I routinely recommend Brother printers to my friends.  I have been delighted with the way they work. In the past few months, I decided to rename our wireless SSID.  This meant that any of our Brother printers would need to be set up again.  No big deal.  Or so I thought.  It turns out that even if you connect a very long ethernet cable to that wifi printer at the opposite end of the house, the Brother 2170 ignores it.  It wants to keep speaking to a wifi SSID that has gone bye bye.  At this point, Brother engineers should have decided that if wifi is down, the printer should just connect to wired. But no.  I had to reset the printer.  This meant holding "Go" while turning on power.  Wait for all 4 LEDs to come on then release "Go".  Now hit "Go" 7 more times.  Is this world war 2?  Am I setting up an Enigma machine for God's sake?  Then I have to waste 3 sheets of paper printing out printer status that could have easily fit on one page.  I printed printer status about 20 times tonight.  Brother owes me almost a half ream of paper.  Then I have to scan the network to figure out what IP address the printer got for itself.  Ok no problem. I log in. I enter my wifi settings.  But wait.  There are so many wifi settings to enter. I haven't seen this much wifi minutia since Windows XP.  Do I really need to provide 4 WEP keys AND a passphrase when I'm running WPA?  The printer can't figure out whether it's AES or TKIP?  I have to go dig up that little tidbit?  All my iThings merily figure this sort of stuff out on their own.  As did my recently purchased Honeywell thermostat.

Flight Magazine has published a list of the top 50 navigation inventions of all time.  Number one is GPS. Duh. But I was surprised to see my favorite computer so high on the list.  iPad came in at number 13, beating out dozens of other navigation inventions on Flight Magazine's list.

Here is an excerpt...

One of the greatest story lines of the march of navigation progress has been the democratization of safety technology with increasingly cheaper, more powerful and more widely available safety utilities. Nowhere has this progress been as visible as with the Apple iPad...

Read more at http://www.flyingmag.com/photo-gallery/photos/top-50-navigation-innovations

One of the things I like best about my iPad mini is the ability to carry around a whole library worth of books (in either iBooks or Kindle) and I'm sure this is a big part of why the iPad is so useful to a pilot as it is capable of carrying around dozens of binders' worth of aeronautical charts.

Santa stopped by and dropped off a shiny new iPad mini for me on Christmas morning.  I turned it on and proceeded to log in with my Apple ID.  Oops. I used the wrong email and it created a new iCloud account for me.  This was very distracting and I wound up simply factory resetting the thing and starting over, focusing on entering the id that has all my stuff.  From there it was totally painless.  My stuff came over in less than an hour and I wiped my iPad 1 and gave it to its new owner, who by the way is loving it.

I noticed my wife's Kindle sitting on her purse so I walked over and placed my iPad mini on top of it.  With the smart cover, my iPad mini is exacltly the same width and height as the old wifi Kindle but it's a lot thinner.  And it's an iPad.  So yes I loaded iBooks and Kindle software and brought over my books but I also brought over my games.  There are times I hesitate to take my iPad along because of its weight.  While the iPad mini isn't in the same "go along all the time" category as an iPhone, it's definitely the right device to take to a meeting to take notes.  I found myself increasing the default font in my favorite ebook readers but it's like reading a paperbook while my iPad 1 was like reading a hardcover dictionary.  

In the following NASA video, enjoy a new view of Earth at night...

Any frequent visitor knows how much I like all things space.  Well this is one of the best (sorry that it's flash based)...

Further Up Yonder from Giacomo Sardelli on Vimeo.

A humorous video has popped up asking for heaters for Norway. 

More at http://www.africafornorway.no/

I found this through a nice article over at NPR about how the video challenges the way stereotypes are often used in aid videos for Africa.  

Rocket Science described in the 1,000 most commonly used words...

I'm excited about today's iPad announcements.  In fact, I'm excited about all of Apple's announcements today.  My iPad 1 is "showing its age" mainly because Apple doesn't offer an upgrade to iOS6 for the device.  But I don't need an iPad. Mine is working well enough.  But a smaller iPad?  That's something I might just consider.  Especially when the price is as low as $329.  I think $329 will prove to be a "tipping point" where people considering Kindle Fires and Google Nexus 7 tablets will walk right by and pick iPad which while more expensive is also considerably bigger.  

Holding my iPad 1 for reading is a bit like holding a heavy hardcover book.  Not comfortable but infinitely more comfortable than reading on a tiny iPhone display or reading on a cumbersome notebook type device.  I expect holding the iPad mini to be like a paperback book.  Lighter, smaller, easier to hold and still very readable. In fact, it turns out the screen isn't all that much smaller than the full sized iPad 2 and iPad 4.  So interacting with apps should still be finger friendly.  When will I get one?  I'm not sure.  But it's a given that I'll be getting my hands on one some time soon.

Chrome just crashed and took this entire article to davy jone's locker so I'm typing it again.  Darn.

Anyway I ordered an iPhone 5 a few weeks back and watched with interest while it worked its way from China through Anchorage, AK, Louisville, KY through customs and to my local UPS store for pickup.  I got it this afternoon and wanted to get the thing set up right away.  Sorry. No unboxing photos, but there are already dozens if not thousands up already.  My phone came almost fully charged and not scratched one bit.

Then I turned it on to find it was almost fully charged.  I logged in to iCloud and hit "restore."  I should pause here to talk about my chat with AppleCare last night...

I called AppleCare yesterday evening to go over the upgrade process.  In the old days. I mean the really old days of Palm before NVFS, I could do a brain transplant to a new device in a matter of minutes.  So I asked the guy whether I had to use the cable and deal with iTunes or if everything would "just come back".  He said the apps wouldn't come back.  He made it sound like I'd get to spend countless hours in the app store trying to remember whether this purchased item or that purchased item was recently on my phone or something I'd already deleted. Not to mention dragging everything around to recreate all the folders I had on my old phone.  He put me on hold a second to go find out that... yes indeed. I could simply restore and absolutely everything (but music) would come back.  Fine. That's what I wanted to hear....

I finally found a car I can drive to exact revenge on all those teenagers with those subwoofers in their cars.  Perhaps a nice rendition of "Stars and Stripes Forever" at 97 decibels will do the trick. Photo originally appeard on engadget.