iPhone 5, a few days later and where to trade in your old iPhone
I wanted to write a followup to my last post, My iPhone 5 Review. Now that I've had my hands on it for a few days and I've been able to put it through some various tests, I can update what I've already written.
First off, I'm on iPhone 5 number 2. My first one had some issues with the anodizing on the case having some scuffs and scratches out the box. I brought it back on Monday and luckily they had one in stock to trade out for me. Since then, I've have 3 days to play around with the new one, plus 2 days with the old one. So far, this is what I've seen (in addition to the first post).
- The battery life isn't as good as the 4S. I've got a femtocell that sits in my living room, a mere 15 feet from me, so you can't tell me that it's the battery life issues due to poor cell signal that other people have seen.
- Passbook, although I praised it in my last post, doesn't work worth a shit. Granted, I've only tried to use it at a few places, but none of them have worked. That may be an issue with Passsource.com, the site that I used to create the passbook cards, but either way, it still doesn't work well.
- The headphone jack being moved to the bottom kinda sucks because I use a dash mount for my phone. Nearly all dash mounts are going to cover the bottom headphone jack.
- iMessages is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I love the fact that I can send texts from my MacBook Pro or iPad and everything shows up on the phone too. If I send from my MBP, all the information shows up on the phone and the iPad, so I can continue a conversation regardless of what's in my hand. I've wanted this feature forever, and it is easily the one I use most (This is an iOS 6 Feature).
- The panoramic pictures can get a bit wonky if you don't have a steady hand.
- Apple Maps sucks. I've used the turn-by-turn directions a few times and every single time, the route was different than the TomTom that was next to it. I find this weird because TomTom provided the data for it. One time, it tried to send me somewhere that wasn't even close to my actual destination.
- The cable. Yes, I know I said I was a fan of the new doc connector, but it has come out that Apple has installed a verification chip in the new cables, so you won't be able to buy cheep cables anymore. This sucks because I've already sold 100 of them on eBay and I've had to process 10 returns already. Those will charge, but won't move any data. Also, the USB side of the cable (on the OEM ones) has a tendency to get in the USB port. They are VERY tight and could take some force to remove.
- There's a bit of chromatic aberration in the camera that causes pictures to have a purple tint to them. This is actually quite normal in small cameras and isn't extremely noticeable until you load it into Photoshop and look at the color levels.
That's pretty much all my complaints about it. Also, if you're looking into getting one, you'll find the prices that different places are paying for trade-ins below. Amazon is by far the best bet for guaranteed money. That's who I'm using!
My iPhone 5 Review
(Jump to the tl;dr if you don't want to read the back story)
Today I got the new iPhone 5. I've been using the 4S for a little less than a year, and the 4S was the first iPhone that I had that actually made calls (the other ones were all programming platforms). I guess that's the price you pay when you're on Sprint. Before the 4S was an HTC EVO 4G and prior to that, a Treo Pro along with a Blackberry back before that. So I've had experience with iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry OS.
I decided to get the phone because I had an upgrade credit and I figured that despite the change in dock connector, I might as well get it over with now because Apple is going to be moving to Lightning on everything going forward. I'm going to have to do it sooner or later, might as well be sooner. I ordered my wife's 16GB on the first day of pre-orders and it arrived Friday afternoon. After toying with it for all of 30 seconds, I decided I needed to get one myself. After calling all over the place yesterday (launch day) and not finding a 64GB Black Sprint phone (quite a few places had white left), the Apple Store informed me they were getting a shipment in this morning. I showed up at 10am when they opened. Since I had already toyed with the phone yesterday, I had an idea of what it could do. My 4S was running iOS 6 already, so I had seen quite a few of the features available already.
tl;dr
I like the fact that it's longer. You really start to notice it after a while and you miss it when you're using apps that haven't been updated yet and are running in letterbox with the black bars on top and bottom. You don't really notice the bars because the black is good enough that it blends in.
Although I bitched and moaned about them changing the doc connecter and not making it any faster (USB 3 anyone?), I kinda like it. I thought it was going to be bigger... maybe the size of a standard USB in width, but it's only about half that. The reversible design is awesome too. The price of spare USB cables sucks.
It's weird to have an extra row of apps on the screen. You're so used to seeing 4 rows plus the bottom that 5 seems alien.
Speed: It's not faster. You may think it's faster, it may feel faster, but I had the 5 and 4S side-by-side and ran some tests. Opening apps, playing music, surfing the net... It's not any faster. Granted, if you're on LTE, your surfing will be faster than 3G, but the apps open at the same speed. That being said, it feels faster for some reason. I'm going to go with placebo effect.
It's lighter. You notice it. I put mine in an Otterbox before I left the mall, seeing as I dropped the phone before I ever made it out of the Apple store, but I hated it so it's out.
Roundest corners yet!
We're going to have to see what battery life is like. I've been dicking with it all day and the battery is at 50% still. Not bad.
That's about it. The new apps and features are pretty cool. I like Passbook because I hate carrying all those cards with me. You can create your own Passbook cards by going to Passsource.com and using their templates. I've got tons of them already, but the CVS card didn't work. They know about it and are looking for a fix.
All in all, it's your typical new Apple phone. Small, incremental changes from the last one, same outrageous price. If you get one, everyone's going to tell you how much better the Samsung Galaxy S3 is and how Android kicks Apple's ass, but they would have said that no matter what Apple did. I really wish they would have implemented NFC and went to Micro USB, but other than that, I'm happy with it.
HTC EVO 4G, Froyo 2.2 Final release, Unrevoked3 and ROOT
Sprint and HTC released Froyo today as an over-the-air update to all of you out there that haven't already rooted your phone. Well, my EVO was rooted within the first 48 hours of me owning the phone. I recently dropped back to the stock unrooted image only to use Unrevoked3 to root it again.
By having a rooted phone, I can't get the Froyo update over the air, but I can still put it on my phone, and you can too. Here's how to do it.
Step 0: I'm adding this late, but if you don't want to have to search for your apps again, check out AppBrain. Install it before the upgrade, sync your phone up with the website, create a new list on the website and copy all your apps to that as a backup. After you are done with the upgrade, install AppBrain first and sync it back up. All your apps will be there waiting for you.
Step 1: You need to have a phone rooted with Unrevoked3. That's the way I know how to go about it, so go root your phone with Unrevoked3 and come back.
Step 2: Download the rooted Froyo image from here. (Thanks netarchy!!!)
Step 3: Copy the .zip file to the root of your SD card on the phone.
Step 4: Power down the phone and reboot into the boot loader. To do this, make sure the power is off and hold the volume down button while holding down the power button.
Step 5: Once in the boot loader, use the volume rocker to navigate to RECOVERY. Select it by pressing the power button. This will bring you to Clockwork.
Step 6: From ClockworkMod Recovery, select " wipe data/factory reset". Confirm it and do the reset.
Step 7: Select "install zip from sdcard", then "choose zip from sdcard".
Step 8: Navigate to and select "HTC-OTA-3.26.651.6-Final-Froyo-Rooted-Odexed-netarchy-signed.zip". Confirm the install.
Step 9: Once the install is done, navigate back to the top level of Clockwork and select "reboot system now".
And you're done! You should now reboot into Froyo. You can verify this by going to Settings -> About Phone -> Software information. You should see "Android Version 2.2" at the very top!
Once you have updated Froyo, you need to apply a couple of radio updates. You do this the same way you installed the Froyo zip file. After each install, reboot the phone and let it do a full reboot. After it's rebooted, power down and boot into the boot loader to apply the other one. Follow the instructions above (you don't have to wipe data for the radio updates) and you'll be just fine. Here are those two files:
Radio update: 2.15.00.07.28
Wimax Update 26023
Enjoy the speed of Froyo and have fun with your newly rooted phone! For the full thread on xda, click here.
-Greg
Update: I've seen a HUGE spike in traffic in the last hour (that's to be expected) and I can see that a lot of you guys are doing the upgrade (I love Woopra). Leave some comments below and let me know if everything ran OK for you.
Port Forwarding on the Cisco ASA in 8.3 from the ASDM made easy
In my last post I taught you how to forward a port on the ASA 5505 running version 8.3 from the CLI. Some of you prefer to use the ASDM to do you changes, so I guess I'll show you how to do it from there. The ASDM is a bit of a learning curve for someone that's used to the CLI, and most CLI guys hate a GUI with a great passion. I can go either way. I use the ASDM to make some changes simply because I want to learn it and there's some guys coming into the field today that were taught on the GUI rather than a command line.
In this lesson I'm using ASDM version 6.3(1) and ASA version 8.3(1). Since we added a web server in the last post, let's make this one an FTP server. The FTP server's IP is the same as the web server, 10.9.8.7/24 and we're running over the standard FTP port, 21.
First off, we want to start up the ASDM and connect to the ASA. Once there, click on the 
button at the top of the screen, then the 
button near the bottom left, and finally select 
near the top left. You'll now be at a screen that looks something like this:
Click for larger version
Now we need to create a new object, so click on "Add" under Addresses, then "Network Object".
Now we need to fill out our new window. Once you fill out the name, IP address and description, you need to drop down the NAT box and fill it out. Click the "Add Automatic Address Translation Rules" box, leave the type as "static" and set the translated address as the outside interface.
We now need to go to the Advanced menu from the Add Network Object window and setup the port forwarding. The source will be inside, destination is outside. Protocol in this instance is TCP and our port is 21, both real and mapped.
Click "OK" twice and your object will be created as well as the port forward. Now we just need to add the access rule. On the left side of the screen, just above the NAT Rules is your Access Rules. From there we want to click "Add" and "Access Rule".
We need to create the rule on the outside interface, coming from any IP to the FTPServer using FTP as the service.
Once you click OK, your rule is added. You don't have to add a description like I did in the image above this one, I just did that for the hell of it. When you click "Apply" at the bottom of the screen, the ASDM will issue the commands to the ASA. I have preview turned on, so I can always see what commands are being sent to the device before they are actually sent. If you followed all the steps above and you have preview turned on, you'll see the following:
And you'll notice that those are the exact 4 commands that I gave in the last post about doing it from the CLI! Now you can forward any port you want from either the CLI or the ASDM!
On a side note, I know a lot of guys hate the ASDM. When I was writing this post and going through all of this I was kinda upset when I saw that I had 10 pictures for 4 lines of code. The good thing about the ASDM is that you have everything right there at your disposal and you really don't need to know the vernacular of IOS. The drawback is that it will take you longer to get things done at first, but once you get used to it, it can be just as fast.
Port Forwarding on the Cisco ASA in 8.3 from the CLI made easy
So it's been a month and a half since I posted an update, and it's 4:15 am right now. I can't sleep and I found out there's another networking blog out there using the same WP theme as me, so I figured I better put something up here since it was fresh in my mind. Well, now that the niceties are out of the way, let's get to work.
I recently added an ASA 5505 to my home network at the edge. Obviously, when I did, all of my port forwards went to hell because the ASA is now blocking everything. I run a web server on one of my servers here and I like to be able to access it because I keep a lot of tech manuals and other stuff on there. Well, I went about trying to set up port forwarding the old way and learned real quick that this pops up when I do:
ERROR: This syntax of nat command has been deprecated.
Please refer to "help nat" command for more details.
Yeah, that sucks. On the new version of the ASA OS, global has gone the way of the dodo. I did a bunch of searches on Google to figure it out and everything I ran across was very hard to decipher. That's why I'm writing this. You can setup a port forward in 4 quick and easy steps. Just change the things that are underlined to fit your network and you'll be just fine.
In this example, we want to be able to access a web server behind the firewall. We'll assume you are using the standard HTTP port, the web server's internal IP address is 10.9.8.7/24, and that you at least know what you're doing enough to be configuring an ASA in the first place. I'll give you the steps, then I'll explain.
Step 1: Create a new object group for you web server.
asa5505(config)# object network Webserver
Step 2: Add the IP of the web server to the network group.
asa5505(config-network-object)# host 10.9.8.7
Step 3: Forward the port via the NAT command.
asa5505(config-network-object)# nat (inside,outside) static interface service tcp www www
Step 4: Exit back to the root and add the access list
asa5505(config)# access-list outside_access_in permit tcp any object Webserver eq www
That's it! Now, let's explain what's going on here. Cisco has started moving more and more towards use of object groups in their configs. It makes things easier, especially when you have a situation where you have 20 web servers behind the firewall and you want to add 1 more in. Rather than having to rewrite a whole bunch of ACL's, you just add the IP of the new web server into the object group and everything is done for you. After you create the object group (in this instance a network object, you can also create service objects), you add the IP of the specific object (or objects) that you want to point to. So here our web server is 10.9.8.7. If you want to send port 80 to more than 1 IP on your internal network, just add more IP's to that object group.
Now is the fun part. While we're in the object group, we need to NAT port 80 only to that specific object group, hence you're still at "asa5505(config-network-object)#" prompt. Now type "end" to get back to the regular config terminal and we need to open that port in the ACL. Yes, www = 80. You can type either one and you get the same result. If I have to go through and explain NAT, how it works and why I enter in that specific command to forward the port, then there's a possibility that I'd need to send you an invoice for my time because we would be here for a while.
This works for ANY port forward. If you want to RDP into a machine, simply replace port 80 (all those www's you see up there) with 3389. There is one caveat. You can only do one port forward per object group. So let's say that our web server is also an FTP server and you want port 21 to forward as well as port 80. You're going to have to create a whole new object group (object network FTPServer), put the same IP in the group (host 10.9.8.7), do the nat command again (nat (inside,outside) static interface service tcp ftp ftp), exit back to the root of config, and add the access list (access-list outside_access_in permit tcp any object FTPServer eq ftp).
This should get you up and running with you port forwards in no time flat. It is a bit of a pain in the ass to have to create a new object group for every port you want to forward, and maybe there's someone out there that's reading this right now thinking "dude, you don't have to create more than one group! You can just do...". Well, you need to enlighten the world with this knowledge and post it in the comments section. And if you're too scared to do so, shoot me an email to greg(at)gregledet(dot)net.
I'd also like to thank Stefan Fouant for an excellent class today on JUNOS Switching. I learned a lot in his class and you can learn a lot from his website. Check it out and tell him Greg sent ya!
Slipping past cell phone voice mail greetings
I hate people that put long drawn-out voice mail greetings on their cell phones. In fact, very few things will cause me to just hang up the phone and not leave an important voice mail more than that. That's why I've done a bunch of searches and decided to tell you guys (and leave it here for my future reference) just how to skip past the greetings. I have a friend of mine, we'll call him "Mary" that has a greeting in which he'll tell you his life story, website, and read "War and Peace" before it ends. I VERY rarely leave him a voice mail because I don't want to sit through that long ass greeting, not to mention eat up an extra minute on my cell phone. Now I don't have to!
Verizon: press *
Sprint: press 1
T-Mobile or AT&T: press #
Of course, you need to know what carrier the person you are calling is using. The way I figure out is simply trial and error until I hit the right one. I timed Mary's once (he's on Verizon) and if I would have left a message, I would have been into the 3rd minute of the call and eating up my shared minutes. After his long ass greeting, Verizon gives all the options (including giving a fax options!) of crap you can do. I'm not sitting through that crap. Now as soon as I hear that voice mail pick up, I slam a * into the phone and I'm done.
What I would like to see is people to put this info at the beginning of the greeting. Something like "Hi, this is Greg. Please press * to skip this greeting". That would go a long way and I'm willing to bet more people would be willing to leave voice mail for you if you did.
Guide to reading the new HurriCam wind meter
Caution tape hanging on side of pole: wind not blowing
Caution tape hanging at 22.5 degrees: wind is blowing, cooling things off
Caution tape hanging at 45 degrees: wind is blowing, getting rid of mosqitos
Caution tape flowing at 67.5 degrees: wind is blowing, Gustav is getting close
Caution tape straight out at 90 degrees to pole: wind is really blowing hard, Gustav VERY close
Caution tape gone: Landfall!
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