My blog runs on a piece of software called WordPress. I love WordPress; it’s well designed, easy to use, easy to maintain. It’s good for serving blogs but it’s also great for creating small simple web sites. I’ve recommended it … Continue reading →

Today is a big day for Apple. The iPhone 4S is shipping and Apple is doing one of its biggest set of software updates ever. Today they’ll be releasing iOS 5 for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. They’ll also … Continue reading →

Free Wifi is great, isn’t it? Except when it’s worth exactly what you paid for it: nothing.

I often have difficulty with hotel wifi. It drops out, you can’t get an IP address, the bandwidth is next to nothing. Forget about streaming Netflix over it, you’re lucky if you can check your email.

Over the weekend we were at a pleasant small hotel whose wifi was utter crap. It barely worked for Mike on his 15″ MacBook Pro, and my smaller MacBook Air was only able to make use of it twice.

I finally gave up and tried out iPhone tethering. This provides what is sometimes called a “mobile hotspot”. The phone acts as a router for several other devices. The number of devices is set by the phone’s carrier, in this case AT&T (and 3, which was plenty).

AT&T has a surcharge for the service. You get 4GB of data instead of 2GB. If you want to access any ports other than mail or the web (for instance, to do ssh or VPN), AT&T requires an extra surcharge for “Enterprise” access.

Tethering worked very well. It will only be as good as your cellular data signal allows for, so if you’ve got weak signal or very congested 3G access, don’t bother. And you’re likely to chew through your data allotment quickly if you try to watch a lot of Netflix over it. But it worked nicely for me all weekend and allowed me to stay online when I would have been stuck to just iPhone access otherwise.

You’ll need to enable tethering with your carrier. For AT&T, you can do this by changing your data plan through their web site or by using the myAT&T app on your phone.

Changing your data plan should not reset your contract timer with AT&T, so you can safely turn on and off tethering without worrying about committing to two more years of service.

You should then see “Personal Hotspot” show up on the first screen of the settings on your phone, right after VPN. If you don’t, go to the “General” settings page and then “Network” from there. You should see “Personal Hotspot” there. Turn it on, set a password and you’re good to go.

Once your phone is acting as a router you’ll be able to connect to it in one of three ways.

First, you can look for a wifi network with the name of your phone. It will be locked and you’ll need the password that you set on the Personal Hotspot screen.

Second, you can try to pair with it via Bluetooth. Both devices will have to use the PIN to complete pairing.

Third, you can use USB. Just plug your phone into the computer you want to access the Internet from. Beware that the phone will charge over USB while you do this, so you may drain your computer’s battery faster. However, you should drain your phone’s battery less quickly this way as USB should use less power than Wifi.

Once someone has started using your phone as a hotspot you’ll see a notice at the top of the screen (in the same place you’ll see a notice about a phone call when you’re speaking to someone while using an app).

I didn’t do any speed tests but was happy with the performance. Really, I was happy that it worked at all relative to the hotel’s wifi.

One curiosity to me is why Apple doesn’t support tethering through the iPad. The iPad uses similar data plans to the iPhone’s; AT&T could easily provide the same tethering option and the iPad’s processor could certainly handle it. That might make 3G-enabled iPads more attractive to buyers.

Summary: iPhone tethering is an expensive but convenient way to get Internet access. It worked very nicely and was easy to use. If you have no better options, or if you’re going to be staying somewhere for a while with Internet-for-a-fee, it may be a good way to get online.

(And for what it’s worth, the free airport wifi I was using as I wrote this crapped out too, so the only reason I can even post this right now is that my MacBook Air is tethered to my iPhone again).

Instead of working on a site redesign that I have a tight deadline on, I am dealing with a long-standing peeve I’ve had: iTunes hygiene.

This isn’t really a problem with iTunes so much as it is a problem with normalizing band names. iTunes’ search is quite smart, and matches similar items even when there are minor differences between them. So “Sigur Ros” and “Sigur Rós” will show up when I search for “ros”.

Its sorting in displays of music is clever as well. If I’m sorting on artist iTunes will cleverly show me “The Doors” intermingled with “Doors”.

The place that inconsistent artist names starts to bite me is on my iPhone. Sometimes I want to pull up an artist and just play all their music. When there are inconsistent names for the artist I end up with multiple entries and can’t get the mix of songs from them that I might want.

It’s easy to spot. Just scroll through the artists list in my iPhone and I find them quickly:

“Deee-lite” or “Deee-Lite”?
“Devotchka” or “DeVotchka”?
“The Doors” or just “Doors”?
“Flaming Lips” or “The Flaming Lips”?
“Iron & Wine” or “Iron and Wine”?
And is it “Gaga” or “GaGa”?

Sometimes she’s “Annie Lennox”, sometimes she’s “Lennox, Annie”.

Don’t even get me started on “Death cab for cutie”.

Then we have accented characters as in “Sigur Rós”.

But the worst of the worst: “Siouxsie & the Banshees”. Or “Siouxsie & The Banshees”. Or “Siouxsie and the Banshees”. Or “Siouxsie And The Banshees”. At least “Siouxsie” was spelled the same each time.

Then we’ve got this one:
Huh?

I realize that some Unicode characters probably crept into one of those names – in fact, I’d love to know what happened. But it’s really not worth the time to me to pry the names out of iTunes and check their bits.

Some of these are my fault. Back in the bad old days I would enter artist, album and song names by hand. I’m sure I wasn’t as consistent as I might have been. Then MP3 rippers started using CDDB (eventually to become Gracenote), and you were at the mercy of whatever some random person had entered for the CD you were ripping. Still, it was usually better than having to enter it all yourself.

Now most of the music I get is through Amazon (once in a while iTunes but Amazon’s generally got my business). And the band names still aren’t always consistent across tracks or albums. Sometimes I think the bands aren’t even sure what their names are.

(For the record, all my music is either purchased for download or ripped from CDs which I’ve purchased.)

The problems are easy enough to fix, once you’ve identified them. Go into iTunes, find and select the batch of songs you want to fix, hit CMD-I, fix the info and you’re set. The next time you sync your i-device, it’ll be updated with the fixed artist names. iTunes deserves plenty of criticism, but that’s for its bloat and random hangs, not for its ability to actually manage music, assuming you can get it to stop hanging.

Then over time the names will start to drift again. I’ll probably never buy another album by “The Doors”, so they won’t be a problem. Maybe Siouxsie will release a new album when she turns 60.

The real solution is to use a database like MusicBrainz to normalize all the artist names in my library. I haven’t tried their Picard product. I am a bit chicken about letting random software loose on my too-large music library or my iTunes database. In this case, chicken wins.