Those that live in Seattle know that Mercer street has sucked for 40 years.

Over the past couple years, there has been an extensive effort to make Mercer better – and the street and surroundings have improved markedly … but …

Rush hour traffic, especially east-bound evening traffic, continues to suck and is actually considerably worse than ever.  This is not entirely the fault of the new design of Mercer.  This one lies entirely on humans, the traffic control officers employed by Amazon around the side streets of Mercer.

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My dear friend April White has just released her self-published young adult novel Marking Time, the first book in her Immortal Descendants series.

Marking Time is available for Kindle for just $2.99.

If you like epic quests of time traveling immortals with a smattering of the paranormal and ancient family lines this will be a great book for you. April needs reviews on Amazon for this initial publishing phase so please download, read and review!

It really is a brave new world in self-publishing.

My son created a fantastic (my determination, natch) paper book, and within a few hours I was able to use iBooks Author to create a version of the book for iBooks.  It was approved a couple days later.

It’s free from iTunes.

The Adventures of Scuts

We only got one of the screen guardz for the trip to Mexico and now I wish we got two!

They really do help. With my polarized sunglasses I can’t see anything on the iPad without the plastic cover, but I can comfortably read from the kindle app with the other.

Sorry for the lack of posts for half the day – I was running the WordPress dev branch and the update this morning apparently couldn’t find the posts anymore.

I have reverted to something more stable.

Just had this error today with an iPhone 4 and the apple support document is not very useful.

From Googling, it seemed that many people used to blame this on corrupt photos in iPhoto – but tracking those down can be painful.

In my case I think it was a partial sync that happened when I drove away from the house in my car. I plugged in my iPhone in the car while in the garage, and it connected to my WiFi and started to sync – I was late so I drove away as it was trying to sync and then gave up. I think this made the iPhone very happy.

I was prepared to go down the route of doing a complete restore but I decided to try the semi-obvious first.

I rebooted the computer running iTunes, I shut down all the running apps on the iPhone and then rebooted the iPhone – and then it did a backup and then did a sync.

All is well. Hope this helps someone.

Not much else to say. Worst purchase I have made in a long time. Constantly crashes. Takes forever to print. Makes all kind of noise before and after printing. Constant scanning issues.

Total POS and my last HP printer.

HP C309a
Canon – I’ll be looking to you.

I’ve been trying to get my s/mime email signing certificate to work under ios5 and i think i’ve found a bug.

If you are trying to send a signed email from your iOS5 device and instead your recipients are receiving an attachment called smime.p7s it is likely that you are using gmail or google apps and are also using the exchange connector in iOS.

My guess is that Google didn’t setup a PKI infrastructure properly and when iOS tries to go a fetch a certificate from the non-existent exchange server the process fails and then an attachment is created.

If you setup your iOS mail account to google via IMAP then smime works as expected.

Filed a bug report with apple – 10302200.

[Update: 7 March 2012 - This is not fixed in iOS 5.1]

[Update: 17 November 2012 - This is not fixed n iOS 6.0.1]