Phone and data services for travelers to Europe

Our daughter is doing a semester abroad in Florence Italy so I've been looking into voice, SMS and data services. In particular the transition from physical SIM to eSIM has given us new options and new complexity. 

I found these sites useful:

• Savvy Backpacker: presumably gets some money for their eSIM referrals.
• Apple: how dual SIM/eSIM phones work: Only 13 and later support dual eSIM
• Airolo eSIM
• Rick Steves travel - using a physical SIM (dated but perhaps most realistic)
• AT&T international calling and roaming: our current service

Some key findings:

• The use of SMS as 2FA means she needs access to her US SMS number
• Although AT&T charges $10 a day for data access it's capped at 10 days of use a month. So max of $100 a month. As soon as you data roam the charge is activated for one day (I think local midnight?)
• For $15/month she can call US numbers toll-free and send and receive SMS without a fee.
• The Savvy Backpacker overstates how established eSIMs are in Europe -- especially if you want a local number. I think physical nano-SIMs are still the default and are more economical
• European eSIMs are often data only, there's no local number. I wanted a local number she could use though we may find that's not necessary.
• eSIM prepaid plans vary in when the clock starts running and when service expires ("credit validity"). Expiration is in the range of 2 to 4 weeks from either purchase or first use or activation.
• Supposedly any EU mobile plans works without roaming fees.
• Foreigners buy SIMs in Italy probably need to jump through paperwork with hidden feeds for "antiterrorism" measures -- and because this is Italy.

We decided to:

• Pay the AT&T international plan fee so she can do SMS and phone on her US SIM.
• Accept that at first she may roam on her AT&T SIM for $10/day ($100/month) until we sort out options
• Switch her iPhone to use AT&T eSIM even though that will cause AT&T to charge us an "activation fee" of $30 (I hate that scam). That frees up a slot for a local SIM card. (We found that the on-iPhone SIM-to-eSIM conversion does not trigger an AT&T activation fee!)
• Plan on buying a physical SIM in Italy, compare options to Lebara.

Update 9/22/2022

Some things we learned after going through the process ...

1. We switched her US AT&T SIM to eSIM so we freed up her physical SIM slot.
2. On arrival she used her AT&T SIM until she had a local SIM ($10/day of use, max $100/mo)
3. In Italy her host organization recommended a local vendor and SIM at a reasonable monthly rate. They streamlined the paperwork.
4. With iPhone dual SIM her phone is set to:
1. AT&T eSIM: no roaming, active so can receive texts and calls (no fee to receive)
2. Local Italian physical SIM: no roaming but provides local data services. Can send and receive calls and texts.

For my part I'm traveling to Florence in a few days. I'm planning to just pay AT&T $100 and use their roaming service. (I tried to be sneaky and sign up for T-Mobile's Network Pass, but of course that doesn't qualify for roaming services.)

A reader, François H., provided some additional useful information for longer term visits (like my daughter's):

① Expect paperwork in any EU country to open a phone line. It is normal procedure to be asked for a passport and proof of address in the form of a lease agreement, landline bill or some other antiquated piece of paper (gas bill, tax return…). I share your feelings on how intrusive and pointless this is, but this is, sadly, a universal hurdle. At a pinch, a handwritten sworn statement from a host often works, alongside a copy of their own ID.

② Beware of eSIMs: they work well but many companies force users to start with a physical SIM before switching to an eSIM, especially when replacing the SIM after the loss or theft of the original phone, supposedly “for security.” This makes your decision to leave the physical slot open in Europe all the more important, as it may be impossible to activate or renew an eSIM directly. (The biggest trap is that it is usually possible to open a new line as an eSIM, but not to transfer or restore it without going physical for “verification” purposes.)

③ Beware of EU roaming: yes, it is possible to roam in the EU without incurring additional charges, thanks to one of the EU’s few straightforwardly positive laws. However, there is a so-called fairness clause attached: travellers must still use more data or minutes per month in the plan’s home country than they do in other EU countries. Failing this, the phone company will be allowed to charge extra. This is to prevent consumers in expensive EU countries from purchasing cell plans in cheaper countries and using them at home full time. In other words, EU-wide roaming works great when travelling within the EU but cannot be relied on to source a cheaper or better plan for someone who plans to remain in another country. (It is also not uncommon for schools and various government offices to require local phone numbers, making the use of a foreign number rather risky.)

We need non-Apple App Stores - because Apple's store has trash like Luni Scanner App.

[Update 3/6/2022: After I exposed this scam I revisited our purchase history and the listing for the scam subscription had changed. Instead of "Luni" the company and "Scanner" the App it showed:

"Municorn" the app and AlexeyBogdanov272750744 as the Seller.

In addition, when I clicked on the Report a Problem link I see there's an entirely new feature!

Unfortunately, perhaps due to issues with my Store Apple ID, I can't select that Apple ID as a family member. Other family members appear.

--------------- ORIGINAL

There are several good arguments for a non-Apple iOS App Store. The best reason I know if for competing App Stores is that Apple's App Store has many frauds.

Consider the case of the Luni Scanner App; #85 in "Business" in the US App Store. 

Luni's is a "mobile app publisher" their site claims they are "the largest french app publisher" (yes, lower case "french"). Their domain information is protected. All their apps are subscription based. 

Luni makes a suspiciously wide range of apps with generic names including a "VPN" app, a "Translator" and a "Video Editor":

The VPN app has 22.9K ratings with an average of 4.7/5 by people like "yessirbruh". The 'most critical' ratings (only accessible on iOS) make clear it is a scam with clever subscription pattern that tricks users into paying a high weekly rate.

The Scanner App is the similar scam that bit my family. It has 174K ratings and 5 stars. The vast majority are obviously purchased. The "critical" reviews mention unwitting subscriptions. A screenshot that appears on first launch shows how it works for the "Free" app with add-in purchases:

This covers the entire screen. It appears that one cannot use the App without clicking Continue. In fact if a user closed this screen the App can be used. Of course most naive users, inducing our family member, will click Continue so they can start their "free trial". Except that's NOT what Continue does. Within 3 days charges will start. In our case, not $10 a month, but $5 a week.

The family member has some reading and processing issues, and a trusting nature, that made him particularly vulnerable to a scam. He thought "5 stars" actually meant something. It didn't occur to him that Apple would allow fake reviews; he trusted Apple. He was also unaware that iOS Notes has a decent scanner app, that Microsoft provides an excellent free app, and that we actually own a quality app from Readdle. 

Because of the way Apple's Family Sharing works for purchases the monthly charges went to my Apple ID. Because of changes Apple made to Apple IDs that account couldn't receive email; I stopped getting Apple purchase statements over 12 months ago.

It took some time for me to see what had happened. I only discovered the scam when doing a routine review of our iTunes subscriptions. With some help from Google I was able find where Apple shows purchase records -- about 20 weeks at $5/week. With more Google help I placed a repayment claim against 20 charges (Apple does not support repayment claims against a subscription.) At this time I do not know if Apple will process the claims.

Scanner App is far from the only scam app on the App Store, and Luni far from the only "publisher" to earn millions from dark subscription patterns. Apple has let this problem fester for years; they are unwilling to fix it.

That's why we need alternative curated high quality App Stores. So we can restrict purchases to a trustworthy vendor.

For me $100 is not a big cost and the experience is a great learning opportunity for my family member. Even so, a reaction is needed. I'm sharing this experience here, but more importantly I'll share a condensed version with our two MN Senators and our Representative and the MN attorney general. If Apple doesn't get the money out of Luni I'll try the AMEX fraud process.

To be clear, the problem is Apple. Luni is just taking advantage of the opportunity they've been given. We need quality App Stores. That requires competition.

Below it the letter I'm sending to our Senators and Representative:

I'm writing to share a family story that illustrates why we need alternatives to Apple's iOS App Store. I hope you will support efforts to force Apple to allow competing App Stores with viable business models.

The problem is Apple has done a poor job keeping scams out the App Store. Recently a vulnerable adult family members was tricked by very sneaky sign up procedure. He unwittingly subscribed to a worthless app for $5/month. Because Apple has no controls on purchases in family sharing accounts I got the bill. It ran for at least 20 weeks before I spotted it and unsubscribed. I submitted a reimbursement request to Apple for 20 transactions.

When I investigated I found the app vendor, Luni, had dozens of similar worthless apps with the same trick subscription process. They have hundreds of thousands of fake reviews. The scam Scanner App was #81 in its category with a 5 star rating. The "publishers" make millions. I'd wager they are a front for anyone who has a good scam app; they create an icon, embed their subscription scam, and take a cut.

The App Store has many apps like this. They make Apple hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Perhaps billions. Apple could have cleaned them out years ago. They could do so many things to make these traps less effective. They've done none of them.

We need a better App Store. Apple doesn't deserve a monopoly on iOS App sales because it's been at best negligent, at worst malevolent. We need higher quality trustworthy curated App Stores in place of Apple's service.

Tech regressions: MORE, Quicken, PalmOS, iOS, Podcasts, Aperture, Music, iPad photo slide shows, and toasters.

One of the odder experiences of aging is living through technology regressions. I’ve seen a few — solutions that go away and are never replaced.

Symantec’s classicMac MORE 3.1 was a great outliner/editing tool with the best style sheet implementation I’ve seen. It died around 1991. The closest thing today would be Omni Outliner — 16 years later. There’s still no comparable Style Sheet support.

Quicken for DOS with 3.5” monthly diskette records of credit card transactions was the most reliable and useable personal accounting tool I’ve experienced — though even it had problems with database corruption. I think that was the 1980s. Today I use Quicken for Mac, a niche product with unreliable transfer of financial information, questionable data security, and limited investment tools.

PalmOS Datebk 5 was an excellent calendaring tool with good desktop sync (for a while the Mac had the best ‘personal information management’ companion). That was in the 1990s. When PalmOS died we went years without an alternative. I briefly returned to using a Franklin Planner. Somewhere around year 3 of iOS we had equivalent functionality again — and a very painful transition.

iOS and macOS have seen particularly painful combinations of progressions and regressions. OS X / macOS photo management was at its best somewhere around the end of Snow Leopard and Aperture 3.1 (memory fuzzy, not sure they overlapped). OS X photo solutions had finally reached a good state after years of iPhoto screw-ups — the professional and home products more or less interoperated. All Apple needed to do was polish Aperture’s rough edges and fix bugs. Instead they sunset Aperture and gave us Photos.app — a big functional regression. Apple did something similar with iMovie; it’s much harder to make home “movies” than it once was.

iOS was at its most reliable around version 6. So Apple blew it up. Since that time Podcasts.app has gone from great to bad to not-so-bad to abysmal. The iPad used to have a great digital picture frame capability tied to screen lock — Apple took that away. For a while there was a 3rd party app that worked with iCloud photo streams, I could remotely add images to my father’s iPad slideshow digital picture frame. There’s nothing that works as well now; as I write this I’m working through a web of bugs and incompetence (I suspect a desperate timeout stuck into iTunes/iOS sync) to sneak some photos from Aperture to an iPad.

Apple Music is following the path of Podcasts.app as Apple moves to ending the sale of music (probably 2019). At the same time iTunes is being divided into dumbed down subunits (iBooks regression). The last 2-3 revisions of iTunes have been so bad that this feels almost like a mercy killing.

We don’t have a  way to avoid these regressions. Once we could have gotten off the train, now the train stations are dangerous neighborhoods of lethal malware. We need to keep upgrading, and so much is bundled with macOS and iOS that we can’t find 3rd party alternatives. Data lock is ubiquitous now.

I think regressions are less common outside digital world. It’s true toasters aren’t what they were, but since 2006 Chinese products have become better made and more reliable. Perhaps the closest thing to tech regressions in the material world is the chaos of pharma prices.

This takes a toll. There are so many better ways to spend my life, and too few minutes to waste. I wonder what these regressions do to non-geeks; I don’t think it goes well for them.

Apple is planning to eliminate many iOS parental controls over next year?

This sound like quite bad if true (emphases mine) …

SimpleMDM | iOS 10 MDM Enhancements To Expect

… Apple plans to deprecate some non-supervised restrictions at some point, though not immediately, in the iOS 10 series. The restrictions slated for deprecation are:

Disable App installation and removal
Disable FaceTime
Disable Siri
Disable Safari
Disable iTunes
Prohibit explicit content
Disable iCloud documents and data
Disable multiplayer gaming
Disable adding GameCenter friends

These restrictions will become available only for supervised devices.

The result would be to make iOS devices like Android devices — restrictions require a mobile device management solution (schools and businesses, also packaged for home use).

The only way this could be a net positive for parents (and those who care for special needs and vulnerable adults) would be if Apple were to add supervision capabilities to iCloud.

I’m going to look for more information on this.

Everyone needs an AI in their pocket

Two articles from my share feed today …

Transit systems are growing too complex for the human mind

… “What makes it messy is the presence of different possibilities," Barthelemy says. "When you arrive at a specific point, you have many choices."

The Paris system has 78 such choice points. The New York subway, the most complex in the world, has 161. New York's system is so sprawling and interconnected, Barthelemy and colleagues Riccardo Gallotti and Mason Porter concluded in a recent analysis, that it approaches the maximum complexity our human minds can handle, the equivalent of about 8 bits of information.

“But then if you add the bus,” Barthelemy warns, “the 8-bit limit is exploded."...

and

Google Research: An Update on fast Transit Routing with Transfer Patterns

What is the best way to get from A to B by public transit? Google Maps is answering such queries for over 20,000 cities and towns in over 70 countries around the world, including large metro areas like New York, São Paulo or Moscow…

… Scalable Transfer Patterns algorithm [2] does just that, but in a smart way. For starters, it uses what is known as graph clustering to cut the network into pieces, called clusters, that have a lot of connections inside but relatively few to the outside…

… Frequency-Based Search for Public Transit [3] is carefully designed to find and take advantage of repetitive schedules while representing all one-off cases exactly. Comparing to the set-up from the original Transfer Patterns paper [1], the authors estimate a whopping 60x acceleration of finding transfer patterns from this part alone….

Humans can’t manage modern transit complexity — but the AIs can. Including the AI in your pocket.

Everyone needs a portable AI, including people with no income and people with cognitive disabilities. That’s one reason I’m writing my smartphone for all book.

See also:

• Life in the post-AI world. What’s next? 9/2011

Smartphone Calendaring: survey results

Our family loves our Google Calendars. Today, looking at Calendars 5.app on my iPhone, I see that our 5 (human) family members own 8 calendars and I’m currently subscribed to 7 organizational calendars and 3 or so related to weather, holidays and the like. We’ve been doing this kind of coordinated calendaring since I got our family (free then!) Google Apps about 9 (!) years ago. The early days were painful, but now it’s smooth — Google hasn’t done any recent damage.

So I was looking forward to talking about Calendaring in my special needs smartphone book (working title: Smartphones for all: Supporting independence with iPhone and Android.). Then I started writing … and ran into a wall. What we did works, but it’s far too geeky. I needed “The Apple Way” (iPhone) and “The Google Way” (Android and iPhone) to be understandable. 

The first step to that was learning what normal people do. So I wrote up a Google Form 2.0 survey (now closed) and promoted it on app.net (mostly geeky) and Facebook (not geeky) and my blogs (sort of geeky). Today I dug through it.

I received 74 responses, about half from experts and half from my target group.

 

Of this group of 74 about 1/6 didn’t use any personal calendars on their smartphone. I didn’t ask this group any further questions, so my survey data is about smartphone users who have personal calendars - about 5/6 in this case.

Among the 5/6 who did calendaring the iPhone was more common than I’d expected - 87%!

Since most smartphones in the US are Android devices, that’s an unexpected result. I suspect some of that is an app.net effect (it’s pretty Apple-centric), but I wonder if many Android users don’t do calendaring. I did notice in the survey that Android users were disproportionately “expert users”, maybe Android users fall into an expert group and a web/messaging/youtube only group. I’m speculating there, but I think the non-expert responders to my survey are a lot like my book audience.

I looked briefly at my 33 expert respondents. Almost half had both personal and employer calendars, most had Google Calendars (many had both), and many viewed and edited multiple calendars. The only surprise was how many iPhone using experts made do with the native iPhone Calendar.app - 2/3 of them! Since most view multiple calendars they must be using Google’s obscure calendar sync web page.

Of my 28 non-expert Calendar few used an employer’s calendar and only 3/28 used Android. Of the 25 that used iPhones about 1/3 were using either Google’s Calendar.app or some other Google Calendar client (Calendars 5.app, etc) and 2/3 used iOS Calendar.app. Most of the iPhone users of Google’s Calendar service used multiple calendars and sent event invitations. iPhone non-experts who didn’t use Google Calendar also didn’t access more than one calendar and most had never sent an invitation. Many were unsure if their iPhone Calendars sync’d to iCloud (the default setup).

Despite obvious limitations with my sample I came away with some useful working conclusions for my book:

• I can’t assume my readers have ever looked at the Calendar app.
• I need to explain the relationship between the phone calendar and the “web” calendar and that changes made to one will show up in the other.
• Many iPhone Calendar users are not aware that they sync their Calendars with iCloud and that there’s a web view of their iCloud calendar. Many use their iPhone Calendar like a paper datebook or the original PalmPilot Calendar.
• Calendar sharing is effectively limited to Google Calendar users. It’s not only that subscribing to public calendars is basically a Google-only thing, it’s that most iPhone/iCloud users never make use of Apple’s relatively obscure iCloud shared Calendar overlays.
• I need to explain what sending an invitation does.
• Calendaring is not an Apple strength.

Calendaring in iOS, OS X, Outlook 2010 and Google Android/Chrome are all very different.

If you’ve ever wondered why healthcare institutions can’t easily share data between computer systems, just take a look at Calendaring in iOS, OS X, Outlook 2010 and Google Android/Chrome.

Google went down the road of calendar overlays. You can have as many calendars as you like and you can share them across a Google Apps domain or between Google users. Public calendars are available for subscription. My current Google Calendar calendar list holds twenty distinct calendars of which 8 belong to my family. (One for each family member, one for entire family, a couple of parent-only calendars that the kids don’t see.) In Google’s world, which is consistent across Chrome and Android, shared calendars can be read-only or read-write. Google supports invitations by messaging.

I love how Google does this, but I’m a geek.

I’ve not used any modern versions of Outlook, but Outlook 2010 also supported Calendar subscription. They didn’t do overlays though, every Calendar stood alone. I never found this very useful.

Apple did things differently. Not only differently from everyone else, but also differently between iOS, OS X, and iCloud.  OS X supports calendar overlays and subscriptions, but the support of Google Calendar subscriptions is  weird (there are two ways to view them and both are poorly documented). iOS has a very obscure calendar subscription feature that I suspect nobody has ever used, but it does support “family sharing” for up to 6 people/calendars (also barely documented). There’s an even more obscure way to see multiple overlay Google calendars on iOS, but really you should just buy Calendars 5.app.

iCloud’s web calendar view doesn’t have any UI support for Calendar sharing, I’ve not tested what it actually does. Apple is proof that a dysfunctional corporation can be insanely profitable.

All three corporations (four if you treat Apple as a split personality) more-or-less implement the (inevitably) quirky CalDAV standard and can share invitations. Of course Microsoft’s definition of “all-day” doesn’t match Apple or Google’s definition, and each implements unique calendar “fields” (attributes) that can’t be shared.

Google comes out of this looking pretty good — until you try to find documentation for your Android phone and its apps. Some kind of reference, like Google’s Android and Nexus user guides. As of Dec 2015 that link eventually leads to a lonely PDF published almost five years ago. That’s about it.

I don’t think modern IT’s productivity failure is a great mystery. 

I want a Zenith CruisePad for my iPhone

I finally realized what I want.

I don’t want an iPad.

I don’t want an aWatch.

I want a Zenith CruisePad for my iPhone …

Rather than a free-standing slate/tablet computer, the Zenith CruisePAD was a remote terminal to one's PC. It was designed to allow the user to interact with that PC's applications from a distance over a wireless network. What made it interesting to me was that it let one do so directly on the CruisePAD's screen, using either a stylus or finger.

This was an interesting approach given when it was released. In that year, 1995, neither Wi-Fi (which came into existence in 1999 with the formation of the Wi-Fi Alliance), nor the IEEE 802.11 protocols on which it was based, were available (the original version of the IEEE 802.11 standard was not released until 1997). Hence, it relied upon a proprietary 2.4 Ghz spread-spectrum radio protocol which they called CruiseLAN…

We played with tech like this at a 1990s Electronic Health Record/transaction processing startup called Abaton.com (no trace of it on the web btw, domain taken long ago). Ultimately impractical, but very cool. This was the era of the PalmPilot device, and we (ok, I) imagined walking up to a wall display and automatically switching from the itty-bitty Palm display to something real big.

That’s what I want for my iPhone. I don’t want the cost and hassle of another OS with all of the overhead of apps and licensing and bugs and DRM restrictions and updates and hacks. I just want a frigging wireless dumb display that can be shared between multiple devices. It would be nice to play video on it, but really I want to read. I’d be delighted if it used Digital Ink and cost $100 with a 1 week battery life.

That’s what I want. Google is much more likely to do this on Android than Apple on iOS; it’s the one thing that might tempt me to the Dark Side.

I wonder if Apple’s App Store rules prevent a 3rd party (Amazon?) from producing a reading app that would communicate with a Digital Ink display via Bluetooth….

Apple kills yet another photo sharing service - and generally screws up iOS photo management

I expect Apple to screw up anything related to long term data management, but this is extreme even by their standards. GigaOm, in language restrained by fear of Apple, tells us of another Apple datacide and botched product transition.

In the article quoted below “iPhoto” is iPhoto.app for iOS. Given the timid language, I’ve added some inline translation in square brackets …

https://gigaom.com/2014/09/27/where-are-my-photos-how-to-use-the-new-photo-management-features-in-ios-8/   

[iPhoto.app has been removed from iOS, replaced by Photos.app with fewer capabilities, including loss of iPhoto Web journals.] 

… In November of 2010 .Mac HomePages gave way to MobileMe Web Galleries. Then in June of 2012, MobileMe Web Galleries ceased to exist as iCloud came online. Now the most recent successor, iPhoto Web journals, is being shut down, or at least that is how it appears. With each transition, users of the previous online journaling feature really had little to no options available when it came to migration to a new or replacement feature. [users were totally screwed and lost hundreds of hours of work with no recourse] 

… you could add titles, insert comments, include maps, weather and other information intermingled with your photos. Users of journals would typically spend a good amount of time personalizing the delivery of their online photos by telling a story alongside their photos. 

The problem this time around is that there was very little notice and there really is no recourse or action that can be taken to preserve your iPhoto projects. … “Photo Books, Web Journals, and Slideshows are converted into regular albums in Photos. Text and layouts are not preserved.” And thats it, no more iCloud scrapbooking per Apple. 

… Apple has finally removed the concept of the Camera Roll …  all of the photos you have taken, whether they are on your device or not, now show up in the same “Recently Added” folder. This is not just a simple name change, it is a completely different experience. All of your photos are now synced across all of your devices, or at least the last thirty days worth. 

… iOS 8 has actually made it even harder to delete photos stored on your device [image capture delete all no longer works]. Tap and hold a photo in your “Recently Added” album and delete it from the album. It will move into the newly created “Recently Deleted” album …  delete it again from the “Recently Deleted” album…

Apple is a bit of a serial data killer -- usually with no public response. I still miss the comments I'd attached to iPhoto albums that were lost in the transition to Aperture.

Speaking of Aperture, both iPhoto (and Aperture) for Mac have been sunset, though Aperture is still sold. All three are eventually to be replaced by “Photos.app”, which may be an improvement on iPhoto but is certain to be a disaster for Aperture users. We can expect a large amount of personal metadata to be lost. (No, Lightroom is not a migration path.)

New users may be transiently better off once all the pieces are finally in place -- until the projects they invest in disappear. This is a cultural problem with Apple, not a bug that will get fixed. Never make Apple the owner of your data.

Bill Atkinson's PhotoCard.app for iOS - weekly messages to my Dad in his nursing home

I plan to expire at 85, 10 years later than Ezekiel Emanuel [1]. My Dad is a bit less directed; at 92 he recently moved into the longterm care unit of the veterans facility in Ste. Anne’s Hospital, Montreal island [2].

Since I live in St Paul Minnesota, and have a good number of child obligations, that’s a long way for a visit. Unfortunately, like many elderly men, he despises phones. He’s also resolutely low tech. 

Which leaves 2,700 year old technology — postal mail. 

The problem with postal mail, of course, is that the sending process takes time — and I don’t think Dad is into long letters anyway. Which is why I buy credits every few weeks with Bill (HyperCard, Paint, etc) Atkinson’s PhotoCard.app for iOS.

Atkinson developed this app in part to showcase his nature photography, but that’s now how I use it. I pick family photos Dad would like to have by his bed; I send one card a week with a short note of family news — and a reminder of the names and ages of 3 of his grandchildren.

I can reuse prior cards as a template, substituting a new photo and new text. The entire process from beginning to end takes about 2-3 minutes, I’ve a ToodleDo task that reminds me to send them weekly. I like the (rare) clarity of Atkinson’s pricing and the “buy credit” approach — my AMEX info never leaves the phone.

Cards are mailed from Silicon Valley and take 10-14 days to reach my father (Canada Post is notoriously slow).

I’m rather fond of this app.

[1] Obviously I approve of Emanuel’s essay, but I must say that by his logic most humans should be dead by age 20. His primary concern is to expire when he is past some absurdly high utility threshold; given his history and genetics a 75 yo Emanuel will still perform above the rest of us. I’m not worried about being vital or useful, I just want a 75% probability that I die in control of my life. So preventive care stops at age 75, cancer/cardiac interventions stop at age 80, antibiotics stop at 84, base jumping and cave diving start at 85.

That said, when I inspect Emanuel’s strategies I think he has rather good odds of making 82. If he really wanted to expire at 75 he’d need to be much more aggressive.

[2] WW II took a lot out of my father — who had more Aspie traits than I have. Maybe even a full diagnosis, though brains change a bit in 80 years. That’s not a good foundation for being a signalman on a frontline tank festooned with antennae (bullseye redundant). So whatever the Vets do now is small recompense. It does help he was a young Canadian in the war, and that Canada’s later wars were far smaller; he inherits facilities built for a lost generation. He’s been remarkably content there - so far.

Future Stunned: Earlier reality flux in the post-material world

When I was a child, I read Alvin Toffler's 1970 book Future Shock...

... Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change overwhelms people. He believed the accelerated rate of technological and social change left people disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation"—future shocked...

For Toffler Future Shock came from physical changes, like a store that moved, or disposable lighters. In the 1970s we went from owning things for decades to owning them for months. We were a long way from the world of possessing a photo for seconds.

Toffler is still alive. I wonder what he thinks of Beijing.

Of course Future Shock turned out to be a relatively mild ailment. Even in China, we seem able to adapt to rapid change. Of course one day we may have more trouble; we may yet fall off the exponential curve.

I had a small taste of the latest version of Future Shock when my daughter accidentally downloaded a 1.5 GB movie and ran up a $136 AT&T data charge (which they reversed).

No, I'm not yet that old. The Future Shock didn't come because iOS 7 changed the rules about the location of our movies. Sure it's mildly disorienting that one day they were all on the phone and could be safely viewed, the next they were in the Cloud and could be viewed anywhere -- for a price. Call that Future Ouch.

The shock came because one day there were no iOS cellular settings on my iPhone (picture is from Emily's screen this morning as she still doesn't have the option):

and 12 hours later there are (this is from my phone)...

Over at app.net some people have this option, some don't.  Our current theory is that my family is in the midst of an AT&T/Apple service transition. One or the other or both are newly enabling Video.app movie download to iOS 7 devices. As the feature rolls out, phones quietly gain a new setting - albeit with odd delays.

As a "happy accident" the setting defaults to On, so some AT&T customers are going to run up big data charges during the transition.

This, as you might have guessed, is Future Shock 2013. It's when people with 50 yo brains aren't sure whether they just missed seeing something, or whether it really wasn't there. It's a state of reality flux that used to start around age 80, but is steadily moving downwards. Call it Future Stunned, or less kindly, premature dementia.

It's going to get worse.

Device size: clothing makes the choice

An App.net thread reminded me of some analysis I did in the 90s on what device sizes we should build our Cloud ASP service against. That analysis focused on pockets and purses; it came in an era when men still had shirt pockets and Jeff Hawkins carried around wooden models of the Pilot until he settled on one that fit his.

Since that time our devices have evolved a bit -- thought not as much as many think. We had slates in the 90s too -- they were just heavy and ran Windows variants or Windows thin client OS. Our clothing may have changed more [3]. Shirt pockets are gone, suit jackets are less common, and pants pockets are larger. Pocket location may also have shifted as men have gotten fatter around the world. (I don't know what's popular in China).

This produces some interesting size options based on clothing. Here's my own personal list of exemplar devices for each transport option with a gender assignment based on typical American practice.

Gender	Clothing	Device
b	None [1]	watch
m	Traditional pants front pocket	iPhone 5S
m	Expansive pant front pocket	Samsung Galaxy [2]
f	Purse	Samsung Galaxy
f	Purse	iPad Mini
b	Backpack / shoulder bag	iPad Mini
b	Backpack / shoulder bag	MacBook Air 11"
b	Briefcase	iPad (full) + Logitech Kb/Case
b	Briefcase	MacBook Air 13"

Running through the list, and disregarding whether one wants a phone or not, device options are probably best determined by one's clothing habits. The list also suggests the women should disproportionately prefer the Samsung Galaxy to the iPhone but that men should split 50/50 -- so the Samsung Galaxy should outsell the iPhone 5 about 1.5:1.

If the iPad Mini provided voice services the list predicts the combination of iPhone 5 and iPad Mini(v) would equal or exceed Samsung Galaxy sales.

This analysis suggests a narrow niche for the 11" Air. I have one and I like it, but if I were buying an Air today I'd get the 13". If I'm carrying a briefcase I might as well get the 13" Air or an iPad with Logitech Kb/Case. The 13" Air vs. iPad tradeoff is an interesting one -- for many travel cases I think the iPad wins on power and bandwidth consumption -- but see the comments -- Charlie Sross and Martin Steiger disagree. I can imagine a future version of OS X and OS X hardware with iPad like power and bandwidth use -- in which case I'd go Air.

[1] Swimsuit, running gear, nudist colony.
[2] I haven't seen mention of this, but my understanding is that Android handles variant screen geometry more easily than iOS. 
[3] Our devices must be influencing our clothing styles by now.

iOS 6.01 Podcast app: Die, Apple, Die.

I had to update to iOS 6 sooner or later, and I knew that meant the Podcast app.

Still, a small part of me hoped that that it wasn't as bad as I heard.

Really, I was in denial.

It's true. All of my Podcast Playlists are gone.

Apple's share price is at 2001 levels -- really, that's not low enough.

Yeah, it's one tiny app that only a few geeks really use -- but we are the geeks that used Playlists and Smart Playlists. This is the kind of colossal screw-up that can't exist in isolation. It's worse than the infamous Maps mess because there Apple had a real business problem.

That podcast silence you hear is the dead canary.

And the big iTunes update is still supposed to be coming ...

Update: Listen to podcasts with Music app on iOS 6 - Mac OS X Hints says you delete the Podcast app and get Playlists back. I had to restart my iPhone with iOS 6.01 for this to work, but it did work.

Update 11/11/2012: After deleting Podcast.app and restarting video pod cats will again appear in Video.app. My kids like those.

How and when will Apple give up on Siri?

I usually wait for my iPhone upgrades, but I was an early 4S adapter. That meant I used Siri when she worked.

She didn't work for very long. Apple couldn't scale the Mathematica code that underpins Siri. Over the past eight months I've seen some good days, but since the iPhone 5 launch the service has been largely worthless for me. Soon the iPad Mini will come and I expect things to get worse.


So how long will Apple keep trying to make Siri work? Maybe it's just a matter of building enough data centers, but perhaps Apple bet on the wrong technology. Maybe it's not economical to scale Siri.

So what can Apple do? What might they be doing now?

Despite my prior comparison to the Newton, things aren't quite as dire as all that. The iPhone is very useful without Siri, and since most of us don't rely onSiri there's not much true functionality to remove. Apple can focus on a few key hands free voice recognition areas and re-implement those partly in iOS and partly on a non-Mathematica server foundation. Scaling can then focus on those key areas. The AI part of Siri can then be treated as a toy -- until Apple can either scale it out or replace it.

I hope they're well along in this process, because I sure would like to be able to set a hands-free reminder or take a memo.

Update: Clark had a good takedown of my Mathematica aspersions. He's right, Mathematica isn't the problem. He says he's in love with Siri, but reading between the lines his experiences aren't really much better than mine. He's just overlooking her flaws after a few dates. Soon he'll be ranting with me.

I suspect iPhone 5 users have a better experience than 4S users thanks to better noise canceling, and I wonder if some users do better based on time zones, carrier, and geographic server assignment. I liked this suggestion:

I suspect they’re going to have to move more of the analysis onto the phone rather than the server. However I bet memory issues are the biggest limit there. What we might find, if this theory is correct, is that Siri will make some drastic improvements as RAM on devices hits 2 – 4 GB and Apple can move more code off the servers.3

What has Apple done for me lately?

The new iOS connector cable. iOS 6 maps. iOS 6 Podcasts. RSS Deprecation. iTunes 11 (train coming). iCloud. Siri. Lion. Embedded webkit hole in iOS parental controls.

I'm sure there are more. Apple hasn't been doing much for me lately. Yeah, I'm in a grumpy mood. The good news for Apple is that Google's done even worse. The past two years have not been great for the 0.00001% like me.

It can't be all bad though. What, with it's zillions of dollars, has Apple done in the past 1-2 years that I like?

I'll grow the list, but here's the start. Send me additions if you can think of them...

• Mountain Lion looks promising.
• MacBook Air.
• iMessage.
• iOS 5 let me override exchange calendar color assignments.
• Six years late, Apple finally delivered iPhoto Pro with it's agonizingly slow and still incomplete Aperture/iPhoto integration project. Way, way late, but it counts.
• Find Friends (I think it will be useful for our family eventually).
• iPhone retina screen - good for old eyes.
• iPhone camera.

The bad and the good are close to balance, which is kind of sad for the world's richest tech company. Of course I'm not their market.

iPhone 5: meh.

What I wanted from the new iPhone and Apple

• Ability to specify calendar colors for Exchange Server/ActiveSync calendars
• Water resistance
• Lower cost data plans
• Parental controls that work (ability to disable embedded browsers).
• Fix the Apple ID debacle
• Bicycle directions on the Map app

What I got

• A new connector with a $30 adapter.
• No more parental controls for YouTube (since it's a separate app).
• A map app without Google bicycle routes
• A bunch of features I don't care much about
• A dumbed down version of iTunes that will probably omit much of many of the query (smart list) abilities I rely on
• More iCloud fail

Meh. I'll probably buy another AT&T iPhone and extend my contract, but I'll wait until I see how the different data plans shake out. The $30 adapter is particularly arrogant.

Weird economics - why our kids end up with expensive iPhones that make me nervous

The US mobile market may not be quite as bleak as Canada's, but it's pretty bad. What I really want is to be able to buy a full-price iPhone and then buy metered data services separately (oh, and some voice too). Unfortunately, that's hard to do here. We're stuck in a market where the economically rational thing to do is buy a new device as soon as AT&T or Verizon allows (typically ever 12-18 months depending on how much money you spend during a 24 month contract). 

If we don't buy new, we pay the same data rate as someone whose data rate includes their phone payment. Sucks really.

This has some odd side-effects -- lots of used iPhones.

These can be sold, but only at a fraction of their original $660 cost [1.] Amazon, for example, will currently buy a 16GB iPhone 4 for $300 and a 32GB for $320. That's good money, but it's comparable to the cost of a 16GB iPod Touch (@$250)[2] and the iPhone includes phone and much better camera capability.

So it makes some sense to give the old iPods to the kids [3], who tend to lose them or drop them in the toilet. Which drives me kind of crazy because these are, in some sense, $500 devices and we're not Romney-rich.[5],[7]

If iPhone economics weren't so weird we wouldn't do this. We'd give the kids cheap disposable phones and an iPod Touch (less cost) or iPad Mini (harder to lose/drop in toilet) [6]. Given iPhone economics though, they end up with overpriced phones which they can't take to school [4].

Weird market.

--

[1] $300 initial plus $15*24= 660
[2] Target has cut the price of an 8GB Touch to $180. They call it an "MP3 Player", which is like calling my iMac a DVD player. The price crash on this pocket computer isn't getting much attention. 
[3] We pay $10 a month for each 12+ kid for their texting and voice services, no data.
[4] If they really need a phone we put the paygo SIM in a disposable plain phone. They each have persistent Google Voice numbers through the family Google Apps domain, so we can route calls as needed. 
[5] Romney rich is when not working doesn't significantly alter your net worth. Below that is simply rich, where not working means you become comfortably upper middle class but do need to sell the mansion. Then there's us and I'm not complaining. Interestingly, in terms of power and security, the merely rich have more in common with the 99% than they have with the Romney Rich.
[6] Very cheap game consoles and media devices because all the real costs are shared across multiple devices. 
[7] At which point they inherit the tail-end device or have to help pay for a used iPod Touch ($130 or so now!) while we wait for a new iPhone to trickle down. 

Computing 2012: The End of all Empires

I grew up in a bipolar world.

Yes, the USSR vs. USA, but also the bipolar world of Microsoft and Apple. One was ruthless and ruled by corporate power, the other was a stylish tyranny.

Times changed. The USSR fell apart leaving a Russian mafia state ruled by a mobster, and the USA fell into a spiral of fear, wealth concentration, political corruption, and institutional failure. China grew wealthy, but turned into a fascist state run by oligarchs and mobsters. The EU has Greece and Italy and the second Great Depression. India, Brazil, everyone has problems, nobody is a secure Power. Now we live in a multipolar world.

Weirdly, the same thing has happened to the world of computing (now including phones). Microsoft's slow collapse is this week's Vanity Fair special. Google joined the Sith and all it got was dorkware, a human-free social network, and a profit-free phone. Post-IPO Facebook is rich and frail looking. Dell, HP, Motorola, RIM and Nokia are history.

Ahh, but what about Apple? Isn't Apple going from power to power -- even in the old Mac/Windows wars?

That's how it looks - to the press. Today. But I'm just coming off an epic 1 week fiasco involving OS X Lion and iCloud. It ended with me deciding to keep my primary machine on Snow Leopard and reverting my iPhone to iTunes sync after years of MobileMe sync. I'll try again when Mountain Lion is out.

Yes, few people will run into the problems I have had (arising at least in part from an obscure geeky bug with OS X/Unix vs Windows "line termination"). Many people, however, will run into some problems. My experience shows that many months after Apple's grandiose iCloud launch and insane MobileMe/iCloud migration, they still don't have troubleshooting tools and procedures or, amazingly, any way to delete your iCloud.com data. It's as though they thought they'd get everything right the first time -- perhaps because everyone associated with MobileMe was purged.

That's a hell of a miss for a corporation with billions in the bank and a fifteen year history of bungling online services.

Then there's the Apple ID/FairPlay/iCloud problems. My friends are struggling with these. Other friends can't figure out how to manage Ringtones on iTunes.

Perhaps most worrisome of all, Apple is providing mega-compensation packages to its corporate executives because, apparently, they must be retained. An unavoidable step with inevitable consequences. Bad consequences.

Apple doesn't look strong to me. It looks vulnerable.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook. None of them are serving me well. None of them are looking all that strong.

All the Empires are falling. My personal balancing act is becoming more complex all the time.

Traveling in Europe with an AT&T unlocked iPhone 3GS

Peter, a friend of mine, recently bought a used A&T 3GS from another friend. Since the phone's contract had passed AT&T approved a request for iTunes carrier-lock removal. So it was no longer a carrier-locked phone.

Peter took the phone to Europe and did very well with it there. I've not read many success stories so I'll pass on what he emailed...

Traveling to Europe the past several years I've taken along a very basic 2007 era unlocked Nokia GSM cell phone. It was always very easy to find small mobile phone stores. I would just walk in and buy a SIM card for that country for about €10 or so. It usually came with some calling time credit (easy to buy more credit at phone stores and some local shops), and the young guys staffing the stores were always helpful with setup assistance.

Buying an in-country SIM card allowed cheap calls and texts within in that country, and more expensive calls out of the country. Keeping in touch with friends and family back home can also be done very cheaply, if calls are made from the US to the European network mobile phone by Google phone from a computer. These calls from the US to a European mobile phone will cost about 10-15 cents per minute (calls from a computer in Europe using Google phone to a US land line cost less than 10 cents per minute).

[Peter then acquired the iPhone ...]

Setup of this clean iPhone with factory settings was easier than expected. I didn't have a SIM card in the US, but the setup was very simple using my home wifi network and following on-screen prompts. During the wifi setup I easily register the phone under my name using my Apple ID number, and synced my Gmail contact data (since I had previously added phone numbers to my Gmail contacts, I now had both email and phone contact data on the iPhone). I then hooked the phone up to my MacBook (OSX 10.5.8) and synced with iTunes. I enabled iCloud for contacts, email and Photo Stream and then bought a few apps. Very easy and intuitive.

In Rome a few days later near my apartment I found a small neighborhood mobile store for a major Italian carrier (TIM). As usual the techy guy working there spoke English. The process was simple - I showed him the iPhone (though he was a little surprised that I had an un-locked US iPhone), and asked to buy a SIM card (€20 with €15 voice and SMS credit plus free unlimited data for 1 month). He then had to register it with my passport info and do a little setup. The whole process took about 30 minutes, and with a little lag in activation time I was up and running with iPhone voice and data service in Rome within 1 hour.

Note: iPhone 3Gs uses a regular sized SIM card, iPhone 4 and 4s use micro SIMs, which may be harder to find in Europe (though it is possible to "cutdown" a regular SIM to micro size). Also you can buy a new basic unlocked GSM phone in Europe for about €30.

During my 2 week stay in Rome, the iPhone was very helpful - calling local friends, restaurant reservations, email, camera, using GPS and maps for locating sites and restaurants, and finding walking routes between sites... Especially helpful purchased apps included: Italian dictionary and verbs, Rome2Go, Rome Travel Guide - Lonely Planet (linked to GPS maps this was incredible useful), Contact Sync for Google Gmail, TripColor and Kayak Pro.

Moral of this story: When traveling in Europe, an un-locked iPhone is a fantastic asset. Next best would be any unlocked GSM smart phone or basic phone.

I'm amazed that a 20 euro card came with unlimited data!

NYT's Bob Tedeschi gives me a parting gift - iOS Parental Controls don't work

A few months ago NYT's Bob Tedeschi missed the iOS Porn story - Apple's Parental Controls don't actually work.

I know, for example, of a special needs teenager who writes at a 2nd grade level but can get from Mobiata's FlightBoard to an embedded Webkit Google search on "hot chicks" in just a few mouse clicks - when Safari is disabled. (Anything with a Twitter share button is trivial to hack.)

Bob followed up on an email I sent him last January, but I didn't see anything in his NYT articles. Until today's farewell article  ... (emphasis mine)

Some Final Thoughts on a Booming Industry - Bob Tedeschi - NYTimes.com

Having covered the boom and bust of the e-commerce industry, and then the boom and bust of the mortgage industry, I’m exiting the mobile apps beat before I see death and destruction again...

... Before stretching my journalistic legs elsewhere, though, I’d like to share a few closing thoughts about where the mobile apps industry might focus, if it hopes to stave off a bust of its own....

... No. 3: Allow greater parental controls.

If, 20 years ago, Google or Apple introduced a new television service or device that included thousands of pornographic channels, and then they marketed the product to children, you could imagine the outrage that would have generated.

Mobile devices are the younger generation’s TV sets, yet our new-age broadcasters deliver pornography and other potentially objectionable content to the devices without giving parents an easy way to reliably block that content.

As it now stands, parents who care about shielding their children from adult content on their mobile devices need a manual, an hour or more of free time and continued vigilance against apps that offer a portal to the open Web...

That bolded sentence -- that was for me. Thanks Bob.

Short of a humiliating Congressional hearing I've abandoned hope that Apple will do anything. Actually, I've pretty much abandoned all hope. Parents have embraced denial (which is a good thing when your kids are away at college, not so good when they're 10 yo). 

Unfortunately, I doubt developers can even choose to disable WebKit access when Safari is blocked. UIWebViewDelegate Protocol Reference, for example, only provides information on WebKit access, not Safari access. I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't provide Parental Control settings for use by 3rd party software.

Where is the religious right when I need them? Oh, yeah, fighting gay marriage. Way to keep your eye on the ball gang.