freachable.net - Apple

Toyota/Lexus Bluetooth Audio (BTA) and iOS stuttering connection problem

Hafthor Stefansson — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 16:03:12 GMT

Ran into this today. Playing audio on my 2012 Lexus CT200h over Bluetooth using my iPhone 4S. Audio would play for about 3 seconds, then show paused, about three seconds later, I'd hear the iPhone playing the content for about a second, then it would start the cycle over again. Tried turn off/on bluetooth on my phone, turning the car radio off/on, reselecting my phone from the bluetooth audio setup menu, rebooting the phone, rebooting the car (at a traffic light, I switched the car off and back on again). No dice. The solution that I needed to select phone (not just audio player).

[Talk] Setup [Talk] Phone Setup [Talk] Select Phone [Talk] <phone-name> [Talk] Confirm

BTW: Bluetooth Audio is nice, but I'd be happy if the USB interface worked better. USB prevents the phone from selecting or viewing the music selection from the music player app. Yes, I can use the car's interface, but that is epic fail town.

Review: Parallels v5

Hafthor Stefansson — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 06:18:59 GMT

Back in February I got a 17" MacBook Pro. I'm not a big fan of Apple, but I got this because I wanted a 17" WUXGA display, like my old, and now stolen, Sony VAIO VGN-A190.

Turns out, getting a machine with a display like that is kinda hard and the Mac really wasn't that high of a premium compared to others. I also got it because I wanted one machine to rule them all... that is, I didn't want to have to lug around a Mac and a PC so I can do iPhone development and .NET development.

I had experience using virtualization software before, like VirtualPC, Virtual Server, VMWare workstation, VMWare ESX, so I kinda knew what those were like. I had heard about Fusion and Parallels, but I was used to getting my virtualization free. (I know VMWare isn't free, but those were at work.)

I found VirtualBox and considered the problem solved. I ran that, but there were several annoying things about it and I ran into bugs.

I really wasn't very happy with Mac OSX and I wasn't doing much iPhone development, so I spent a stupid amount of time and effort to set up BootCamp on my Mac so I could just run Windows 7 x64 with no brakes. Sigh. Even that had problems. I couldn't TruCrypt the Windows system partition, which was a big reason for doing that. Couldn't pair my Apple Bluetooth keyboard to it. Then, of course, the need to do iPhone development came back. I wasn't looking forward to migrating back to Outlook for email and using iTunes on Windows. The other factor was that I wanted to be able to run SharePoint 2010 on my Mac. I upgraded to 8GB then found out VirtualBox wasn't gonna use it. I tried a crazy scheme where I booted Windows and ran VirtualBox to guest Mac OSX... yeah, that's not working. Had it worked, I would have spent even more time totally paving to run Windows 7 under TruCrypt with OSX in VirtualBox. Then I saw that MacSales was running a sale on Parallels v5, researched it and concluded, eh, for $50, I'll try it. I knew I couldn't keep running VirtualBox and BootCamp was too annoying.

The Parallels Experience

I got the disc, put it in, entered in the obscenely long license key, it downloaded a newer version, installed and walked me though getting a new VM going. Very easy. I built a new VM using Windows 7 Ultimate x64. A minor hiccup was the Windows timezone was not set correctly. I think it got set to Mountain Time, not Arizona's most-awesome, immutable, daylight-consistent-time. I could have migrated my BootCamp partition (or just run it in VM) but I wanted to get back to a single partition world and, if it is going to be a Windows install I have to work in everyday, I'm going to spend the time to build it clean. This is probably my sixth Windows 7 install that I'll use everyday. It's not really that hard.

A Freeway of Delight

Wow. Taskbar and the Dock are one. The start menu is right there! And I can Cmd+Tab across Mac and Windows apps! Double-click an Excel document from Finder and Excel launches! Launch Mac programs from Windows.
Ooooh, coherence mode. My Windows apps are running in, uh, a window!
Brilliant! I can always use Cmd+C and Cmd+V, even in Windows! It's so clumsy having to remember Cmd+C vs. Ctrl+C.
Awesome. My %USER_PROFILE% folder points out to the Mac disk!
Cruising through the configurations, man, this product is built by passionate+crazy smart people. Features like disk resizing with guest resizing... nice. The incantations and shenanigans you have to go through to do this on a "mature" product like VMware made me recommend a while ago to just make vdisks crazy big, always.... bigger than the host disk even. Now, I don't have to. Turns out, these are the crazy smart people behind Virtuozzo, the OS-layer virtualization system used by a lot of hosting providers.
Heh, heh, heh. The features of Aero that I hate don't seem to work, but the ones I like do.

The Alley of Sorrow

Oh, my dream of keeping all my projects on the Mac side are dashed. Even after adding \\.psf\Home and the network drive mapped to it (Z:) to my Trusted Sites list and using caspol to make .NET trust them, I still can't really work with Visual Studio projects off the mapped disk or host sites using IIS from there -- I think this is due primarily do lack of ChangeNotification support. ASP.NET really wants to know when a dll or web.config changes. Visual C++ totally refused to build even a console project there. If I had one wish for a future feature, making this work would be it.
Alas, I had to kill the beauty of Cmd+Tab across Mac+Windows because I needed to be able to use the function keys in Visual Studio. Boo.
Minor hiccup: I set up another virtual machine to run Windows XP and IE6, because it is the most awesome browser! Anyway, running a second VM made things a little weird. I was expecting a second start button on the Dock, but instead I had to switch between them. Not a huge deal, given I was just going to run IE6 on the other VM, but the main thing was the networking totally didn't work when the VM came up the first time. Not sure why, but I could ping the gateway, but DNS didn't seem to work.
I like the fact that I can access the Windows disks from Finder, but, it looks like that only works when the VM is running and didn't seem to work reliably. How sweet would it be if I could work with Windows disks anytime, but that, of course, would require Parallels include a full NTFS driver.
The audio and video playback doesn't work quite perfectly, but given I run iTunes and surf mostly on the Mac side, this doesn't present a big problem for me.
Another minor feature request: It would be nice if it could virtualize the iEye camera a little better. Allow all VMs to see it as hardware and the first to turn it on gets exclusive use of it until they turn it off or the VM is killed.
I had this problem on bare metal too, but Aero seems to switch on and off. Sometimes, I'll have translucent window frames, other times opaque.
I expect that when I shift+click a Dock icon for a Windows app, that it should launch a second instance. Heck, Parallels should add that for Mac apps. Ever try to run two instance of Calculator?

Conclusion

Parallels isn't perfect, but it is worlds better than any other virtualization product I've ever used. Is it as good as just dual-booting? No, for audio/video, but better for most everything else.

Caveat

The big caveat to this review is that I have never used VMware Fusion. I will. VMware offers a 30-day trial version and I will try it. I almost never get trials, because I'm hardly ever ready to commit to starting the clock on them. But I will. Give me a couple of weeks and I will download and try Fusion and report back. If it turns out to be mega-awesome, at least I can get $30 back on their competitive rebate.

You should try Parallels. They offer a 14-day trial, but, honestly, 14-days is just barely enough time to really evaluate it if you started right away. They don't seem to offer a competitive upgrade.

Crackpot theory on Apple's 3.3.1

Hafthor Stefansson — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:15:38 GMT

While the pundits (no, not me, the other pundits) argue about whether Apple is trying to protect their delicate users from the chainsaw gangs of Flash apps or if Adobe is now being beaten like an LAPD cop killer because of some ancient grudge, I'm thinking that their may be a whole 'nother reason: It is step one on the road to killing the Mac.

Why kill the Mac? Easy. Jobs can only make money on hardware and a little bit on their own software, but he wants the 30% on everything like he's getting on the iPhoneOS side. Can't lock down the Mac and setup an app store on it now, so it must die.

In order to kill the Mac, you'd need to be able to do everything you can do on a Mac on a iPad (well, except for development -- screw you developers!)

Replace my Mac? Yep. Get iWork on the iPad and a bluetooth keyboard. Oh, you want a bigger screen and everything. Ok, what about a 15" iPad Pro that folds up like a laptop with a built-in keyboard and multitouch trackpad/display. MacBook Air-like dimensions with a full day's battery life. Oh yeah, and you can sync it directly to your iPhone.

What more do you need pointy-haired boss? Pointy-haired boss wants a corporate dashboard application on his iPad with notifications... pronto!

The one kind of development Apple does want is iPhoneOS development. What if there was an app available for free in the app store that let you design your UI, kinda like you do in Interface Builder now, and let you write code. When you're ready to test, you click build, the code goes up to Apple, is compiled, packaged, signed and comes back to your iPad ready for you to test and debug. When you are satisfied with the results, click Publish and your app is in the App Store, ready to be enjoyed by all fartapp-aficionados.

Ah, but how can that work if you are doing stuff like Corona, MonoTouch or CS5. And so 3.3.1 had to be changed.

So, specifically, my predictions are:
* iPad Pro - Ives will twist his hands and say that they completely rethought the portable computer and voila, iPad Pro w/ laptop style and a second touch-display that acts like a trackpad - the whole package suitable for authoring applications - at the same time, Steve will declare that they listened to you and now you can own and use an iPad and iPad Pro without iTunes and you can sync your iPhone to your iPad Pro.
* iPad XCode - Integrated Development Environment on the iPad Pro for authoring apps for the appstore. Maybe free, maybe $49. But it won't include a compiler or code-signer. Your source will go to Apple to be compiled, signed, versioned, scrutinized and approved.
* Mac languish - only minor hardware improvements - Snow Leopard is the last Mac OS - security problems go unfixed and just become justification for the glorious iPad Pro. Every move they make will be to reduce the need for people to buy Macs.

The net effect is Steve gets his 30% on everything.