Wireless Vive VR: Fanny Pack Not Included

battery pack for the HTC Vive's wireless adapter, with belt clip and penny for scale. The battery is roughly 4" x 2.5" x 1".

The Vive wireless adapter’s battery and belt clip, penny for scale.

The Vive VR headset’s new wireless add-on is a great idea with a really annoying non-inclusive design flaw.

Playing an active VR game without being tethered to a PC by a nest of wires is a revelation, almost recapturing the novelty of jumping into VR for the first time. I’m inherently clumsy, and removing the trip hazard notably ups my immersion factor.

Belts Required

Calling the adapter wireless is a bit of a misnomer. The headset needs power, which comes from a battery pack connected via a long USB cable. The battery has an integrated belt clip, which is clearly how you’re meant to carry the thing.

For me, that works well. I wear pants and a belt just about every day. I clip the battery on my belt, and get on with my VRing. But this is a headset used in the Libraries’ public VR service. Some of our most active regular users wear dresses or skirts. You can slightly awkwardly tuck the battery in a pocket instead, but that’s an imperfect solution and again assumes that pockets are present in any of those wardrobe choices.

I’m sure the battery was kept separate from the headset to cut down headset weight. And yeah, having a pack awkwardly hanging off the back of your head wouldn’t be great either. So fine, I’ll accept an external battery.

Inclusive Testing

Regardless, I’m curious about HTC’s testing process. Did they test the battery pack’s clip-on nature with anybody outside of the pants & belts crowd? If they did, did they just not care about the results? I’m not sure which option is less bad. At this point I thought it was obvious to test hardware with as diverse a crowd as possible. VR and gaming already have a cultural problem of being non-welcoming to non-males. While this is ultimately a small decision in a small niche of the field, it doesn’t help that divide.

Workarounds

One quick workaround is to hang the battery on a lanyard. That works well for experiences where you don’t move around much, but for active games like Beat Saber or Space Pirate Trainer it quickly goes flying around and risks clocking you in the face. And HTC didn’t even bother to include a lanyard, anyway. I had to raid my weirdly hoarded supply of conference badges to find one that works.

There’s an obvious better solution: a hip pack battery holster. Just put the thing on a nylon resizeable belt. The fashion world will never convince me that fanny packs are cool again, but let’s be real: by using a wireless Vive you’ve already self-selected as someone willing to look like an awkward hybrid technobull anyway, complete with rear horns. At this point a fanny pack isn’t going to turn you away.

So now thanks to HTC’s weird non-inclusive battery design, I somehow find myself in 2018 trying to find a suitably subtle fanny pack for our VR users. We live in a weird world. One which could have been avoided with a more inclusive design process.

Movies Anywhere is Great for Consumers

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In early 2014 Disney announced a surprisingly reasonable approach to their digital movie sales: Buy it once, access it on many services. “Disney Movies Anywhere” ensured that when bought one of their movies on any of iTunes, Amazon, Google, or Vudu, you also got it on the other three services at no extra charge.

Ever since then, Disney movies (including Marvel and Star Wars) are the only digital movies I’ve been willing to buy. If any one service went out of business, I knew I’d still be able to access the movies elsewhere. And since this coincided roughly with the time my daughter started watching Disney movies over and over again, I had to know they wouldn’t disappear into the void.

Even when DMA dropped support for Microsoft’s movie store recently, purchased & linked movies weren’t removed from your Microsoft account. Very reasonable.

As a bonus, DMA meant digital movie sellers could actually compete with each other on price. I don’t use Vudu, but if they put a Disney movie on sale I could buy it and watch it on my iPad via iTunes.

Sure, the Ultraviolet movie locker service has been around longer and did similar things, but it never had direct integration with platform-specific services like iTunes and Google Play. DMA was a breath of fresh air.

Today it got even better – Disney Movies Anywhere is now simply “Movies Anywhere“, since Disney added new studios to the mix. Fox, Warner Bros, Sony, and Universal movies now sync across services too!

That leaves Paramount and Lionsgate as the holdouts, and yes it’s slightly annoying to have to scrutinize a movie’s studio before I buy it, but this is still huge. I had a number of movies trapped in Vudu that I got via free promotions over the years, but I never watched them because I hate Vudu’s apps so much. Now those movies are also safely stashed in my Google, iTunes, and Amazon accounts.

And I’ll say it again: I can buy movies at lower prices from different stores when they go on sale! For example: The Lego Batman Movie is $2.49 on Amazon right now, so I bought it and watched it tonight via Google. The same movie is $19.99 elsewhere. This sounds simple, but it’s new territory for digital movies.

I’m strangely excited about this. Go sign up for Movies Anywhere. Link your various accounts and they’ll even give you a pile of free movies right now.

How to Fix Google Home’s Shopping List (again)

ifttt logoA few months ago I wrote about how to fix Google Home’s shopping list when I ran into an unusual error.

Two weeks after that post, Google removed the shopping list’s integration with Google Keep entirely. It now saves your shopping list to a weird isolated Google Express webapp, which notably has no offline access.

Without offline access, I can’t use the shopping list in a number of stores with poor cell signal.

Boo Google, this was an awful decision clearly done just to push shoppers toward Google Express. I could rant for a while about how much this decision bugs me. (This also eliminated the only reason I used Keep.)

But there’s a fix! Thanks to the magic of IFTTT, you can hijack Google Home’s voice commands and do something else with them instead. I wrote some applets there that save my shopping list items to the Todoist app instead of the Google Express webapp.

In the interest of sharing, here they are:

Create an IFTTT account, link it to your Google and Todoist accounts, and you’re off.

Note that you’ll need to set up both applets to get it to work with more variations on the voice command – IFTTT doesn’t let you specify enough variations in one applet alone.

How to Fix Google Home’s Shopping List

June 2017 update: This doesn’t work anymore, Google made major changes to how shopping lists work on Google Home. See this updated post.

I love my Google Home! I switched from the Echo a while back, largely for two things:

  • Chromecast integration
  • A much better shopping list app

(I could go on a looooong rant about how much I hate the Echo’s companion Android app.)

But lately the Home’s shopping list functionality started failing me. It worked fine until about a month ago, when it got very confused:

I kicked it off with the usual “Hey Google, add cheese to my shopping list”. After a 5-10 second pause, Home almost always told me it didn’t understand what I was asking. If I tried again, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.

To make matters worse, sometimes the Home was actually adding items to my shopping list when it told me it wasn’t.

Here’s how I fixed it:

  1. In Google Keep, delete the note that Home uses for your shopping list.
  2. Use a voice command to add something to your shopping list.
  3. Home will re-create the shopping list note
  4. Now it works just fine! No more lengthy delay or failed commands.

Important note: This will obviously delete all the items on your original shopping list.

I still don’t have any hard evidence for what causes this, but here’s my theory:

I had more than 350 items that I’d added to that list and then checked off as I bought things. All of those items were technically still part of the list, just hidden from view. Maybe that got too large for Home to handle?

Who knows. But I’m going to delete the list every couple months from now on.

As I’ve written before, I like to document tech fixes – especially when my usual searches for help failed me. With a little luck this’ll fill in some Google gaps.

My Recent Webinars

florida library webinars logo - a bird and a computerThis year I’ve had a great opportunity to present a series of webinars for Florida Library Webinars. I love that they record all webinars and publish them freely online afterward! I’ve neglected posting links to mine here, so here’s a catching-up list:

I plan on doing at least a couple more webinars with them, including an introduction to Google Tag Manager in early February.

Amazon Echo: The Case for Voice Commands

Windows 10 is almost upon us, just over a day away as I write. Among other new features, I’ve seen article after article talking about the integration of voice controls into Win10. Has their time finally arrived? For a long, long time I was skeptical of voice controls in any context. Way back in elementary school I played with an early version or Kurzweil Voice, and I was impressed if it got more than 10% of my speech right. I think that experience colored my expectations until very recently.

My Android phone has had voice commands built in for years, but other than setting timers or alarms I almost never use them. So for a while, I expected my use of Win10’s voice commands to run along the same lines: I’d think it was neat, play with it for a bit, and then forget about it entirely. Then in February my Amazon Echo arrived, and completely changed my thinking.

Amazon Echo

I bought the Echo almost on a whim, thinking once again that it would be a neat toy for a while but probably not have long term utility. I’m as surprised as anyone that now, four months later, I still use it multiple times a day. When I get home from work, I usually blurt out three commands as I unpack:

  • “Alexa, turn on the lights”: I have two lamps on a wemo switch, which the Echo controls.
  • “Alexa, how’s the traffic?”: The Echo reads me a report of the traffic between my daughter’s daycare and my home, giving me a rough idea of how long I have to make dinner before she and my wife arrive.
  • “Alexa, play NPR”: This one does what you’d expect – it plays a live stream of my local NPR station.

Then while I’m cooking, I usually ask Alexa to set a couple timers or add things to my shopping list. Later in the evening I often ask Alexa to play music by a certain band or in a given genre, and then I control the volume by voice commands too.

This is all done hands free, while I get other stuff done, and I almost never have to repeat myself or cancel a command the Echo heard incorrectly. We’ve come a long way since my arguments with Kurzweil Voice.

And ok, I’ll admit that I’m on the fence about just how useful it really is to have the Echo turn on lights for me. A plain old fashioned lightswitch is a pretty darn perfect UI already. But using a voice command to trigger lights still delights me in a Jetsons kind of way.

I didn’t set out to write a review of the Echo here (although if I did, I’d say it was totally worth the early bird $99 price but the current $179 is too steep of an ask). Instead, my point is that voice commands can fill some very valuable niches. I still don’t use voice for dictation, but it turns out voice recognition is a very good way to do a handful of things in my life. I can group them into general categories:

  • Asking for brief reports and updates like traffic, weather, or checking for new messages and alerts
  • Starting or stopping a background process, like a timer or music
  • Toggling a system setting like volume, wifi, and bluetooth connections

Today I do these things on my computer nearly constantly throughout the workday, without the benefit of voice commands. If Windows 10 lets me do them by voice instead, without breaking stride to open another program or dig through settings menus, that’s a bunch of small gains that will add up to a big improvement in how I work. I’m truly excited to try Win10’s voice recognition and see where it goes. Maybe you’ll even catch me dictating an email someday – but probably not in public.

Your Content Management Strategy Can Save Lives

My headline is an exaggeration, but only a slight one. Bear with me:

Last night at about 11PM there were two armed robberies on campus in quick succession. (Nobody was hurt, thankfully!) UNC has an elaborate campus alert system called Alert Carolina designed for just such an occasion. The sirens went off as intended. The accompanying email and text message blast did not.

It wasn’t until 11:45PM that a message with details was finally sent, by which point the crisis was essentially over. The All Clear siren sounded at midnight. (The Daily Tar Heel has a more complete timeline)

Text messages sent by Alert Carolina. Note the incorrect URL in the topmost message.

Text messages sent by Alert Carolina. Note the incorrect URL in the topmost message.

But here’s what is, from the perspective of my work, extra shameful: even when that text message finally went out, it had the wrong URL listed for more information. Instead of alertcarolina.unc.edu, it pointed to alertcarolina.com. That .com is held by a domain squatter, and helpfully offers hotel deals. While follow-up messages had the correct URL, none of them acknowledged the initial error. In fact, even the official statement about the delayed message still doesn’t mention the incorrect URL.

So what can we learn from this? While I have great sympathy for staff who work what I assume is likely a finicky but powerful piece of software like Alert Carolina, why didn’t they have a clear content management strategy in place for an event like this? The official statement calls this a “breakdown in communication”, but doesn’t elaborate. While an unpredictable event like this can only be planned for so much, it would be easy to build in simple structures in advance to help manage a crisis:

  • Have content templates ready to go for emergency updates. This would avoid the incorrect URL problem while still allowing flexibility to communicate as needed. At UNC Libraries we have templates ready to go for when we quickly close due to weather, for example.
  • Have clearly written backup procedures for when a mission critical system fails. These should cover both technical and personnel issues. There are countless campus listservs that could have been used to send a backup notification during those 45 minutes, for example. Or (I’m speculating) maybe nobody was at work who knew how to trigger the alert messages. Staffing redundancy should be built in for something at this level of importance. Build sanity checks into your procedures too, defined review points where someone looks to see if everything’s on course.
  • If something does go wrong, immediately be transparent and open about what happened and what you’ll do to fix it. The vague “breakdown in communication” acknowledgement is not sufficient in this case. Right now I don’t trust Alert Carolina to function in the next emergency situation.

Most of this can be boiled down to: Know who is responsible for which content, and prepare for as many eventualities as you can in advance. “Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” That’s it in a nutshell, and in this case Alert Carolina unfortunately makes for a great case study.

I’m lucky – the content I deal with on a daily basis isn’t a life and death matter. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have the same level of readiness, at least on a basic level.

How to fix Amazon’s “Send to Kindle” feature

stkTopBanner[1]When I manage to fix a technical issue that doesn’t seem to be well documented online, I like to share what worked for me. In that spirit:

This morning, as I often do, I emailed an ebook file to my @free.kindle.com address to load it onto my Kindle. For the first time in years, it didn’t work. I got no error message from Amazon, and never got the standard email acknowledging receipt of my file either. The file just never appeared on my Kindle. I tried sending it via their Send to Kindle PC application too, and got the same results – my file disappeared into the ether with no confirmation or error message.

After pulling my hair out for a while, I noticed that my Amazon Cloud Drive (everyone gets 5gb of storage for free) was full. I piled it full of some last resort backup files six months ago and promptly forgot it existed. When I deleted a few files out of that Drive today, suddenly all my Send to Kindle features started working again. I don’t know if this is a policy change or related to the recent changes to the structure of Amazon Cloud Drive, but I do know my Drive has been full for months. I don’t know why it suddenly started rejecting my files, but there we are.

Side note: It’s very poor design for Amazon to not provide any error message in this situation. They could very easily email me about the full Drive, or pop up a message in the PC application. Both options looked like they sent the file successfully. Amazon support was also completely clueless about this when I contacted them.

The TL/DR version: If your @free.kindle.com email address or Send to Kindle program has suddenly stopped working and provides no error messages, check if your Amazon Cloud Drive is full.

10 Years Later: What 2004 Predicted For The Internet Of 2014

epic 2014

This blog turns 10 later this month. I’m no longer nearly as prolific a writer as I was back then, but I’m still kind of amazed that I’ve kept at it this long. Among other things since then: I got my master’s, moved cities/jobs twice, got married, and had a daughter. Wow.

While all 625 old posts are still available in the archives, I implore you to pretend most of them aren’t there. With the benefit of a decade’s hindsight I just see typos, odd sentence structures, weird choices in my URL structure that still haunt me today, and all-around questionable writing galore.

There’s one exception: I do want to point out the second post I ever wrote, way back on 12/26/04. I titled it simply “Googlezon”. While I was a bit late to the party at the time, I pointed out an interesting little movie called EPIC 2014. It forecasted the internet and society of 2014, from the perspective of 2004. It’s about 8 minutes long, and still exists on the web in flash format today (remember, this predates Youtube! Ancient history!).

EPIC posits a 2014 where Google and Amazon merged (after Google bought Tivo), Microsoft bought Friendster, the New York Times has gone print-only, and more.

But buried among these amusing predictions are grains of truth. EPIC’s forecasts of how we generate and consume news aren’t that far off from reality, and it seems to have pretty accurately predicted the rise of Big Data. EPIC is a fun look back at where the web was, and where it might still be going. I’ll check in with you again in 2024.

(side note: While researching this piece, I realized that the Robin Sloan who worked on this short film is the same Robin Sloan who wrote one of the best books I read last year.)

Holiday gift guide: Motorola Keylink

I have a strange fascination with all the holiday gift guide lists that pop up this time of year. I’ve always wanted to do one, but also feel like I’d be reinventing the wheel. Many more interesting people than me have already done the job. But I do want to point to at least one item, something new that I don’t think is getting enough review coverage: The Motorola Keylink

41264_07_motorola_keylink_lets_you_find_your_lost_keys_with_your_smartphone

Basic Features

The Keylink ($24.99) is billed as a “phone and key finder”. And it works well for that: Attach the small Keylink to your keychain. Lose track of your phone? Push a button on the keylink to make the phone ring. Lose your keys? A button in the Motorola Connect app does it the other way around: the Keylink beeps.

Better Security

That’s all well and good, and it works well. But my favorite feature is one that’s getting far less billing. If you’re running Android on the latest version (5.0/Lollipop), the Keylink can let you bypass your phone’s lock code.

Lollipop introduced a handy new feature to Android devices, the idea of a trusted bluetooth device. You can tell Android that if you’re connected to a certain bluetooth device (like your car or a home stereo) then there’s no need to use a lock code. If you go out of range of that bluetooth device, the lock code becomes necessary again. Handy while driving, and in a bunch of other situations too. I spend most of my day away from my bluetooth devices, so I didn’t have anything I could use to take advantage of this feature. But the Keylink uses bluetooth!

I attached it to my keys, which spend most of the day in my pocket. As long as the Keylink is near my phone, no lock code necessary. But if my phone gets more than about 30 feet from me, then the code snaps back into place. I’ve had a lock code on my phone in the past, but it’s always been a very simple one. I have to enter it countless times per day, so anything truly secure got annoying fast. Now I’m free to use a much more complex code, knowing that I’ll rarely have to enter it. I still wish that my phone had fingerprint-based security like the iPhone, but using the Keylink as a trusted bluetooth device makes for an interesting and convenient alternate method to keep my phone a bit more secure.

The Keylink’s battery should last about a year, and is replaceable.

Who’s it for?

Anyone who carries an Android phone and a keyring should find the Keylink useful. Just make sure their phone is on the latest version of Android. The Nexus 4/5/6 all fit the bill, plus a list of a few others that should grow soon.

Where is it?

The Keylink is often out of stock on Motorola’s website. But it’s in stock at many T-mobile stores, which also lets you skip Motorola’s shipping charge.