Leah H.’s Neighborhood

Extending iPhone battery life

Alex
2 days ago
2 comments

Since my first iPhone, I've never had any issue with its battery life. As long as I get access to the charger by the end of the work day the battery life on the iPhone 2G or 3G have been perfectly adequate. That is until I started working on a project down in Atlanta and my weekly commute now extends to around 6-8 hours, depending on flight delays.

I began looking for battery extender for my iPhone. Initially I wanted a battery extender that can charge the iPhone 3G and 3GS, as well as possibly the Kindle. This means the ability to attach different cables to the battery. Also the 'green' side of me wanted a solar charging battery so that it'd be possible to charge the battery up using solar energy alone. Unfortunately after perusing iLounge's extensive list of battery extender reviews, it was pretty obvious that there weren't any battery out there that would satisfy my initial list of requirements. The closest one is the IceTECH Solar i9005. With its large solar panel, large battery capacity (2500 mAh), and large collection of connector tips, it would be ideal. The only issue is it doesn't currently support the iPhone 3GS, as Apple in its infinite wisdom has changed something with regard to charging on the 3GS.

So the search was back to regular battery extender. There are plenty of options out there but none of them really excite me. At least not at the price they are charging for. That is until I came across MonoPrice's iPhone backup battery. With a rather large capacity (2200 mAh *) and very affordable price (~$15, depending on quantity purchased), it is perfect.

It arrived two weeks ago and I have so far used it twice. From about 10-15% charge in the iPhone, it would take about two hours to fully charge the phone from the backup battery. During that time, I was able to continue to use the iPhone with podcast playing in the background while online twittering and browsing. The only thing that is annoying is the 'cyclon'-like blue LEDs in the front which move from left to right during the charging process (both from main to battery, and battery to phone). They are very bright and very distracting while using the phone with the battery attached, especially in a dark backseat of a taxi! To charge the backup battery, simply plug the iPhone cable to the bottom of the battery and charge it just like the phone. Unfortunately the battery does not pass the data through to the phone so you can't sync with iTunes while charging both the phone and the battery.

But overall, the MonoPrice iPhone backup battery is priced just right and perform as advertised. High recommended if you are looking for a simple backup battery for your iPhone.

* For comparison, iPhone 3G battery capacity is 1150 mAh which means the MonoPrice battery can potentially charge the iPhone from 10-15% charge to full twice!

Update

Hello Vox! I've missed the neighborhood feel of Vox over on my WordPress blog, but keeping up with you all in my Google Reader is working quite well. In case you are interested, here's what I've been up to and what you're missing since I'm posting at bookishlyfabulous.wordpress.com now. If you missed my last post about moving over there, add me to your Google Reader (or whatever RSS reader you use) if you miss me. :)

I've started running, and I'm planning to run a 10K on Thanksgiving Day. I ran the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure last Saturday in my grandmother's memory.

I've posted book reviews of:

Shanghai Girls by Lisa See

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

And I gushed about the movie Bright Star.

UITableView scrolling performance gotcha

Alex
Sep 30, 2009
Post a comment

After a few months of .NET reporting/SSIS development work, I'm back to an iPhone project this week. One enhancement I added yesterday was a better formatted table section title in a UITableView. Before, the section title is either a bunch of unformatted (also incorrectly by locale) dates (e.g. 2009-09-30), or times (e.g. 14:58) straight from the data source. The enhancement/bug fix is to format the date or time to be locale aware so the title would either be "Wed Sep, 30 2009" or "2:58 PM" if you are in the US.

Pretty straightforward I thought, and after a couple of trips to NSDateFormatter and use the output in UITableView's titleForHeaderInSection:section method, it was all working very well in the simulator. That was until I put the app onto my iPhone for some real in-device testing.

The scrolling performance in the table was horrible! My first thought was that it had to do with the background view I added to the custom table cell view for colouring the table cell background. But after nearly an hour of debugging through the code I still couldn't find anything wrong.

Turns out that the titleForHeaderInSection:section method is not just called once per controller instantiation. It is called once per table cell display!

Once I moved the code to format the section title into viewDidLoad and cached a copy of the nicely formatted titles in an array, the scrolling is back to normal speed.

Hello, I'm alive.

I haven't been posting here because it has gotten to be a real pain. Vox loads so slowly that I don't even want to attempt posting. Half the time I have to retype a post that got screwed up because I tried to add a picture, and typing in Word makes it look funky once I paste it.

I have not decided whether I'm definitely leaving Vox, but I plan to continue to read and comment on neighbors posts while I try out Wordpress. I will still read my neighborhood even if I decide to move my blog somewhere else. If you are interested in following my blog there, here is the address.

It was a tough decision to try another platform because I love the social aspect here on Vox, but I'm going to try something else and see how it goes.

QotD: The One Historical Event I'd Like to Witness

Alex
Sep 12, 2009
Post a comment

If you could have personally witnessed one event in history, which one would you want to have seen?

July 16, 1969 Landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon.

Portland photos

Alex
Sep 12, 2009
Post a comment

Booking Through Thursday

What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

(Tell me you didn’t see this one coming?)

______________________________________________

This question was timely because I just finished reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last weekend and enjoyed it immensely. I have grown a little weary of the thriller genre lately (especially the Americans) because they seem to all be so formulaic and unoriginal. Apparently, I just needed to look to Sweden. Steig Larsson crafted an engrossing tale that kept me up far too late on several nights. Part mystery, part business intrigue, and part family saga, this was one of the best books I've read this year.

I'd put a book cover in, but Vox wouldn't let me.

How safe do you feel?

Alex
Aug 16, 2009
Post a comment

Most people I know do not have any plan to backup their data. Somehow they put their trust to a piece of 3.5" glass disc, spinning at 5400 times a second or more with a sharp metal spike fraction of a hair above it. Me? I like to spread my risk and backup my data, especially after suffering a total data lost about 12 years ago. As Alex Lindsay from the PixelCorps often says on podcasts, "Unless the data is stored in 3 different places, it doesn't exist". This may sound over the top but with all the online file sharing or storage services available it is actually pretty easy to have decent backup strategy with minimum cost. To achieve comprehensive backup coverage, it would definitely cost a few dollars.

Like computer security, any backup strategy should be constructed in layers. This applies to both time, location, and accessibility. Let me use my backup strategy as an example.

The least time consuming (in terms of setup and maintenance) backup component in my setup is Time Machine that comes with OS X. I setup Time Machine to backup to an external drive (more on that later) that is the same size as my main bootup drive and that's it. Time Machine will then backup everything on the drive and updates the backup copy with any changes every hour. This provides the first layer in my backup strategy; files that are used most will always be backed up and available to restore quickly.

In the event of my bootup hard disk fails, I can restore from the Time Machine backup. But that can take a while given most hard disk is rather large nowadays. So to keep down time to the minimum, every week I also clone the entire hard disk to an external disk (separated from the one Time Machine uses). I use Carbon Copy Cloner for this and while it is not a 'set and forget' setup like Time Machine, it only requires 5-10 minutes of actual effort every week on my part to clone the hard disk. This copy will allow me to boot my Mac up from the external drive within minutes of any internal hard disk failure. At the most, I'll have 6 days of data to catch up using Time Machine and that would not take long at all.

So I have two copies of my internal hard disk on two different external drives, e.g. data in two places. Pretty safe, right? Yes, pretty safe but not very safe. What if any of these two external drives fails? Then I can easily back to having no backup at all.

Drobe on Mac Pro - 3

To mitigate that, the external drive that Time Machine uses is actually a Drobo. Drobo is a fully redundant disk array so data will be stored in a way that only all the drives fail at the same time in order to loss the data. This means my Time Machine copy is actually safer than just being stored on a regular external drive. The problem is that the Drobo drive is still sitting right where my machine is. What if someone break into my apartment and steals my computer, the clone external drive, and the Drobo? What if there is a fire in the building and all my computer equipment are lost?

For that eventuality, only an offsite backup will save my data. Again, time, location, and accessibility guide which services I choose to use. For files that I access and save often, I store them on Dropbox. It is ultra fast (way faster to sync to the cloud than MobileMe, for example) which makes it a pleasure to use. The free option let you store up to 2GB of data and it is more than adequate for my day-to-day data. This also have the added advantage of allow me to access files on different computers, e.g. my work laptop. For files that I need less often and larger (for example, video files that I want to share online), I store them on MobileMe's iDisk. Data syncing is nowhere as fast as Dropbox but it provides more data storage.

I also use a separate online service to store my code. cvsdude provides online storage of code using CVS or Subversion. I also use GitHub for my latest code project. Eventually all of my code will be stored on GitHub once my subscription with cvsdude expires.

But what about all the music, photos, and videos files that I own? Their large size make it difficult to backup to the cloud. Right now I store all of them on the Drobo so they are protected against disk failure but that means they exist only in one place (strictly speaking more than one copy is stored by Drobo). To guard against total loss, I am currently in the process of using Mozy to backup all of the media files which come to about 600+GB. The MozyHome Unlimited plan is not free but it will be tough to ask someone to provide that amount of backup storage at no cost! The issue with Mozy is the time requires to upload that much data to their data centre. Even with a decent upload connection of ~2Mbps I am expecting the upload to take at least 3-4 months to complete.

To recap, here is where my data exists:

1) Files (e.g. documents, emails, applications, etc.) - Internal hard disk, Time Machine on Drobo, clone on USB external drive = 3 places

2) Important/Frequent use documents (subset of #1) - Internal hard disk, Time Machine, clone drive, Dropbox, MobileMe's iDisk = 4 places

3) Code files - Internal hard disk, Time Machine, clone drive, MobileMe's iDisk, cvsdude/GitHub = 5 places

3) Media files (iTunes library, iPhoto library, iMovie Events & Projects) - Drobo, Mozy = 2 places

Am I crazy? Ask me again when you have a hard disk failure and want some advice on how to recover your precious data.

My first published iPhone app

Alex
Aug 6, 2009
Post a comment

One of the two iPhone app that I worked on during earlier part of this year has landed on iTunes AppStore! As part of the sponsor for Agile 2009 conference, a small team of ThoughtWorkers developed a conference app to help the attendees. I left my fingerprints on the Twitter, Maps, and Schedule screens. The other interesting parts include the cloud computing (on Google App Engine) that provides up-to-date sync of conference schedules, ability to mark sessions that you plan to attend, and provide feedback to the presenters. The app also includes the Agile Manifesto, the 12 principles, allows you to sign the manifesto, or even send email to your friends to sign up.

QotD: The Perfect Kid-Friendly Laptop

From the design to the features, what should the perfect kid-friendly laptop include? What would you leave out?

Sponsored by WePC.You dream it. ASUS builds it. Intel Inside®