Starstruck

It wasn’t all that close – Toronto and Ottawa are separated by a couple of hundred miles – but yesterday’s earthquake was noticeable down here in not-so-sunny Woodbridge. It’s not quite true to say we’ve had no sun, but we have also had a couple of deluges in the last day or so.

I’m not sure if the combination of these two events is a contributing factor, but when I went out to the observatory today I found that the bubble level on the mount was no longer showing a cleanly centered bubble. Instead, the bubble is off to one side, so it looks like the mount has shifted quite a bit. It looks like the next time I go out I should set aside a half hour or so to confirm and reset the alignment.

Oh well. At least the wrath of a vengeful god didn’t make the earth gape open and swallow the observatory whole. That won’t happen until 2012….

While I’m on the subject of castles (previous post) this is a view of Lincoln Castle. The walk up to the castle was by way of a stiff climb along a street named appropriately – Steep Hill.

Good exercise – for those who like to walk, and are in good shape!

One reason I haven’t posted much recently (aside from the continuing WordPress saga) is that I spent three weeks visiting relatives in England during the month of May. I took “lotsa pictures” and, hopefully, one of them will be attached to this post, resized as needed, and online with the article.

This is Hermitage Castle, a small castle in the border region between England and Scotland. It passed a couple of times between the English and the Scots, and while the inside lies in ruins, the castle still has a brooding presence – particularly when the clouds roll in as they did on this day, with a chill rain spattering down from time to time.

This image was sent from my iPad, so the process does work, but I am not sure if the changes which I had to make to the site are safe. I will be watching to see if any glitches show up as a result of the modifications – but eventually I will post more images of the trip (i’m not sure, but that may pass for a threatening remark – don’t say you weren’t warned!).

OK, I lied.

While it’s certainly another day, it’s only another version of an app which failed previously – namely, the WordPress app. The last time I tried this out, it failed about as many times as it succeeded, and I eventually gave up on it. However, I didn’t delete it from the iPad, and yesterday the App Store let me know that there was an update available.

So far though, I have to say, not so good. In trying to post this item, I lost the edit about halfway through the setting up of the headers – specifically, when I tried to set the category, the entry screen reset to blanks, and I had to start over. I’ll forgive that, at least for now, but it doesn’t bode well for the continuing saga…

It’s rather unfortunate, but since the iPad version of the WordPress app fails, I’ve had to update this post manually. There are some very strange quirks in the update process, related no doubt to the auto-completion which I have enabled. However, while this article reports the same troubles with WordPress as I have experienced, it also reports trouble with updates using Safari on the iPad—which I am not seeing at all. Strange -about the only weirdness I see with Safari is that in text entry for this blog I am unable to position the cursor at the first point on a line, and have to set it at the second character and then backspace to get to the position I really want. I find that to be only a minor irritant, but YMMMV.

I have been updating the blog through the WordPress app on my iPad, but for some reason I am no longer able to connect through that app. I did manage to update my other blog location with it, so it’s not a total fail, but it’s a mystery to me why it works on one but not the other. Not a big deal, since I can still update using the web interface, but it’s still irritating (and as my wife will testify, lots of other things are irritating to me).

Another try at posting from my iPad, though this time only from home. Posting from out in the wilds of Bramalea, specifically from my dentist’s office, was successful, but since then I’ve added another blog to my list (my formerly inert ptatters.wordpress.com blog) and that seems to have confused the WordPress app no end.

In particular, going from local draft to draft to Published seems to be fraught with danger – I’ve had the entire text of a post disappear on me while transitioning from local draft -held on the iPad – to remote draft – held on the server, and thereafter the placement of the cursor while trying to enter text was very iffy. Ultimately I reset the app by reentering all the id’s and passwords for the two blogs. Very annoying.

Then again, this is a free app, so I suppose I’m getting what I paid for.

Sitting here in a Tim Horton’s in the back end of nowhere, typing away, I realize that – first of all – I am enjoying myself. I’m not actually connected, yet I’m still able to make entries on my blog (be afraid!), continuing the evaluation of my iPad even while far away from my office. That is, forgive my geekiness, something off a rush.

Something I miss on the soft keyboard is cursor control. if I make a mistake I may not recognize it for some time, and it’s usually faster for me to move up a line or two rather than reposition the cursor manually by touch. Something else is the curse of soft keyboards – if I brush against the keys even briefly, I may find that I have inadvertently entered something inappropriate or just plain nonsensical. The auto completion and corrections are great, but I wish the system would recognize that an ‘i’ by itself is probably a a first person pronoun and should be capitalized. Oh, and I wish the spelling could be set to a Canadian variation – the US uses too many ‘z’s for my taste.

All that aside, using the iPad under these circumstances is painless and fun. And so….

WARNING: increased number of inane posts may follow.

This may be interesting. I’m posting this from my iPad using a (free) WordPress app. I expect to make some use of the app in the future at least for plain posts if it turns out to be easy to use. There have been some complaints (for a free app, which strikes me as somewhat churlish) already about the fact the app is not WYSIWYG entry, so there may be upgrades which will make this easier…. Right now, I’m just posting from home, but on the upcoming trip or from someplace like Starfest, this could be a very useful tool.

Speaking of useful tools, text entry is currently by way of the soft keyboard on the iPad. Doable, but awkward. I may wind up investing in a folding Bluetooth keyboard if this proves useful. It may be even more likely that I will buy one if the iWork suite works out being useful (but I can’t test paid apps yet. Sigh).

I’ve been absent for quite a while. It’s not that I’ve been especially busy, it’s much more like that I’ve been distracted, over the past several weeks, by thoughts of the Apple iPad and how I might use it. That’s right, I’ve been swallowed by the hype machine.

It was an unpleasant surprise a few days back when Apple announced that the local release of the iPad would be put back a month. I had been geared up for a release around April 24, but now I had to reset to the end of May. Nuh-uh. Wasn’t going to wait that long – I need something to take to the UK during the early part of that month.

The US and Canadian dollars are at par for the moment (which shows how the US has been tumbling), so it really isn’t a big deal to swing down to Buffalo and hit the Apple Store there. I went down on Thursday and picked up a shiny (really!) 64Gb iPad with WiFi but no 3G access. I don’t expect to use it a great deal away from the house (I don’t go much away from the house!), so on the rare occasions when I do, and need Internet access, I can look for a hotspot. I don’t expect much from local cell service providers, so I’ve decided not to buy the 3G model for now. I may revisit that decision later, once I’ve had a chance to use the ‘Pad for a while, particularly after my [planned] trip to the UK next month [assuming planes aren’t grounded by ash!].

I ran into a problem once I got back home. The Canadian iPad store isn’t active yet, so I couldn’t buy any apps and I couldn’t update the ones I had already (I was able to buy the GoodReader app a few days back for some reason, despite the fact the iPad store wasn’t ready). There was a workaround for free apps, though – I registered a different id using my daughter’s US address. That got me the iBook app, and let me load up the Epub format ebooks I have purchased already from Baen’s ebook store. My usual ebook reader, Stanza, doesn’t have an iPad version as yet (or at least, not that I could find), so the iBook app was a necessity. The iPad is a very comfortable reader, and I’m finding it much better to use than the iPod Touch I had been using, even if I can’t access the Baen store directly as I could under Stanza.

The iPad has been billed by many as a pure entertainment device, and so far it has been entertaining enough (book reader, web browser, music player, occasional video views), but I have also been using apps from my old iPod touch, and they work well enough. There are a number of iPad-specific apps available which I might buy, but since my credit card uses a Canadian address I can’t buy them from the US iPad store, and will have to wait for the Canadian store to open. Also, for updates to existing apps transferred from my iPod I am having a problem since I can’t login to the App Store to update anything purchased from the Canadian store. This is a pain, though it should be resolved by the end of May when I expect the Canadian store to open up.

Battery life has been excellent. I used the ‘pad all day yesterday, manually turning it off whenever I expected to be away from the machine or not paying attention for more than a brief time, and at the end of the day I still had 72% power. During the day I had read a couple of books (Much Fall of Blood and The Rolling Stones), so there were a few hours of use in that time. This is quite acceptable, and I expect to be able to eke out a weekend’s use if I am away from power for any length of time. I have a solar cell which might let me charge up enough to last out a longer observing trip, say to Starfest or Nirvana, though even there I usually have access to a power outlet for long enough to charge up.

I will probably have additional comments on the iPad over the next few weeks – right now I’m still nosing around trying to determine the usage limits I can expect.