Megatheriums for Breakfast

One year ago I bought my first iPad. Or I should say, my first two iPads, since I also bought one for my wife – an excellent decision in retrospect, as if we had had only one in the house I’m sure that we would have often argued about who could use it next.

So I thought that the anniversary of my ownership of one would be a good time to look back and reflect on what I enjoy about it, what I have used it for, and how I expect to be using it in the future.

I lusted for an iPad almost from before Steve Jobs announced it in February 2010, and I placed an order the moment they were put on sale in Australia.

My iPad usage has changed quite a bit from the first few weeks. This reflects both my better understanding of how I could best use it, but also, very importantly because of the development of more and better apps as the year progressed.

As it happened, the iPads arrived not long before we left for a holiday driving around Victoria, and so some of my earliest use of my 3G iPad was for the Maps application, remote email access, and Internet lookups. Free wireless access at all MacDonalds was a benefit! My wife is a keen family history buff, and the iPad was often useful to be able to check facts and find addresses via the Internet. The iPad is far more lightweight and convenient to carry and use on holiday than all but the smallest netbook.

When I returned to work, I did attempt to do such things as use the iPad to take notes at meetings, trying out apps like PaperDesk and a few other notebook apps, but found these apps far from perfect for this use. Mind you, at that stage my touchscreen typing skills weren’t very good. As a fairly fast touch-typist on a normal keyboard, I at first struggled with the on-screen keyboard on the iPad. In the time since then, however, I have abandoned trying to type with all my fingers on the iPad and instead reverted back to hunting-and-pecking with two fingers on each hand. Doing this I can achieve reasonable speed and accuracy even on the smaller touch keyboard available in the iPad’s portrait mode.

One of the reasons I wanted an iPad in the first place was so I could use it as an ebook reader. I owned something like 2500 to 3000 “dead-tree” books, and having moved that huge number more times than I want to remember, I was keen to start buying books that weighed nothing!

I also felt that I was spending far too much time during the day sitting at a computer desk. Both in the office and at home I was spending hours in front of a computer, and most of what I was doing, I realized, was simply reading stuff. Emails, web pages, documents for review, and so on.

I calculated that using an iPad instead, I could cut my time at the desk down by at least 75%. And so it has proved. Today I spend the majority of my time with the iPad in reading, in considerably more comfort than I could ever do while sitting at a desk.

In the past I have talked about the difference between “desk culture” and “couch culture”, and the iPad illustrates this beautifully. In desk culture mode you are working, somewhat tense, alert but a little bit uncomfortable. You are working on stuff, solving problems, being serious. Couch culture, on the other hand, is about being relaxed, enjoying yourself, absorbing information or consuming entertainment, reflecting.

The iPad, needless to say, fits perfectly into couch culture. Steve Jobs didn’t demo the first iPad while sitting at a desk, but while relaxed in an armchair.

So, 12 months later, what do I use my iPad for?

At the start of this post is my iPad home screen. There are several following screens, with apps crammed into folders. But here on the main screen I have placed the apps I use most often.

iBooks is right there in the very first position on the first screen. In the last 12 months I have read two dozen or so novels and a couple of non-fiction books on my iPad, and have bought far too many more.

Next to it is The Age newspaper, the well-regarded broadsheet which is the daily paper of my home town Melbourne. I subscribe to the digital edition for $18 a month, good value. The app takes an interesting approach in that it simply reproduces the layout of the physical newspaper, complete with ads, but adds hyperlinks and copyable text versions of every article. Pinch and zoom work, of course. The text is completely searchable.

I love this approach – after all, the layout of a newspaper, the way it gives different emphasis to stories depending on their importance, the placement of photos, have all been developing over the last 200 years or so, to a high degree of perfection. Why lose that for a digital version?

I start the day reading The Age over breakfast. Flipboard and Zite are next; these are apps which collect together blogs, tweets and website news, each excellent in its own way, each giving me a slightly different selection of the topics I am interested in.

Zinio is a magazine app, and through it I currently subscribe to New Scientist and National Geographic. These are for more relaxed reading over the weekends. I am also trialling a subscription to The New Yorker, but that is through its own dedicated app, on a later screen.

Then we have the usual suspects such as Contacts and Calendar.

Oz Weather is a wonderful app which ties into my local Bureau of Meteorology site to display forecasts, current conditions and animated rain radar. This also gets used daily.

I’m trialling Daily Notes (alias All My Days) as a journaling program, and for taking meeting notes. Not sure yet if I will keep it, but probably.

MSecure is a “password wallet” program, which I would be lost without as I have so many different user names and passwords in play at any one time. I also use it to store software registration keys. Needless to say I have used a very long master pass phrase for it! I love the way it syncs with versions on my desktop and phone.

ToDo and Due are pretty self-explanatory – task list and reminder/alarm program. I tend to use Due more on my phone though, and it might soon lose its premium position on my iPad home screen.

IM+ is an instant messaging aggregator, and I use it to keep an ear out for Google Talk messages from my colleagues. You do need to keep opening it every so often, though, so it stays resident listening for new messages. But it has proved useful several times, and again it is something which helps free me from the desk.

Then we come to Blogsy, which I am using right now to write this blog post. I realized that I had made some kind of transition when I decided a week or so ago that I would rather sit down on the couch to use Blogsy to write a post than do it at the computer desk. Love it, though there is certainly room for improvement, particularly in positioning images.

PCalc is the best calculator app I have yet found, used probably more on my phone than here, but still useful to have readily available.

Paprika is a recipe program, which I actually do use fairly often – I cook most of the meals in our house. It has a great method for incorporating recipes from web sites, though because of the way it treats ingredients as plain text it’s rather weak when it comes to making up grocery lists. Nevertheless it’s the best I’ve found for entering my own recipes. I’m old enough to remember when the earliest personal computers (I’m thinking 1979 Tandy TRS-80 here!) were marketed to homes as great devices to have in the kitchen with all of your recipes handy. I can’t imagine that anyone at all ever used them for that. But the iPad actually makes the concept practical – for one thing, it’s easy to wipe the screen clean of cooking splatter!

Westpac is my bank. Though this is still only an iPhone app, it is an extremely convenient way to check my balance, transfer money or pay bills. It is so focused that it is far more pleasant to use for this than their full web site.

The Melways mApp [sic!] is another delight. Melbournians are very attached to this street directory, and a huge percentage of cars in this city would carry a copy. But the physical directory is a big slab of paper, not something to be carried around with you on foot. But now we have the digital edition, which is brilliant. It’s great when out and about because all of the maps are stored locally, and so they are instantly available, unlike Google Maps. Melways maps are also easier to read than Google maps and are packed with useful local information. The app of course uses GPS to place you exactly on the map. I wouldn’t be without this.

Navigon is a turn-by-turn GPS navigator. Again I use the phone version (listening to the voice instructions only) more than I use the iPad version, but with a passenger holding the iPad, this version is really useful when travelling because of the higher resolution display.

And last up on this first screen is Wikipanion, which I use a lot to look things up when reading.

Mail, Photos, Safari, iPod, Settings and Apple Remote get pride of place in the dock at the bottom so they are always to hand. All of these get a lot of use, particularly Mail and Safari. Remote gets used to drive my Apple TV, another device I love.

On subsequent screens I do have a lot of other apps, but apart from games they get used far less often. I have the iWorks suite, but in truth have only used Pages and Numbers a handful of times, and Keynote not at all, though I can see its usefulness. I have used TouchDraw several times to draw diagrams which I would use Visio for on a desktop computer. It keeps getting better and better, to the point where I’m wondering if I need Visio at all. It’s astonishing to be able to compare a $9 iPad app with a $450 desktop program!

I don’t watch a lot of video on my iPad, but do occasionally watch TED talks or iTunesU lectures. When we are going on holiday I do appreciate being able to load it up with TV episodes and movies just in case we are bored; but in practice this rarely happens.

There are a bunch of other reading apps:

And some reference works:

And too many games, though I don’t actually play them very often:

So that’s a pretty good survey of how I’m using my iPad. Outside of office hours, it is rarely out of my hands, or at least, rarely out of reach.

For me, I would now consider the iPad all but indispensible. If I lost it, and could afford it, I would replace it immediately.

Security theater is a term that describes security countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to actually improve security.

– Wikipedia

I’ve been getting annoyed lately by web sites and applications which insist that passwords must be entered in a specific format, or with specific characters, in theory to improve security.  Specifically, so many sites and apps demand that passwords must include upper and lower case letters, numbers (and sometimes symbols).

For example, here’s what happens now when you try to create a new Apple ID in iTunes:

If you can’t read that grey text, it reads:

“Passwords must be at least 8 characters, including a number, an uppercase letter, and a lowercase letter.  Don’t use spaces, the same character 3 times in a row, your Apple ID, or a password you’ve used in the last year.”

This greatly annoys me, because it’s silly – it’s “security theater” rather than real security.  Using a mix of upper and lower case characters and insisting on the inclusion of a number, only marginally increases the security of a password compared to lower case letters only.  And on iOS devices like the iPhone, entering a mix of numbers and upper and lower case characters correctly in a password is simply a pain because of the limited keyboard. Note also that Apple only ask for 8 characters.  It’s this short length which is the real flaw.

The fact is that you can greatly increase the security of a password, even if it is all in lower case letters, simply by making the password a few characters longer.  I’ll show you the figures below.  It annoys me because the assumption is that a password such as NyZq573j is magically (and that’s the correct word, because it’s magical thinking) stronger than a password such as myfavoritefoodischeese.  In fact, the latter is both much easier to remember and is many, many orders of magnitude more difficult for a brute-force cracking program to discover.

If you treat myfavoritefoodischeeseas simply a string of random lower-case characters, then there are some 130,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (=1.3 × 10^29) possible combinations of the 22 letters in such a password.  No cracking program could try out that many combinations in the lifetime of the universe.

But, I hear you say, “if the cracker knows that you habitually use a string of English words in your passwords (I prefer Jeff Attwood’s term “passphrase”) then they can use a ‘dictionary attack’ and quickly crack them”.

Such an attack would work on passphrases of one or two words, perhaps.  But with something like 40,000 reasonably common words in the English language, it only takes a phrase of four or five words to be beyond reach.  In the case of the 5-word phrase above, there are some 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (= 10^22) possible combinations of words, less than the random letter scenario but still a vast number, and way more than the mere 210,000,000,000,000 (=2.1 × 10^14) combinations of characters in an 8-character password like NyZq573j.

Here’s a comparison chart (the vertical scale is logarithmic).  ”Tokens” means either individual characters or whole words:

Here’s the raw data:

Note how adding a few more characters to a lower-case-only password equals or exceeds the complexity of a password mixing upper and lower case characters plus numbers.  Eg, a 12-character password of all lower case letters is MORE secure than a 9-character password of mixed case and digits.

The moral of this story, if there is one, is that longer passwords or phrases are much better than those which merely add a greater variety of characters or symbols.  And web sites which ignore that (or worse, put a limit to the maximum length of passwords) are being ignorant.  The majority of passwords have been stolen because people are forced to write them down because they are hard to remember.  Easy to remember passphrases do not have to be written down and, if long enough, are much more secure.

PS: myfavoritefoodischeese is NOT the password to any web site or computer I use!!

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Update: more thoughts on this here. I demonstrate that mandating a combination of character types actually decreases password security.

We recently moved house and I had to move the 3,000-odd books in my library, a total of over 75 boxes full. This was not fun. I’m now seriously trying to trim down my book collection (yes, I tried to do this before we moved, but didn’t succeed too well, so now I’m getting serious).

The difficulty, of course, is trying to decide what books I am prepared to part with. I do love well-designed hardcover books, but the paperbacks I own are definitely a target. Some of these paperbacks are forty or more years old, and many are not in great condition. So I’m going through them ruthlessly.

Here is where e-books can be a real boon. If I really want to retain the ability to re-read a particular book, but want to get rid of my current poor-quality paperback, I go looking for an electronic version. If I can find an e-book version on sale at a reasonable price then I’m prepared to pay for it and divest myself of the physical copy. In many cases I can find free e-book versions (for example, all of my Joseph Conrad novels, most of Dorothy Sayers, all of Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle etc, are out of copyright and are readily available as e-books from Gutenberg.org or other sources).

But there are a few books that I can’t locate as e-books (or at least, not legally). Extreme measures might have to be taken!

A case in point: a very old paperback copy of Poul Anderson’s Guardians of Time, which some time in the past had been cheaply bound. I think I bought it second-hand, in this bound condition, many a long year ago. It was now literally falling apart, with the paper oxidized to a light brown color. So I decided to try out my new Epson V330 scanner, which came with a nice OCR program called ABBYY Fine Reader.

The result is shown above. It was a fairly tedious exercise to scan each double-page spread, but it was eventually done. The ABBYY Fine Reader did a remarkably good job in converting the scans into text. I turned the raw text into a first-draft epub e-book using the excellent free Sigil program, transferred it to iBooks on my iPad and read through it, enjoying the story, but also highlighting bits where the OCR hadn’t quite worked correctly, which I subsequently went back and fixed. Result, one resurrected book.

Now my question is, was this legal or ethical?

Here’s my case for the defense: The original book is out of print, so I couldn’t buy another physical copy. I had paid for my original physical copy of the book, and I was not going to sell or even give away that copy (in fact, it went into the recycling bin). I am not going to give away or sell the electronic copy. So at the end of the day, one (physical) copy of the book was destroyed, and a new (electronic) copy was born. I’m left, as I was, with one copy of the book. This may not be strictly legal, but I reckon it is definitely ethical.

I don’t expect that I will be transferring many of my books in this way – the whole OCR exercise is very tedious – but it’s useful to have in reserve when there is no other (affordable) way of retaining the words of a book whose physical copy is beyond redemption.

Well, at the sake of being seen to be the total Apple fanboy (a description that a few years ago I would never have dreamed could be applied to myself), I’m going to talk about my new Apple toy – the new Apple TV. The name is a bit of a misnomer as it isn’t a TV at all, just a media device which connects to your television.

At only AU $129 it wasn’t a major expense, and I figured it would be a modest enhancement to my existing television / hi-fi system.

It has actually exceeded my expectations already, and that got me to thinking about how Apple products compare with products from other companies. I have found through personal experience that a product which looks good on paper often turns out to be a disappointment in practice. That has never happened to me with an Apple product. Rather I usually find myself surprised and delighted that the product does more, or works better, than I had hoped. Perhaps this is one reason why Apple is now (by market capitalization) the second largest company in the world? Or maybe not, there are plenty of huge companies which produce awful products (viz Microsoft).

Anyway, I ordered my Apple TV not long after it was announced, and it arrived a couple of weeks ago.

The first amazing thing is how small this thing is – it literally fits into the palm of your hand. With its tiny size and sleek blackness, it is just unnoticeable in my audio-visual set-up – a visitor would have to have it pointed out to them.

I connected a HDMI cable from the Apple TV to my television, via a switchbox (I only have one HDMI input on my television), and to my hi-fi system via an optical cable. Neither cable is supplied with the Apple TV, by the way. Plugged in the power, turned on the television, and within moments I was being asked to set up a connection to my wireless network, a matter of putting in the network password (you do password your network, don’t you?). Bingo, I was up and running and could rent a movie, or view YouTube or Flikr. A little more set up (turning on Home Sharing in iTunes on my computer and on the Apple TV) and I could play all of the media I have in iTunes on my computer – all the movies, iTunesU lectures, and digital music I own. One more bit of set-up (pointing iTunes to the photo folder I wanted to view) and I could view all of my digital photos or turn them into a slideshow.

The quality of all of this media is just great, either viewed on my (modest) digital television or played through my (equally modest) hi-fi system.

The first night my wife and I picked out a movie we’d missed at the cinema (The Men Who Stare At Goats), paid for it with a couple of clicks, and watched it through. Sure, we could probably have rented a DVD of this same movie for a couple of bucks less, but the hassle of having to go out to the video store, find the movie, drive it back home, then return it has got to add up to a few dollars of inconvenience value. The only disappointing thing is that, so far, there are a number of movies I would like to see which aren’t yet available for rent in the Australian iTunes store, but, as they say, patience is a virtue. And there are still plenty of movies available for rent which I would like to catch up with.

But the best thing about all of this is when I installed the Remote app on my iPad. It turns my iPad into the media centre of the house. With this, I can sit down in my armchair and scroll through all my media on my computer and start playing through the Apple TV. Being able to scroll through all my music albums and pick one to play instantly through my hi-fi is wonderful.

Then there’s the Internet connection. My daughter came round and mentioned a YouTube clip that our son-in-law had posted. Within a matter of moments we were viewing it full screen on our television.

So I have to confess it – I’m an Apple (TV) fanboy!