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Yes, this is not a typo – printing To your iPhone, I know it sounds weird! It is actually very handy, saves plenty of trees and makes “printouts” easier to carry around and find in the future. There are specific cases where you want to “print” a confirmation of an appointment from a website, both to remind yourself and to show at the business you are heading to. Other times it could be a receipt for online order, or any other “generated” page which you can’t easily link to, but may need to reference in the future. Some places will accept coupon printed this way, where you can simply show it to the cashier or scan it from the phone.

Step 1 – If you don’t already have one, get a free account with Skydrive, Dropbox or Google Drive. Right now Skydrive gives most free space while Dropbox had more native clients for iOS, Android and many others. For those unfamiliar with this category – this basically creates a file system in the cloud, where everything you drop into special folder gets synchronized

Step 2 – Works best from Chrome browser, because it has excellent Save As Pdf feature in the Print window! If you are on the Mac, Print window for Everything comes with Save As Pdf button. Finally, on Windows you can install PDF driver, like this PDFCreator which is open source and free. Then, simply Print to it from any App.

Step 3 – Save the PDF into a Dropbox (or Skydrive, etc) folder on your computer. I recommend you actually organize things with subfolders into categories. I have Confirmations, Coupons, Manuals, eBooks, etc.

Step 4 – Open the Dropbox (or Skydrive, Google Drive, etc) dedicated client on your iPhone and just access the PDF whenever needed. Depending on the client app, you may need to “pre-download” the file before going out of Data range or on a flight.

In fact, you can use this simple trick instead of things like Instapaper, Readability and others. There’s really nothing wrong with these other options, I just find that having too many accounts and places to keep information is distracting and chaotic. If anything, Evernote is the one you should consider. Coupled with Clearly addon, it is sometimes better way to save large articles for later offline reading.

There are tons of Free eBook PDFs online: educational, fun and classics. Simply download and drop into your Cloud folder – Voila.

This one is definitely filed away under Weekend Fun! Kudos to Mozilla foundation, though a bit sad that it doesn’t play on iPad (and some other browsers) yet.

The brilliance of the BrowserQuest is not just in it’s grand fun gameplay, but also that it is truly and completely open-source!

After my son played through 19 of the 20 possible achievements in about 19 minutes, we set out to find the elusive 20th achievement, which is unlisted. Well, as a responsible father (and because it is tons of fun), I set out to find the last one using the source code! The code itself is brilliantly simple. I am really looking forward to promised official post about the architecture, but meanwhile it is easy to see that the entire thing is running on NodeJS server, using BiSON, WebSockets and written in JavaScript and HTML5.

Although it took me only about a minute to track the last achievement down, and figure out that an NPC named Rick is who I need, finding him proved illusive. Even though I had coordinates of the dude from world map definition JSON, it’s really tricky to track him down as game use teleports when doors are opened, to shift you to new area, as I gathered.

So after about an hour of math and checking different door/portal/methods/logic, I just got annoyed and did a quick Google! And voila, of course someone already posted it on our beloved StackOverflow (for Gaming). There you have it – complete fun experience with hidden achievements FTW !!! Next? Just clone the GitHub repo and set of on your own adventure, of making a browser game!!!

Today I want to reflect on Zen of iOS and overall Apple philosophy. But first, there’s a disturbance in the force that I must deal with. My overall tranquility has been compromised, and by Apple Genius Bar employees, no less.

Here’s the issue at hand – the list of icons displayed at the bottom of iOS device when you double-click The Button. The “Geniuses” at the Bar insisted that All These Apps were Running, even though I just fully rebooted the device! Furthermore I watched them toil for a long time to Delete My Icons, from a VERY long list which came together as I tried most of my 400 apps, and apparently were the cause of my broken iPad microphone.

Although I am yet to reference Apple SDK on this, I feel that my own understanding here is correct. I believe that iOS shows icons of apps that are Running together with recently used apps. If I open too many apps and device starts running low on memory, it will silently shut down Apps in the background, but leave the icon on the list for re-launch as expected. When I tried to contradict Apple employees on this, I was asked whether “I work for Apple”, which furthered my disturbed serenity.

On the way back as I was enjoying excellent Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance audio-book, I think I developed deeper understanding of what “Intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts” really means at Apple. It is all about device keeping us “at piece” with how we expect it and the World to behave – Serenity is the secret sauce!

Still, back to the disturbance – I have noticed that this specific “running apps” issue is a source of frustration for many people, even some who don’t know true source, but are still frustrated. This is especially felt with iPhones, as they can’t understand why their device lasts all day on one occasion, but dies prematurely the next day, seemingly with exactly same amount of usage! I believe that a person who was deciding to show Running iOS apps list was approaching it from Simplicity and Practicality perspective, not from the Zen  and Tranquility Angle! Otherwise, something as simple as Glow or Highlight on an App that is actually running and consuming battery/resources, however little, would make All the difference people need to eliminate this frustration!!!

That brings me to yet another disturbance that Apple is suffering from, in my book. In the Real-World, the number of mediocre to purely useless Apps is continuously growing! Sometimes, what was state-of-the-art on iOS 2 is almost offensive on iOS 5. Yet, nothing is there designed to help us depreciate our unused Apps, and suggest newer alternatives. Normally I would jump on this as “Startup Opportunity”, but Apple locked up this opportunity for allowing us to Innovate management of Ocean of Apps. Even as brave Appsfire still managed to sneak in there, the efforts are painful and can’t fully develop,

In short – the Magic we’ve come to expect from Apple devices is being compromised! These little things band together into a growing disdain, something Steve would never accept! Seriously, putting “Talking Tom the Cat” (or Ben the Dog) right up at the top, next to ABC, Wall Street Journal and Netflix apps – makes sense to you?!? Clearly these appeal to VERY different audience, and although App Genius tries to resolve some of that, not being able to remove old apps or categorize Kids versus Adults, is a Big issue.

For me, the mere act of putting these thoughts out there and reading your comments is sure to restore the Tranquility – that and the next iOS upgrade!

PS: Thanks to my old friend Eran Zadok for recommending this wonderful book to me about 15 years ago – yes, I am a bit behind on my reading list

This famous ship sailed the seven seas for years and years. It rode the waves up and down, and often seemed like it will capsize, but it managed to survive. The ship’s crew has long lost hope of finding the promised land, depressingly they pressed on, forgetting why they embarked on this voyage to begin with. And worse yet, their captain lost all hope as well, misguidedly he just stood on the lookout, blankly staring onto the endless sea

No, I am not getting into publishing Children’s Books, though maybe I should, since new iBooks Author makes it easy. Instead, this post is all about the venerable Marketplace, the tough competition and the Innovator’s Dilemma.

I wanted to weigh in on RIM’s situation, after reading about Mr. Heins trying to defend himself and his company. Granted, RIM really was an innovator back in a day, with their breakthrough platform for routing emails, internet and other information we care about – directly to our mobile devices. Today, however, that is a bygone conclusion – a feature that everyone expects as Standard right now.

Apple outplayed them (and pretty much everyone) by focusing on User Experience. I really believe they were the first to realize that good user experience starts with Presentation, and they invested to bring Top Notch graphics into mobile devices. They also realized that Battery Life is critical – a cell phone without power is a paper-weight.

But how does one innovate? Start by reading latest Sci-Fi, then ask yourself – why is this fiction? Maybe it is Seth Godin’s Poke the Box influence on me, a book I am enjoying this week, but I really want to give some tips for once-mighty RIM. Being a Me-Too is a tough place to be – especially in the current marketplace. With three mighty companies there (Apple, Google and Microsoft), and with biggest decision point for consumers (all else being similar) is focused on Overall Experience and Apps Ecosystem.

Innovation is all about revolution and radical jumps forward, not small incremental improvements. Alas, did you know that Large Jumps Forwards are HARD?! I say RIM should focus All Their Resources on Radical, on Revolutionary, on Rethinking. And maybe I don’t see it, but bringing us yet another operating system (or platform on top of *NIX) is just a Large Waste of Resources. Those talented people should be focused on revolutionizing every other aspect of the mobile experience, and leave the base platform alone, to leverage existing ecosphere of Apps.

I was going to title this post “The Exciting Adventures of the Brave Me-2 Ship”, but you know what, being a Me-2 is never exciting nor brave…

My son and I went through rather painful ordeal with this Event 11 that Windows quietly generates. It took us few weeks to fully work out why Windows suddenly started hanging, misbehaving or even crashing with blue screen. Now that I feel it is fully resolved, I thought I’d share my conclusion (and the process) – hopefully it will help few others out there who are struggling with this. Ridiculously, many people are likely affected by this issue, but unless they open Event Viewer and search for this event id 11, they will not realize that hanging is not “normal” behavior, even for Windows! OS seems to silently recover from this problem 10 to 60 seconds later, which is really strange in my book – considering that user isn’t even alerted to this serious atapi error.

For impatient souls among us, here are my conclusions:

• First thing – check the SATA/EIDE and power cable connection between your hard-drive and the motherboard. If possible, try another SATA outlet on motherboard or another SATA cable if available.
• If it still happens, the bad news is that this is likely a disk controller error, which is especially problematic since nowadays disk controllers are built into the Motherboard. If you are in a budget crunch, one potential workaround is to slow down your HD to use different PIO. This may avoid hangs, but will slow overall performance, so no fun solution…
• Proper solution appears to be to replace motherboard, hence replacing disk controller. There are many motherboards starting at just $50 and in most cases it will improve overall performance and stability for you, even if you keep the same CPU and other components.

I am pretty confident that this is the right diagnosis, as we went through a lot of trial and error investigative work, in a space of few weeks, after it started abruptly. At first, I was pretty much convinced that HD is dying. The system had two hard-drives, and the older hard-drive was seemingly working just fine, even with the same SATA cable and connected to the same slot on the Motherboard. Turns out it was using slower PIO by virtue of it being older HDD. During the troubleshooting process I reinstalled fresh Windows 7 64 Bit multiple times, on various HD drives, only to see the issue start happening almost instantly after clean install. Few days ago a fresh HDD became available (separate long story), so I tried replacing the “dying” HD. Guess what, it being newer HD, it was instantly affected by the same issue, even though I put clean Windows there also. Thus it was concluded that controller was faulty, and I went shopping for a new motherboard. As an aside – DDR3 memory is Ridiculously Cheap. I was able to pick up 8 GB of Gamer grade memory for $25 (after rebate), so that is another bonus with upgrade.

We ended up replacing CPU also (time for upgrade anyhow), but all other components stayed the same. Right now I have 3 Hard-drives happily working flawlessly there, including the “dying” HD, and the rest of the computer is faster and better than ever.

Feel free to leave comments if you are still struggling with this issue, and I will try to answer. Good Luck and Happy New Year!

PS: As a bonus tip – while I was troubleshooting, I had to reinstall Windows 7 couple of times on various HD drives. Did you know you can avoid “tarnishing” your license in such scenario by Skipping product key page during Windows 7 setup? Very handy, and then you have up to 28 days to put your real key in and activate. During that period Windows is fully functional and we had used it like that for over a week while troubleshooting.