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My review of the Touchfire, the Kickstarter iPad keyboard

I like to back Kickstarter products, especially Mac and iPhone-related gadgets. In the past I’ve backed and received an iPad stand and power adapter covers (not to mention a coffee gadget, some musical productions, and more). Maybe it’s the hope and promise embodied in the little guy with a big idea.

So when I heard last fall about the Touchfire, an iPad keyboard, and watched the video, I knew I had to back it. After a series of manufacturing delays (you get a good lesson in the woes of product design from being a Kickstarter backer) and a re-design caused by changes in the iPad 3, I finally got my new Touchfire a couple of weeks ago.

It’s pretty remarkable and mostly lives up to the hype. While it’s designed to tuck up under the Smart Cover when not in use, I feel like it’s a little too bulky to keep there so I keep it in its case. And I think you will benefit the most if you’re a touch typist. But even if you’re not, you will still benefit from the tactile feedback it gives.

The Touchfire is a thin, clear plastic flexible film, with raised button pads to correspond with the onscreen keyboard underneath. (It may be obvious, but it bears pointing out that the Touchfire only works in landscape mode, but then that’s the only way I type when I use the iPad on a flat surface.) A touch typist will be able to rest his fingers on the home row, but even a hunt-and-peck typist will find their typing speed up.

Sure a real keyboard, like the Apple Bluetooth wireless keyboard or the Logitech keyboard case, will provide a better experience, especially since you don’t lose screen real estate to the onscreen keyboard with them, with the Touchfire you don’t have to worry about batteries or Bluetooth pairing.

Touchfire also has a nice website for new users to help provide some training and familiarization as you get used to it. By the end of the training, I was up to 120 words per minute.

At $50, it’s not a cheap accessory, but if you’re looking for an iPad keyboard that adds little to no bulk, it’s a worthy consideration.

Oh, and of course, I typed this review on my iPad using the Touchfire keyboard.

My changing view on Lighthouse Catholic Media

About four years ago I wrote a blog post about a company called Lighthouse Catholic Media. I’d had some difficult dealings with them and carried out a threat to describe the details on my blog if they failed to fix things. In an illustration of the results of search engine optimization, my post ended up as the number one Google search result apart from their own website. I had some further dealings with them, especially with them wanting me to take down the post. I refused, but they eventually fixed things and as I describe in an update to that post today, things have been good in the past four years.

So, I took the step of updating that post to reflect my new attitude toward them. You might ask why I don’t just delete the post? Well, that doesn’t remove the Google link and plus everything lives forever in the Internet archive. At least this way I can provide a new explanation to those who click through.

My Ikea hack mail rack and charging station

Ever since I saw this Ikea hack mail rack linked at Lifehacker.com back in February, I knew I wanted to build one for myself. (In case you don’t know what an Ikea hack is, it’s the combination of various products purchased at the giant discount-price Swedish home decor retailer, Ikea, in unexpected or unintended ways. There’s even a whole blog dedicated to them.)

I primarily wanted to replace the mail-catching basket we had by the front door. We have an antique telephone table I inherited from my mom, on top of which is precariously perched a basket containing way too much mail. (I do a cursory sort as I come in from work each day, tossing out junk in the recycling basket set there for the purpose and putting the rest in the basket, but too often that’s where it stays in a giant heap.) Because it’s so top-heavy, the kids are always knocking it over, sending the mail flying all over the living room.

Ikea hack to the rescue! We were going to Ikea today to pick up a mattress for Anthony to sleep on in his new room (cf. previous post) as well as various other items like a lamp, a shelf, and what not. I remembered the hack I wanted to build, so I looked up the clipped Lifehacker article in Evernote on my iPhone and picked up the necessary materials. You can see the complete instructions at the first link above, but here’s how it went for me.

The original hack called for using three of the Ikea KNUFF magazine holders and some spare wood to make an impromptu shelf. The KNUFF come in pairs so I decided to use four. I also opted to buy a new shelf, the EKBY JARPEN/EKBY BJARNUM combination, for a more polished look. Since it was a little longer than the original hack’s shelf, it could hold four KNUFFs pretty well. The original hack also opted to stain the shelf and magazine holders, but since the Ekby shelf was already a birch veneer, I left the Knuffs untreated. We’ll see how that works out long term.

I started by laying out the four Knuffs under the shelf on my desk, spacing them equally and then marking their left and right edges on the shelf bottom.

The next step was to drill pilot holes for the screws in the short side of the Knuffs where they would attach to the shelf. Then I would hold the Knuff in position against the shelf and mark the spot for the pilot hole there through the hole in the Knuff. Everything went well until I realized that my big hands just didn’t fit well into the Knuffs. I’d already drilled all the pilot holes in them, but I had no choice. More on that in a second.

My other immediate discovery was that there is a wide variety in the relative size of the Knuffs. While the pair in each package were the same size, those from different pairs varied in both width and depth. If you attempt this hack, it might be worth keeping that in mind when shopping and try to find pairs that are alike. In my case, I just made sure to place the thinner ones on the outside and the thicker together inside and so it looks okay.

I made sure to number the KNUFFs as well as their place on the bottom of the shelf since each pilot hole and placement of the KNUFFs was to be unique. Wouldn’t do to lose track and try to figure out which was supposed to be where while in the midst of putting it on the wall.

As for my pilot hole problem, I went back and drilled a second hole in each KNUFF, closer to the opening into which I could fit my hand.

You can see here that I ended up drilling two pilot holes in the bottom of the shelf for the first box. That’s why we do dry runs! Otherwise I would have done a lot more unnecessary drilling.

Of course, when drilling into the bottom of the shelf, be sure not to go all the way through. That would be bad. Not “crossing the streams” bad, but still bad.

Once all the pre-assembly and testing and dry runs were done, it was time to put everything in place. First I put up the shelf as per the instructions. It was a tiny bit tricky because I wanted to avoid both a light switch’s and an electrical outlet’s wire runs. I ended up a tiny bit further from the door than I wanted, but that’s okay.

After the shelf was in place, I screwed the Knuffs into the bottom of the shelf with regular wood screws and then screwed them to the wall as well. I didn’t use anchors or anything because I don’t expect them to be load-bearing. It’s just for basic stability.

Here’s the final result. The mirror with key hooks was there before, but I had to move it higher up the wall. But now I have four sorting bins for bills; needs-to-be-scanned; magazines, Netflix, etc.; and needs-to-be-shredded. Everything else goes right into the recycling bin. Plus there’s room on top to plug in a phone or Kindle or iPad for recharging and space for outgoing mail.

I am curious to see how long it lasts. The Knuffs are not made of very tough material so the first time a child grabs the bottom of one of them to keep from falling or as a climbing handhold, it’s going to come apart. One other consideration is that I might bore a hole up through the shelf to run the charging cables. I have one of those outlets with USB power ports on the wall down below, so it makes a great charging station by the door. So that’s it for now.

What modifications would you have made to the hack? Would you build one of these?

…And we’re back

Has it really been since the beginning of May since I wrote a post? Sorry about that. It’s just that I so often say what I want with a paragraph or two on Facebook or Google+ or a sentence or two on Twitter that writing a whole blog post seems excessive and redundant. Not to mention all that’s been going on to keep me away from the blog. To wit, let’s recap.

For those of you who don’t follow me or Melanie on Facebook, Twitter, of G+ and don’t read her blog, we’re expecting again. We found out about the time my blog writing went kaput. Coincidence? I think not. We’re in the throws of “morning” sickness, which means that Melanie is sick all day and all night and I do my best to pick up the slack before and after work. Anyway, we seem to be nearing the end of that godawful phase and we’re entering the nice part of pregnancy before the third trimester is upon us.
The due date is January 7. Since this is a caesarean section by necessity (four previous ones), it will be a scheduled delivery. Scheduled deliveries are invariably scheduled before the due date. I’m pushing for December 31. Tax deduction, you know. Plus if it takes longer than we expect, we could have the first child born in the new year. Bonus!
Melanie’s sister Theresa, who has lived with us the last 3-1/2 years has moved out and moved back to Texas. This is bittersweet. (I would tease her by saying bitter for Melanie and sweet for me, if she were here. She’d know I was kidding. Or am I?) No, really, it’s bittersweet in that we’re sad to see her go, especially the kids who obviously loved having their auntie here; and Melanie who got to have her best friend around all the time; and all of us who benefited from having a third adult to watch kids or run an errand or cook dinner. The sweetness of the bittersweet comes from the fact that three adults and four children in our little house was a lot, and now we have a bedroom for the boys to be in. Ben can move out from his sisters’ room and Anthony out of ours. That’s right, for the past 16 months we’ve have a third occupant of our bedroom. It will be nice to get our room back. For the next 6 months. Sigh.

So that’s what we’ve been up to. There’s been more, of course, family gatherings, plans for a trip to Texas in September for my brother-in-law’s wedding, plans for a trip to Texas at the end of August for me for the Catholic New Media Conference, plus the usual trappings of work, summer weekends at farmers markets; trips to visit Grandma in Maine; and so on.

But now, my hands are back on the tiller and the ship of this blog is being sailed again. We’re back.

Elizabeth Warren’s “Fauxcahontas” problem

How my FitBit landed me in the hospital

To be more accurate, the title should say, “How my FitBit may have landed me in the hospital.” But first, you’ll want to know what a FitBit is.

The FitBit Ultra is one of a couple of health-related gadgets from the company called FitBit. It’s a nifty little gadget that clips to your clothing or drops in your pocket. It keeps track of all your activity—walking, running, stair-climbing, and even sleeping. Then it communicates all this data automatically and wirelessly whenever you’re near your computer.

I’ve been trying to be more active lately, but found it difficult to stay motivated. When the alarm buzzes at 6:15am for my walk before work, it’s sometimes easier to roll over, especially when the kids have kept us awake all night. But playing some online games showed me that winning “achievements” and reaching goals were a good motivator for me and so when I saw the FitBit and it’s system of goals, badges, and accountability Tweets, I thought it would be just the thing.

Now the way it tracks your sleep is that you put a wristband on your non-dominant hand, slip the FitBit inside and set it to sleep mode. Then while you sleep it keeps track of your movements and how often you wake from deep sleep. Now, let’s put a pin in that and come back to it later.

Saturday morning, when I woke up, I noticed my forehead and right front scalp felt numb. I’ve woke up with a numb forehead before, which I attributed to sleeping face down on my pillow or arm, but it always came back within a couple of hours. But this time it didn’t. By early afternoon, I still had no sensation in my scalp and it hadn’t got any better (or worse).

Melanie and I decided that I should call the Nurse’s Helpline that our health insurer provides. She asked me a bunch of questions related to both heart attacks and stroke. (This would be the first of a dozen different times in the next 24 hours I would answer these same questions.) She couldn’t say it was nothing and being a very conservative service, she suggested I call the on-call doctor for my primary care physician. He asked the same questions and said I should go to the Urgent Care center for his practice, which he said would be open until 7pm. (It was about 3:30pm by the time I talked to him.)

So I drove off by myself to the Urgent Care center, which is about 25 minutes south of us. When I got there, it turned out that the place closes at 4pm on the weekends. Thanks, Doc. So off I drove to the local hospital’s emergency room (about 10 minutes north of our house).

After giving my situation to the triage nurse, they immediately brought me back in a wheelchair, which I thought excessive. I saw a nurse, then an attending physician. They sent me for a CAT scan that showed nothing. (Yes, ha ha, they found nothing in my head.) So with the numbness still unexplained they thought there was still a real chance of a stroke, and I should see a neurologist… who would only be available in the morning. Ugh.

At first I was told I would be moved from the ER to a room upstairs in the cardiac monitoring unit, so I was fitted with an IV line and EKG electrodes and hooked to a monitor. Then I proceeded to wait. (My brother came to sit with me for several hours that night, for which I’m grateful.) I tried to read, but was too distracted. So I watched some TV and then tried to sleep, which was nearly impossible with all the talking and beeps and alarms and hullabaloo, not to mention the needle in my arm and wires wrapped about me. In the morning the nurse asked me if I got some sleep. Hah! Who can sleep in a hospital?

I never did get moved to the room upstairs, which meant the electrodes were pointless after all. But the neurologist ordered an MRI. Ugh. I’d heard the horror stories about claustrophobia and they were right. They laid me down on the table, put a cage over my face that touched my nose, put on headphones for music (because of the noise), and told me I wouldn’t be able to move for 45 minutes. They then started sliding me into a tube that would put me about an inch away from the sides.

I’d never thought I was claustrophobic before, but I could feel the panic rising. Perhaps the lack of sleep and anxiety over my still unexplained condition that contributed to the feeling, but whatever it was, I was almost ready to push the eject button and demand to be pulled out when the technician stopped feeding me into the tube. It turns out my shoulders were too wide. Thank God for my stout build! They pulled me out of the device and told me that I’d have to use the larger MRI in the cancer center next door, which was only open during the week. (This was still Sunday.)

They sent me back out to wait for the neurologist to see me and this time I was sent to a private room. While I lay on the stretcher outside the room, waiting for them to make it ready, I was wondering if Melanie would be able to contact our pastor and have him bring me Communion, since I was missing Mass. Wouldn’t you know it, just a few minutes later I see a man walk by holding a gold pyx. I stopped him, by asking “Are you a Eucharistic minister?” He seemed a little surprised, but said Yes, so I said I would love to be able to receive Communion. The Lord provides.

Finally,I saw the neurologist and we had a good conversation. He did the same tests—touch your nose, follow my pen, squeeze my hand, although pull my finger was new (and smelly); Ba dum bump! I’ll be here all week, tip your waiter—and then suggested that I pinched a nerve. There’s a one nerve cluster that controls sensation in the area of the skull that went numb and we agreed I must have slept on it funny. Then he suggested I do a sleep apnea study and I mentioned how the FitBit measures my sleep pattern and started to explain it: “I wear the wristband on my non-dominant hand and put the device inside…”

He interrupted me and said that must be it! The nerve cluster begins in the forehead right about where I sleep with my head on right wrist at night. I must have slept on the FitBit where it pressed on the nerve ending all night, causing it to go dead.

No stroke. No aneurysm. No Bell’s palsy. No heart attack. No, I just spent about 24 hours in the hospital because I slept on my new gadget the wrong way.

Good grief.

So here I am, home again. At least I didn’t have to endure the MRI after all and now I’v e had a full workup of my heart’s health. And while I didn’t wear the FitBit last night, I think there’s a way to wear it at night without turning me into a numbskull. And even if I don’t wear it at night, it’s still useful for everything else it does.

But if you’re a FitBit Ultra owner who sleeps on his belly, beware of the possible consequences. Here’s hoping the feeling returns to my scalp because at this point it’s coming back, although slowly.

Better safe than sorry, though, right?

Photo by pixieclipx – http://flic.kr/p/u7Kty

The world they inherit will have smartphones

Sophia, who is 4, and Isabella, almost 6, came to me and Melanie the other day with a little game they were playing. Sophia had a stack of colorful cardboard cards with difference colors and patterns on them, telling us that this was her phone. Not to be outdone, Isabella carried over a stack of small Beatrix Potter books she declared were her phone. I captured it in videos.

What a world they will live in. What amazing inventions they take and will take for granted as just the way things are.

The wider Implications of Obama’s contraception “compromise”

There’s been a lot of furor over the Obama administration’s implementation of universal health care, specifically the provision by Health and Human Services department regulation that every health insurance plan, without exemption for religious reasons, must include coverage for contraception for employees.

The Catholic Church (and I don’t mean just the bishops) has reacted very strongly against this intrusion on our religious liberty. Some have said that this is just the chickens coming home to roost; that it’s the result of years of backing down from conscience violating laws when the institution, but not individual Catholics, gets an exemption.

And then last week, Obama claimed to offer a compromise—one that didn’t include anyone but his own team in the “negotiations”—that wasn’t really a compromise at all. In fact, Nothing has changed:

But the rule HHS finalized on Friday actually put in place nothing like what the president announced. On the contrary, the final rule enacts the very same terms that HHS had announced on January 20th.

But I think there’s a wider issue here as well. Under the President’s plan, the health insurers for Catholic organizations would be required to provide contraception to employees at no cost. But not a word was said about government reimbursement. In fact, it looks to me that what the federal government has done has ordered an industry to provide a product at no cost, with no reimbursement.

What’s next? Doing away with food stamps and ordering grocery stores to provide food to the poor out of their own pocket? Telling local fuel oil providers to give heating oil to customers who can’t afford it? Free college educations for all?

This is essentially nationalization of industry. I’m no constitutional scholar, but it seems to me that this is unconstitutional. Why isn’t the insurance industry howling? Why haven’t they been fighting Obamacare tooth and nail? If this law was really going to reform healthcare in this country and make it less expensive, you’d expect they wouldn’t like that at all. Maybe they aren’t protesting because in the end they know that with the federal government being the bad guy—mandating premiums, limiting treatment options (except where it’s requiring them like this)—they’re going to end up with even fatter profits.

The HHS mandate is just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s not really news for any of us who objected to four years of extreme policies from this White House. While I have great hope that come November we’ll have a new president, I think this thinking goes beyond one president and even one party. I have a hard time imagining politicians mustering the will to walk back all the Obama-era excesses. If so, we are on a very bad path indeed.

A Catholic college in Big Sky country

As Melanie said when she watched this video, “It makes me want to move to Wyoming and go to Wyoming Catholic College”, and yet she’s a Texas girl who hates winter, so you know it must be good. I think it’s very stirring with great cinematics as we’ve come to expect from the great filmmakers at Grassroots Films.

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The Life of the Mind for a Good Marriage

Before I was married I used to lead a Bible study in my parish that brought together mainly young adults. As the resident guy with the Theology degree, I became the study leader, leading the discussion and doing the research into what we were reading at the time. I enjoyed it immensely, because it was a great social gathering (we always went for food and drink at Salem Beer Works afterward) as much as a wonderful intellectual and spiritual stimulation. I loved exercising those theology muscles again.

(The memory of the Bible study is also near and dear to my heart because it’s where I truly started the courtship of Melanie. After our near-disastrous beginning, she started coming to Bible study with her roommate and she saw I wasn’t just an impetuous cad.)

We haven’t had anything like the Bible study in a long time. After we and our friends started getting married and having kids, getting a free night to have people over the house became more and more difficult. Then we had to up and move to the South Shore of Boston, at least an hour away from our old place (at best). I’ve been attending the Men’s Group in our parish, but it’s not the same.

However, Melanie just started something new, which brings back the old theological joy, while also making me appreciate all over again what a smart, intellectual woman I married. Someone (I forget who, sorry) linked to 2006 academic article by Dr. Scott Hahn published in the journal “Letter & Spirit”. It was entitled “The Authority of Mystery: The Biblical Theology of Pope Benedict XVI” (PDF). It looked intriguing so I downloaded it to my iPad, but I was having the hardest time reading it. Maybe it’s the lack of hard theological reading lately or just the many nights of sleep interrupted by wakeful children, but I couldn’t grasp it.

However, when I mentioned this, Melanie asked me to start reading it aloud to her. So I did as she cooked and cleaned in the kitchen, with punctuations from children seeking a drink or something. And what do you know? It worked. Suddenly I was grasping it. Not only that, but we start discussing it as we went, digging into the meaning, applying to our own situations or more broadly. As if by magic, we were back in our dating days, when we’d have long intellectual discussions while sitting in my car in front of Melanie’s house, as I was dropping her off from a date. Or standing by the door of my house after Bible study, her hand on the doorknob, for two hours.

A large part of our mutual attraction was indeed the intellectual curiosity and capacity of the other, but as we settled into the routine of family life, we seemed to have let that slide somewhat.

(While I’m shallow enough to admit that Melanie’s good looks were an equal part of my attraction to her, I’m also lucky that when Melanie considered me, looks were not as important as intellect.)

I’m reminded again what a blessing it is to have a wife with whom I share not just so many interests, but whose differences from me are also intriguing. I’m not a big poetry or “literature” fan (I like books just fine, but serious English Lit eludes me), but with Melanie I can begin to appreciate it. Likewise, Melanie has never been big on politics or science, but she likes to talk with me about them. And when it comes to faith and theology, that is a shared love we dig deep in together.

Some of the best husband-wife couples I know include two great intellects in them, which seems to spur both on to greater accomplishments. I’m thinking of Scot and Kimberly Hahn for one and Phil and Leila Lawler for another. Certainly, the life of the mind is a key element to a happy marriage, I think.