Smule’s Ocarina has a very simple interface. In the main operating mode you have four circles that represent the air holes on the instrument and an indicator on the bottom that shows the intensity of the air being blown. You play the instrument by blowing into he microphone, and have the combinations of pressing or not pressing the circles to determine the notes. I admit that I was skeptical when I first tried this, but it works really well in practice. After working out where to blow for the best sound I was playing notes clearly within a few minutes. If you tap on the indicator at the bottom you get a menu with four options: he ocarina, a globe, preferences, and an information button that has links to tutorials.
The preferences allow you to change the root note and the sound of the instrument. As a nod to the videogame fans, there is a “Zeldarian” mode. On the ocarana site, you can find a growing number of songs being adapted to the Ocarina. Smile makes a nice score generator for users to use so they can share their creations. I’m addition to the many Zelda themes, there are a lot of good adaptations. The one downside to he music on the site is the lack of note length and rests. If you don’t know what a song is supposed to sound like, chances are that it won’t sound right.

The globe icon brings up a darkened globe with lights scattered over it indicating Ocarina users. One light has a DNA-like spiral coming up and plays the music from that user. It is amazing to hear how good some people are with this already. For those of us that aren’t experts yet, I haven’t seen an opt-out option other than not allowing the app to use your location. That should really be made more clear.

In the end, Smule’s Ocarina is a polished application that shows what out of the box ideas can do with the iPhone. My wife and I spent an hour playing with it, and it has renewed a desire to start playing music again. I highly recommend this application. Thanks to Lawson for telling me about this app!

For an example of Ocarina in action, take a look at this video from the Ocarina website:

Title: Ocarina
Publisher: Smule
Price: $0.99 (Introductory special)
Rating: 4/5

Sunday night I contacted Drobo’s support. I feel that my request was clearly written and conveyed my problem as well as I could. Here was my request:

My Drobo Share stopped working. My drobo (1st gen) still works fine when connected through USB, but will not show up in the Dashboard when connected to the Drobo Share. My Droboshare is getting an IP address and is responding to pings, and the drobo is showing the lights it would normally show when connected and disconnected. This Drobo has data that multiple computers need to access, and being usb-only for very long isn’t an option.

I got a reply with some good questions to help them troubleshoot my problem:

To help us track down what is happening with your Drobo, we will need you to check a few things.
Did you use any special characters like spaces, backslashes, hyphens or underscores in the name of your DroboShare?
Did you format your Drobo for 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16TB virtual volumes?
What is the part number (P/N) of your Drobo power supply?
Have you tried resetting your DroboShare back to factory defaults?
Have you tried manually mapping to Drobo on DroboShare by using Go then
Connect to Server?

Thank you,
Drobo Support - LG

So I replied:

Thank you for responding. Here are the answers to your questions:
My droboshare name is just drobo, no spaces or special characters
I have a 4TB HFS+ volume set up (and it is working properly via USB)
My power supply part number is GPD80-12-7A
I have tried resetting the droboshare to factory defaults with no success
I cannot connect to it manually via connect to server, as well as the
run command from Windows.

Jeremy Dennis

At this point I was happy with their support. I probably should have mentioned what I had done to troubleshoot in my original request, but in my answers I assumed that they would have the information they needed. In particular, I was surprised they asked for the power supply model number. Was there a problem with power supplies causing this type of problem? I was optimistic that there might have been, and the problem would be a quick warranty replacement.

Boy, was I wrong.

Monday night I got a reply from Drobo Support:

Hello Jeremy Dennis,

Thanks for contacting Drobo tech support.

Put Drobo to standby
Wait 2 min the lights should go out (except the orange power LED)
Unplug the power from the Y-Cable (leave it plugged into the units)
Find and unroll a paperclip twice
Push in the rest button on the ethernet side of the DROBOSHARE.
While holding the reset button power the Y-Cable back up
Hold the reset until the Drive bays on the Drobo are solid green
Then let go and the share will be reset to default settings and should fix the issue.

Please reply to this e-mail and let us know if the issue is resolved.

Thanks for your time,
Drobo Tech Support - JB

This set me off. Was I unclear in my previous e-mail? Did I not say that I had tried to reset the Drobo Share? I probably shouldn’t have replied right away, but I was so incensed that I couldn’t stop myself:

Drobo Support,
Is anyone even reading the past history on this ticket? I mentioned in
my last e-mail that I did already reset my drobo share. You asked me
specific questions to help troubleshoot the issue, and I answered
them. Now the reply is to do something that I already said that I did?
This is a very stressful and frustrating situation for me and to make
sure that everything is clear, I will repeat my problem, as well as
your questions and my answers from the previous e-mails so everything
will be easily understood to the next person to receive this support
ticket.

My original support request:
My Drobo Share stopped working. My drobo (1st gen) still works fine
when connected through USB, but will not show up in the Dashboard when
connected to the Drobo Share. My Droboshare is getting an IP address
and is responding to pings, and the drobo is showing the lights it
would normally show when connected and disconnected. This Drobo has
data that multiple computers need to access, and being usb-only for
very long isn’t an option.

My reply from “Drobo Support - LG” and my answers (prefixed by >):

To help us track down what is happening with your Drobo, we will need
you to check a few things.
Did you use any special characters like spaces, backslashes, hyphens
or underscores in the name of your DroboShare?

> My droboshare name is just drobo, no spaces or special characters

Did you format your Drobo for 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16TB virtual volumes?

> I have a 4TB HFS+ volume set up (and it is working properly via USB)

What is the part number (P/N) of your Drobo power supply?

> My power supply part number is GPD80-12-7A

Have you tried resetting your DroboShare back to factory defaults?

> I have tried resetting the droboshare to factory defaults with no success

Have you tried manually mapping to Drobo on DroboShare by using Go
then Connect to Server?

> I cannot connect to it manually via connect to server, as well as the run command from Windows.

As I mentioned before, I really need to access my Drobo over the
network for access from multiple computers and right now I’m unable
to. This is very stressful for me. Please help me resolve this
problem.

Thank you,

Jeremy Dennis

I know that was a little over the top, but I wanted to make sure that there was no way that anyone could misunderstand my problem and what I had done so far to troubleshoot it. I’ve worked in tech support for almost 10 years. I know what help desk systems are like. They all have a history of correspondence between the user and the technician, and these e-mails all have text in the subject line with the ticket number and codes for the help desk system to pick up and import into the ticket. I knew all this information was already in their system, but what harm could come from having it in there twice?

Apparently twice wasn’t enough:

Hello Jeremy Dennis,

Thanks for contacting Drobo tech support.

Apologies we sent the reset instructions because if not done to how it was typed it will not reset the Droboshare. Assuming the Droboshare is reset you should be able to access the Droboshare via

go~connect to server~ type SMB://Droboshare/Drobo (replace Drobo with the volume name. Leave Droboshare the same as the name will be reset)

Also please check your computers Firewall(s) (OS and 3rd party) have exceptions for the Drobodashboard.exe

Thanks for your time,
Drobo Tech Support - JB

Ignoring the fact that he’s mixing up OSX and Windows terminology (”connect to server” line and “drobodashboard.exe”), was this also not covered in the previous e-mails? Let’s look up a bit and see.

Have you tried manually mapping to Drobo on DroboShare by using Go then Connect to Server?

> I cannot connect to it manually via connect to server, as well as the run command from Windows.

It appears that I had covered that bit. My thinking now is that “JB” from Drobo support isn’t very good with reading the whole e-mail. That is only way I can see this happening without really getting mean about it. Once again I replied without giving myself time to relax and sent this off:

Drobo Support,

Once again, this is something I have already covered in my previous
answers. You asked: “Have you tried manually mapping to Drobo on
DroboShare by using Go
then Connect to Server?” I replied: “I cannot connect to it manually
via connect to server, as well as the run command from Windows.” As I
said in my previous e-mail, resetting my Drobo Share did not allow me
to connect to the Drobo. There have been no changes to the computer’s
firewall settings since the problems started, and the firewall was
already off.

This is absurd. Every e-mail is asking things that have already been
asked by someone else and answered by me. This is extremely
frustrating, especially for a product as expensive as the Drobo and
Drobo Share.

Jeremy Dennis

We’ll see what happens. I am close to calling, but Drobo provides a support request form. It “should” work through this method. I really like my Drobo, and for a product that costs as much as it does, I would have expected better support. I’m hoping I don’t have a $199 doorstop. I will update this as this saga continues to unfold.

I’m not happy with the changes. The new Gmail gadget now opens within the same window instead of opening a new window (or tab). You can work with e-mails by replying or forwarding, but if you need to click on any web links you have to copy the link and paste it into your address bar. Moving the tabs from the top to the left also has some problems. Google’s blog post describes the move so you can “access to any gadget with one click.” It may be so, but it would have been nice to have some notice of the change.

(left, old design. right, new design. Click for larger versions.)

Don’t get me wrong, I like some of the new apps. The Weather app is particularly nice. However, this design has the feel of being rushed. Maybe it was hurried because of Yahoo’s upcoming redesign?

The hardest part of this process was to figure out how to get my addresses out of Exchange and into the Address Book application on my Mac. When you delete the contact syncing on the phone it removes them from the device, so syncing the contacts from the phone into Address Book was out of the question. There’s no good mass “export from outlook” and “import into Address Book” option either. My solution actually came from Entourage, proving that it is actually good for something. Entourage has the ability to sync with the local iApps, and it worked out really well. As you can see you can sync calendars and notes as well, but I only chose the addresses as I didn’t need notes and my calendar was already synced.

For Calendar syncing, I discovered BusySync. It can sync my Google Calendar with iCal, and include the multiple calendars I subscribe to as well. BusySync costs $25, but is well worth it. Updates to any of the calendars are quick as long as it’s running.

If that were all I needed, then I would be done with the only cost being the $25 for BusySync. However, to sync with my iPhone I had to pay for MobileMe. I got it with my new Mac for $79, and you can get it from Amazon at that same price. MobileMe syncs my local addresses and calendars with their servers as well as between their servers and my iPhone. I was hesitant at first after hearing horror stories when it launched, however I haven’t had a single problem with the syncing. Updates are fairly quick from phone to MobileMe, and from MobileMe to iCal.

It is frustrating to have to use two applications to get all my services synced, but in my opinion it’s worth it. I use Thunderbird, iCal, and Address book on my Mac, Gmail and Google Calendar on the web, or my iPhone when I’m running around and everything is up to date.

In practice, TripIt is pretty useful. I’ve used it on about four or five trips, and in all but one, the itinerary from the booking site was recognised. I’m not sure what happened with the one that wasn’t, but when I used them again about a month ago it was imported with not problems. If you book items from multiple sites, say you go to Expedia for your plane ticket, but Travelocity for your hotel and car rental, TripIt will figure out that they’re all on the same trip for you. You can also share the trips with multiple users and give them read or write access to the trip. In practice it’s pretty useful to have my wife and I both add things to the same place rather than e-mail things back and forth when preparing for a trip.

One of the best features is the print option. Once all your bookings are consolidated onto TripIt, it can generate a really nice looking printout that includes all the information, including driving directions, maps, confirmation numbers, and phone numbers for the entire agenda. It can be a lifesaver not having to search around for that restaurant phone number if you’re running late.

TripIt also has a mobile site that has improved greatly over the months I’ve been using it. It started with a fairly bland text based interface, but now it visually looks much better and is easy to navigate. My favorite feature is probably more of an iPhone feature than a TripIt one, but I love being able to click on the Google Map directions and have it open in Google Maps on my phone, with the directions ready to go. If you don’t have an iPhone, you still get a picture of the overall map with the text based directions.

One of the problems I’ve had with the site is slow iCal updating. I subscribe to my TripIt calendar feed on both Google Calendar and iCal on my Mac and they both take a little time to update the entries for the trip. When we were adding things to the agenda during the trip, I had to delete the subscription and re-add it on Google Calendar in order to force it to show up immediately. It does show up within an hour or so if you don’t do anything, but when you’re on a trip and you’re using it for organization, you’d like it to be quick.

Overall I give TripIt a good review. It’s a really useful site that seems to be heading in the right direction and I really like being able to have my calendar updated so easily with trip information.

Net Neutrality has nothing to do with the Fairness Doctrine. Net Neutrality involves the “packets” of data on the internet and how ISPs send them over their networks. A “neutral” internet would have all ISPs treat all packets equally and pass them along their networks on to the packet’s destination. Some ISPs such as Comcast have been in trouble with the FCC for showing preference to a certain type of packet or blocking packets without letting the customers know about it.

For example, if an ISP offered VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services, they might want to ensure their packets make it through quickly, and degrade the packets from competitors like Skype. Another one is if an ISP offers video downloads, they could degrade or block access to sites that stream video like Netflix or Hulu.

Recently Comcast got in trouble interferring with Bittorrent (a form of P2P filesharing). It was proven by two independant groups when they tried to transfer a copy of the King James Bible, which is completely in the public domain, and saw that Comcast was sending their Bittorrent clients a packet that shut down the transfer. Bittorrent is used for many illegal purposes, but is simply a technology for transferring large files quickly and is used for many legitimate uses including distributing Linux CD and DVD images, World of Warcraft in-game patches, and the Bittorrent.com online media store.

The marriage of ISPs and content providers such as Comcast and Time Warner is raising many fears in the industry. The ISPs have stated that they would like to charge sites to guarantee that their traffic gets through quickly. The ISPs, just like consumers already pay for their access to the Internet. They pay for a specific amount of bandwidth and should have unlimited access to the net at the speeds they pay for. They should not have to pay Comcast, Time Warner, or any other ISP an additional fee to ensure their users get to use their sites. It is extortion, plain and simple.

This thing is great! TivoToGo works just like I hoped it would (although rebooting the Tivo while you’re copying a show over is not recommended). With my other Tivos being a Series 1 and a Series 2, I hadn’t been able to use multi-room viewing before either. That’s a pretty nice feature.

This is a screenshot from today’s Conference USA finals game on CBS. I captured it using my antenna because my cable card wasn’t setup yet. I’m looking forward to trying to convert this to a DVD to see how it looks.