MichaelPrewitt.com

Find My iPad Failure

On October 20, 2012, my iPad went missing. I knew I’d last seen it at church, which in my case brought some comfort, because the people at this church are, for the most part, a pretty trustworthy group. Still, not everyone in even a good church is a saint, and besides there are visitors who could be — gulp — capable of anything.

Since I had iCloud, I decided to try Apple’s nifty Find My iPad feature. But when I tried, this is the sad news I got:

Short summary: It says “Location Services Off”. This meant I could not trace the iPad’s location. Being able to trace the location is obviously a huge deal, and greatly increases the chances of recovery by either yourself or law enforcement. And there is no way to remotely enable location services if it is off. The fact that it was shown as off was very strange, because I use location services on my iPad all the time. It’s used for maps, weather alerts, and much more. Apparently it can be turned off on a per-app basis, but since I’d never disabled it for the Find My iPad feature, why would it be off?

The Good News

The good news is that I found my iPad. After sending an email to the church secretary, who forwarded it to everyone else, I learned that the church librarian had seen my iPad sitting on a chair after I left, and decided to lock it in the church library for safe keeping. Since we knew each other personally, it was easy to recover it the next Monday, just two days later.

The Frustration

Once I had my iPad back in hand, I decided to check out what its current location services settings were. You see, I had read a comment on an Apple support forum in which a user claimed that they had experienced the same problem, but it was due to a bug in iOS (perhaps the most recent version 6 only, I’m not sure) that required the iPad user to manually turn Find My iPad’s location services off and back on before it would actually work.

And this turned out to be the case for my iPad. Everything was on, but not working.

In this screen capture, taken just after I’d found my missing iPad, but before I’d changed anything, you can clearly see that Location Services is turned On:

Scrolling down to the bottom of the same list, I also confirmed that Find My iPad was turned On:

Clicking on the Find My iPad sub-screen within Location Services, I noted that the Find My iPad toggle switch was turned On:

So … everything was on, but still it hadn’t worked. Based on what I’d read earlier, I tried turning it all off and back on again. I returned to iCloud, and confirmed that my iPad was now appearing on the map.

I’m glad it’s working now, but I really expected more from Apple. If this had been a less easy recovery, I might never have seen my iPad again.

I guess the moral of this story should be: If you plan to ever use Find My iPad (or iPhone, or Mac), be sure to test it before you lose your device, and make sure it works! In fact, it wouldn’t hurt to test it after every iOS upgrade.

OS X’s Wimpy Finder

Normally I am pretty positive about all things related to Mac OS X. However, despite some nice features, I have to say that the OS X Finder is one of the weakest links in the operating system. In particular, it fails woefully at something very commonplace and important to many routine computer tasks: copying or moving files.

Wimpy error handling: One of its most annoying traits is its utterly wimpy error handling. Recently I was trying to copy a Time Machine backup from one drive to another. This was many gigabytes in size, and could take hours to complete. The source drive was a bit flaky, beginning to fail physically. I couldn’t wait for the copying operation to finish at home, since I had to go to work. But while I was at work, the drive went to standby mode (after the lengthy file counting process, but before any actual copying had begun, since at that strange juncture Finder asks for a username and password), and then the drive didn’t want to come back online when I returned home — at least no without some kicking and screaming. This caused the copy operation, now in progress since I just typed my username and password, to get an error, but rather than giving me a chance to try again, it just quit. Which put me back at square one, with hours of copying ahead. What Finder needs is a simple “Retry / Cancel” dialog. There is no excuse for operations to fail because of a single error; give the user the chance to remedy the error and resume. Even DOS had “Abort, Retry, Fail?” Come on, Apple! We need something robust. And this is not the only situation where that can happen — it appears any error will cause Finder to give up.

No intelligent file merging: There appears to be no Finder mechanism to handle merging files during copy, wherein newer copies will be copied, older items won’t, etc., or simply letting the user decided item by item. Instead, the user is given no choice except replace everything or cancel. This is totally pathetic.

I really need a good workaround for these problems. I am thinking of giving the shareware application Path Finder a try. I am not sure if it will help, but I hope so.

Orbitz, CheapTickets … Who Copied Whom?

Here is a screen shot comparing, side by side, the flight search results on both Orbitz.com and CheapTickets.com:

Orbitz and CheapTickets compared — Click the image for a full-size view.

Note the similar layout, same search results, same wording, same abbreviations, same pretty much everything, except the colors, theme, and a few minor layout differences. The results are so similar, it appears they may be using even the same database. One notable difference in the search results is that Orbitz returns 250 results, whereas CheapTickets returns 150. But in both cases it could be an arbitrary cutoff.

OS X: Create a Command to View UNIX “man” Pages as PDFs

A website tipped me off to a Terminal command that lets OS X users (the geekier ones) view UNIX “man” pages* as PDFs.

However, since the command is long, it would be hard to remember and difficult to type. I wanted to make an alias (a custom UNIX command) that would be shorter, but Bash (the default terminal in OS X) does not allow aliases to accept arguments (variables), which is critical to making this work.

I found a way to create a custom command that does this. Here are the steps:

Edit your ~/.bash_profile with your favorite text editor
Add this line:
[cc]manpdf () { man -t $1 | open -f -a Preview.app ; }[/cc]
(You could call it something other than “manpdf” if you want; you may also want to add a comment to remind yourself what it does.)
Save it
Try it: Open Terminal and type:
[cc]manpdf ping[/cc]

Enjoy!

*For newbies: The “man” command lists instructions — “manuals” — for various UNIX commands. For example, if you wanted to know how to use the “ping” command, you could open Terminal and type “man ping”.

iPhone Nature Kit

I read a post called iPhone Survival Guide, about how your iPhone (or iPod touch) could be useful in an emergency. It’s worth checking out.

That got me to thinking about how an iPhone (or iPod touch) could be used for nature activities in general. The iPhone has a clear advantage over the iPod touch in a couple areas:

The iPhone is a phone, which is handy. (However, AT&T service is not available everywhere. Too bad it doesn’t work with Verizon.) But the iPod touch has wifi, so if you find a hotspot (at the lodge or wherever), you’re not too badly off.
The iPhone has a built-in compass and GPS, which are very useful in the outdoors.
The iPhone has a camera. Of course it’s a very limited camera. But combined with the other powers of the iPhone, it does some fancy things. (Note: If you have a cell phone that has a camera and a wifi connection for your iPod touch, you can get tricky: Take a photo on your cell phone, email it to yourself, download it on the iPod touch, and proceed as if the iPod touch took the photo.)
The iPhone has a built-in mic (although you can buy one as an accessory for the iPod touch).

The following apps or uses require an iPhone:

You can geotag photos with certain apps (do an iTunes app search for “geotag”).
Record colors of natural things (myPANTONE).
Email the photos you’ve taken on the iPhone to people, or upload them online.
GPS Tracker (free), iMapMyRun (free), TrackMe (free), Trails ($2.99), Trailguru (free): Track your speed, distance, etc. iPhone needed for GPS tracking features.
Metal Detector Pro (99¢), or other similar app: Could help you locate a buried tent stake.
TopoPoint ($9.99): Find your location on USGS maps.

However, both the iPhone and iPod touch work equally well with a number of apps useful to the nature lover. The following apps require Internet access:

With phone or wifi service, you can talk, email friends (or monitor work email, if you get the nagging feeling), send SMS messages, visit any website, etc.
Google Earth (free): Get the lay of the land, check out other people’s comments and photos of local attractions.
Ski Report (free), The Snow Report from the North Face (free), REI Snow Report (free): Check ski conditions.
The Weather Channel (free), Weather Bug (free), etc.: Get weather updates.

These apps do not require Internet access:

Use the built-in voice record, or app of your choice, to record those breakthrough insights that come in the wilderness solitude, or capture your final words for posterity. (Requires separate mic accessory if you have an iPod touch.)
Animal Tracks (99¢): Track animals.
Army Survival ($1.99): This is the big brother of the 99¢ Survival Pocket Ref app. Everything you wanted to know about survival, medicine, shelters, water, plants, animals, tools, environments (desert, tropics, etc.), orienteering, weather, knots. From an official Army survival manual. Includes pictures.
Brushes ($4.99) or other drawing app: Draw what you see!
Flashlight: Many uses. If you get one that can do signaling, SOS, different colors, all the better. Great for night games like capture the flag, too! (Use it to signal your buddies or whatever. The apps Banner or Fuzz Lites could be fun too.)
A Free Level (free), TiltMeter Pro (99¢), etc.: For setting up your campsite.
Guitar: Play and Share ($3.99), iRecorder (99¢), Ocarina (99¢), Pianist ($3.99), or other musical app: for those fun campfire moments
iBird Explorer Plus/Pro ($19.99/29.99): Photos/drawings of birds, along with sound samples of their calls, regional maps, etc.
iTrailMap 3D ($4.99): 3D views of ski locations. View from any angle. There is also a color version that is free, but not 3D.
Night Stand (99¢), or clock of your choice.
RiverGuide for Kayakers ($4.99): Name says it all.
Seismometer (99¢): Measure the shockwaves.
SkyGazer ($2.99), SkyVoyager ($14.99), Star Walk ($4.99), Starmap ($11.99), or other astronomy app: Learn constellations, get directions.
Sol: Daylight Clock (99¢): Predict sunrises, sunsets (great for photo shoots).
TideApp (free): Find out when tide will be in or out. Oakley Surf Report (free) is another, but requires Internet.

Always remember to bring the charging cable. You can get a cheap adapter that will give you a USB port from any power outlet. There are also hand-crank devices and solar devices that will charge via USB.

Be sure your device is protected in some kind of case. You don’t want to trip and fall and land on it, or suddenly get a rude reminder that you put it in your hip pocket while rock climbing.

Electronic devices require a little TLC, but can be very handy when exploring the great outdoors.