Today’s blog offers follow ups to three other recent blog entries and columns:

• In search of headphones for my iPhone. In May’s User Friendly View column, I detailed my search for a Bluetooth device to use with my iPhone when driving. I indicated that I would likely wind up getting a Bluetooth headset, such as the Aliph Jawbone or the Plantronics Discovery 925.

As it turns out, I went another route. I picked up a Virtual Reality Sound Labs’ Bluetooth Speaker Car Kit VRBT200V at Costco for just $40! Although the device has received mixed reviews at Amazon.com, I have found it to be a satisfactory solution.

The device clips onto a car’s visor and connects to an iPhone via Bluetooth. When a call comes in, you just press a button on the device and start talking. There’s nothing to stick in your ear and, if there is more than one person in the car, they can participate in the conversation. The LCD display serves as a caller-ID, showing you the incoming phone number. The unit also maintains a log of all recent incoming and outgoing phone numbers, from which you can later select to dial — eliminating the need to use the iPhone itself to call back a number. I confess that the logging feature did not always seem to save a phone number as expected but, when it worked, it worked great. The sound quality could have been better, but it was good enough for me to easily maintain a conversation. The device comes with a DC charger that connects to your car’s outlet.

Getting back to headsets:

Regarding my complaint about the poor fit of the Etymotic’s etyBLU headset, I made the surprising discovery that, when I shifted to the larger size plugs, the device fit better in my ear — even though the problem had appeared to be that the fit was already too snug. Go figure!

Regarding wired stereo headsets, I advise getting a set that has a relatively thick cord. Etymotic Research’s hf2, noted in my May column, is a good example of a thick cord headset. Eytmotic’s 6i Isolator Earphones, in contrast, have a much thinner cord. I have found that, with models that have a thin cord, it is almost impossible to keep the cord from becoming tangled while in its case. No matter what I do and no matter how carefully I store the cord (short of tying up the cord with a rubber band or whatever), there is apparently some gremlin inside the case that tangles everything all up so that I have to spend five minutes undoing the damage the next time I take the headset out!

• CableCARD Conspiracy? In my April blog entry, I complained that Sony televisions no longer include CableCARD slots, a turn of events that will force me to get a set-top box when I replace my existing Sony LCD model. It turns out that the problem isn’t limited to Sony. It appears that CableCARD slots has been dropped from all 2008 televisions. At least that’s what I was told at both Circuit City and Best Buy.

However, there is a glimmer of good news here. According to an SF Chronicle article, the set-top box may soon be extinct. The article reports that: “Sony Electronics Inc. and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association…{have}…signed an agreement that will allow viewers to rid themselves of set-top boxes yet still receive advanced two-way cable services, such as pay-per-view movies…Sony agreed to use the cable industry’s technology in its sets as soon as possible.”

I am guessing we will see these sets on shelves starting in 2009. I’ll be there to buy one!

• Apple’s unsupported support articles. Regarding my May blog entry, lamenting about how hard Apple makes it to locate recently added Knowledge Base articles: Check out the addendum I added to the entry three days after it was first posted. It notes that Apple has now addressed two of my main concerns: (1) modified dates are once again included with each KB article and (2) the special KB article that lists other recently modified articles is working again.

I don’t have much use for the iPhone’s autocorrection feature. If you feel the same way, here’s some good news: You can turn the feature off. It’s not as simple as you might hope. But it can be done. I’ll explain how in a moment. First, let’s start with why you might want to do it.

What’s the problem?

If the iPhone does not recognize a word you are currently typing, it offers a suggested alternative. Keep typing text and it will ignore its suggestion. If you instead press the space bar or a period, the iPhone automatically substitutes its suggested alternative for what you were typing. This, in essence, is autocorrection. It’s a minimalist spelling checker.

Autocorrection has its upsides. Particularly cool, for example, you can enter contracted words without needing to type the apostrophe. Type cant, for example, and the iPhone will offer can’t instead. Still, I rarely use autocorrection. More to the point, I too often find that it gets in my way, suggesting alternatives that are not at all what I intended to type.

The “tipping point” situation for me occurs when an alternative suggestion pops up at the last letter of a word. For example, suppose I truly intended to type cant (it is an actual word) instead of can’t. After typing the “t,” how do I tell the iPhone not to change the word to can’t? The only way, as far as I can tell, is to move my hand from the keyboard and tap on the word itself. Not only is this inconvenient, as it slows down my already slow typing — but, if I don’t notice the suggestion and continue typing (pressing the space bar), the unwanted word substitution is made. When I at last notice the error (which I hopefully will at some point), I have to go back and undo the damage, wasting even more time.

Given this, I decided to disable autocorrection. Oops. It turns out that the iPhone does not provide a setting for turning this feature on and off. So I did some searching, both on my own and on the Web. Eventually, I discovered a way to disable the feature. I found a second method described on the Web (although it required some minor updating for it to work with iPhone Software 1.1.4).

Before you get started

Before I detail how these solutions work, here are a few caveats:

• The solutions require that you jailbreak your iPhone (a procedure I have covered on several prior occasions, such as in this blog entry).

The solutions also require editing iPhone system software files. While there are several ways to do this, my preferred method is to use the AFPd utility, which you add via the Installer on a jailbroken iPhone (as I mention in this column and as covered in more detail at a UC Berekeley Web page). With this software installed, and the needed name and password entered, you can mount your iPhone on your Mac, as if it were a shared hard drive — and directly access its content.

Doing these things always has an element of risk. To be safe, make sure you have a backup of your iPhone’s files before making any changes. Even though the risk is small, you may be hesitant to take it at all. If so, you may still be intrigued to read on and discover what can be done with an iPhone if you push the envelope a bit.

• The solutions below require the use of Property List Editor (an Apple utility installed when you install the Developer software). For the sake of brevity, I don’t provide details on how to use this utility (or similar third-party alternatives such as PlistEdit Pro). If you need more help here, there are several places you can go, including my own series on the subject.

[By the way...if you have registered for access to Apple's iPhone Dev Center, and have downloaded the iPhone SDK, you may have discovered that the SDK includes a significantly updated version of Property List Editor. Among other additions and changes, it includes a View menu — with a suite of choices such as "Show Raw Keys/Values" vs. "Show Strings as Non-lossy ASCII."]

• iPhone 2.0 software is due to be released this month. With a little luck, this should mean that you will no longer have to jailbreak the iPhone to add the AFPd utility (as iPhone 2.0 permits the installation of third-party software). With a bit more luck, iPhone 2.0 may even build-in the option to turn off autocorrection, eliminating the need for this fix altogether. However, I have not seen any indication that this is the case; I expect the fix will still be needed. Finally, it is possible that iPhone 2.0 will include changes to the system software that make the instructions here invalid. Again, I doubt this will be the case, but it’s possible. I will certainly check into all of this after iPhone 2.0 is out.

Solution #1

This first solution is a bit simpler and less intrusive than the second option, but it offers less flexibility.

1. After using AFPd to mount your iPhone on your Mac, navigate to Mobile’s Home Dir > Library > Preferences.

2. From here, locate the com.apple.Preferences.plist file. Open it in Property List Editor.

3. Add a new property. Assign its name as KeyboardAutocorrection, with a class Boolean and a value No.

4. Save the modified file.

That’s it. You’ve now disabled autocorrection. It should take effect immediately; there is no need to restart. To reverse the change, simply go back to the plist file and change the value from No to Yes.

Solution #2

This solution adds an Enable Autocorrection option to your iPhone’s Settings, allowing you to turn the feature on and off without having to edit a plist file each time.

1. After using AFPd to mount your iPhone on your Mac, navigate to Root File System > Applications.

2. From here, locate an application called Preferences. Use the Show Package Contents contextual menu command to go “inside” the application.

3. Once there, locate a file named Keyboard.plist. Open it in a Property List Editor.

4. Add a new sub-property to the items property. There should already be 7 sub-properties there. Set up this new 8th one to have the settings as shown in the figure below.

5. Save the modified file.

Once again, that’s it. Now, go to Settings > General > Keyboard on your iPhone. You should find a new Enable Autocorrection option. Use it to disable or enable autocorrection.

I have recently discovered what is a near-perfect solution for my reluctance to use a camcorder — even though I have a desire to take “home movies.” And, no, the solution is not the Flip Video.

Sunday’s New York Times had yet another article lauding the Flip Video camcorder (David Pogue covered it back in March). All articles I have read about this device make pretty much the same basic point. The camera’s video quality is not as good as a high-def camera, not by a long shot. It’s not even as good as an upper-end standard-def camera. It certainly doesn’t have the full set of features that these cameras sport.

But, for many people, the Flip is good enough. They happily sacrifice a degree of quality in exchange for a much less expensive device that is also far simpler to use. There’s no multitude of buttons or a dizzying array of menu options that are often more confusing than helpful.

I have never used a Flip. But I can relate to the basic arguments in its favor. I am now on my third camcorder (it’s a digital tape machine from Sony). The problem is that I have never used any of these camcorders to the extent that I anticipated and hoped I would. Actually, I probably use my current camcorder the least often of any of them.

I have tried to figure out why this is.

Especially with my most recent camera, I believe it is partly due to the shift to using the camcorder primarily with a computer rather than a TV. In the old days, I would just connect the camera to my TV and press Play. Now, I instead feel compelled to import my video into iMovie, edit it and perhaps create a DVD — before possibly shifting to a television to watch it. This is much more time consuming. The result is that I too often avoid the task altogether.

I also put part of the blame on having to work with tape instead of a “true” digital media — such as a hard drive or media cards. With tape, I must use an application such as iMovie just to get the video on to my computer. This can be a lengthy import process all by itself. Plus, prior to importing, if a tape has numerous recordings on it, I have no easy way to check on the exact content without rewinding and searching, yet another tedious task.

This is why I have given thought to getting yet a fourth video camera, one that works with media cards. Still, while media cards avoid most of the problems with tape, I am not convinced that even this is the solution. Among other things, any camcorder is still another device to carry around — in addition to my iPhone and still camera. Too often, I just don’t want to bother.

Happily, before I spent $1000 on a new high-def camcorder, I came upon a better solution: I use the movie capability built-into my 8-megapixel Canon SD870 IS point-and-shoot camera.

First, let me acknowledge the obvious: The 870’s video quality is not a good as a top quality camcorder. And it is limited to a resolution of 640×480. But, as with the Flip Video, this turns out to be good enough for me. Especially so when you consider that I now do most of my video watching on my computer, rather than on a television.

With the image viewed on my computer display, the quality is actually quite impressive. If I didn’t know the movie came from my Canon camera, I could easily be convinced it was taken with a true camcorder.

To get this level of quality, you probably need a relatively recent model camera and one of the newer high-speed high-capacity media cards. With such a pair, you can expect the same pleasant surprise that I have found. Using my 4GB card, I have had no trouble taking good quality videos of several minutes in length.

But the good news gets even better.

The camera saves each video as separate .avi file. After downloading the files to your Mac, you can immediately view each movie in QuickTime Player. There’s no need to first import the video into iMovie and then export it to another format. Short videos are often small enough that you can directly email them or post them to the Web, without any hassle. Or you can use QuickTime Player (Pro) to convert the files to other formats. Of course, if you want to do fancier editing in iMovie, you can easily import the files there.

Another plus with the Canon is that my still camera and video camera are now the same super-compact device — eliminating the need to decide each time if I want to take my video camera along for the ride. A minor related bonus is that people often don’t know whether I am taking a still shot or video; this avoids the phony “hamming for the camera” that some people do when they see you are taking video.

Finally, if you already own a still camera that takes good video, my solution is cost-free.

This solution is not the ideal one for everybody. I understand that. But it has solved my biggest video camera dilemma. My movies may not be the best quality. I don’t always edit them or add transitions. But I am now taking more video, watching more video, sharing more video and enjoying the whole process more than I have ever done before. To me, that’s the bottom line.

Pay a visit to Apple’ Support site and you’ll be treated to one of the best places for technical support in the computer industry. However, there’s a critical component of this support that has long been lacking — and recent changes have made it even worse.

I am talking about the collection of articles that Apple refers to as its Knowledge Base. The problem is not with the content of these articles (which tend to fine), but with the ability to locate specific information, especially if what you want is to track recent articles.

You may be the type of user that visits Apple’s Support site only when you seek a solution to a problem you’re having. I often use the site that way myself. However, I also want to be able to track all that is new at the site, especially to the Knowledge Base. This assists me in staying up-to-date with the latest advice from Apple, and thereby deciding what new troubleshooting findings are worth writing about in my columns and blogs. This, in turn, helps you (as a reader here) stay informed — without having to scour through Apple’s Support site yourself.

Unfortunately, you won’t even find the words “Knowledge Base” on Apple’s Support home page. Downloads, Manuals, Discussions, Specifications, and How-To articles all get separate links, but not the Knowledge Base. In fact, there isn’t even a way to specifically search the Knowledge Base from the home page, other than as part of a more general Search of the entire Support site.

But let’s ignore this relatively minor quirk. My concerns go deeper:

No more “created” date. Years ago, every Apple Knowledge Base article included two dates: The “created” date (when the article was first posted) and the “modified” date (when it was most recently updated). Apple also provided a way to generate a list of recently updated articles, with new articles separately identified from modified ones.

For articles described as modified, Apple did not (and still does not) list what had been changed. So, unless you had a saved copy of the older version to compare against, you’d be hard-pressed to know whether a change was trivial (such as a typo being fixed) or significant (such as a critical correction to a procedure).

Still, it was a good system overall. At the very least, it made it easy to identify truly new information. Until Apple started messing with things.

At some point, Apple stopped listing the “created” date, leaving only the “modified” date. This meant there was no longer a quick way to separate totally new reports from updates to old ones.

Making matters worse, Apple often releases several dozen articles in the space of a week. Only one or two of them may be truly new. Trying to extract the new from the modified pile can seem a bit like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack.

No more “modified” date. Apple is in the process of updating its entire Knowledge Base. All articles will eventually sport a new look and new URLs. Here is an example of the new approach: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1717. In contrast, here (at least until it gets updated) is an example of the older format: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306723.

One of the changes in the new format is that the “last modified” date has been dropped. Now there isn’t any date information associated with an article. This can make it difficult to tell if an article is even relevant anymore. For example, suppose an article describes a problem that affects Mac OS X 10.4 but not 10.5 — but the text does not clearly state this (as is sometimes the case). If the article included a “last modified” date, and that date preceded the release of 10.5, you might at least suspect that it is not a current issue. Without this date, this is much harder to figure out.

The newly formatted articles also no longer list the article number or its associated keywords. These often assisted me in searching for a specific article. No more.

Harder to track recent articles. At one time, the Search engine for Apple’s Knowledge Base allowed you to search by date. This is no longer the case, and has not been so for quite some time. So if, for example, you wanted a list of every new or modified article Apple has posted in the last month, you cannot use the Search feature to get this information. As far as I can tell, you only have two options left:

• The first is to check a special Knowledge Base article that lists all the other “articles modified in last 7 days.” Unfortunately, this article is currently “out of order.” If you check it out today, you will see that it lists zero modified articles in the last seven days! This just ain’t so (at least not by the standards Apple has been using).

I am not sure what is going here. If Apple intends to permanently abandon this special article, why not just delete it? Perhaps Apple has only temporarily stopped updating this listing because, at the moment, so many articles are being modified — as part of the transition to the new format (more on this point in a moment). But that’s just a guess. Who knows? Maybe this article is truly dead, adding yet another way that Apple no longer supports its support articles.

• The second option is to subscribe to the Weekly Apple Support Update. If you do, you’ll get an email each Saturday that lists all the updated articles of the past week.

By the way, there used to be an option for getting a Daily Apple Support Update. It’s still mentioned at the bottom of each weekly email. But, in yet another move by Apple to make things more difficult, this option no longer exists.

The weekly email is okay as far as it goes. Of course, you have to wait until Saturday to get it. And it doesn’t distinguish new from modified articles.

An added current irritation is that all articles that get converted to the new format, even if there is no other change, are apparently listed here as modified articles. As a result, recent weeks’ listing have had as many as 100 articles (which is how I know that the “zero modified items” listed in the special Knowledge Base article is wrong). Almost all of these articles have no substantive changes. Trying to find a truly new one from among the entire list is once again — you guessed it — a bit like looking for the proverbial needle.

The end result is that what should be a simple, speedy and mundane task — keeping up with Apple’s latest troubleshooting documents — has become unnecessarily time-consuming and sometimes nearly impossible. And the entire reason for the problem can be laid at Apple’s doorstep.

This leads to one final question: Why does Apple appear to go out of its way to make this task so difficult? Frankly, I don’t know for sure. And Apple certainly isn’t saying. But the conspiracy-seeker in me sees a possibility:

As a matter of policy, Apple does not like to publicize any bugs or problems with its products. This is why, for example, when Apple comes out with a bug-fix update to its software, Apple is often vague about what exactly the update fixes (sometimes saying little more than it “increases reliability”). While this is understandable from a PR point of view, it runs counter to much of how this industry operates. And it is a frequent source of complaint among Mac journalists, administrators, developers and even many users. Still, I can imagine someone at Apple thinking that making it hard to track what is truly new in the Knowledge Base would be consistent with Apple’s general policy. That is, if people can’t easily find Apple’s new confirmations of problems, it is less likely that such information will get publicized. I’m not convinced this is Apple’s rationale (and I admit to some problems with the logic here). But I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that it is.

If you have other theories (or facts) as to what is behind Apple’s policy, feel free to let me know. Even better, if you have any suggestions on how to get Apple to change its policy, I would definitely want to know.

Addendum: May 24: Good news!! Just 48 hours or so after posting this blog entry, I noticed that Apple restored “last modified” dates to their new-format articles. If you click on the above link to the HT1717 article, you will see what I mean. The old and new article numbers are also now included.

Coincidence? Or did someone at Apple read this blog and respond?

I’ve made no secret of my overwhelming enthusiasm for the iPhone, and have sung its glories here and elsewhere many times. That doesn’t mean that I never get irritated with the device. I do. And, by far, my most frequent annoyance is with Safari — especially when using it with the EDGE network.

The problem starts with the obvious: The EDGE network can be impossibly slow. Its speed appears to vary from moment to moment, as a function of the current signal strength as well as more mysterious factors that you can neither predict nor control. Its speed range varies from barely tolerable to virtually useless. And the greatest negative impact of these slow speeds occurs when using Safari. There are times when it can take several minutes for a Web page to load; assuming it ever completely loads.

But the problems with Safari on the iPhone extend beyond just the overall slow speed. What often happens is that, after tapping to load a Web page, your hopes are initially raised. You see the progress bar advance (indicating that more and more of the page’s elements have loaded) to as much as 80% completion in a relatively short time. Then it all just grinds to a halt. There is no more movement for an indefinite number of minutes.

Even this might be tolerable if, in fact, 80% of the Web page was now loaded and accessible. It might turn out that all you need from the page is within that 80%. However, more likely, your Safari screen will be blank. Absolutely nothing appears until after the bar moves past this 80% barrier. As a result, there are many times when I have given up entirely — until I can get to a Wi-Fi connection.

If you do wait long enough for the Web page to appear, your troubles may still not be over. Suppose there is a link on the page that you want to check out, but you also want to be able to return to the page you are now viewing. For example, suppose after you load the New York Times’ home page, you want to click a link to read an editorial; but you also expect to return to the home page to scan the remaining article listings.

On your Mac, you would do this by opening up the editorial in a separate window or tab. Unfortunately, the iPhone’s version of Safari does not support any variation of this capability. The best you can do is go to the editorial and then tap the Back arrow to return to the previous page. Ideally, this page should at least load faster than it did initially, because Safari had cached its contents. Don’t count on it. Safari does do caching, but it is very ineffective in my experience. Typically, I have to wait almost as long for the page to reload as I did in the first place. Once again, I often wind up just giving up on Safari until I can get to a Wi-Fi connection.

What can be done to improve the situation? Four things, none of which should be a surprise by this point: (1) Improve Safari’s caching of Web pages; (2) Improve Safari’s ability to display partially loaded pages; (3) Add a tab (or similar) function to Safari; and most-of-all (4) offer a faster network than EDGE.

Happily, the faster network is all-but-certain to arrive with the new iPhones (apparently expected to ship any day now!). These new iPhones are widely reported to support the much-faster-than-EDGE 3G network. As to the Safari-specific upgrades, it’s not as promising. The version of Safari included with the latest builds of the iPhone 2.0 SDK appears very much the same as the current version. Of course, Apple could be holding back a revamped version until the public release. I certainly hope so.

Consumer Reports finally gets it right!

Consumer Reports may not be the most influential voice in determining which computers are most preferred by the buying public. But it matters. Each year, for the past who knows how many years, the magazine has dutifully provided its assessment of the best and worst in computers. And almost from the get-go, its overall assessment of the Mac has been negative.

At best, the magazine viewed buying a Mac as an oddball decision, only advised for those willing to swim against the tide and venture beyond Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows universe. At worst, it downgraded and dismissed the Mac as being too expensive, too underpowered, and generally just too weird to be taken seriously. It never seemed to understand that the Mac OS was substantially different from (and, in the view of many, significantly superior to) Windows. It couldn’t see beyond the superficial similarities of the Mac and Windows desktop interfaces. And since Windows PCs ran much more software than a Mac (even if most of the software was crap), why get a Mac? This was the essence of the magazine’s logic.

I would regularly feel my blood pressure rise as I read these reports. “They just don’t get it,” I would wail. “They’re not taking into consideration how much extra stuff comes built-in to a Mac. They’re picking a low-end Mac to compare against a high-end Windows machine.” And on and on. I despaired of ever seeing Consumer Reports giving the Mac a fair shake.

Yet, over the past couple of years, the seemingly impossible has happened. Consumer Reports’ attitude has turned around. It’s been awkward and a bit slow, much like an ocean liner attempting a tight turn in a harbor. But it has happened.

Some may argue that the attitude shift is more due to improvements in the Mac than to a change in Consumer Reports’ perception. Or they may point to the ever-growing importance of the Internet, which has in turn minimized any software advantage of the PC. Plus, the Mac can now run Windows. Others might suggest that the shift simply reflects the increased status and popularity of the Mac, in this post-iPod world.

Perhaps. Or perhaps, after all these years, Consumer Reports at last gets it. Whatever. The completion of the pro-Mac attitude shift is readily apparent in the magazine’s current (June 2008) issue. Here are the ratings highlights:

The 15″ MacBook Pro was the highest rated 15″ workhorse laptop.

The 17″ MacBook Pro was the highest rated 17″ workhorse laptop.

The MacBook Air models were the second and third highest rated slim-and-light laptops (only slightly trailing the Sony VAIO). Even the MacBook made the list here.

Moving on to desktop Macs, the 20″ iMac was the top-rated all-in-one budget computer. Actually, it was in a category by itself here; there was no second place.

The 24″ iMac placed a strong third in the all-in-one workhorse computer category.

In the magazine’s separate Quick Picks listings (which consider value and tech support, in addition to test results and features):

The 15″ MacBook Pro was included in the “Best for features and performance” list.

The 17″ MacBook Pro was cited as a “Best desktop replacement.”

The MacBook Air was a Quick Pick in the “Best lightweight laptops” category.

The 20″ iMac was (no surprise) the lone Quick Pick for “Best inexpensive all-in-one.”

The 24″ iMac was cited as “Best for features and performance.”

In a separate assessment of companies’ technical support, Apple was far and away the winner. It received the highest ratings by a wide margin, both for laptops and desktop computers. Apple outpaced the second-best rated company by 17 points for laptops and 25 points for desktops!

The only place where Macs didn’t score was in the component desktop computer category. The Mac Pro is Apple’s entry here, but it didn’t even show up in the magazine’s listings. The high price of the Mac Pro was probably a factor in the magazine’s decision. With one exception, the rated computers in this category were $1300 or less, often much less. However, the one exception was the “high end” Dell XPS 420, listed for $2975. This is certainly in the same price bracket as a Mac Pro, which leaves me a bit uncertain as to why a Mac Pro was not included.

Apple’s Cinema Displays were similarly not included in the article on monitors. Once again, I suspect price was the primary reason. The most expensive rated monitor was $500; the least-expensive Cinema Display (20″) is $600.

Still, why quibble? Taken as a whole, Consumer Reports gives the Mac line-up a super solid endorsement. If you want a laptop, you want a Mac. If you want an all-in-one desktop computer, you want a Mac. If you’re concerned about technical support, you want a Mac. That’s just what I’ve been saying all these years. Now Consumer Reports is saying it too.

As is evident by what you are now viewing, I write blog entries. I also occasionally post reader comments to articles on other sites. Every so often, I wonder how many people actually read this stuff. Not my blog in particular (actually, I can get stats on this from the TMO staff). But blogs in general, especially the smaller more obscure ones. And, most especially, reader comments — at any site.

Now I know that reader comments on some sites, such as Amazon and the New York Times, get viewed numerous times. But that is probably more the exception than the rule. Case in point: I hoofed it over to Entertainment Weekly’s Lost site the other day. This section of the EW site is dedicated to the Lost TV show (which is having a spectacular season, by the way). After reading Jeff Jensen’s latest recap, I was prompted to post a comment, actually a question I wanted to raise (if you are a regular viewer of Lost, you know there are many many questions that can be raised).

Shortly after posting my question, I checked back to see if anyone had perhaps offered an answer. No such luck. However, this was at least partly due to the fact that readers were adding comments at such a rapid pace, my posting fell off the initial comments page within minutes. Even worse, when I checked back at the article page a few days later, I found that there were now 52 pages of comments. Because of the irritating way that EW’s site works, you have to click through each page to get to the next one. I estimated that my question was on about page 42. I gave up clicking long before getting there. Given this arrangement, I’d be surprised if more than a dozen people ever even read my question.

And this is at a popular site like Entertainment Weekly.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are all the blogs that are, at best, read by a few hundred people each day. Many are read by no more than a few hundred people each year! If you visit one of these sites and happen to leave a reader comment, there’s a high probability that the only people who will ever read it are you and (hopefully) the blog author. You are basically talking to yourself.

Yet the blogs and reader comments continue to accumulate like an ever-enlarging avalanche. This mass of information can easily leave you feeling overwhelmed. As the author of an iPhone book, I spend a good deal of time checking the Web each day for significant new information about the device. Given that the iPhone is less than one year old, I am still surprised by how much Web content is out there on this subject. Not just articles on technology and general news sites, but entire Web sites devoted only to the iPhone. Just for fun, I entered “iPhone Blog” as a search term in Google. There were over 300,000 hits! Granted, not all of these were for different blogs, but a lot of them were. Want to learn about Apple’s “iPhone SDK roadmap”? Enter that term in Google and you’ll get over 31,000 hits! You could spend the next month just reading all that was written on this subtopic, and still not read it all. Of course, by that time, you’d be hopelessly behind on all the other news that occurred during the month.

Of course, the reality is that you don’t read all of this stuff, even on the subjects that interest you.

The amount of information on the Web that no one ever reads is staggering to contemplate. Granted that much of it is repetitive or unimportant, but you can’t know that for sure until you check it out. Trying to stay well informed on a given topic, such as the iPhone, can be difficult. Trying to stay well-informed in general is nearly impossible. There are days that I don’t even read all the headlines in my news reader, never mind actually reading all the articles that sound worthwhile.

Admittedly, the information explosion problem has been with us for quite awhile.

You can walk into the Library of Congress, or almost any large library, and stand in awe at the mass of books, realizing that even if you started reading at that moment and never stopped until the day you died, you’d hardly make a dent in the total content.

Similarly, you could pick up a copy of any Sunday New York Times, and realize that it would take at least until Wednesday before you managed to read even most of what was there.

The problem has long been with us. It’s just that the scale is now so much greater.

While I appreciate the democratization of information that the Web has given us, I have some nostalgia for the smaller scale of the not too distant past. It was also a bit comforting to know that, before an article made its way to the public, it had been edited for style and accuracy as well as for the general value of its content.

It’s two sides of the same coin. On one side is the overwhelming amount of information. On the other side is how much of it never gets read. We wind up knowing an increasingly smaller percentage of information on fewer and fewer topics — and spend an increasing amount of time talking only to ourselves.

Oh well. I guess I am as guilty a contributor as anyone — writing a blog entry about how many blogs entries there are. The irony is not lost on me. Perhaps you’d care to leave a comment?

As you probably know, the mission of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization is to provide their $200 XO laptop computers to children in the developing world.

Back in December, I participated in OLPC’s “Give One Get One” promotion. The deal was that I donate one XO laptop and get to buy one for myself. [The deal is no longer offered; you can still donate an XO, but you can't get one for yourself.]

I finally received my laptop about a month ago. I have been playing with it, when I have had the time, ever since.

From a hardware perspective, the XO is amazing. It would be a bargain at twice the price. The XO is small, lightweight and runs on a very power-efficient battery. Helping to keep battery use and weight to a minimum, it has neither an optical drive nor a hard drive. Similar to the super-expensive version of the MacBook Air, it uses a flash drive for data storage, although only a 1GB capacity.

The XO comes with a built-in camera, microphone, a slot for an SD memory card, and a color screen. You can even pivot the screen so that it closes with the display facing up (allowing you to use the XO as a tablet or ebook reader). The XO promises to get even better in the future, without requiring a hardware upgrade. As one example, its trackpad is designed to work with a stylus, although the software support for doing so is not yet there.

The XO especially shines as a network device, easily allowing you to find and connect either to nearby Wi-Fi networks or directly to other XO users via a “mesh” network. The only glitch here was that the XO’s ability to detect a network could be quite finicky. It failed to find my AirPort Extreme in the same room as the XO, while picking up my neighbor’s similar device across the street.

The XO’s water-resisitant keyboard is designed to withstand almost any abuse. However, the keys are too small and cramped together for my pudgy fingers and the cursor response to trackpad movement is often jerky. There is no way I could ever use an XO for any serious typing. But, as I sometimes need to remind myself, I am not the target demographic for this laptop.

While the XO’s hardware, despite my few complaints, is unquestionably impressive — the software is a different story. The XO uses a Linux OS overlaid with a graphical user interface, designed for the XO, called Sugar. In judging the software, it was very difficult to ignore my experience as a Mac user. There’s no getting around the fact that Mac OS X is a far superior OS to Sugar. Most of the software that runs on a Mac is similarly better, both in terms of its ease of use and its range of features, than what comes on the XO.

Still, even trying to put my Mac experience aside, I found the XO’s interface to be clumsy and often hard to navigate. As to the specific programs, a few (such as the Web browser) worked pretty much as expected. But others (such as some of the games and the music software) took a good while before I could discern exactly how they worked. I suppose you could argue that young kids would figure these out faster than me; I’m not so sure.

In any case, don’t expect any documentation to come to your aid. The laptop comes with none. To learn about the XO, you have to go online — which can be an obstacle if you can’t figure out how to get online or have no Wi-Fi access at the moment. Even if you do access the help site, you still won’t find details on most of the XO’s software.

I also have to question the decision to include advanced applications, such as Terminal and Analyze, right along side of the child-oriented software. There is no way for a kid to distinguish what is or is not appropriate for them to be using.

Most frustrating, I could find no equivalent of any sort of Finder utility. There was no option to easily see a listing of the files on the drive — or to copy, move, or delete items.

The conclusion of a review by Jon Fingas pretty much echoes my overall reaction to the XO’s software:

“The Sugar interface does a good job of simplifying computers in general for the educational world, even if doesn’t always mask the Linux software underneath as well as it should and is likely to require more help than should be the case in rural areas.

As a private purchase, however, the XO is not much more than a curiosity or a child’s first notebook. Once you venture beyond the surface, it becomes evident that the XO’s ease of use is only surface-deep: to be as useful in a conventional sense as a Mac or Windows PC, an owner either needs to have tangible knowledge of Linux text commands or else to wait for a far more elaborate file management system, neither of which are very probable given the audience.”

In the end, paraphrasing a familiar quote, I admire the XO not always for how well it does what it does, but for the fact that it does it at all. Especially for $200. If this computer were to be sold in the U.S. (presumably for more than $200) as a competitor to low-cost Macs and PCs, I wouldn’t recommend it. But for the children in its intended market, most of whom will have had no prior access to any computer, the XO will seem almost miraculous. And that, after all, is the whole point.

[P.S. If you are interested in reading other reviews of the XO, check out the articles by David Pogue and Joe Barr.]

I am currently in the market to replace my 32″ Sony LCD television with a larger (37″ or 40″) model. I like Sony and my preference is to stay with the brand. Looking over Sony’s 2008 line-up, I had pretty much decided on a 37″ model (KDL-37XBR6), when I made a disturbing discovery: the television did not have a CableCARD slot.

The Sony I now own does have a CableCARD slot, and I have a CableCARD in it. I had assumed that Sony’s high-end televisions would maintain this CableCARD capability. Not so.

The CableCARD allows me to get all of Comcast’s stations without having to pay for or make room for a set-top box. True, I can’t access the online program guide or use On Demand, but that’s an okay tradeoff, as this is not my primary TV anyway. For me, not being able to transfer my CableCARD to a new television is a significant negative.

Perhaps I could find a CableCARD slot in a different Sony model? Nope. A closer look at Sony’s 2008 line-up reveals that not one of the models have the needed slot. I called Sony to inquire why this was so. Not surprisingly, the low-level person I spoke to had no official explanation — other than to suggest that it may have been dropped to save costs, as so few people were using it.

Of course, more people might be using the slot if the cable companies offered more than grudging support for the option. It is no secret that cable companies would much prefer that you use a set-top box, and typically don’t even tell you that a CableCARD is an option, unless you specifically ask about it.

There had been talk of a CableCARD 2.0 technology coming soon, that would allow CableCARDs to work with all cable features, including On Demand — but that now seems dead in the water. The CableCARD option in televisions, rather than expanding, appears to be vanishing.

But here’s the kicker: CableCARDs are not really disappearing. To the contrary, the Federal Communications Commission’s Separable Security mandate actually requires that CableCARDs be used in all new cable set-top boxes. They’re similarly used in TiVo Series 3 boxes.

CableCARDs are thus doing just fine; it’s only CableCARD slots in televisions (which would eliminate the need for a set-top box) that are vanishing. This works out well for Comcast, but leaves viewers as the losers. I can’t help but wonder if television manufacturers have capitulated to cable companies here in their decision to drop CableCARD slots from their televisions. It certainly smells like some sort of conspiracy to me.

In the end, it may not matter much. Even the cable companies are predicting a future that will see the end of all set-top boxes. But that’s still years off. In the meantime, it appears that I will be forced to get a set-top box with my new TV. Too bad.

Today is a sad day for for the world of Mac journalism.

Stan Flack, one of the “founding fathers” of all Mac Web sites, died of complications from a pre-existing illness. Former co-workers, Dennis Sellers and Jim Dalrymple have already offered their thoughts, with more I am sure to follow. Here are mine.

My memories of Stan date back to when I was first starting MacFixIt. He and Dave Moser were at the helm of MacCentral. The word blog hadn’t been invented yet — but that’s what we were all doing. MacCentral was perhaps the first Mac Web site to seek out a broader audience beyond Mac technophiles. MacCentral placed a greater emphasis on design, seeking to appear more like a Web magazine than a blog. Its articles were generally written in a language that even a Mac newbie could understand. The formula worked. MacCentral went on to become one of the most popular (actually, I believe it became the most popular) Mac site on the Web.

It was a rough-and-tumble time for all of us in those early days of Web sites. The future was uncertain, the potential for making money was unclear. As a result, there was an understandable degree of competition among the dozen or so Mac sites. For some, this led to a lack of co-operation and even unfriendliness toward the other sites. Not so with Stan. At least in my interactions with him, he was always ready to be helpful, always supportive of what I was trying to do, and always generous with his advice and any other assistance he could provide.

We met at Macworld Expos on several occasions. Even the first time we got together, he treated me as if I was an old friend, inviting me to join him for drinks or dinner — and insisting on picking up the tab. My conversations with Stan became one of the special treats of attending Macworld Expo.

A few years later, he sold MacCentral to Mac Publishing (the owners of Macworld). Again, he was leading the pack. He was perhaps the first and still only one of a few Web site owners to pull off such a deal. When I began my negotiations to sell MacFixIt, Stan once again was there to answer my questions and provide helpful advice.

After he left MacCentral (and went on to start MacMinute), I lost contact with him — although I occasionally heard from others about what he was doing. I had no idea that he was so ill. It was a shock to learn of his death today. As a friend and colleague, I will miss him. As one of the pioneers in Mac journalism, we will all miss him.

It is truly a sad day today.