Squeezebox Boom Microsurgery

Introduction and Background

At home, I serve up my music using the Logitech Media Server, which plays music through a variety of interfaces collectively known as Squeezebox. One interface, the Squeezebox Classic plugs into my home entertainment system. Another interface, the Squeezebox Boom is a stand-alone box that plays very high quality sound from digital formats.

Squeezebox and the Logitech Media Server were ahead of their time, but the hardware was discontinued by Logitech. However a loyal community of enthusiasts continue to evolve the server, and attempt to keep the old hardware alive. Interestingly, in the years that have elapsed since the demise of the Logitech Squeezebox hardware, nobody has come up with a unit that hits the same price/performance point.

Similar functionality can be achieved at higher cost on a proprietary platform using the Sonos Whole House Audio System.. I personally prefer to be able to dig into the media server software and tune it up myself. I like the diversity and the thousand flowers that have bloomed that extend the Logitech Media Server. I expect one day I'll build a box out of a Raspberry Pi and a DAC Hat, and speakers and an amplifier, but catching up to the beautiful design and sound of the Squeezebox Boom will be a big challenge.

The Problem

The display on one of my Squeezebox Boom players had gone dark. The unit played just fine, and I could control it remotely, as long as it never lost the ability to talk to my home network. If we changed our wifi password, the Boom would be forever lost.

The Solution

Although Logitech never made any kind of service manual or internal documentation available, there have been intrepid souls who have explored the hardware and have come up with possible repair solutions. The richest collection of repair recipes can be found at Joe's Technology Blog.

As documented in the Squeezebox Forum, my problem was very likely, a bit of blown driver circuitry that could be kludged back to life by wiring in three diodes. The challenge was in opening up the unit and making the mod without damaging anything.

The Complication

When it came time to separate the front panel from the control board, I misunderstood the instructions, and instead of unplugging the front panel, I tore the whole surface mount connector off the front panel board, taking a few precious traces with it.

The Surgery

Spare parts for any of the Logitech Squeeze family of hardware are not available from Logitech. The best one can hope for is to find someone who wants to get rid of their Squeezebox. Maybe one can find a "broken, parts-only" posting on Ebay.

I resolved to try and fix what I broke. But first I had to find a finer soldering iron tip than what I usually use, and I had to find some finer diameter solder.

So I glued the connector back onto the control board, making a mess with the super glue that would become a problem later.

The above photo doesn't show what a mess I made, so I'll circle it for you in yellow:

I now realize that I should have been much more careful in applying the super glue, and taken care to avoid the pin slots of the connector. See below for the consequences.

I tack-soldered what I could to what remained of usable traces. This got me 3 out of ten pins. But happily there turned out to be a set of test points that corresponded to the ten connector pins.

So with patience I did not know I could manifest, I got out my #30 AWG wire wrap wire and attached leads to the remaining pins of the connector.

I then began snaking the wires to their positions on the text pads. My wire cutting and stripping technique required refinement. As the photo below shows, when I put my first wire in, I managed to tear out the blue wire on pin 9 of the connector and had to re-attach it. 

However by the time I got all the wires in place, I had fewer and fewer instances of having to re-re-solder the wire onto the connector.

I expect someone who had ever done this before would have known, as I now know, to lay out, cut and strip the wires before soldering any of them.

When it came time to re-connect the ribbon cable that joins the front panel to the control board, I discovered that the cable would not go in the connector!

The little piece of blue plastic that helps keep the cable making good contact tore off rather than going in the hole.

The only thing I could figure was that the super glue had gone into the pin slots and prevented them from moving.

With no shim, the ribbon cable seemed too loose. But a sheet of paper seems to have been skinny enough to get in, and fat enough to do some good.

I powered the unit back up and got my blank screen and sound playing.

Thus emboldened, I made the 3 diode repair, and have put the unit back into service!

Reading on the iPad Part 13: New version of WSJ iPad app wrecked the user experience.

First a tip of the hat to my lucky number thirteen. Born on the 13th, and mom now living at #13, thirteen been very very good to me. Alas, Thursday, 13 July 2017 was not a lucky day for my reading experience with the Wall Street Journal iPad app.

Like installment 12, this review is a candidate for my all negative all the time blog, Angry Poetnerd. On 13 July, for my daily read of the Wall Street Journal, I was greeted with a perky, self-congratulatory pop-up announcing the new app version. I hate the new user interface. This article details why.

As early as 2011, in Reading on the iPad Part 4: Extreme disappointment: The Wall Street Journal, I expressed disappointment. I found basic usability problems. Although there were a couple areas where I changed my mind, and where the app improved, I continue to feel that the WSJ iPad developers fail to understand the needs of daily readers. I feel they systematically make a bad app worse -- failing to fix basic problems, and introducing aspects that harm usability.

Review of initial problems:

• Failure to adopt iPad standard "draw" and "pinch" gestures to enlarge and shrink image. Never fixed. The app still wastes precious screen space with a font resize button. Worse, you don't choose the size. You step through 3 hard-coded sizes.
• Co-opting standard "pinch" gesture to close article and go back. Fixed. A Back button was added.
• Broadsheet layout retained, but squished into iPad form factor resulting in tiny article introductions that usually end in the middle of a sentence. Accepted. My opinion here has changed from initial hatred to approval. The positioning and relative sizes of articles turn out to be useful typographical cues. Having seen the Washington Post app abandon this, I miss it.
• No "Table of Contents View". Fixed for 5 years; broken this week. More details below.

Buggy operation around suspend and sleep:

In my early review, I encountered many problems around resuming the app after either running another app, or putting the iPad to sleep for a while while I did something else. I chose not to mention these problems initially because I expected them to be fixed in short order, and because I wanted to focus on the main flow through the app.

In retrospect documenting the bad behavior from the beginning might have provided useful documentation to other users, and might have gotten usefully back to the developers. Here it is, six years later, and the Wall Street Journal app still simply dies sometimes when I put my iPad to sleep.
It still sometimes completely forgets where I was when I go back to the app. It still sometimes resumes with chunks of the page simply missing. When re-opening the app on a new day, it still often fails to offer a pop-up to take you to the new issue.

No other iPad reading app that I have used has this much difficulty handling resume from suspend and sleep.

Evolving/Devolving Workflow:

In my second post of this series, I provided background and the evaluation criteria for apps that I would review. I suggested that two interfaces were necessary for a complete solution: one that let you "turn all the pages," and one that let you "navigate a table of contents view." In my initial review of the WSJ app, I lamented the lack of a table of contents view.

Shortly thereafter a table of contents view was added. In retrospect, I should have provided an update so as to give credit where credit was due, and to document the evolution of the interface.

The view worked like this: Tap on the three bars in the upper right hand corner to get a list of sections. When you tapped on a section, you got the front page of that section. You could tap on the three bars again to see a list of the articles in the section. It was not ideal for me flipping between a page display and then having to re-enter the table of contents.

Somewhere in 2014, if I'm properly interpreting my somewhat incomplete notes, I spoke with the Digital Editor and expressed how much I hated the table of contents view. I was told that improvements were coming, and indeed one day they came.

The interface changed, and I liked it. Instead of getting the first page of the section, you got the list of articles for the section. For me this was the ideal way to navigate.

• I always knew all the sections that were available.
• With a single finger tap, I could see the articles in the section.
• It was easy to know how many sections and how many articles there were so I could plan my read-through.
• The app was good at returning me to the table of contents with the article I just read highlit, so it was easy to keep my place as I stepped through the articles.

I didn't make note of the exact date and the exact workflow, because I figured that once the good workflow was established its value would be obvious and it would be kept. On 26 October 2016, an update came through that went back to the old "dump you in the first page of the section" interface. A new bug: sometimes the highlighting failed.

Damaged workflow detailed:

The update that came on 13 July, however, so totally changed the interface, that it provoked me to invest the time to produce this article. I am completely mystified how anyone could consider the new interface an acceptable way to navigate the content.

It used to be that you always had the 3 bars to take you to the list of sections. One of the sections was "Issues". From that page, you could select either the "Latest News" or a particular day's edition of the paper. When the notifier pop-up for a new issue failed, as it often did, it was easy to recover by going to "Issues" and selecting the new one.

Now when you start the app you land on the "Latest News" section by default. The three bars are gone, but now you have "Menu". I think "Menu" is more obvious than three bars, but what is under the menu is not at all obvious. How do you get to today's paper? You just have to know to tap on "Issues". From there you get a scrolling display of the different issues. What was once a mild inconvenience when the notifier bug bit, is now the normal workflow. Where once I got today's paper by default, I now tap and look tap and look. Annoying.

It used to be that, when viewing the table of contents view of a particular edition, you got additional sections like "Journal Report" and "Wall Street Journal Magazine." This made perfect sense. Just like how you received special sections in the print edition, there they were in the iPad edition. With the new interface, you don't get those. They're now grouped ONLY in the "Latest News" edition's table of contents. Since I never read the "Latest News" version, I missed a couple of these inserts until I figured out I needed to start looking there. What I got by default in a timely and graceful manner is now off someplace I used never to look, and have to remember to visit. More annoying.

Having to open the list of articles view again for every section was annoying. But the new interface solution is worse by far. There is no list of articles. You just have to know that you scroll down to see the articles in the section, and you scroll to the right to see the other sections. Are there indicators of any kind to let you know there are more articles to see? No. Well there might be. Sometimes I see a big bold "V" at the bottom of the section screen. But sometimes it's not there when there is more to see, and sometimes it's there when there is nothing more to see. Sometimes I scroll down and get a totally blank page. What used to be a simple, obvious display of what articles there were, how many there were, where you left off in your reading, is all gone, and replaced with an interface that has to be explained and which fails to provide useful, consistent indication of where to go next.

Having had a really good experience with the 2014/2015 edition of the table of contents view, I am beside myself in hatred of this new interface. I am seriously considering canceling my WSJ subscription and switching to reading the Financial Times via Zinio.

To anyone who is reading this article and who also reads the Wall Street Journal on the iPad, I'd very much like to hear if you agree or disagree with me here. Definitely call up the Journal and provide your feedback. When I went to the reviews on the App Store, it seemed like the negative reviews of the new interface outnumbered the positive ones by like 5 to one or more.

Continued Struggles:

I'm not sure if readers will find it easiest to get updates at the end of this article or with new postings. Please feel free to comment with what works better for you.

28 July 2017: The reason why broken recovery from sleep is so annoying:

Breakfast today (when I read the WSJ) has been interrupted by various things. I was in the middle of reading the article "Scaramucci Erupts Over Priebus, Leakers" in today's paper, and I stepped away from my iPad.

I fingerprinted back in, and landed not in the app, but in the folder containing the app. I guess the app crashed.

I restart it, and instead of going to the article I was in the middle of, I got dumped into the front page of "Latest News." To get back to where I was, I do this:

1. Tap Menu
2. Tap "Issues"
3. Tap on the issue I was reading, Friday 28 July 2017.
4. Tap on "Page One"
5. Tap on the article I was reading, "Scaramucci Erupts Over Priebus, Leakers"

There. Wasn't that easy? No it wasn't! It epitomizes how the new version has mis-organized the content, and deleted useful interfaces into the content so that the broken resume from sleep forces me to tap tap tap just to get back to where I was in reading today's paper. This is the fundamental problem I have with the new version.

Contrast this with how I would recover in the previous interface I liked best but which got harmed with the update of October 2016:

Restarting the app brings me to the issue I was previously reading.
If I was on the front page, tap on the article. Done.

Otherwise:

1. Tap on the 3 bars to bring up the list of sections.
2. Tap on the section I was reading.
3. From the list of articles presented, tap on the one I wanted. Done.

With the October 2016 reversion to the "Force the reader onto the first page of the section and make them re-open the menu" interface, those 3 steps becomes 4 steps:

1. Tap on the 3 bars to bring up the list of sections.
2. Tap on the section I was reading.
3. Tap on the 3 bars to bring up the list of articles.
4. From the list of articles presented, tap on the one I wanted. Done.

Sometimes one step. Sometimes 3 or 4 steps. Now always 5 steps. This is bad workflow design and represents ignorance of user experience. (In addition to failure, across many years, to get "Restart after sleep" working.)

How Comcast SHOULD have worked to fix signal leakage problems, but DIDN'T.

Everybody whose worked with a cable or telephone company has a story to tell about crappy customer service. Recently Comcast called saying there was trouble anticipated on my line and asking to fix it. What should have been a simple proactive service call has turned into a multi-call multi-day fiasco. It did not have to be this way.

I claim some blame for getting angry and not responding in the most constructive way. I offer suggestions in how Comcast could have communicated better through the multiple interactions that could have avoided my anger, and put things back on track.

The story/problem:

Upon my return from vacation I found multiple messages on my phone answering machine, from someone identifying themselves as calling from Comcast, saying that their monitoring system had identified a problem with my network and asking me to call 844-482-6747 between 8AM and 8PM to work on the problem.

An internet search on that number turned up several forum posts saying they believed the call was a scam. The CallerID on my phone reported either "Unavailable" or "Private Out of Area". Signing onto the Comcast web site and reviewing the calls log showed, "Cell Phone MA (508) 922-7953". Searching for that number again turned up much speculation that it was a scam.

I called my the Comcast service number that was on my bill, and asked about it. Surprise! It was legitimate. I was asked to schedule a service call, but that the work was strictly to be outside my house and I didn't even need to be home for it. When I asked why bother scheduling a call, I was told quite confidently by representative Anne that it was so I would know why a Comcast truck was outside of my house. The visit was scheduled for between 10 and 12 a couple days later.

At 9:30 the Tech shows up and wants to come in and check for loose wiring. I confess I did not respond constructively to this, and said angrily, "That's not what I was told!" My partner, a senior network engineer, offered to do the testing. I said a bunch of things in a hostile tone including, "Do what you have to do," "Perform your outside testing," and "We've had the line to the house replaced five years ago when squirrels bit through it. Check that." The Tech simply left and logged that he was not allowed in the house. That log information didn't reach me until the third follow-up call I made asking what the resolution was.

I called Comcast in a rage because I didn't want my service to go bad, but that I had not been communicated with properly. The first representative I spoke with started working through a script, and I hung up. The next representative I spoke with offered to log a feedback ticket, with an ID could use for check-ins, documenting how I was told the wrong thing about the nature of the service call, and that the tech left without saying what the resolution was.

Later that evening I got another call from Comcast just like the ones I got while on vacation. I called the 844 number, and said, "The Tech has already been here. But I do not know if the problem was or was not resolved." The caller apologized, and said that after reviewing the information I could be assured the problem was resolved.

I called my regular service number, referenced the ticket, and asked what the story was. I was told, "The real nature of the problem was a problem with your internal wiring, and we need to schedule a tech to come and look at it." This being the fourth different story, I got really angry and demanded to talk to a supervisor. I had to get a bit rude to get that demand satisfied.

To the supervisor, I inventoried all the wrong stories I had gotten thus far, and he said a new visit had been scheduled. Again I got angry, because I had not agreed to any new visit. A visit on Sunday was offerend (which would normally be quite nice) but I was not going to be home on Sunday, and I was angry that I seemed to be getting told, not asked about a service visit. We agreed to a different day later in the week.

This morning I got another call from Comcast, this time with valid Caller ID asking to set up a visit to work on a network problem. I angrily quoted the ticket ID and said, there is already a visit scheduled.

So the problems were:

• Incorrect description of work needed and nature of service call.
• Inability to come to understanding with visiting technician.
• Delay in getting information on why technician left back to me.
• Disconnect between service call setup and service call requests.
• Incorrect statement that problem was resolved.
• Continued disconnect between service call setup and service call requests.

Again, I admit to not having responded in the most constructive ways to these. The result was that I wasted my own time, and probably made it harder for Comcast to do the right thing.

If Comcast had told me up front, that a technician needed to inspect wiring in the house, or if I had been less hostile to that change of plan when the technician had come, the problem would have been resolved quickly and easily.

However, I would suggest that the internal fragile processes within Comcast caused several missed opportunities to make this all run more smoothly:

The solution:

Make the service process more robust by understanding the nature of failed communication. Add a little bit here and there to reduce mis-communication and to respond constructively to it when the inevitable mis-communication happens.

1. If you have a proactive trouble identification system, give clear indication of how to confirm it is not a scam. Adding, "or call the Comcast service telephone number on your bill." to the message would have given a quick and easy way to verify the call was legitimate. Don't hide your Caller ID!

2. When you are doing proactive trouble resolution, give the people working the issue the CORRECT information to communicate to the customer.

3. When you send your service technicians out to the field for proactive work, train them in responding to customers taken by surprise in mis-communication of the nature of the call.

4. Connect your proactive work order system to your regular service order system.

5. Remind your service personnel to AVOID MAKING STUFF UP when they don't know the answer. Make sure the correct answer is made available to them to communicate. Make sure they understand the customer's attempt to resolve conflicting information coming from multiple sources.

As things stand, the Comcast system for proactively correcting cable network leakage problems is fragile, and can too easily turn into a system for creating angry customers. Indeed I more than once said, "Maybe I should switch to FiOS." I'm lucky to have a choice. But I'd prefer for both me and Comcast to win here going forward.

Let's see if the problem does get properly diagnosed and fixed next week.

Epilog:

• The technician showed up within the scheduled timeframe.
• A quick connection to the house wiring from outside of the house determined that the RF leakage was acceptably low.
• The technician marked the issue as resolved.
• The supervisor who scheduled this visit promised I would get a call half an hour before the technician showed up.  None was received.
• The supervisor promised he would call on the afternoon of the visit to check in.  No call has been received.

When the first technician visited, we ourselves found and corrected one imperfectly tightened down connection behind a switch plate.  We also realized we had one connection in the house wiring disconnected while we were away on vacation.  We theorized that the disconnection was what Comcast detected, but multiple calls, and multiple visits were required to get us to the point of recognizing that the current state of affairs is just fine.

There was no email in my Comcast inbox confirming either of the two scheduled visits.

One interpretation of events is, "If the first technician had done his job and checked the outside wiring as was originally agreed, everything would have just run smoothly."  However I'd say that my hostile reception for the first technician made communication too challenging for him. If he had said, "I checked the outside wiring as you were told, but I can show you how there is noise coming into Comcast lines from inside your house," I would have let him in.  Maybe we'd have found the loose connection as root cause and fixed it together.  But the first technician could not know that I was receptive to that message.

However, that situation would not have arisen if basic communication had been done right. Instead, communication of:

• What the problem is.
• How we will know the problem is solved.
• The conditions on which inspection of inside wiring will be needed.
• Consistent status reporting.
• Promised follow-up contacts.

Were ALL failures.  0 out of 10 for communication, Comcast.

Epilog2: 

I finally did get the promised follow-up call from the Supervisor.  We reviewed the other communication failures. He told me that the problem arose on July 1, the day we disconnected the coax from our line filter. This tilts my belief in the direction of, "We caused this, and fixed it ourselves, but didn't have a functional conversation with the first technician to resolve the situation."

I'll work harder myself to inform, rather than act out displeasure when I'm confronted by technicians doing unexpected stuff. I had the opportunity to make this iffy situation better and I blew it.  I hope that Comcast also learns from this and does better with explaining the problem, and working through it.

Reading on the iPad Part 12: Drop Fast Company's app. They have.

I have another blog, Angry Poetnerd for posts where I have only bad things to say. By rights this posting should go to that blog.

With the May 2017 issue, Fast Company stopped doing any extra work to re-render for the iPad app. Instead the regular printed version was loaded verbatim into the app with no post processing, and no additional work on the app to deal with the new requirements.

• Small, unreadable font: No ability to enlarge the font was added, so you were stuck with the large form factor magazine page in the small form factor iPad screen. This is a problem for near-sighted readers like myself.
• Links needed but not supported: No links were included to go to or get back from articles that were continued elsewhere in the issue.
• No additional navigation aids offered: To get to a continuation or back from it, you use trial and error either with the scroll bar and page flipping.

I Emailed Customer Care and the Letter to the Editor addresses raising my concerns. I never heard back from the Editor, but Customer Care was happy to refund the unused fraction of my subscription so that I could switch to Zinio.

I appreciate that creating an iPad-specific design and rendering is expensive. I'm personally skeptical of its value. But the way Fast Company transitioned out of this model was terrible. The change was un-announced and completely ruined the reading experience for me. I am only continuing as a subscriber because of the availablity of Fast Company via Zinio.  Zinio offers an excellent balance of cost and benefit for reading on the iPad. See also: Reading on the iPad Part 11: Zinio, My New Favorite

I continue to highly recommend that magazine publishers switch to Zinio. For example the IEEE. qmags still hasn't fixed any of the problems I flagged years ago. They have been surpassed by Zinio, but, alas, the IEEE has not yet noticed.

In related news:

The IEEE Computer Society has quit offering IEEE Computer via qmags. Sadly, they didn't adopt Zinio. There was a self congratulatory note sent out touting the additional formats available instead. For example, Kindle Format. Alas, the Kindle rendering was as bad as the Forbes rendering I reviewed back in 2011 (Reading on the iPad Part 6: Forbes was a disappointment.) I summarize the relevant bit:

The beautiful glossy magazine had been ground down into a cheap paperback book. The pages shrank down to 3x6 inches and the typography was reduced to a single font in only a couple point sizes. Colorful icons and graphical navigational aids were eliminated and everything re-formatted into block paragraphs. But as if to comply with a marketing directive to be able to say, "We offer color!" a very few select photographs were retained as "color plates" scattered throughout.

Forbes sensibly abandoned that format. The IEEE Computer Society has yet to learn what was obvious to some of us in 2011.

Pretty much the only rendering of IEEE Computer I find useful is the PDF format. With a few clicks I can get from the Email announcing the new issue through the iPad web browser into iBooks. If only Apple would copy Zinio's great interface for organizing magazine issues and bookmarks across items.

I feel that the IEEE Computer Society got caught up in offering a list of features, and lost contact with how to provide the best user experience. In my opinion, inadequate outreach was made to their own contacts in the User Experience realm.

PiDP-8 USB Hack

I have just finished building a PiDP-8/I from a fantastic kit offered by Oscar (Obsolescence Guaranteed) Vermeulen. This is a 2/3 scale reproduction of the front panel of the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8/I computer. Inside is a Raspberry Pi using SIMH (See also: SIMH project on GitHub.) to emulate a PDP-8. The PDP-8/I has a special place in my heart as the first computer I really got to know. You always remember your first...

One of the challenges is to bring the various and sundry connections through the bamboo case out to the world in a pleasing manner. I managed this:

Details on the connectors:

The power, audio, and HDMI extenders were findable with care.

Power was pretty straightforward.  I went with one from Renrii sold through Amazon, but I see it is no longer available, only a month later. Word of advice, look closely at the pictures, "Left Angle" and "Right Angle" are used inconsistently from vendor to vendor.

Audio extender to the box was straightforward.  I picked up this one from Amazon:  [Benly-38] Right Angle 4-pole 1/8" 3.5mm Stereo Plug / Male to Straight 4-pole 1/8" 3.5mm Stereo Jack / Female Aux Headphone Cable 0.55 Feet (17cm) Wvyr-4l4sf-15

But once outside the box, if you want to split the 4 pole 1/8" jack into separate RCA connectors, you must buy VERY carefully.  The assignments are not standardized, and some of the splitters have ground where you need signal.  My recommendation:  Buy new/old stock Zune a/v output cable. I got mine from a third party seller on Amazon:  Zune A/V Output Cable (Discontinued by Manufacturer). I confess I've not tested this yet, so I'm not 100% sure this is right.

For HDMI, I tried a cheaper one, but it failed to fit.  So I went with the Vanco 233306X 6" Right Angle Super Flex HDMI High Speed Male to Female Cable with Flat Top from Amazon.

I used standoffs to mount the PiDP-8/I, and then glued a 1/4 inch wood shim to the bottom of the box. This is to improve friction fit, serve as strain relief, and provide a surface to epoxy to.

I did some careful measuring and established a baseline for my connectors that would descend a bit into the wood shim.  Then I drilled a couple holes, and used a rotary tool and wood carver's tools to make the holes mostly shaped like the connectors.  A couple times, I lost control of the rotary tool and scraped up the box.  For example the line above the power connector you see in the final picture below. My holes are less than perfectly shaped.

The USB Hack:

The USB and hard-wired network connectors of the Raspberry Pie were quite close to the edge. Some people just cut a hole in the box, but I wanted to try and make an extender that would work in a confined space. But there is very little clearance between the Raspberry Pie and the case.

For me this meant cutting up a standard USB connector and hacking up a cable. My first attempt failed as the pins broke off. Here are the steps I took to get to the cut-down connector that did work.
Mouser Electronics was a quite reasonably priced source of male and female USB connectors.

1. Start with a USB Male connector.

2. Use a cutting wheel.

3. Cut the sides at the notch. 

4. Side cuts to guide the main cut.

5. Cut the metal.

6. Then the nylon 

7. Solder it up and your done?

8. The pins break right off.

9. Second try. Cut here.

10. Clear the nylon above the pins. 

11. The wires fit well in the well.

12. Power, Signal, and Chassis Ground.

13. Magic elixir!

14 Protects physically and electrically.

15. Carefully carve out  the case
where the USB connector will land.

16. NOW you are done!

Reading on the iPad Part 11: Zinio, My New Favorite

I can't believe that the most recent update to this series was nearly two and a half years ago!
I should have written this installment months ago, but blogging gets too small a pie-slice of my life.

In this installment I review Zinio. I like Zinio very much. It is the iPad magazine reading app that I have wanted since day 1. Here is why:

My judgment criteria:

To review, in part 2 I defined my personal criteria that defined as a "good" reader:

• Did the reader offer a good, "turn all the pages" interface when I wanted it?
• Did the publication offer a good table of contents summary and easy fetch when I wanted it?
• Was the content in front of me when I wanted to read it or did I have to wait?
• Was the interface familiar, sensible, and obvious?

In the course of several years of experience I found additional criteria:

• Does the reader return to the page I left off when I resume after doing something else?
• Does the reader avoid distracting additional features?
• Does the reader allow easy setting/clearing/visiting of bookmarks?
• Is navigation easy within an issue?
• Is navigation easy between issues?
• Does the reader app stay up and running without crashing?

How Zinio found me:

I had a paper subscription to Out magazine, but I had a problem: The scented cologne ads freaked out my nose and some issues were unreadable because of the stench! Their customer service department graciously offered to extend my subscription and switch it to digital through their partner Zinio.

I'd never head of Zinio, and it took me a while to schedule time to try out the app. But when I finally took the time with a trial issue I found it quite adequate.

Meanwhile I encountered a readability problem with Forbes on the Maz app: In January 2014 Forbes re-designed the iPad layout with a much bigger font. In the paper edition and the old format on Maz, I could quickly flip the pages, skim to content and zoom in on details I wanted to read. In the new Format, a 2 page article became 5 pages. I could no longer skim effectively. Furthermore, I kept hitting the wrong part of the screen and activating the "Select Text to Share" feature.

What I formerly viewed as the fastest and most robust reader that I liked best, had turned into the most annoying experience of all of the readers. I exchanged some emails with the CEO of Maz, but he said that his hands were tied -- that Forbes insisted on the new design.

I exchanged email with Lewis D'Vorkin, Chief Product Officer of Forbes, who said he would look into my issues. Nobody ever followed up. I sent a couple of follow-ups myself but got no reply. It got to the point where I got too angry even to open the Forbes Maz interface. I went back to paper.

It turned out that there was a Forbes subscription available through Zinio. It gave me exactly the experience I wanted in the first place. It kept what was good about the paper edition design without distractions from additional features or crashes. I love it!

How does Zino do by my judgment criteria?

Zinio uses the paper layout of the magazine rather than a "special for iPad design".

• Yes, it offers a "turn all the pages" interface.
• Yes, it has a good table of contents summary and easy fetch. Specifically, it offers two table of contents interfaces: Tap on the article entry in the magazine's contents pages, or tap on the icon at the top that looks like an outline.
• Yes, the content is in front of me when I want to read it. I do not have to wait. Indeed I can turn the pages in Zinio even on my ancient iPad FASTER than I can turn the pages of a paper magazine.
• Yes, the interface is familiar, sensible and obvious. The pinch and draw and the double tap magnify interface is there. Rotating between landscape and portrait mode works just fine. Switching amongst issues and publications is simple and direct.
• Yes, the reader returns to the page I left off with 100% reliability. Something that qmags STILL does not do.
• Yes, the reader avoids distracting additional features.
• Yes, the reader allows easy setting/clearing and visiting of bookmarks. Indeed it gets right what Wired can't seem to get right: Going to bookmarks in a different issue than the one I am currently reading. In Wired there is a bug where I tap on a book mark in an issue I'm not currently reading and get an error message. In Zinio it opens the other issue and takes me where I want to go.
• Yes, navigation within the magazine is easy. Flipping pages, the thumbnail view,  the page grid view, the table of contents view or the bookmarks page.
• Yes, navigation between issues makes sense.  The bookmark interface handles this well too.
• Yes, the app stays up without crashing.

All in all, I find using Zinio a joy! That is where I read Forbes, Out, and The Advocate. It is where I would like to read IEEE Spectrum, IEEE Computer and CACM instead of the current apps on offer.

I plan to drop Jason Pontin of MIT Technology Review a note and let him know that there is a digital custodian available for his print publication that does everything we hoped TR's foray into the app world would have done if it could have gotten debugged and put into production at reasonable cost.

I am considering switching my Fast Company subscription over to Zinio. I have to take a little time and compare the two apps head to head.

There may come a day when all the fancy video add-ons and half-working links out to the Wired.com gets to be too annoying and I switch that subscription over to Zinio.

A friend with the big-screen iPad let me install Zinio to play with. The big-screen iPad basically reproduces the full page of a paper magazine with 100% fidelity both in picture quality and size.

I tried out Zinio on the Microsoft Surface at the Microsoft store, and it seemed to work just fine. Sadly, back at the Apple Store, there was NO demo model that could let me play with Zinio there, so I have no experience with Zinio on the faster, newer iPads that have superseded mine.

Downsides:

Zinio is it's own subscription world. You have to switch from subscribing through the original publisher to subscribing through Zinio. However the Zinio folks do try to make this easy.

The Zinio Shop interface is a bit pushy, but wow they have a lot of publications on offer!

I did have a little trouble finding my 2015 issues when the year turned over to 2015, but eventually figured out I needed to click on year to see a list of years to pick from, and go back.

Conclusions:

People who know me know that I'm the sort who finds 99 wrong things before I find one right thing. I am extremely difficult to please. Zinio pleases me very much.

Now that I have it, this is the reader app I have been looking for from the beginning.

It gets right what the others get wrong.

It has a huge catalog of publications available.

I recommend it for readers and publishers alike.

Aspiring to Essentialism #1

Background:

How to describe the state of desperation that led me to Greg McKeown's book, Essentialism, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less?

From the outside, I look like a hyper-organized, hyper-busy person who gets a lot done.  But inside I feel a continuous and near overwhelming pair of feelings: 

• fear of failure -- I can't accomplish what truly matters because there isn't enough time.
• self doubt -- I've chosen the wrong thing to work on and invested myself in what didn't matter.

Through a near obsession with self help books to manage time and improve productivity, I've mastered many useful techniques and explored many good ideas, but those two feelings never abated. For years, I have expressed the desire to "focus on the few things that mattered" but always find myself spread too thin, pursuing too many options, and feeling afraid and doubtful as I tried to cram ever more into my day.

I picked up McKeown's Essentialism seeking insights to identify and change the habits that kept me overworked, overwhelmed and under-satisfied. I hoped for techniques to apply to that oft expressed and never realized goal: to build a satisfying life focused on the few things that truly mattered.

Having finished the book, I have this to say about it:

• McKeown's distinction of "Essentialist" vs. "Non-essentialist" spoke to me profoundly.
• My personal evolution led me to habits directly opposed to finding "the few things that mattered."
• McKeown's structure for defining, embracing and maintaining Essentialism looks workable.
• I will have to change a little bit about everything I do.
• Weighing in at 275 pages, the book wasn't long enough.

This Aspiring to Essentialism blog series is my personal attempt to address those last two points.  I need daily practice at picking up the one most important obstacle and working to remove it.  The book has various stories that are helpful to understanding, but I feel the need for more.  So with the short term goal of, "Experiment with McKeown's directive to write in a journal daily" and the long term goal of "Live the life of the few things that matter", I hope to write stories here.

Perhaps others will find them useful.

Reading on the iPad Part 10: It's a changing world. Keep up!

Recently the Association for Computing Machinery made an app available to read their glossy magazine, Communications of the ACM (CACM for short.) I will be providing a review of it in part 11, but first I wanted to check in on how the other apps I've tried out have stood the test of time.

Summary of past reviews:

Back in August 2011, I said the app for The Economist was my favorite, followed closely by the app for Wired. I also expressed my disappointment with the app for The Wall Street Journal. I liked the 3rd party app from qmags.com for reading IEEE Spectrum and advocated its broader use.

I gave a negative review of the Forbes experience in 2011, then revised it in March 2013 to say that the third party app from MAZ was a dramatic improvement but it still wasn't ideal. From those past reviews I ranked the experiences as:

1. The Economist app -- My Favorite; Gets the glossy magazine experience right: easy to read, quick to turn pages. Offers audio word for word.
2. Wired app -- Sets the standard. Also easy to read with fast page turning. Excellent organizational aids and bookmarking. Clever use of extra media, but it's sometimes gratuitous.
3. IEEE Spectrum on qmags app -- Reproduces the magazine. Resizing the page is necessary for folks with imperfect eyesight. Page turning reasonably quick. Reasonable links for article continuations. Occasional crashes that one works around by using bookmarks.
4. Boston Business Journal and other generic pdf files in iBooks -- Rudimentary, but responsive. A working generic solution is better than  a clever solution with bugs.
5. Forbes on 3rd app, MAZ -- Almost as good as qmags, but lacked bookmarking, was slower, and crashed more often.
6. Fast Company app -- Similar to Wired, but was portrait mode (tall instead of wide) only.
7. Wall Street Journal on website online.wsj.com -- Adequate summaries and easy access to articles. Occasional production problems that seem to show it's the under-funded, un-loved delivery mechanism.
8. Books and pdf files in the Kindle app -- iBooks seemed like a more graceful interface.
9. The Wall Street Journal app -- It's no good viewing a broadsheet newspaper scrunched down to iPad screen size. A different approach is needed. Also the interface was gratuitously different from iPad standards.

Where we are today:

At that time of my Forbes update, I felt no need to revise the other reviews. Today I do, primarily driven by the improved robustness of the MAZ app, and by how the other apps don't seem to have improved much.

"Improved" can be a subjective term, because many aspects of user interface come down to matters of familiarity and comfort. Even so, it might be bad after this much time has elapsed for the app for The Wall Street Journal to abandon its unique interpretation of the pinch gesture -- even though I personally hate how it's different from the standard action on the iPad.

To me, improvements would consist of:

• Fewer crashes.
• Faster start-up times.
• Greater speed in turning pages.
• Additional key functionality, such as navigation aids and book marks.

By this criteria, the apps for Wired, qmags, and Fast Company seem to have made no progress. By way of full disclosure, I will mention that I have not extensively used the app for The Economist because I use their word-for-word audio in the car. I also almost never use the app for The Wall Street Journal, because I can't stand it.

Although I would prefer that the MAZ app got book marking and additional navigational aids, I must say that the performance and robustness of the app have improved and surpassed that of qmags.

Indeed, I am regularly disappointed that when I leave and then later return to Wired or IEEE Spectrum. The app has restarted and forgotten what page I was on. Indeed the Wired app takes a surprisingly and unpleasantly long time to start. Additionally, the qmags app often simply crashes while I'm reading.

The MAZ app seems to have had some good work done. It used to crash, and often forgot what page I left off upon. Now it turns pages much more quickly and manages always to remember where I left off. Kudos to MAZ!

New Conclusions:

It does seem that there are two approaches to the iPad app:

1. Producing a special layout for the iPad with a readable font size.
2. Utilizing the paper layout, and letting the person doing the reading resize.

The former is used by Conde Nast for the Wired app, as well as the apps for The Economist, and Fast Company. In fact I could not find a font resizing control on the app for Fast Company. I see that the app for Wired has one, but I never needed it and only just now went to look for it. I can appreciate that producing a tablet friendly layout is probably expensive, and probably drove the decision to be portrait orientation only, and to not support resizing.

Lately I find myself resizing every single page to read IEEE Spectrum on qmags, and I don't like doing that. I have to do that with the MAZ app to read Forbes, but not quite as often. Recognizing these two approaches have different costs, I can respect MAZ and qmags for adopting mode #2, but I find mode #1 much more pleasant.

The investments made in the more expensive production and apps needs to be followed by continued maintenance and improvement. Sadly the leaders seem content to rest on their laurels and this is probably a mistake.

Advice to the various publishers:

Conde Nast: You guys need to fix two things about the app for Wired:

1. It needs to start up faster. 
2. It needs to remember which page was current and return to it on restart. 

These are things that the much less ambitious app from MAZ gets right, and now it makes you look bad.  Additionally, even the second version of your bookmarking interface is clunky.  Please consider something simpler like how iBooks and the Kindle app do it.

qmags.com: You guys should consider pooling your resources with MAZ. Failing that, you need to get your developers to spend some time making the app crash less often, and teaching it how to remember the active page for restarts.

Fast Company: I'm still disappointed that you guys are "portrait mode only" and that text cannot be resized.  That said, you seem to have learned many good lessons from the example set by the app for Wired.

Dow Jones & Co.: Pretty please put additional resources behind making your web site more robust. The missing columns on the front page are an embarrassment. Additionally, you guys really should consider a rethink of the layout for the app. A broadsheet page will never look right on a tablet.

MAZ: You guys did a great job of addressing performance, robustness, and restart issues with your app. Well done! Pretty please consider adding bookmarking. Also, recognizing it's an additional production cost that your customers might not want, do please consider offering the article navigator view like Wired and Fast Company offer.

ACM and IEEE: You guys should consider switching to MAZ. It may do a better job than what you've currently got going.

Apple: Too many subscriptions through the iPad are over-priced compared to the "free" online access I get from my print subscription.  The recycling bin is full of Wired and other magazines because of your myopia here.  Make it easier for publishers to make the online only version cheaper, not more expensive than the print edition that includes the online edition.

Is it supposed to work like that? #1 iTunes and app data.

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of articles addressing the question:  How can we make things more useful, learning lessons from what has been tried in the past.

My dad was an artist, tool maker and master craftsman.  He had a powerful ability to find what was wrong and a powerful desire, once a wrong thing was found to make it right.  He worked very hard to instill these aspects into me.  Even though I've specialized in the computer realm, I find myself all too often exclaiming in my dad's invective how wrong some tool, appliance or computer program is, and how much I wish it could be made right.

My challenge here is to distill suggestions for affirmative action to take rather than to merely complain.

At the very least, to those with less technical insight than I, I propose to answer the question, "Is it supposed to work like that?" with answers of the form, "Not really.  Here's why.  Here's what can be done.  Here's what you can do."

So on to our first exploration:

Is it supposed to work like that? #1 iTunes and app data.

Today I wanted to copy some sheet music I'd scanned onto my iPad for use within the amazing and wonderful forScore app  (http://www.forscoreapp.com/). I use this app in Chorus rehearsal instead of paper scores.  I don't drop pages on the floor, and I can make extensive annotations when needed.

My problem is that months elapse between each update of music.  Every time, I have to re-learn how to copy the the scores in:

1. Open iTunes
2. Plug my iPad into my Desktop computer.
3. Click on the iPad button to get to the contents of the iPad
4. Click on the Apps button
5. Scroll past the list of apps to the bottom "File Sharing" section
6. Click on the forScore icon
7. Drag my scores into the "Documents" window.

Apple is supposed to have the simplest and most usable interfaces.  Is it supposed to be like this?

Not really:  This is an example of how if you haven't thought carefully about how a person will end up using your simple idea, the result is overly complex and not very usable.

Here's why: Indeed, organizing objects -- papers, books, music, etc.  is a difficult and complex process. 

Something that made sense to computer folk, a tree structured generic filesystem, proved mystifying to non-computer people.  The developers had spent a lot of time trying to organize stuff, and as a consequence when the interface of, "a display that shows the files in this folder, and where this folder sits in a hierarchy" they were happy, and thought they were done.

But lots of people who use computers don't even have a lot of experience of filing papers in a folder in a filing cabinet.  And presented with the computer equivalent, they get confused, and lost.  Things seem too complicated.

Perhaps the developers of iTunes thought, "If we just have a few simple folders, people can drag the few things they want to where it belongs, and they won't have to master that hierarchical filesystem thing."

That worked fine when it was just music, and then when you added a couple different other kinds of media, audio books, books, podcasts.  But now we have "anything an application might want to use" has made that a long list of places, and the iTunes interface is just a messy hierarchical filesystem, with stuff jammed into strange places that are more an artifact of when that kind of new thing was added, than to where it intuitively would belong.

Here's what can be done:  iTunes needs to be simplified, and not try to provide individual, "obvious places where each little thing should go," because that list has gotten too long.  Everything that's pretending to be a filesystem interface should be stripped BACK out of iTunes, and you should go back to the regular hierarchical filesystem.  Let people learn ONE hierarchical filesystem instead of having to learn the iTunes one in addition to the native one on the computer.

But that'st not all.  A simple interface for each app needs to be provided so that people who only want a couple things, they can get directly to what they want to do, without having to master a computer's hierarchical filesystem.  There should be file sharing that can be "pulled" from inside the apps running on the iPad. Perhaps iCloud will grow into being able to do this.

Here's what you can do:  Use Dropbox as a rendezvous point.  

Sadly this is complicated initial startup.  You need to create a drop box account, and get the dropbox app running on your computer.  (If people would like instructions on this, reply in a comment, and I'll dig out what I did.

1. Make sure the iPad is on the network.
2. Drag the relevant scores to the Dropbox folder.
3. From inside forScore click on the Toolbox icon.
4. Under "Add Scores" click on Dropbox
5. Pick the scores you want from the Dropbox folder.

Although this seems like almost as complicated an act, 5 steps, versus 7 steps, I just remember one thing:  "Use Dropbox as intermediary."  Because there's only one Dropbox folder, I don't go through the complicated mess of remembering where to find the place inside iTunes to drop my application-specific data.

Bottom line:  By trying to eliminate the complexity of a hierarchical filesystem, but desiring to have a specific landing point for particular application data, file sharing has become too complicated.  The remedy is to take a step back and say, "Let's have a generic rendez-vous point where sender and receiver can still think simply within their mindset."

Does this make sense, Gentle Reader?  What do you think?

-Poetnerd

Reading on the iPad Part 9: Forbes Revisited: Still a bit of a disappointment.

I originally wrote about the experience of Forbes magazine on the iPad back in August 2011. Slightly more than a year and a half later, there is news to report: There is now a Forbes iPad app, but it is not as good as what was available from others a year ago.

I opened my original review of Forbes on the iPad mentioning that they had written excitedly in July 2010 of big changes at Forbes embracing the digital age. But the focus seems to have stayed almost exclusively with content production rather than dissemination. It has taken until 2013 for Forbes to offer a bona fide, "Forbes on the iPad experience."

The nitty gritty:

In comparison to the previous iPad Forbes experiences of the web site, which sacrificed the magazine layout and the otherwise excellent article ordering, and Forbes via the Kindle which pretty much sacrificed everything except the barest of article content and a few color plates, the Forbes iPad app is a dramatic improvement.

However, in comparison to what was available from others more than a year ago, it is a disappointing also-ran. It that lacks functionality, robustness, and even page turning speed. I hope the folks of mazdigital.com are listening.

Lets go to the basic four criteria I used for all the other apps:

• Did the reader offer a good, "turn all the pages" interface when I wanted it?
• Did the publication offer a good table of contents summary and easy fetch when I wanted it?
• Was the content in front of me when I wanted to read it or did I have to wait?
• Was the interface familiar, sensible, and obvious?

At first glance, the app meets these four criteria. I can turn all the pages. The table of contents is an augmented version of the print magazine's table of contents that enables me to just tap on the article I want to read. There does not seem to be a big delay in rendering and displaying content. The interface is indeed familiar, sensible and obvious.

The interface and behavior is most similar to the qmags interface I reviewed in Part 5. A bit-for-bit rendering of the print edition is augmented with links to other areas of the magazine, additional media, and external content. With the "grow" and "pinch" gestures, one can zoom in and out. The zoom behaves a little strangely in the landscape mode (which shows two pages side by side). Your first "grow" gesture will only expand one of the two pages to a full width. You can enlarge bigger after that in a second gesture, but it's a little more coarse grained that I liked. Still, the rendering is quite fast, perhaps because of this coarse control.

I very much liked how, unlike pretty much every other magazine reading app I've thus far reviewed, the Forbes app gave me a page number indication when I tapped to get to the control interface. Seeing page X of Y at the top is most welcome! The scrollbar provided page thumbnails only when it was manipulated. This too seemed like a superior interface to having them always present.

One feature I would have liked is the overview interface offered in the Wired and Fast Company apps which would let me scan through the articles in a grid.

A feature I desperately needed was a bookmark capability. Now we get to one of the two aspects of the app that made it so disappointing: When I'd pick up reading after a couple days hiatus, the app forgets where I left off!

I often find myself putting a magazine down in the middle of reading and not coming back for a couple days. With the Forbes app, regularly forgot where I left off. This also happens with the qmags app, and I really need to file a bug report with both qmags and mazdigital. No app is immune to crashes, and whenever this one crashes, my location in the magazine is always lost. With the other apps, I work around this by setting a book mark. With no bookmarking capability, I just lose.

The second source of disappointment came with a subtle aspect of, "Was the content in front of me when I wanted to read it or did I have to wait?" With all the other apps, I've gotten into the habit of flicking through pages VERY fast to skip through content I do not want to read. Sadly there is some kind of delay to page turning in the Forbes app that keeps me from turning pages even as fast as I can turn them in the paper edition.

The subscription / business model:

This area continues to be one with a variety of approaches on offer. As of today:

• The Economist generously provides a free iPad feed to all print subscribers.
• Wired also offers a free iPad feed to print subscribers but is still saddled with the bizarre cost model (perhaps imposed by Apple) that an iPad-only subscription costs more than a print subscription that includes the iPad feed.
• Fast Company offers the online version free to print subscribers.
• With the IEEE, but I have two publications as online-only at no extra charge, and one that is dual print and online at no extra charge.
• The Wall Street Journal offers online-only at a discount.

When the Forbes app first became available, only the purchase of individual issues and new subscriptions on the iPad was available. Because of early (and subsequently corrected) misbehavior of the app, I was in an angry mood when I contacted Forbes complaining of "trouble" with my subscription, saying that it looked like I was being offered cancellation of my print subscription and starting over as the way to access the iPad edition, and how upset I was that Forbes chose that model in contrast to what Wired, and The Economist did.

The reply I received said that the iPad edition would be available $10 for print subscribers, but that the current issue was available for free.

While I appreciate that production of the iPad edition involves additional costs to add the links and the additional media, I like to believe that going paperless is something to be encouraged, and that the right model at the present time is to get the online edition at no extra cost.

I suspect Forbes may have gotten many angry notes from people like me protesting against the additional charge, because when I went to try out the app, the system told me that I was one of a select group of loyal subscribers who could have the iPad edition at no extra cost. (I have been a subscriber since the 80s.) 

Conclusions:

I now read Forbes primarily on the iPad, so the app is pretty good. However I find the slow page turning, and the losing of my place frustrating, and I always think less of Forbes for these limitations in comparison to what I get with the apps on offer for Wired, The Economist and IEEE Spectrum.

To make this a truly stellar and best of breed app I see only three changes necessary:

• Add a bookmark facility.
• Let me flip through the pages as fast as I want.
• Give me the overview interface.

I'd also suggest some more time spent testing and debugging the app. Sometimes the app just crashes, and I lose my place in the reading. The app can get confused as to what to render when one switches between landscape and portrait mode while zoomed. (Still, this is better than Fast Company's app which still is portrait only. Boo!)

I'd give a single bit of advice to anyone considering offering their print publication on the iPad: 

Try the Wired app. It sets the standard against which you will be measured.

Epilog:

I used the "Send Feedback" function inside the Forbes iPad app to let the folks of mazdigital.com know that I'd published a review.  The CEO replied thanking me for the detailed review and said that it would be taken into consideration as they evolve the platform.  So indeed they are listening.

Reading on the iPad Part 7: Fast Company: applying my WSJ reading habits

Recently Fast Company magazine offered me a sweet deal to try them out. In spite of trying to cut down on subscriptions, I decided to investigate whether Fast Company could replace one of my existing subscriptions, or provide new insights without adding significantly to my reading load. I find the magazine a fun read. But I do have to be ruthless in my subscription management.

There is no Fast Company app for the iPad. Utilizing the table of contents and full article offerings of the fastcompany.com web site, I've found I can read it quickly and usefully following the same workflow I use for The Wall Street Journal:

• Read the summaries in the table of contents, 
• open the articles I desire in background tabs.

I have chosen to err on the side of missing a tasty tidbit and not following links with insufficient justification up front. I think I'd prefer a qmags.com style interface if one were available. But for now, "dispatch from table of contents" works well enough.

This concludes a very brief part 7.  Let's go right on to Reading on the iPad Part 8: Boston Business Journal: Generic trounces clever!

Reading on the iPad Part 8: Boston Business Journal: Generic trounces clever!

A one year experiment reading the Boston Business Journal is coming to an end for me. BBJ is a fine publication, but I am letting my subscription run out without renewing, following a useful keep/cancel criterion I found in The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. In Chapter 6, "The Low-Information Diet," he says:

It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most are all three.

I've paraphrased this into a question to ask myself as I pick up each new issue of a magazine, "Can I point to an article containing at least one significant idea that is relevant, or important to what I'm doing these days in a way that changes what I do?"

With Fast Company, the answer is "yes" from every issue. But for the things I'm doing right now, the answer is a weekly "no" from the Boston Business Journal. That said, it remains fine publication with lots of information that may become relevant to me in the future.

This experiment gave me the opportunity to try out reading The Boston Business Journal on the iPad using a different method from any of the other publications: The iBooks PDF reader.

Like many of the other publications I've mentioned, The Boston Business Journal offers paper-edition subscribers online access to the full content in various forms. There is actually a multi-tiered offering with limited digital access to everyone, or low-cost access to most content, or a premium subscription that offers everything from the print edition and more. My one-year experiment was a premium subscription at a bargain price offered as a promotion.

Every week I received email that announced the new issue and contained links to article highlights and my online subscription page. The subscription page contained links to the most recent five issues as "View Online" or "View PDF". Interestingly, if you tap "View Online" you get an error message:

Unfortunately iPhone and iPad devices do not support flash,

which is used by our current digital edition. To read your

digital edition, use the same URL on any laptop or PC

device.

For information about non-flash solutions, namely mobile

Smartphone applications, which are compatible with iPhone

and iPad devices, please visit

http://pagesuite.com/Smartphone.aspx. To understand

whether your digital edition will be available as a

Smartphone application, please contact the publisher

directly.

That turns out to be a rather silly and un-helpful error message. If you follow the link, you land at a web page clearly intended for magazine publishers interested in establishing a business relationship to create an iPad app for their publication.

If, instead you go back and tap on "View PDF" instead of "View Online", a very usable verbatim rendering of the entire publication loads into Safari, and a control bar appears at the top of the page offering additional options for viewing. That control bar vanishes pretty quickly, but if you tap in the top half inch of the page, it comes back. When you tap on "Open in iBooks" you're switched over to the iBooks reader which offers precisely the kind of nice interface one gets from qmags.com, or the iPad apps for Wired or The Economist.

The interface is most similar to the qmags.com app. You get a bit-for-bit rendering of the paper edition which sometimes takes a moment to scale and render into an in-focus page. There is a thumbnail view at the bottom, but I like the qmags.com thumbnail view better because the icons are bigger. There is no linking within the document. The qmags.com edition of IEEE Spectrum offers rudimentary, but very helpful links:  article access from the table of contents, skipping to the continuation of an article from the "Continued on page xxx" link, and a return to where you left off in the main body of the publication from the "Continued from page yyy" link. No such links are present in the PDF edition of the Boston Business Journal and I miss them.

Although the PDF iBooks interface to the Boston Business Journal is rudimentary, it scores pretty well against my basic evaluation criteria.

• My need is for a "turn all the pages" interface, and that's what is provided.
• The table of contents is the same as the print edition. It doesn't do anything extra, but unlike Forbes, it doesn't do any extra work that creates problems.
• The rendering is not immediate, but it's fast enough. It takes about the same amount of time to wait for full rendering as it would for me to turn a physical page. It's no better than print, but no worse.
• The interface is sensible and obvious with a small bar at the top with controls and navigation aids.

I would very much like to try out an issue of The Wall Street Journal as a plain PDF file in iBooks. I suspect I'd find it much more comfortable and usable than the existing WSJ iPad app. Such a rendering might be usable enough to return me to the "turn all the pages and let my eye work with the typography" approach.

This concludes my 8-part blog posting, Reading on the iPad. Thank you for taking the time to read it. If I may make a mercenary pitch:  If you enjoyed the article, and would like to encourage me to write more, please click on an ad, or visit my Cafe Press store, and buy some swag with a Poetnerd one-liner.