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Cool Hardware

The AT&T Family Share Plan’s vanishing discount—don’t get burned

The popularity of this article led me to write two followups:

Please give these a read if you'd like to know even more about AT&T Next.

Tomorrow (starting at 12:01am Pacific time, apparently) you can order a new iPhone 6/6 Plus. But you probably already knew that. What you may not know is that if you're on AT&T's Family Share Plan, and you enrolled in that plan with phones on a two-year contract, you'll see a large increase in your bill if you upgrade to a new on-contract iPhone 6—even if your current contract has expired and you're now contract-free.

Why would your bill go up, simply moving from an older to a newer iPhone? That's never happened in the past. But we've not had the Family Share Plan in the past. And when AT&T rolled out this plan, they gave folks an incentive to move to it: they offered a discount for on-contract phones, from a $40 per month per device cost to either $25 (for under 10GB of shared data) or $15 (10GB or more) per month per device. So if you look at your bill, you'll see something like this:

That discount was applied to the under-contract (at the time) iPhone 5 I moved to the Family Share Plan; the other two lines we have in the plan show the same discount. But if I buy a new iPhone 6 under contract, the discount will go away. If we upgrade all three phones with contract iPhone 6's, that'd be another $75 per month!

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Amazingly fast garage door opener

I posted this to Twitter a year or so ago…

Unfortunately, just after I posted it, Google decided that YouTube accounts also had to have Google Plus accounts, so I closed my YouTube account. So here's the video of those fast garage doors at our local Toyota shop.

These doors are tall, yet roll up in under a second; they come down nearly as quickly, too. The end result is that the service bay entrance area isn't exposed to the elements for any length of time at all.



How I create digital versions of Blu-ray discs

As I recently wrote about, I'm weird in that I prefer to buy my movies on physical media, versus electronic only. But I also enjoy the benefits that come from having an electronic version of the movie. The recent Frozen Blu-ray release, for example, was perfect: In the box was a Blu-ray, a DVD, and an easy-to-use redemption code for the iTunes digital version.

Other studios, though, want to force me outside the Apple ecosystem, and into the hell that is Ultraviolet. More and more, in fact, this is the norm. Which means I need to make my own digital versions.

For DVDs, this isn't too troublesome (and well documented), but I'm only buying Blu-ray discs now, and that makes things a bit tougher. (Kirk McElhearn discussed Blu-ray viewing/ripping for Macworld last year. Kirk focused on playback; I'm ignoring playback, and expanding on the ripping tutorial.)

If you're interested in creating your own digital copies of your Blu-ray discs, read on to see how I do it.

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11.6″ MacBook Air: Who needs a netbook?

As I'm really enjoying my new 11.6" MacBook Air, I thought it might be interesting to compare it with some other portables I currently own. Specifically, I wanted to compare the Air to my previous fave ultra-portable Mac (the 12" PowerBook G4), a Dell Mini 10 running Mac OS X, and my current fave Mac laptop, the high-res anti-glare 15" MacBook Pro.

What follows isn't a comprehensive set of benchmarks done under controlled conditions. It's more of a quick look at performance (and measurements and specifications) across a series of machines, three of which can be considered "ultra portables."

Read on for the table...

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My new favorite (for now) laptop Mac

A while back, I tweeted that my new MacBook Pro was my fave-ever portable Mac—this despite having only used the machine for under two weeks at that point. A few people asked me "why your fave-ever?," so I thought I'd use those queries as an excuse to post here on my near-silent blog.

The specific machine in question is a 2010 15" MacBook Pro with the 2.66GHz Core i7 processor, 4GB of RAM, and (when new) a 5400rpm 500GB hard drive...and, oh yes, the single most important spec: the anti-glare 1680x1050 high resolution screen.

This machine replaced a 2008 MacBook Pro (last of the non-unibody laptops) with a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, and a 7200rpm 200GB hard drive (and the only screen at the time, the standard 1440x900).

Comparing the two, the only area where I gave up anything at all was in the hard drive's speed. I took care of that problem by installing a new Seagate Momentus hybrid hard drive, the 500GB version, to be exact. (A hybrid drive is one that combines a small solid state drive—4GB in this case—with a traditional drive, and then uses its firmware to optimize performance on the fly. For more on the Seagate hybrid drive, see this excellent article at Anandtech.)
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Indoor flying fun

For quite a while, I've wanted an electric radio controlled (R/C) helicopter--one of the small ones you can fly around inside the house. Over the last couple years, I've tried cheap versions (complete waste of money; they fly like crud), and the expensive versions seemed too, well, expensive for what would be nothing more than a silly time waster.

Then, just before Christmas, E-Flite released the new Blade mCX, a smaller, lighter, and easier-to-fly version of their Blade CX2. The CX2 was one of the expensive models I'd passed on earlier. The mCX, however, comes in $50 cheaper than the CX2, and came close enough to my self-imposed $100 limit that I bought myself one for Christmas :). (Click the image at left [and any image in this writeup] for a larger view.)

After only a few minutes with the mCX, I was hooked. This machine is unlike any other R/C helicopter I've ever tried to fly. Within a couple minutes of my first power-up, I had it hovering in place, and could maneuver it relatively well. Even for me, a complete novice to R/C flying, this machine is incredibly easy to fly. R/C purists probably dislike it, though--relying on dual counter-rotating rotor blades and a gyro, the mCX isn't a "real" R/C helicopter in any sense. But for my desires, it's (nearly) perfect.

The mCX weighs one ounce (with battery), and has a rotor span of just 7.5 inches. Everything about this machine is tiny, including the motors (the round items in the image at left) and the battery (visible at the bottom of the image; it's got a red dot on it). The front of the machine is the brains, though--a circuit board there holds the gyro, motor control units, fully proportional servos, and radio receiver. Amazing that it all weighs but an ounce.

Combine that with very sensitive flight controls, and you can fly the mCX almost anywhere--I've flown it above the garage's workbench, for instance. The throttle is amazingly precise, making it easy to fly at whatever altitude you desire. As a brief example, here's a video of me flying around in the den, trying to keep the mCX within view of the fixed video camera:

Read on for more about this amazing little machine...
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Deals to be found at the Apple refurb store…

If you know me at all, you know how I feel about glossy screens, especially on laptops. As nice as the new MacBook and MacBook Pros are (and they are very nice, based on some early hands-on time with the new MacBook at the local store), the glossy screens are a deal breaker for me. I tried to use a MacBook for six months or so, but in the end, the glossy screen was too much for me, so I went up to the MacBook Pro and its nice matte display.

With the lack of a matte option on the new MacBook Pro line, I won't be buying another Mac laptop (of the 15" variety) until Apple comes out with some form of non-glossy screen--whether that's a true matte screen, or just an effective anti-glare coating, I don't really care. But until there's a solution, I'm going to use what I have for as long as I possibly can.

My current machine is a two-year-old 15" 2.33GHz MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM--and it's a very nice machine. However, it's already two years old, and I want to get at least five more years out of my matte screened laptop...so I figured I'd go look on eBay for used last-gen 2.6GHz MacBook Pros--the fastest 15" machine with a matte screen available, basically.

On my way to eBay, though, I got sidetracked by the Special Deals section of the Apple Store--otherwise known as the Refurb Store.
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Music in the new iPod nano ad…

Because I couldn't find this anywhere else on the net, here it is ... the music in the new iPod nano ad is a song called Bruises by Chairlift from an album called Does You Inspire You. I found this by doing a lyric search on the first line ("I tried to do handstands for you..."), which led me to this blog post [dead link removed] -- not directly about the iPod nano ad, but it does mention the song and the lyrics.

iTunes store link

The new nano may just get me to upgrade my original "tall" nano, which is one of my favorite iPods ... but the new one has some really nice sounding features; I'm going to try to go see one in person tomorrow.



iPhone wallpaper collection

After updating my iPhone to 1.1.3 (and jailbreaking it, courtesy of ZiPhone), I decided I was bored of my current iPhone wallpapers—I've been using Rob Randtoul's very nice iPhone wallpaper collection, but felt it was time for something new. So this morning, I spent a bit of time trimming some of my pictures down to iPhone size, and found that the end results looked better than I was anticipating. So I thought I'd share the results, in case anyone wants more variety on their iPhone. Click the image at left for a larger view of the collection, and if you'd like to download the wallpapers, well, here's the link:

iPhone Wallpapers [1MB]

To use, just add these to your iPhoto library, then sync to your iPhone. I code my iPhone wallpapers with a unique keyword in iPhoto, create a Smart Album based on that keyword, then sync that smart album to the iPhone. Then use the Wallpaper section of the iPhone's Settings panel to set your wallpaper. (If you have a jailbroken iPhone and you install SummerBoard, you can use your wallpaper as a background behind the iPhone's actual screen, too, and not just the wake-from-sleep screen.)

Many of these aren't really suitable as wallpaper (especially in SummerBoard mode), but some actually work out pretty well.



A most useful home project assistant

toolI took last week off as vacation, though what I spent most of the week doing was far from a vacation: I tackled many of the jobs on the never-ending household to-do list. So instead of relaxing on a beach, I spent last week hanging three curtain rods and curtains, installing towel bars in a couple of bathrooms, and doing some work in the garage to hang a pegboard and clean up the work area--among many other not nearly so exciting tasks :).

Through it all, the cool little device pictured above helped me immensely. That round thing is the STRAIT-LINE Laser Level 30 (LL30 from here on out), a cheap and effective laser level. Until about a year ago, I used to futz with an old-fashioned bubble level whenever I needed to get something straight on the wall. However, for most of the jobs I was doing, a bubble level was next to useless. It takes an extra set of hands to hold it where it's needed, and it seemed it was either too big or too small for the task at hand. So on a sojourn to Home Depot, I spotted the LL30. For the price ($15 or so), I figure I couldn't go wrong giving it a try...and after just one project, I was sold.
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