The iPad Mini vs. the iPad Biggie

There's trouble in Pixeltown.

The reviewers, non-reviewers, and Mac pundits are embroiled in an intense debate: is the Apple iPad Mini better than the regular Apple iPad?

The iPad Mini is a perfect form-factor, they all agree. The iPad Biggie, the larger version with the retina display, is the perfect screen resolution. But is it better to wait for the Mini to get the screen of the Biggie? That, dear reader, is the question.

It's O.K. Take a deep breath, we'll get through this together.

Dave Winer, who has been covering the tech business since before devices began with the letter “i,” argued on Gizmodo that the Apple Mini is a failure - a travesty, if you will. He thinks that the screen, with its low resolution pixel density, signifies one thing: Apple's decline.

“I believe it's not only not a winner, but it signals a new Apple that's no longer beyond compare,” Mr. Winer wrote.

But others disagree. (Go figure.)

John Gruber , the author of the Apple blog Daring Fireball, unsurprisingly loves his iPad Mini more than chocolate cupcakes with sprinkles on top.

“I completely stand behind mine, and still have barely even used the iPad 4 I have on loan from Apple,” Mr. Gruber wrote. “In the meantime, we have to choose: big iPad with sharp retina display, or small iPad with a fuzzy one. I've gone small and fuzzy.”

So what do mere mortals decide in a debate worthy of Revenge of the Nerds?

I've used them both and I have to say, the iPad Mini, although fuzzier than the retina display variety, is incomparable to the larger iPad. Picking them both up together feels like picking up a feather and a dumbbell. And as any geek who hasn't been to the gym in a while knows, lighter is usually better.

I never felt like the original iPad was a portable device. Its size was too close to the Macbook Air to be different. Frankly, it was just too heavy to tote around.

The iPad Mi ni, which now fits in my jacket pockets, is the perfect size. Sure, it doesn't have a screen that allows me to zoom into see a grain of sand, or a pimple, but the weight and shape instantly negate that. 

I've gone warm and fuzzy, too.

Defier of Police and Storm, Tender of Residents\' Cats and Fish

Yana Paskova for The New York Times Residents of the Osborne in Manhattan toasted the building's resident manager, John Coyne, center, on Monday. Mr. Coyne had sneaked back into the building to watch over things after the area was evacuated when a crane boom broke nearby.

It was billed as a welcome-home party for an apartment house diagonally across West 57th Street from Carnegie Hall that was evacuated as Hurricane Sandy flailed the city and the boom on a construction crane a few doors away tw isted and crumpled and dangled over the street.

But the gathering on Monday evening in the apartment building's lobby was really a surprise thank-you party for the resident manager, John Coyne, who had borrowed a ladder, scaled a wall and sneaked back inside when the streets in the neighborhood were still closed off. From somewhere inside the building, Mr. Coyne sent residents reassuring e-mails saying that it had survived the storm and that their cats had been fed. And their goldfish. And their hermit crabs.

For nearly a week, he kept evacuees “informed” and “hopeful of a quick return,” said the film critic Jeffrey Lyons, who lives in the building, the Osborne, at 205 West 57th Street, at the corner of Seventh Avenue.

Davida Deutsch, another longtime resident, called him the “captain of our ship.” Another resident, the novelist Elinor Lipman, said Mr. Coyne “was our lifeline” once residents were ordered to le ave the building and scattered - staying with friends, staying in hotels, staying in private clubs â€" until their block was reopened late on the night of Nov. 4.

“John answered the big questions, John answered the little questions” by cellphone and e-mail, Ms. Lipman said. And, she said, “He writes very well. I noticed.”

He provided more than a just-the-facts report on life in a largely empty building. On Oct. 31, he sent an e-mail that said, “Beginning to feel a little bit like Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining.' Happy Halloween, alone in the Osborne!”

Yana Paskova for The New York Times The Osborne and, at right, the crane that forc ed its evacuation.

Of course no one sang “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow” in “The Shining,” as the Osborne residents did to Mr. Coyne on Monday evening. And the composer and lyricist Maury Yaston did not write a song about the Hotel Overlook and the snowstorm in “The Shining,” as he did about the Osborne, the hurricane and Mr. Coyne.

“A lot of resident managers think, ‘This is where I work,'” Mr. Coyne told the crowd. “You're my family.”

The damaged crane was above the 74-story skyscraper going up at 157 West 57th Street - so close that people in the Osborne heard the noise as it broke apart on the afternoon of Oct. 29, hours before the storm finally steamed across the New York area. But the winds on its leading edge were already gusting to 80 miles an hour, and Mr. Yaston's wife, Julianne, said she heard “this hideous sound, a sound I had no template for.”

“What it sounded like - I don't even know the word - was s creeching, or ripping,” she said.

It was the sound of the crane coming loose. “If you know the opera ‘Salome,'” said Naomi Graffman, who has lived in the Osborne since 1962, “the way the double basses play as they're starting to cut off John the Baptist's head - it sounded like that.”

Ms. Yaston described seeing pieces of metal from the crane tumbling past her window and slamming into the ground. “You could feel it” when they hit, she said.

Mr. Yaston said it was not long before word came to clear the building. “A firewoman with an ax came in and said: ‘Everyone out right now. Do not spend time gathering your things,'” he recalled.

The next day, West 57th Street was cordoned off, and Mr. Coyne said the police were not allowing anyone south of 59th Street. But he went to visit a friend at 240 Central Park South. He walked through the building and out its back entrance onto 58th Street. Then he walked down the block to the build ing at the southwest corner of 58th Street and Seventh Avenue - the building that backs up to the Osborne.

Mr. Coyne asked if he could borrow a ladder.

Sure, the superintendent there said.

Mr. Coyne put the ladder against a wall between the Osborne and the other building and climbed it.

At the party, another resident, Alison Macheras, had a question for Mr. Coyne: “How many times in our lifetime is this going to happen?”

He said, “I wish it hadn't happened in this one.”

Upper West Side Nanny Is Indicted on Murder Charges

The nanny accused of fatally stabbing two children whom she cared for on the Upper West Side has been indicted on murder charges, according to court records released on Tuesday.

The nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, 50, remains hospitalized at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Her arraignment on murder charges is expected to take place via a video link to State Supreme Court in Manhattan, but has not been scheduled.

In the early evening of Oct. 25, the police have said, the children's mother, Marina Krim, returned home with her 3-year-old daughter to find her two other children - Lucia, 6, and Leo, 2 - dead of knife wounds in the bathtub.

As Ms. Krim walked into the bathroom, the police said, Ms. Ortega plunged a kitchen knife int o her own throat.

Ms. Ortega was intubated and unable to speak for more than a week. She eventually told detectives that she resented the family because they always told her what to do, a law enforcement official said last week.

Alternate Side Returns

It had to happen sooner or later. Alternate-side parking rules, which have been held in abeyance by storms, floods, downed trees, general destruction and a thorough reshuffling of municipal priorities since last month, will resume in most of New York City on Wednesday, the city's Transportation Department said.

But the rules will remain suspended indefinitely in the Rockaway peninsula and within the confines of Brooklyn Community Board 13, which includes Coney Island, Brighton Beach and Gravesend; and Brooklyn Community Board 15, which includes Sheepshead Bay and Manhattan and Gerritsen Beaches.

CareZone, an Anti-Facebook

Social media is about sharing ever more information about ourselves with an ever larger crowd. But some of the most valuable information, about things like health and children, needs to be kept close. Now there is a social too for that, too, and it comes from a well-known name in technology.

Jonathan Schwartz, the former chief executive of Sun Microsystems, is cofounder of CareZone, a service that enables families to organize care of their loved ones. CareZone provides secure storage of patient information like medical records and prescriptions, plus critical phone numbers and digitized documents associated with care, like insurance information. There is also a journal feature, for keeping notes on things patent conditions and future appointments.

“It's a biological reality that we are all going to take care of somebody,” says Mr. Schwartz, who oversaw the sale of Sun to Oracle in 2009. “You need a safe place to keep information about things like doctors , care and medicines. You need to be able to share that with your spouse, your immediate family and trusted neighbors.”

The service debuted last February with little notice, and while Mr. Schwartz would not say how many subscribers he has attracted, he says it is growing. On Tuesday, Mr. Schwartz added voice broadcast and calendar features designed to make it both more functional and more accessible to larger groups of people.

The calendar enables subscribers to assign tasks, like picking up medication or taking someone for an examination. The broadcast service enables messages of up to 10 minutes to be sent to the phones of up to 100 people at a time. Formerly a Web-based service, the company is adding a mobile application.

CareZone is not taking the usual social media route of targeted advertising, since the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, closely guards how closely medical information must be shared. “Advertisin g and HIPAA are oil and water,” Mr. Schwartz says, adding that CareZone will have an overt policy of “no ads, no data mining.”

It is an interesting reflection of changing times. During the early days of the Internet, Scott McNealy, Sun's cofounder and Mr. Schwartz's onetime mentor, was known for saying that “privacy is dead, get over it.” Now that we are under even more corporate surveillance, Mr. Schwartz calls privacy “something people will pay for. There is a lot of value in the data that only you have.”

The trick is to keep things private, but widen the circle of trust to include larger organizations that participate in care, and also pay. The new features are intended to make CareZone an attractive tool for home care workers, outpatient hospitals, and church groups trying to establish food and care services for a parishioner.

While the main application is free for up to five individuals under care, from January 1 it will cost $5 a month or $49 a year to use CareZone for five to 10 people. From 10 to 100 individuals, CareZone charges $25 a month. There may be additional charges for above 100 people. CareZone will also add other paid features, like charging for lots of data storage.He figures that professional caregivers will pay for the service because it will help them manage patients.

“My bet is that a year from now hospitals will be a revenue stream,” says Mr. Schwartz. “Pharmacies and hospitals are looking to communicate with you in a secure way.”

Battery Tunnel to Partly Reopen to Motorists at 4 P.M.

Andrew Burton/Getty Images The Hugh L. Carey Brooklyn Battery Tunnel filled with seawater as the storm pounded ashore on Oct. 29.

The Hugh L. Carey Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, last of the city's major crossings to remain closed to motorists in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, will open one lane to general traffic at 4 p.m. today for rush-hour travelers, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said this afternoon.

BREAKING: Hugh L. Carey #tunnel will open add. lane @ 4PM TODAY for car traffic in peak directions #rushhour #Brooklyn-Battery

- Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) November 13, 2012

On the nigh t of Oct. 29, the tunnel, which has no gates or plugs to block water at its entrances, simply filled up with the Hudson and East Rivers â€" nearly 100 million gallons worth â€" and carried their waters onto the streets of Brooklyn.

The tunnel, typically used by 50,000 vehicles a day, reopened to express buses on Monday. One of its tubes is open but the other will remain closed for weeks, Mr. Cuomo said.

Also on Tuesday, the city Department of Transportation announced that the Battery Park underpass at the bottom of Manhattan, which links the West Side Highway and the F.D.R. Drive on the island's east side, will reopen to all vehicles eastbound tomorrow morning and to buses westbound this afternoon.

Justin Lane/European Pressphoto Agency A truck lay submerged at the entrance to the Battery Park underpass on Oct. 31.

Wayward Boat, After 2 Weeks, Still Awaits Tow Off Road

Corey Kilgannon/The New York Times A cabin cruiser was pushed onto land by Hurricane Sandy and it now sits in the middle of Cross Bay Boulevard in Broad Channel, Queens.

The 30-foot cabin cruiser named the E-Z Goin was going pretty hard at the height of Hurricane Sandy, driven into the deeply flooded streets of Broad Channel, Queens, and sent ramming against a corner house.

“I figured it was a matter of time before it just rammed my windows in,” said the owner of the house, Mark Ott, 38, who was inside riding out the storm with his family. Mr. Ott managed to jump into the boat, get its engi nes started and run it aground near the median of Cross Bay Boulevard, where it has remained for two weeks.

“It's become a conversation piece,” said Mr. Ott, a bus mechanic for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who spray-painted a new name on the battered boat: the S.S. Minnow, after the wayward vessel on the popular television show “Gilligan's Island.”

“I figured it would lighten people's moods,” he said while surveying the boat from his front stoop on Monday night. “On the show, it was a three-hour tour, but I was only on board for about five minutes.”

Mr. Ott said he did not know who owned the boat, adding that it most likely broke free from a local dock or washed in from one of the nearby boatyards.

Another neighbor had scrawled a heartfelt message on the side of the boat directed at the city's Department of Sanitation, whose members have been hailed as heroes in the neighborhood for their a ggressive cleanup. Another neighbor had placed a big plywood sign on the boat saying, “Broad Channel, the Forgotten Town!”

“There have been cops and firemen taking pictures in front of it every day,” said Mr. Ott, who like other locals considers the boat a symbol of how, in the days after the storm, little attention was paid to Broad Channel, a working-class neighborhood in the middle of Jamaica Bay whose streets were turned into raging rivers during the storm. The waters splintered houses, obliterated docks and tossed dozens of boats into the streets, many of them still untouched.

Photos of the E-Z Goin have been widely seen on social media, but the boat has not been removed. It still juts out across the shoulder and into the boulevard, blocking one of the two northbound lanes of this main route in and out of the storm-ravaged Rockaways. It has caused delays every day, despite the traffic agents stationed there to help move cars along.

On Monday mo rning, a sticker from the Sanitation Department was put on the boat declaring it “condemned property” that was “scheduled for removal.” But by Monday afternoon, someone had slopped black paint over the sticker.

“Maybe it was the owner, I don't know,” said Mr. Ott, who then recalled how on the night the storm hit, the boat floated along East 16th Road toward Cross Bay Boulevard. Part of the boat became entangled in utility lines in front of his house.

“The wires were stretching like a rubber band,” said Mr. Ott, who was inside with his wife, their three young children and his mother, 62.

“My mother said, ‘Why don't you see if you can steer it away from here?'” He threw some tools in a plastic bag and mounted a headlamp on his head. He put on a pair of shorts and waded out through the water and pulled himself over the side of the boat.

“I figured I could hot-wire it,” said Mr. Ott, a third-generation Broad Channel resident who used to work repairing boat engines. He checked its twin inboard engines, turned the battery switch on, and followed the ignition wires, to begin his planned hot-wiring caper.

“Then I realized I didn't even have to, because the keys were in the ignition,” he said.

Both engines started easily and he gunned the boat until it came to a stop, and waded back to his house, where his basement was filled with water and an oil tank had spilled 200 gallons of its contents.

“I'm still cleaning out,” he said.