Category: Macs, iPods, and iOS

Last week, I wrote about my battle with the spam I was getting on my phone via SMS text and the new means that AT&T has given to let us block them. The particular spam I was getting all seemed to come from the same place and I’d been getting it forever. Later, I updated the post to say that I’d received an email from the company where the texts were originating apologizing and explaining that it wasn’t in fact spam, but were marketing emails being sent to someone else.

 

First of all, I would like to apologize. We do not, as policy, send SMS messages to any of our customers, but occasionally a customer will provide us with an email address that is actually an email for their cell phone ( for example:1112223333@txt.att.net) and that will cause our system to generate a SMS message. In most cases, we are able to catch these and reach out to the customer for a legitimate email address or another method of contact. We have a Dorothy Bettinelli listed in our database, but the only email associated with the account is a Gmail address. I’m not sure how these are being routed to your cell phone.

I replied with copies of the texts as well as my phone number and my own Gmail address. (They weren’t able to give me Dorothy’s email address in a laudable concern for their customer’s privacy.)

So here’s the weird thing: None of my information is in their database. Not my email address or phone number. If they are to be believed—and I have no reason to doubt them at this point—there is nothing in their servers that their IT people can find that should result in one of their marketing emails ending up on my phone as a text message. Somehow, the email they send to Dorothy is going through an email-to-SMS gateway and somehow her email and my phone number are associated in the gateway.

To make it even more strange, I don’t know Dorothy, despite us sharing the same unusual last name. There are essentially two groups of Bettinellis in the US, my family which is mainly clustered in the Boston area, and the other which is in the San Francisco and Pittsburgh areas. As far as I know, we aren’t closely related, at least as far back as 100 years or so.

It’s a real enigma, but as long as the messages stop, I’ll be satisfied. The marketing guy from Replacements, Ltd., tells me they scrubbed their database of Dorothy’s email and will only send materials to her by snail mail from now on. That should result in no more spam. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I will still wonder at how this all started in the first place.

When I first heard about The Daily, the iPad-only electronic daily newspaper, I raved about the idea even though I couldn’t buy it, not having an iPad yet. I concluded that a 99-cent per week subscription with all the possibilities that a tablet form factor and multimedia allow could save the newspaper industry. I still believe that, even after I heard others pan the newspaper as gimmicky, shallow, and difficult to use

I now have an iPad 2 and I have become a subscriber to The Daily. Whatever problems there had been with crashing and inability to download the latest issue are now gone apparently as I haven’t had any troubles, and in fact, I found the experience to be mostly smooth and crash-free.

I do have one quibble, which is that the app doesn’t do multi-tasking. If you quit for any reason, the paper reloads from scratch when you go back in, losing your place and forcing you to find it again. (You can set a bookmark if you remember it.) I also haven’t found a way to read back issues in case I wasn’t done with yesterday’s paper, for instance.

However, as for the other complaints, I don’t find the reporting to be shallow. Each of the articles tends to be just long enough for a daily newspaper. I subscribe to the Boston Herald, which is our local tabloid and I compare the articles to that paper. While newspapers like the Boston Globe or the New York Times offer longer, more in-depth coverage, I just don’t the luxury of the time to read them. The Daily offers the right mix of breadth and depth for me.

Some have also complained that the newspaper has a conservative bias, presumably because it’s a News Corp. property, but I don’t see it. Certainly, I don’t think the newspaper has a liberal bias and so in comparison to the mainstream media, perhaps it does seem conservative, but a scan of The Daily’s editorials shows plenty where the editors took a stance outside the conservative norm. The news coverage itself doesn’t seem to exhibit a general bias at all so far.

My favorite sections so far include the general news and business. I’ve also been happy with the opinion and apps & games. Opinion includes a feature called “The History Page,” which profiles a topic and/or moment in history. Usually quirky, it’s always interesting. The sports section is okay and seems quite comprehensive. I’m not a fan of the gossip or arts & life sections, but that’s not my thing anyway. I couldn’t care less about celebrities or fashion.

While there are ads, they are not obtrusive, with a handful scattered throughout each issue. They can slow down reading as they try to load the interactive elements, but you can often just side past them.

What I have found interesting is that I no longer feel the need to read my paper copy of the Boston Herald every day. Sure, I skim the local news and keep up with a few of my favorite weekly sections, but I find myself turning to The Daily first for the kind of news I used to go to the Herald for. I don’t think it’s because I’m no longer interested in local news, but rather that the form factor and experience of reading the news on my iPad is so much more convenient and compelling that it supersedes any quibbles over exact content.

As I said before, this is a wakeup call for local newspapers like the Herald. Either follow The Daily’s example or risk oblivion. I’m ready to question whether it still makes sense to pay $45 per month for a physical newspaper over $4 per month for a digital version. That should scare old school publishers to death.

I’ve been saving bookmarks using the Delicious bookmark service (now owned by Yahoo) for about 6 years now. If you’re not familiar with it, Delicious (which was originally at the unusual URL of del.icio.us), it is a web site that saves your bookmarks, which you can tag and comment on. One of the benefits of the site is that all users’ bookmarks are aggregated and you can find some good content there using various tags. Another benefit is that it makes the bookmarks universally available so that you can find them even when you’re at another computer other than your own.

The downside is the same as many online services: After you’ve laboriously entered your data you have to remember to go back and find it there later. How many times have I saved a link only to forget about it, Google it again later, and then try to save it to Delicious, only to be told that I’ve already saved it.

Another downside to Delicious is that it’s only a bookmark. Unlike Evernote, it does not save any portion of the page’s content, except what test you may put in the comments field. Evernote, on the other hand, will save a portion or the entirety of a webpage if you wish and it indexes all the words from the webpages, including any word in any image that’s also captured.

Even better, if you use the Chrome web browser and the Evernote extension for the browser, when you do a search in Google, it can also search your Evernote database for the same search terms and let you know if there are matching notes. This feature handily answers that downside I mentioned above about remembering to look in your database for what you’ve saved.

The final downside to Delicious is that various Internet sites have been reporting that Yahoo is either going to shutdown or sell Delicious, which means that 6 years worth of bookmarks could disappear at any time.

So now, I don’t save web pages to Delicious, but instead save them to Evernote. But what about all those old Delicious bookmarks, of which I have about 800 now? Delicious does provide a mechanism for exporting your bookmarks (Click on “Settings” and then “Export/Download Your Delicious Bookmarks”), which creates an HTML (i.e. web) page that it saves to your computer. Still, it’s not the most convenient format.

But what if you could import those bookmarks into Evernote, saving all your tags and the dates you created then and then adding images of the pages, taking advantage of Evernote’s capabilities. I got the following tip from the excellent online video series Screencasts Online in their Evernote episode. The tutorial about importing Delicious bookmarks into Evernote is in the members-only version of the show, but they do provide a free link to the Applescript used for importing at Veritrope.com. There are several options and ways to do this, but the simplest is to click the link at Veritrope to open the script in Script Editor on your Mac—this is a Mac-only tip, unfortunately for Windows users—and then click on “Run”. The script will ask you to locate the Delicious export file and then it will create a new notebook in Evernote called Delicious imports. For any site that it can’t load—because the site is down or the page doesn’t exist any more—it will add the link to an Evernote note called “List of URLS Returning Errors”. (I found that I could manually open some of those links later, but many of the older links were dead. This is the reason it’s better to save the pages in Evernote.)

If you have a lot of Delicious bookmarks, like I did, this process could take some time. It also requires some manual intervention at times, clicking buttons in dialog boxes. And Evernote spontaneously quit once or twice, but it re-opened on its own as the script moved on to the next bookmark.

So now, my bookmarks are saved, they’ve been pruned of defunct links, they’ve had the webpages added to the link, and now when I do a Google search, I’ll also be searching all my saved webpages in Evernote. Excellent.