Adventures in Tech

Over the holiday season I was looking for a speaker with a decent sound quality, and good support for playing music wirelessly. With a bit of research I settled on the Sonos Play:5 speaker. Most of the online reviews were favorable, and it supported streaming online music from Spotify, Pandora, and a dozen other services. The speakers were also on display at Target stores for a live test, and despite the background noise in the store, they sounded great. Sonos was running a promotion at the time, where you got a free bridge with the purchase of any of their speakers, which is a decent discount. Setup was extremely easy. I plugged the bridge into my wifi router, plugged the speaker into a power outlet, and installed the Sonos application on my computer. The application guided me through the intuitive setup, which involved pressing a button on the bridge, and another on the speaker to connect the whole system together.  After that it was time to play music. The Sonos application...

One of the great things about getting a haircut besides the feeling of freshness, is the enjoyable conversations that I have with my barber. The conversations usually span multiple topics, and are mostly random, but sometimes we chat about technology, and it is always great to get the perspective of someone not embedded in the field. Last time we talked about how the younger generations are using technology to communicate. My barber made astute observations about the topic, gleaned from his observations on how his kids, nephews and their friends communicate. It was interesting to learn that despite having cell phones, the younger generation has forgone all types of voice communication on the mobile device, and instead has opted for text messages and instant messaging. My barber was complaining that his kids rake in thousands of text messages a month, and if he did not select the right cell phone plan he would have gone broke by now. Despite not using voice communication on the mob...

About a year ago I switched from the iPhone to the Samsung S3, and was initially pleased with the switch. What's not to like about a bigger screen, better technical specs, and easy expandability and connectivity. As I gained more experience with the phone, I started getting annoyed by the quality of the software, the inconsistencies between applications, and all the wonderful carrier add ons that I could not remove from the phone, unless I rooted it. And not to mention the dropped calls and the garbage collections that rendered the phone unusable at times. The poorly written software and the carrier add ons drained my stock battery so quickly even with minimal use, that I had to replace the stock battery with one that has 4x the capacity to get a usable phone. The replacement came with its own inconveniences that a bulky phone brings. It made me think about how a superior hardware spec and a bigger screen do not necessarily make a good phone, and that the unified experience ...

Recommendation systems are in wide use today, and Amazon's website is a prime example of that use.  In addition to the recommendations on the site, whenever I buy a new Kindle book, I receive emails with recommendations for other items I would be interested in. The recommendations are usually spot-on, and I end up buying more Kindle books, and the cycle continues. Recently I noticed that whenever I finish a Kindle book, Amazon sends me an email with related books that I might be interested in, which is pretty cool if you ignore the fact that an algorithm is watching when you finish a book, and triggers a recommendation email to entice you to read more. The feature might have been in place for some time, and I might not have noticed it, were it not for a very long book that I was reading on and off over the last year. After I was done, I received an email recommendation for other books by the same author, equally as long. Even though the recommendations are good, I am sure I am...

There is something to be said about using computers before going to sleep, and the effects they have on how well we sleep at night.  The authors of the free software  F.lux  believe that one of the reasons for the sleep disruption after using a computer is the color temperature of the screen. They postulate that computer screens are designed to feel like sunlight during the hours of the day, which is great, but they don't change how they look at night, which is not so great. They designed and implemented the F.lux software to warm up the screen as the sun goes down. And to make things easier, the software can automatically read the location of the computer, and adjust the warming schedule accordingly. The software is free, and works on Windows, Mac, and the jailbroken iPads/iPhones. I have only tried it on the Mac, and while I cannot attest to any changes in my sleep patterns, I admit that the screen looks a lot more pleasing at night: warm and soft, unlike how it lo...

I have had my Samsung S3 phone for a bit over a year, and the most annoying thing for me is its poor battery life. I mainly use my phone for work email, with the occasional phone call or text message, and the minimum Internet browsing, and despite that light usage, I can barely survive a day on a single battery charge. I used every trick possible, from power savings mode, to manually syncing emails and accounts, and finally through installing Juice Defender, an Android application that turns off most of the unnecessary radio antennas when the phone is not in use to maximize battery life. The most I got was almost 10 hours of usage without charging. Better than nothing but not ideal. I attribute the poor battery life to the poor software that runs on the device, including Samsung's and AT&T's add-ons, that I cannot uninstall after their latest update. Most of that background software eats up the battery in no time. Barring a software fix, a hardware answer would do. A...

One of the areas often overlooked when writing software systems is thoroughly understanding what needs to be developed. Specifically who are the users that are going to interact with the system, what are they trying to accomplish with the software, and how is the system expected to behave under normal and error conditions. In short, developing software requirements and specifications before the software is written. " Software Requirements 3 " addresses these questions, with clear answers and advice in a rather longish format of roughly 673 pages. The book starts with a story about the importance of software requirements: a case of an employee who changed her last name without getting married, and the accounting software's inability to handle the change, with the repercussions that the employee will not get paid until the the "bug" is fixed. The book mentions that this is not an atypical situation, and that  ... errors introdu...