did I fall completely in love with it. :love: Ever since I got into it with my boss over his refusal to accommodate my disabilities (among other things), and watching him piss all over my efforts to go back to school, I no longer felt safe using my work PC to surf the net and blog when things at work got slow, at least not with him lurking around. So I started exploring my options. When I somehow stumbled onto Torrify, I found something that not only enabled me to keep my browsing contents off the servers, it also enabled me to install the StumbleUpon and ScribeFire plugins as well (something I couldn’t do on my work PC). I now had a completely portable browser on my USB thumbdrive with all the goodies I needed for secure blogging (and *ahem* a little bit of stumbling too). It even bypassed the server filters so I could once again access Pandora and other streaming radio sites, something I USED to enjoy until the party crashing snotballs in ISD (Information Systems Department) decided to block it all.

Only problem was Torrify’s ability to access the Tor network (for anonymous web surfing). Initially it was slow (which was to be expected), but then it suddenly stopped working altogether. I’m not sure why, but I wasn’t too concerned about it since I rarely used it anyway. My main concern was keeping my content, cookies and whatnot off ISD’s servers, and Torrify was able to accomplish that for me quite nicely.

Now it looks like Torrify has become XeroBank, which will eventually offer anonymous email and a completely portable virtual machine (??????). It also offers hi-speed access for anonymous Internet surfing (the cheapest package being ten dollars a month), and I had to admit its touted features looked impressive. Offering a true broadband solution for secure and anonymous surfing had been an elusive quest for many privacy minded users, so if XeroBank is able to deliver here, this could be the start of something big.

I, of course, already signed up for a 3 day demo. :shades:

Important Update and Review:

After receiving email instructions on how to download Xerobank, I went to the site to choose the 3 day demo, but then it it forwarded me to a signup page for an account even though I had one already. Oh well, a minor hiccup that didn’t affect my account status, since I was able to download the browser from my Profile page without any further issues.

When I went to extract the files into my thumbdrive though, my antivirus software AVG suddenly started to throw a FIT, insisting that one of the XeroBank files was a trojan (Generic4.XXX). The name of the offending file was called KillProc.dll, and after a quick Google search I learned some antivirus products like to make a false hit on this particular file, even though it did have legitimate uses (which is to kill processes, duh). Still, this is probably gonna freak some people out if their AV also starts going bat crazy because of this particular file. AVG was still trying to grab and quarantine the file in my case, so I couldn’t get it to extract properly when I ran Xerobank the first few times, and sure it enough when I closed the browser, the processes were still running in Task Manager. I finally disabled the AVG shield and extracted it successfully, but then had to flush and recopy the files on to the thumbdrive a few times because the Firefox add-ons seemed to lock up on me for some reason.

When I finally got it running smoothly, I noticed the start page gave some some IPSpy statistics on the network I was currently using to surf anonymously. I was being rerouted through a server in Germany, but there was definitely a clear difference in speed compared to the Tor network. Wheeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!! At long last, anonymous BROADBAND!!

From what I could tell, I wasn’t actually using the Tor network anymore (even though oddly enough, the add-on to access the network still came pre-installed as it did in Torpark). My guess is that it’s being relegated as a backup option now, while your real connection is granted via an assigned static IP address as regulated by XeroBank. I’m assuming if I signed up for a Plus account that I would probably still be maintaining the same static IP, though this could really just be a unique characteristic of the demo version.

The important thing was that my connection was now effectively proxied, AND it was operating at broadband level speeds. If XeroBank can maintain this level of service, then man it’s definitely worth the 10 dollars a month it costs to use the Plus version at least. I can finally entertain my delusions of grandeur of being the faceless superhero who hacks his way through the Internet in an endless pursuit of truth and justice.

Update 2:

After being contacted by one of the administrators of XeroBank, I learned that if you wish to downgrade to the free “Torpark” version of the browser after installation, simply delete the two files in Data/XeroBank and you’re good to go. It was also confirmed the the static IP I was initially assigned would eventually be followed up with a broader range of IP addresses as they continue to expand their network and work out the remaining kinks.

Tags: anonymous internet, anonymous surfing, anonymous web, antivirus, boss, broadband, browser, disabilities, firefox, goodies, hi speed, job, little bit, mobile, pandora, portable, scribefire, streaming radio, stumbleupon, thumbdrive, tor, tor network, torrify, trojan, usb drive, virtual machine, whatnot, xerobank
Categories: Blog Fog

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Let There Be Blog

Lincoln Adams | July 29, 2006 @ 1:29 am

And so it begins.

After 32 days of hair tearing, head banging, and extended bouts of rip roaring insanity, my blog is now officially online and ready to go. I still cannot fathom the reality that it took me well over a month before I could finally put the finishing touches on this new work of blogging art. It began with an idea that may or may not have been drug induced, and a subsequent hunt for the perfect blogware that would be given the esteemed honor of publishing my most intimate of thoughts online for all the world to see and revel in. It wasn’t long before I settled on Wordpress, and in spite of the absolute FITS it gave me, I don’t regret making that decision. It’s certainly not as polished as MovableType is, but it’s just as powerful, if not more so. The ability to write private and password protected posts, for example, are to this day features that are still missing from MovableType’s blogging solution. The plugin support is also amazing, even though it sucked up a good two weeks of my time before I finally finished scouring the Net for nifty and cool plugins to install and play with. By the time I was finished I had over 70 plugins installed, and the fact that they seem to be getting along with each other without blowing things up was a small miracle unto itself. The widget features were also way cool. It meant having the ability to move my sidebars around nilly willy, while adding all sorts of wild features without ever having to look at code (which I imagine is not the case with MovableType).

But now I understand why most people would just as soon rather open up an account with Blogger or Xanga and get straight to it than build a blog from scratch, even if that meant having far less control over its look and feel. Building a blog from the ground up while having only a rudimentary knowledge of PHP, XHTML standards and CSS styling was not an endeavor for the faint of heart to undertake, but I wasn’t scared. Stupid, maybe, but never scared. :shades:

I was however, reintroduced to wonderful things such as whitespace, XHTML validation, PHP syntax errors, and other frightening critical errors that so abruptly stopped my blog dead in its track that I thought the Rapture was about to occur. Then there was the very long fourth of July weekend where my PC box suffered from several viral infections, effectively taking it out of commission for days before I finally got everything working again.

For weeks, working on my blog became a daily ritual of adjusting some code, saving the file, uploading it to the server, then refreshing the blog in my browser to view the results. Adjust-Save-Upload-View-Repeat. Ad infinitum. There were some nights where I stayed up till 4 in the morning wrestling with some code until I either passed out or emerged victorious (usually the former). Some things just ended up being lost causes (such as getting skins to work right).

If that weren’t enough, I had to deal with the headache of making my blog look consistent across different browser platforms. I cannot tell you how many times I had things looking just fine and dandy in Firefox, only to see Microsoft’s Internet Explorer projectile vomit my blog all over the monitor screen. I’m forced to bastardize and invalidate my stylesheet with some ugly snippets of javascript all because IE to this day is still not standards compliant. Beautiful. Then there was the CSS standard itself, which makes it bloody near impossible to include a decent footer at the end of your blog. If this were a perfect world, my footer would be placed under all three columns here, not just the middle one. But because of either gross oversight or sheer stupidity (or both), this is virtually impossible to do without resorting to using floats (whatever the @#$% that is) or some other wacky means. On the plus side, the way my blog is set up now makes it far more search engine friendly than it was before, because the sidebars are absolutely (permanently) positioned on either side of the screen, which means search engines only need to crawl the header of the site before getting to the real meat of the blog. In other setups that don’t involve absolute positioning, search bots may have to sift through a crapload of code (involving the header AND the sidebars, and maybe even other superfluous data) before it finally reaches the main content of your site. I noticed a lot of blogs seemed to be set up like this too. Bad for them, good, however for me.

As if all this grief weren’t enough, my original hosting provider apparently had a fetish for rebooting their servers on a regular basis, which meant searching for a new hosting service, and then dealing with the agony of canceling my account, signing up for a new one elsewhere, moving all my files to the new server, etc., etc., etc.. Overall, the amount of work I was investing to getting this blog up and running was bordering on the absurd. For weeks I would stumble into the office at work in a daze after getting only 3 hours of sleep the night before, only to find myself logging into my work PC and getting right back to where I left off before I passed out. And why not? It’s not like my job was important or anything.

Eventually…finally… my work was at long last completed. So what happens now that the dust has settled, and I’m ready to move on with my life and start blogging for real?

I get writer’s block.

For the past month I had a million ideas and thoughts I wanted to put down on blogging “paper” and make known to the world (especially with what’s been happening in the Mideast), but when that moment finally arrives, I’m now drawing a complete blank. :pullhair: