Let’s be up-front about this: you pay a premium for the convenience of built-in WiFi. A regular 8gb Class 6 SDHC card runs about $10 on Amazon whereas the 8gb Mobile|X2 is 8 times that (although keep an eye out for price drops, I got mine for $60). On top of the higher price, you’ll get poorer battery life in your camera (unless your camera supports Eye-Fi cards in their menu system which lets you turn off the wireless sync to save battery life).

That being said, it’s amazing that this little SD card also contains a WiFi radio that allows for wireless synchronization and backup of your photos directly from your camera to your PC (or some supported online services like Flickr). And when it works (it takes some setup), it’s pretty slick.

There are some gotchas, however, and it’s not all magical. The Eye-Fi card is meant primarily to work with your home wireless network. After installing the Eye-Fi Center software on your PC you can configure the card (via the included USB card reader) and enter your wireless SSID and password (the Eye-Fi card doesn’t support RADIUS authentication, however, so if you’re trying to use it in a corporate environment, forget it). Then, whenever your camera is on, in range of your network, and the Eye-Fi Center software is running on your PC, your photos will be uploaded to your computer. An important thing to note is that the photos are not (and cannot be) automatically removed from the card after they are transferred, so you’ll have to delete them yourself. If your camera natively supports Eye-Fi cards like mine does, photos that have been already uploaded will have a special symbol on them when you view them on the camera’s screen.

Ok, that’s cool when you’re at home, but what if you’re out-and-about, taking photos? You can pay $30/year for hotspot access, which lets your card upload from AT&T hotspots in Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, aiports, etc. It also lets the card upload from any open WiFi access point. Another add-on service is geotagging ($30 if the card you bought doesn’t come with it) which uses WPS (WiFi positioning system) to tag your photos with the coordinates of the location you took the photo. This can be used with services or software to show your photos on a map. The gotcha here is that WPS is not the same as GPS (which uses satellites). If you’re in the middle of the Grand Canyon and you take a photo, unless there happens to be a WiFi network in-range of your Eye-Fi card the photo won’t get tagged. Just something to keep in mind.

If you don’t want to pay annually for hotspot access (and I didn’t) the new X2 cards have the ability to create their own WiFi network. “Direct Mode” lets your card send your photos directly from the camera to the free Eye-Fi app on your iOS or Android device. The gotcha here is that your card can only be configured to upload to a single device at a time and you have to use the Eye-Fi Center software on your PC to change it. You can’t change it from the web either, so if you’re away from home and don’t have access to a PC with Eye-Fi Center on it, you’re out of luck.

Another gotcha is that you can’t just plug the Eye-Fi SD card into any ol’ card reader that might be built into your desktop PC or laptop. Due to the extra power requirements, you must use the included USB card reader when connecting the card to your PC. Your PC might recognize the card without it (mine did) but you won’t be able to read/write to it (strange things seem to happen). So if you’re travelling with your Eye-Fi card, don’t forgot to throw that card reader in your bag, just in case!

The Eye-Fi Center software itself is another gotcha, in my book. It’s like the iTunes of photo sharing: slow, bloated, and buggy. And it needs to be running (which means your PC needs to be on) in order for the Eye-Fi card to upload its photos. I’d rather run something on my Linux media server (which is on all the time), and the hacker community has come to the rescue in this regard. I found and tried four different Linux-based Eye-Fi solutions:

• Eye-Fi Standalone Server v2.0
• eyefiserver 
• Eye-Fi Framework
• Eye-Fi Card Manager (iii)

I’m currently using the first one. Written in python (so it will actually run on Windows and OS X as well), this Eye-Fi Center replacement supports multiple Eye-Fi cards and is pretty easy to set up. It didn’t work with the app on my iPad or iPhone, though, but I was able to make a few changes to the code and get it working (you can download the patch/diff for my changes here). Now I don’t have to worry about having my desktop PC on. And if I’m out, I can use direct mode to transfer my photos from the Eye-Fi card to my iOS device, and then VPN into my home network and transfer the photos to my media server via the python server. Nice.

In summary, once you understand the abilities (and limitations) and get all of the pieces set up and configured properly, the Eye-Fi card is a digital camera accessory worth considering.

 … in the not-so-distant future the world has turned into a very bleak place, but luckily there is OASIS, a virtual reality world that is a vast online utopia. People can plug into OASIS to play, go to school, earn money, and even meet other people (or at least they can meet their avatars), and for protagonist Wade Watts it certainly beats passing the time in his grim, poverty-stricken real life. Along with millions of other world-wide citizens, Wade dreams of finding three keys left behind by James Halliday, the now-deceased creator of OASIS and the richest man to have ever lived. The keys are rumored to be hidden inside OASIS, and whoever finds them will inherit Halliday’s fortune. But Halliday has not made it easy. And there are real dangers in this virtual world.

After hearing Jick talk about it on a Kingdom of Loathing podcast last year, I picked up a copy of  “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline. I have to admit, this book had me hooked after referring to “Heathers,” Oingo Boingo, the Atari 2600, and 800XL, Galaga, and “Family Ties” in just the first few pages.

The beginning gave me a distinct “Daemon” vibe: when an eccentric software developer and creator of the OASIS (think the Matrix), James Halliday, died he left behind a massive virtual scavenger hunt inside the massive online system. The first person to find all three keys, pass the three gates, and find Halliday’s easter egg becomes the sole heir to his entire estate and owner of the OASIS (the similarity to “Daemon” ends there since Halliday isn’t trying to kill people and take over the world from beyond the grave).

Our protagonist, Wade Watts, is a high school senior and an expert in all things Halliday. He’s just one of millions of gunters (or “egg hunters” trying to find Halliday’s egg. But it’s been five years since Halliday’s death and no one has even found the first key yet. That is, until Wade (known as Parzival in the OASIS), makes a breakthrough discovery and the hunt is suddenly on. Wade quickly learns that the search for Halliday’s egg is serious business in some circles, even worth killing for. Can Parzival and his fellow gunters find the egg and keep the OASIS free from the hands of the corporate behemoths who want sole financial control?

“Ready Player One” takes place in 2044, but it’s chock full of 80s pop-culture (check the wiki page for just a few!). “Whiz Kids,” Cory Doctorow, Will Wheaton (who reads the audiobook version), “WarGames,” “Blade Runner,” and Monty Python all make appearances. It was those references that really appealed to my nostalgic side, having been a geek in the 80s (the golden age of dungeons and dragons, video games, music, movies, and TV) when being a geek wasn’t cool. Without getting into spoilers there was a whole interactive fiction section (I took great pride in figuring out the “dwelling long neglected” puzzle chapters before Wade did ), and I had actually listened to Rush’s 2112 the day before it came up in the book. On top of all of that, I learned some things: I had no idea the last level of Pac-Man was a corrupted split-screen (I never got that far), or that the very first easter egg was in Adventure on the Atari 2600.

I also couldn’t help but wonder if Cline had modeled James Halliday on Steve Jobs with the way he is portrayed in the story (an intensely private person who built something that changed the world, and died, tragically, of cancer). Halliday’s business partner, Ogden Morrow, even reminded me of Woz, and the evil empire of Innovative Online Industries could have been Microsoft.

Overall, “Ready Player One” was an immensely enjoyable ready for me. If you were a nerd in the 80s, you really should read it.

Take some time today to learn about SOPA and PIPA and sign Google’s petition.

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she’s made it out of the bloody arena alive, she’s still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what’s worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss’s family, not her friends, not the people of District 12.

I just finished reading “Mockingjay,” the last book of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy. (Warning … slight spoilers may follow!)

The book picks up immediately where “Catching Fire” ended: Katniss has been rescued from the arena by the rebels from District 13, but they were unable to rescue Peeta who is now in the hands of the government forces. As part of the resistance, Katniss reluctantly becomes the titular Mockingjay, the face of the revolution, and a tug-of-war of propaganda ensues between the revolting districts and the Capitol.

The revolution in Panem takes center-stage in this final book of the trilogy while the love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale continues to be a main plot point. Peeta is eventually rescued from the Capitol but turns out to be brainwashed, no longer his gentle self, but a ticking time-bomb programmed to (hopefully) kill the Mockingjay.

Can Peeta fight his demons be returned to normal? Will the Districts be able to overthrow the Capitol and win the war? Will Katniss get her final revenge and kill President Snow? Most (but not all) of your questions are answered in the final chapters. I found the end to be a little rushed (and my daughter had ruined one of the major surprises for me) but still enjoyed the series.

It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out on the silver screen. We went to see “Beauty and the Beast” in 3D today and all of “The Hunger Games” movie posters were hanging up (only two months to go!) which got my daughter all psyched. It’s going to be PG-13, though, and even though she’s read the books I’m not sure how seeing some of those sequences on screen are going to affect her (real or not real?) so we may have to do the “wait and watch at home” thing.

• Twitter: don’t use it
• Newsstand: don’t use it (I use MegaReader)
• iCloud: don’t use it (except for Find My iPhone)
• WiFi iTunes sync: only works when the device is plugged into power, so I might as well just connect it via the USB cable to my PC
• Reminders: I was excited to learn that iOS5 finally added support for synchronizing my Tasks in Microsoft Exchange via ActiveSync. However, the lack of categories, no sorting by priority (or any sorting at all!), and no way to easily clear all Completed entries quickly led me to dump Reminders and go back to iMExchange 2. Nice first try Apple, but this still needs work.
• iPad multi-tasking gestures: don’t work on my iPad 1

Ok, now for the stuff I actually do use (why did I upgrade again?).

• iMessage: being able to chat other iOS users without using my AT&T text messaging plan (the no-longer-available 200 messages/month for $5) is nice. It’s even nicer that biteSMS seamlessly takes over the the built-in Messages app and supports iMessage too.
• Notification Center: it’s not perfect, but it is a huge improvement over the previous notification system. I like that SBSettings can integrate with it since I’m already used to swiping down from the top of the screen. I’m still configuring all of my different app notifications but for the most part I’m happy with this new feature. I do wish it was wider on the iPad when in landscape mode, however.

Unfortunately, I have run into some problems since upgrading. Slow/sluggish performance and poor battery life were the initial indicators. Sometimes the phone is so slow it takes one of my taps as a tap-and-hold, or just ignores the tap altogether so I end up tapping multiple times on the same element. I’ve gone through some of the tips to improve battery life, which did help, but it still seems like my battery drains faster than it did on iOS 4.3.3. I’m going to stick with it, though (I don’t feel like attempting to downgrade back to 4.3.3 and setting up everything again). There may be a new iPhone in my near future anyway …

To prepare, I made a final backup of my phone with iTunes and also used PkgBackup to backup all of my Cydia apps and data. I also took screenshots of all of my springboard pages so I had a reference of all of my icons, folders, sort orders, etc.

2012 is a brand new year so to start it out fresh, I decided to restore my phone to iOS5 instead of upgrading (in hindsight, this turned out to be a mistake, but more on that later). I let iTunes start the install but kept running into a problem where my phone would hang in DFU mode and iTunes would show a -5000 error.  None of the generic resolutions I was finding on the internet were helping, but after trying a few times the update finally installed and soon after I had a “clean” iPhone running iOS 5.0.1.

Next it was time to jailbreak: I fired up redsn0w 0.9.10b3 and followed the instructions. This part went a lot smoother than the iTunes portion and just minutes later I had Cydia back on my iPhone. I ran into another small problem when I launched Cydia for the first time: it kept saying “cannot locate package” and wouldn’t let me install anything and no applications were found in any of the sources. I tried refreshing the sources as suggested by some internet posts but that didn’t work. What did work was tapping the Refresh button on the Changes tab, though! With Cydia finally working, I re-installed PkgBackup and then restored my backup, rebooted, and re-sprung. My final jailbreak step was to SSH into my phone and change the root password.

Now the full impact of doing a restore to iOS5 instead of an upgrade hit me. First I had to re-create all of my folders and set up my springboard pages (thank goodness I had taken screenshots of everything!) which was a pain since I use FolderEnhancer and thus couldn’t do it through iTunes. Then I had to re-configure just about every app. For some of them I had the foresight to back up their data with DataDeposit so I didn’t lose my saved game progress, but for others I just had to start over (mostly this involved just logging in but it was still annoying). For some reason, though, I lost all of my biteSMS messaging history, even though I saw those files get restored from my PkgBackup backup. I was never able to figure out how to get it back so I had to start from scratch there as well. Also, since my iPhone was completely empty, that first sync with iTunes took a long time as all of my music and videos had to be copied back to the device. Lastly, my voicemail password was lost so I had to reset it through the AT&T web site, which inexplicably deleted my custom greeting so I had to re-record that. *sigh*

I persevered through the problems and annoyances, however, and now have my iPhone 3GS jailbroken on iOS 5.0.1 and back the way I like it. A few days later I did the same thing to my iPad but this time upgraded instead of restoring and everything went a lot smoother. Now to learn my way around iOS5 …

The 300HS is a 12.1MP camera with 5x optical zoom, a 2.7″ LCD screen (no viewfinders anymore!), and shoots 1080p HD video. The controls are almost identical to my SD600, so the learning curve was pretty flat and I was almost immediately comfortable with using the camera. It’s slightly thinner and wider than the SD600 and I like the matte black, textured metal casing.

HD video is recorded in MOV (QuickTime) format, which is a pain since I like to keep all of my video in MP4 (but it’s nothing WinFF can’t take care of, just an extra step). My only gripe with video recording is that the microphones are on the top of the case (near the power button) so you tend to hear more audio closer to the camera than what you’re actually pointing at. The video quality, however, is excellent. I don’t see why I would use my mini DV camcorder anymore when I have HD video capabilities in such a small, portable package (and no tapes!).

This is now the third Canon PowerShot model I’ve owned in a row and it seems like every time I get a new one the megapixels have doubled: my A70 was 3.2MP, the SD600 was 6.0MP, and now the 300HS is 12.1MP. I guess that means around 2017 or so I should be getting a new 24.0MP PowerShot.

I do need to get a new SD card now, however, because the old 2gb one I had isn’t a Class 6 so it can’t handle the recording of HD video. It’ll do about 45 seconds and then stop as it can’t keep up with the amount of data being thrown at it.

I’m actually a little surprised I haven’t written about IF before on this blog considering how fond I was of playing Wishbringer or Moonmist on my Atari 800XL back in the day. Even my daughter had even gotten into playing IF games on my iPad with Frotz. She’s an avid reader and also loves playing games, so IF games are a natural fit for her. Back in late August I decided I wanted to try my hand at writing her a personalized game which eventually evolved into the idea of making the game a scavenger hunt of sorts for her birthday in December. That gave me about four months to plan, design, write, and test the game.

The first thing I did was to download Inform 7 and start reading the documentation. Inform is a natural language design system for IF games which makes it pretty easy to learn. In almost no time at all, I was creating the rooms of our house, writing (a LOT of!) descriptions, linking rooms with exits, and creating objects.

The screenshot above shows the basic Inform interface. On the left-hand side is my source code and the right-hand pane is showing the running game for testing. Tabs along the top of each pane allow you to quickly switch between different views, like the skein (a flowchart of in-game commands you’ve run, showing the branches), the map, compilation errors, etc.

Inform’s syntax is extremely flexible, allowing for the simplest definition of objects and rooms to more complex actions like wandering NPCs, conversation tables, almost anything you can think of. The Inform web site contains an impressive library of user-contributed extensions: re-usable modules of code you can include in your own to add features like locking doors (with keys), vehicles, or even writing games in different languages (like Spanish) which let you avoid writing all of that code from scratch.

Over the next few months while I worked on developing the game, I made extensive use of Inform’s built-in help system, code examples, and also participated in the Interactive Fiction Community Forum whose members were very helpful when I got stuck on a particular coding problem or needed advice on how to approach something. At last, I was ready for testing so I “released” my game and published it on my Dropbox account using Quixe, a javascript-based IF interpreter. This made it easy for my play-testers (my brother, sister, and sister-in-law) to play the game without needing to install their own Z-interpreter like Frotz plus I was able to quickly re-publish new builds as I made corrections or changes to the code.

Finally, it was December and time for the game to be released for real. I put the final game into Frotz on my iPad told her I found a new IF game I thought she’d enjoy. Her reaction, once she realized she was playing a game as herself in her own house, was priceless, and well-worth the months of effort it took to write. Unlike my play-testers who had a hard time with some of  my puzzles (since a) they were new to IF games and b) the game was tailored for a young girl), my daughter blew through the game in just under a day and completed the scavenger hunt, laughing almost the entire time. Lucky for me she missed some of the non-critical puzzles so the game still has replay value. She has even expressed interest in writing her own IF game, which is pretty cool.

Of course, my new coding challenge is now … how do I top this for next year?

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the annual Hunger Games with fellow district tribute Peeta Mellark. But it was a victory won by defiance of the Capitol and their harsh rules. Katniss and Peeta should be happy. After all, they have just won for themselves and their families a life of safety and plenty. But there are rumors of rebellion among the subjects, and Katniss and Peeta, to their horror, are the faces of that rebellion. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge.

During our summer road trip we listened to the audiobook version of Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” and my daughter quickly read the remaining books in the trilogy shortly afterwards. With the upcoming March 2012 release of the movie, I know I’ll probably be taking her to see all of them anyway so I figured I might as well read the rest of the books myself.

“Catching Fire” is the second book in the series and begins about six months after Katniss and Peeta emerged as the dual victors of the 74th annual Hunger Games, as they prepare to go on their Victory Tour of the other Districts. This year’s Hunger Games will be a Quarter Quell, which occurs every 25 years and usually includes some sort of miserable twist to the Games. The surprise for this Quell is that the Tributes will be selected from past victors, which means Katniss and Peeta are going into the Arena … again.

The secondary plotline continues to be the unrest in the Districts towards the Capitol. As the title suggests, Katniss has become the spark that could ignite a revolution and the Capitol will do everything in its power to prevent that. So where the first book focused more on the Games themselves, this story gives us more detail on the other Districts, their relationship with the Capitol, and the current political situation in Panem overall.

Just like the first novel, “Catching Fire” is laid out in three parts of 9 chapters each, and is an easy read (not surprising since it’s really young-adult literature). It seemed to end rather abruptly just and events were really picking up, but having started “Mockingjay” now I know it picks up immediately and keeps going, so it was the logical break point for the book.

Just remember who the Enemy is …

The heart of Pulse is the iHub, a WiFi and Z-Wave router that connects the ADT system to the internet. The ADT technicians installed the iHub in my computer closet near my cable modem and existing router. Then they fished a serial cable through the attic to the location of the alarm panel equipment and finally connected the iHub to my router via a Cat-5 cable.

The WiFi side of the iHub is encrypted with WPA2 and used for any wireless cameras you install with the system. Unfortunately, ADT only supports one model of camera, the RC8021, which has no night-vision or PTZ features. Plus, you can’t just buy one from any retailer, only from ADT (due to customized firmware). My existing camera setup is a lot more extensive and capable so there’s really no need for me to use the ADT one that the installers brought other than it ties into the security system and mine can’t. Another annoying thing about the iHub wireless is that it broadcasts its SSID as “iHub_<serial number>.” There isn’t a customer-facing web configuration page available on the iHub and no one at ADT seems to know if this can be changed or hidden. Ideally, since I’m not using the WiFi features of the iHub, I’d prefer to turn it off altogether.

The real focus of this post though is the Z-Wave side of the iHub. Z-Wave uses the 900MHz range of the RF spectrum (so it doesn’t interfere with WiFi and other devices in the more crowded 2.4GHz band) and was designed with home automation in mind. Z-Wave devices form a mesh network to talk to each other and the iHub which basically means even if one device is out-of-range of the iHub, it can still send/receive commands by communicating through the other Z-Wave devices that it is in range of.

My initial ADT install came with a single appliance/lamp module but since then I’ve installed two dimmer switches and two outlets and also added two outdoor plugs (for the Christmas lights and landscape lighting) and another lamp module. Adding a device to the existing network is pretty simple: on the Pulse web site you select the device type being added which puts the iHub in discovery mode for 45 seconds. Then you press the “pairing” button (usually the on/off switch) on the Z-Wave device and it’s added to the network. Even though Z-Wave is an industry standard, ADT only supports certain makes/models (like with the WiFi cameras) so I went with the GE devices, all readily available from Amazon.

I got to experience the mesh network benefit of Z-Wave first hand during my rollout. Unlike lamp modules which plug into an outlet so they can be near the iHub during pairing, one electrical outlet and one dimmer switch I installed were too far away to be initially paired. To work around this I purchased the GE 45601 Z-Wave remote control, which could be paired with the iHub to be used as an inclusion controller. Basically, once the remote was part of my Z-Wave network I was able to pair the far devices (the outlet and switch) to the remote, which then relayed the pairing to the iHub when I brought it back into range. Then after refreshing the Z-Wave network, the other devices in the house were able to “see” and route to those further devices and include them in the network. Pretty sweet! Another benefit of having the inclusion controller is that it allows for advanced programming of the GE Z-Wave devices. By changing the values stored in registers you can control, for example, the speed of dimming, or even turn off the annoying bright blue LED with the device is off (nice for a switch in a common area, but annoying in a bedroom at night).

Once the mesh network was in place I started building my home automation schedule on the ADT Pulse web site. You can create recurring schedules (turn on the family room lamp every Monday and Thursday at 6pm and turn it off at 10pm) or automations (when the back door is opened, turn on the rear landscape lighting). Since my Z-Wave network is integrated with the security system I also have the option of only triggering events when the system is in a certain state (i.e., armed) or when system events happen (like a burglar alarm). I have found some complex scenarios you can’t create through Pulse, though, such as combining the alarm status and time of day (ex. if the alarm goes off after 9pm, turn on the inside lights). Also, you can’t set schedules or automations as inactive so if you have a schedule for when you’re away on vacation, you’ll have to delete those events when you’re back from your trip and then re-create them for your next vacation.

In addition to controlling my Z-Wave network from the Pulse web site, I can also control the devices from the ADT Pulse app on my iPhone. Simple rocker switches allow me to turn lights on or off, and even control the dimmer settings:

In conclusion, I’m pretty happy with Z-Wave and the automation it’s allowed me to add to my home. I’ll be sure to add updates to the comments on this post as I learn more or run into problems.