Sucky Bluetooth audio quality on a Mac ?

I’ve noticed audio quality on Mac’s is a bit of a hit & miss affair; until I read this article about terminal hints to fix stupid default Mac settings.

 

Applied the terminal hints, and happiness! In case it gets removed,

 

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Bitpool Max (editable)" 80 

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Bitpool Min (editable)" 48 

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Apple Initial Bitpool (editable)" 40 

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Negotiated Bitpool" 58 

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Negotiated Bitpool Max" 58 

defaults write com.apple.BluetoothAudioAgent "Negotiated Bitpool Min" 48

How does Vodacom expect to stay in business ?

I have had a good historical reason to stay with Vodacom. I've always liked their services, and frankly, they've been as rubbish as their competition. But recently, the number and scale of outages, and complete and utter ineptitude at managing their network has resulted in me being rather disappointed with them. If it wasn't for the crazy early cancellation fees, I would have ported over to someone else at least 6 months ago.

 

But I digress; lets focus on the last 3 weeks of ineptitude. I returned from an overseas trip with an iPhone 4S. I wanted to enable Visual Voicemail for it, and miracle of miracles, Vodacom has it. For the purposes of clarity, please see this article on their website. I tried to enable it on the 12th of November. Through an endless series of calls, first explaining what the service was, then that they did in fact have it, and that it wasn't activating, it finally started working  - on the 20th, with no explanation or understanding from the myriad operators I was speaking to as to what had changed. No-one knew why it wasn't working, and no-one knew why it started working. Major problem!

 

Then, I foolishly decided to add Voicemail Plus, which gives me the ability (theoretically) to forward my voicemail to an e-mail address; having both would have been voice messaging nirvana! I activated it (on the 21st), was immediately charged for it and received a summary notification saying my Visual Voicemail service was cancelled. No excuse, no explanation. So, for clarification, it appears you can't have both services together, even though none of the documentation (nor, for that matter, the operators) seem to know that.

And they're an innovative company! I decided the ability to get my voicemail as an e-mail was worth more than not having to sit through tons of tedious IVR messaging, and started looking for a place to enter my e-mail address. Lo and behold, hours on the web site, several calls to the help desk and two call references later, I still don't have my voicemail forwarded.

 

So, to summarise;

1. It took 8 days to enable Visual Voicemail, a service that Vodacom advertises it has
2. You can't have multiple value-added voicemail services at the same time (something I only learned when I activated another one) - there is nothing in the documentation or collateral that states otherwise
3. I have been four days (and counting) without the ability to forward my voicemail to my e-mail, in spite of having being billed and have, as active, the service on my profile

How do cellular operators expect to survive when they offer up such shit service ? Can't get the basics right (keep the network up and don't drop my calls), can't get the value added services right, and can't support the end-user when things break ? I'm a "premium" customer to them, paying over R1000 a month. Not for long; not for long.

 

Update: as of yesterday, December 30th, I now have the service working. No apology, no explanation and (still) no ability to configure it on the web. It has to be configured "on the back end".

Apple, you ruddy wankers.

Apple released iTunes Match, a cloud-based system whereby a copy of your music is stored online, and is retrievable (and critically, streamable!) from any authenticated device. But, you need an American credit card to make it work. Major suckage :-(

 

PS. Now that I'm in the ranting mood, isn't it weird how Google and Samsung postpone a device launch event out of respect for the death of Steve Jobs, but Apple themselves choose to launch new software and hardware for the same date. Talk about poor taste.

The fastest SD card in the industry - not!

So when I heard a tagline like that, I had to test it. I ordered a Sandisk Extreme Pro SD card, and tested it in an Apple MacBook Pro, which I thought would have no interface or bus-related speed limits.

 

I also tested it against their Ultra and their Extreme cards. The summary of results is that there is a 1Mb/s difference (17Mb/s vs 16Mb/s) between the top end card (~R900), and the bottom end card (~R450).

 

Conclusion: its not worth paying more money for these "faster" SD cards. For double the money, I want to see more than 6% performance difference. Pfffft.

MacBook Pro Core i7

Apple announced new MacBook Pro's that would use Intel Core i7 processors; great I thought, quad-core processors here we come!

Afraid not; these new machines have dual-core processors. Fail, Apple, fail, when other manufacturers released this stuff two years ago. Fail.

Disappointing, I wanted to upgrade this year. Guess I'll wait for the next cycle, which should be in six months time.

Don't buy a DroboPro or a DroboShare

I posted about the Drobo before. This month, I ordered its bigger brother, the Drobo Pro. Think the standard unit, but with iSCSI and 8 drives - awesome, the hotness!

Except, for two epic fails;

1. It only allows one host to connect at a time using iSCSI
   
   • Which begs the question then WTF bother ?
   
   
2. It behaves exactly the same as the Drobo with respect to logical volume size (i.e. 16GB)
   

These are stupid restrictions. Even more of an epic fail is the companion product, the DroboShare, which also has two epic problems;

1. It doesn't support the Drobo Pro
   
   • So you can't network a Drobo Pro
   
   
2. It only allows one username/password to be created, and that user has full write rights
   
   • Which makes it absolutely pointless as a NAS device
   
   

Come on, Drobo, fix these stupid restrictions.

Apple and the demise of Firewire 400

A colleague had her laptop stolen (a Macbook Pro), a machine that had Firewire 400 and 800. I too had mine stolen in November; thankfully mine was while I was sleeping, not at gunpoint.

Thankfully she saw the humour when I told her at least she could upgrade to a newer machine (there is a silver lining, even if its a bit scuffed). Faced with the replacement choice, it was either a Macbook (with no Firewire at all), or a Macbook Pro (which had Firewire 800 only). The Macbook was nicer for me (smaller, perfect specs and price point), but I ended up buying the Pro purely for Firewire 800. What's the big deal about Firewire ?

Firewire 800 (aka IEEE1394b) is cool; 800MBits (not like USB2's 480Mbits in burst mode). Firewire 400 (aka IEEE1394) is less cool (400Mbits), but far more ubiquitous. The basic properties are the same; I can plug a hard drive or peripheral in, and its powered by the bus far more reliably than USB-based power.

No drivers, fast transfer speeds, and the ability to chain and mix/match on the same bus. Oh yes, and the formats are backward compatible. Sounds great. Except that Apple has basically killed Firewire 400 (and replaced with 800) from most of their machines, and removed it completely from the new Macbooks.

Now this is annoying.

• My camcorder no longer works on my machine without a different cable or an adapter
  
• Firewire target disk mode is no longer available on all Mac's (this is a subtle return to the "what machine do you have, because it changes how I approach a problem" behaviour that is common with PC manufacturers)
  
• My expensive Firewire 400 drive enclosures and hubs are useless
  
• etc, etc, etc
  

Why Apple, why kill off a good option, and close options for Macbook users who are already paying a premium ? I don't get it.

As an aside, I just bought a Firewire 800 drive enclosure from OWC. Excellent drive, and the performance is brilliant! They're great for memory and drive upgrades too.

Rant: eSATA, what a stupid system. You have to supply your own interface and power. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Maybe USB3 will solve all of these problems and unify these disparate connectors.

Sheep shagger

Literally. Another proud South African, doing his bit for animal rights and equality.

See here. Summary, a 36-year old man was caught shagging a sheep, because it was keeping him awake.

Now, if a sheep was keeping me awake, I'd shoot it, or block my ears; and I'm a vegetarian. Not go outside in the cold and get funky, so to speak ?

WTF ?