Behold. Apple TV using a composite monitor. Thanks to KFM82, who suggested that connecting a standard RCA cable between a TV and one of the three component jacks would produce a monochrome image on a regular composite TV. It did. Not great for TV watching, but excellent for testing out an Apple TV box during modding.

I’m running out for the weekend, so I have to make this short. Sorry! Earlier, I crashed my Apple TV. (You know, blue screen of death, but Apple style, so there’s a nice Apple logo to look at).

When this happens, you need to run Finder to reboot and restart properly. But I’d swapped Finder out with QuickTime. So I had to take my hard drive back to my mini, switch Finder back to itself, put the drive back into AppleTV and then go through the whole “Select Language”, “Can you see the Apple Logo 720 p” routine. Once this was done, I was able to ssh over to my baby, kill ripstop, dekext Watchdog, and put QuickTime back as my Finder.

Summary: Apple didn’t kill my Apple TV. I’m guessing I did it myself with my relentless testing of software and plug-ins. If you mess up, make sure Finder is available for your reboot. Hopefully soon, someone will come up with a USB flash drive fix that doesn’t require anyone to move hard drives around physically.

Unfortunately, last week Napster changed its download system making it International-unfriendly. So no more International Friday Freebies for the time being.

Apple has just released the 1.2 public beta version of Boot Camp, which will now support booting up into Windows Vista. The new version also includes updated drivers for trackpads, graphics, audio, and iSight cameras, and a new Windows system tray icon for easy access to Boot Camp info.

I’ve heard some mixed reports about how well Vista runs under Boot Camp. If you are using Boot Camp 1.2 with Vista, I’d love to hear about your experience so far. Is Vista humming or crawling?
Drop a line in the comments section and let us know how it’s working for you.

CLIX
The text command line is usually under-appreciated. Even Microsoft recognized it and introduced PowerShell for Windows XP and Vista. However, unless you spent the last decade or more on a UNIX or Linux box (lots of fun, btw), you may not feel comfortable opening Terminal on a Mac to make use of all the power of the command line. Rixstep has a free tool to help you reduce your anxiety and start using the command line with…

CLIX

PhotoInfoEditor
MMI Software’s PhotoInfoEditor is a Mac OS X freeware metadata editor that can edit meta-data (latitude and longitude, location, description, and notes) of photo (JPEG/RAW/Tiff) files. FYI: MMI Software has a regularly updated blog where you can pick up useful information about PhotoInfoEditor as well as their other products.

YALE: IDE for Machine Learning and Data Mining
YALE (Yet Another Learning Environment) is a multi-platform Open Source application that provides a graphical interface for machine learning and data mining. Its feature description page should give you a better idea of what it is capable of.

Ruby 1.8.6
The latest version of the great Ruby scripting language was released on March 12…

Ruby 1.8.6

Ruby is probably best known for being the language used to develop Ruby on Rails. However, the Ruby language itself shouldn’t be ignored even if you are already comfortable and productive with other dynamic languages such as Perl or Python.

Music isn’t the most important thing on my Mac. I don’t store my entire collection on it, nor do I depend on computers for playing music at home. Consequently, I’ve never really devoted much time to checking out the various helper apps available for iTunes.

Which might have been a mistake, because some of them are very helpful indeed. When, for the third time in one morning, iTunes started playing a song whose name I couldn’t remember, I decided I needed something to display basic song information for me, in an unobtrusive manner.

Did it. Finally. This is a screen shot of a live stream from my EyeTV tuner playing back on Apple TV. I’m working on the write-up for Bruce and Mac Devcenter. For the curious, the screen shot was taken as such: /usr/sbin/screencapture -tjpeg ~/sponge.jpg from a ssh session at the Apple TV command line.

Here’s my new favorite thing: Gmail Browser.

It supports Gmail’s built-in shortcuts - well, mostly - I’ve found that in some instances, keyboard input appears to stop working and I have to resort to clicking. But that’s happened in other browsers too.

Gmail might have been suffering some downtime problems in the last week or so, which makes me hesitant to return to it full-time. But I still check a couple of Gmail accounts about once a week, and Gmail Browser makes the job that little bit more pleasant.

One thing that doesn’t work in Gmail Browser is Google Documents & Spreadsheets, but not because of any fault of its own. It’s just that Docs & Spreads does not fully support WebKit yet. Google’s little explanatory note about this is entertaining:

If you are working to fix problems with a specific browser and would like to bypass this check, just add &browserok=true to the end of the Google Docs & Spreadsheets URL. Please note that it is a violation of intergalactic law to use this parameter under false pretences, so don’t let us catch you at it. And, it won’t work very well — really.

Just a quick update here. I’m going insane playing with and hacking the Apple TV. I’m trying to write things up in a clear and coherent way–but please let me know which topics are the ones you want to see first (either by e-mail or leave a comment here). Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

I’ve gotten VLC up and running and am trying to learn all the command-line nuances because using the interface is just a wee bit iffy and I want to be able to automate displaying shows without having to return to a desktop machine. Fortunately, VLC works perfectly with the Apple Remote so you can control playback (and playback volume!) directly from the Living Room/Apple TV side of things. I’m hoping to get live streaming of recording and recorded eyeTV shows up and running later today. Joost is running well (with just a few hesitations) on my 802.11g network, so I’m confident that the eyeTV streaming (for standard, not high def) TV will be able to work with VLC. Having bricked one Apple TV, I don’t have the cash to purchase an Airport Extreme (and I’m not even sure my Intel Mini is “n” capable–any hints on how to find out?), so High Def streaming is going to have to wait a bit.

Finally, proof of gaming on Apple TV. Yes, I’m controlling it over VNC. So it’s kind of a lame gaming example, but there you have it.

One of my interests is electronic notebooks, and how different kinds of note-taking and note-storing software products appeal to different kinds of users. Scientists, in particular, need something to keep track of, and possibly annotate, all the papers they need to read in the course of their work.

Flip Phillips made two posts to Apple’s Scitech mailing list today, outlining his views on a variety of note-management apps that fellow scientists might put to use.

Part 1 looks at Yep, Papers (itself the subject of intense scrutiny recently), and DEVONthink; Part 2 deals with WorkLife, BibDesk, and EndNote.

If you’re looking at note apps, especially for use in academia, Flip’s brief views are well worth a read.

Update: changed from TIFF to JPEG. Thanks for the tip!

Dan over at UneasySilence has hacked the raw floating photos Quartz Composer screen saver. Check it out.

Perhaps the most famous key combination in computing is the notorious "three-finger-salute" that lets you break out of crashed programs. On the Mac, you press Command-Option-Escape; in DOS and Windows, the three keys are Ctrl-Alt-Del.

A few years ago, someone tracked down David Bradley, the IBM engineer who devised the Ctrl-Alt-Del combo, and asked him why he had picked those specific keys. He said that he’d wanted keys that were far enough apart that they couldn’t be pressed accidentally.

Of course, he didn’t realize how often that ejector seat would be used. In later years, Bradley started joking that although he had invented the combination, it was Microsoft that made it popular. (Here’s a funny video of Bill Gates’s reaction.)

I thought about that today after reading about the FlipStart, a new palmtop PC with a tiny keyboard designed to be operated with your thumbs. It was so awkward to press Ctrl-Alt-Del on prototypes that the company combined the three keys into a single button—sorta defeating the purpose.

The FlipStart merges three keys into one Ctrl-Alt-Del button. Reviewers called it an ergonomic nightmare.

Coincidentally, we just published an unusual article about user interface design over at O’Reilly Digital Media. It’s called “Singing With Your Thumbs.”

What are some of your favorite three-finger salutes?

My brother recently switched back to Mac after about 15 years, and left a frustrated voicemail asking for help getting set up. Good thing I called back via Skype: the return call lasted about 90 minutes. After getting nowhere trying to transfer his Windows documents via Ethernet, he had bought some kind of kit listed on the Apple site that does the shuttling over USB.

Three days later (!) his photos, iTunes library, and Microsoft Office documents were on the Mac, but he couldn’t figure out how to open them. I walked him through the “Import to Library” process in iTunes, and he immediately grasped that the importation process worked similarly in iPhoto. He then felt confident enough to set up Address Book and Mail on his own.

With that out of the way, I started thinking it would be great to set up videoconferencing in Skype or iChat. My brother’s new iMac has a webcam built in, but my G5 tower didn’t come with one. Any recommendations? I’d prefer a FireWire cam (maybe a used iSight?) because I have some free FireWire ports, but the USB Ecamm iMage and some Logitech models look interesting.

I’m often looking for ways to improve my home automation system. A few days ago, a post at Hackszine drew my attention to Jesse David Hollington’s article on Bluetooth Proximity Detection on Mac OS X. And more recently, Bruce Stewart wondered how else proximity detection might be used, with Jeff Harrell’s comment about the problematic range of Bluetooth, approximately 40 feet, echoing the problems I’ve had in trying to incorporate Bluetooth into my home automation system.

I quickly learned that using Bluetooth to determine if I am at home (as inferred by the presence of my cell phone) was simply not going work to my satisfaction. The problem was that if I wandered too far from my home office, yet still within my home, the Bluetooth connection would drop and my automation system would decide that I’d left. That’s not such a big deal if all this does is activate your password-protected screen saver; it’s a different story when it causes your home to completely switch operating modes.

Perhaps I should back up a little. One of the cornerstones of my home’s automation is that it behaves differently depending upon who is at home. For example, if someone is home at sunset, inside lights are turned on for them. If the house is empty at sunset, a different set of lights, and the porch light, are turned on instead.

During the middle of the night, if the system detects that someone is walking in the upstairs hallway, the lights in the kitchen are turned on very low, if that’s the direction they’re heading. However, if nobody is at home, and there’s motion upstairs, the house goes into full “intruder alert” mode!

This sort of thing isn’t hard to set up, and it starts to put the smart in “Smart Home,” but it only works correctly if the information about who is currently at home is trustworthy. Yes, it’s “garbage in, garbage out” all over again. I concluded that Bluetooth proximity detection, used for this purpose, would mostly result in “garbage in.”

But after finding out about the intriguing Home Zone application, I was willing to try it again, and this time I had a new idea. Instead of using Bluetooth to figure out if I have departed, I would use it only for determining that I have arrived.

I guess it seems obvious in retrospect, but this realization made all the difference for me. I’ve been playing with the idea for a few days now, and I’m quite pleased so far.

When I leave the house I press a button, located near the front door, that tells the automation system that I’m departing. This is similar to turning on an alarm system and is an easy habit to get into. (In fact, if I’m the last person to leave, it does turn on the alarm system. For full details on how all this works, see “Hack #70-Know Who’s Home” in Smart Home Hacks.)

Normally, when I arrive home I press the button again so the system knows I’m back. Now, I can eliminate that step by using Home Zone (or Salling Clicker , or Proximity, et al). This is accomplished by having the monitoring software execute the following AppleScript when my phone’s Bluetooth signal is detected.


tell application "XTension"

if (status of "Gordon Home") is false then

turnon "Gordon Home"

end if

end tell


This script works by asking XTension, one of the home automation software programs I use, if it believes that I am currently at home. (Represented by the variable “Gordon Home.”) If XTension already knows that I am home, the Bluetooth detection event has offered no new information, so it is ignored.

However, if XTension believes that I am gone, the detection of my phone’s Bluetooth signal is significant, so the variable that tracks my presence is changed. (Which causes other things to happen, depending upon the time of day and other conditions.) When I first got this working it was an almost magical moment; shortly after walking in the front door I heard my computer announce that I had missed four telephone calls while I was gone, and the lights in the entryway turned on by themselves.

For me, the key to successfully using Bluetooth to detect presence, for home automation purposes, is to track only the first appearance of a device, and even then, only in specific contexts. Inferring meaning from the lack of a Bluetooth signal is difficult; there are many reasons why a signal could vanish. But, the arrival of a new Bluetooth device is unlikely to be spurious, and it gives you concrete, actionable information that is easily incorporated into home automation routines.

There are three partitions. One, disk2s2 (400 MB) cannot be mounted. OSBoot is 900MB and contains a mini-OS X installation. Media (35.8GB) contains the AppleTV data and looks almost identical to the file system on an iPod.

Here’s my weekly summary of Freeware, Open Source, and free web services mentioned in my personal blog last week.

Minuteur 4.7.2 Egg Timer and Stopwatch
This Mac OS X freeware may seem a bit light hearted at first…

Minuteur 4.7.2 Egg Timer and Stopwatch

But, I’ve found this kind of little single function utilities useful in the past (haven’t tried this one though). This version was released on Oct. 10, 2006.

TalkShoe (Beta): Web Voice Talk Show Service
I first learned of…

TalkShoe

…when Leo LaPorte and Amber MacArthur switched the format and name of their Inside the Net from a Podcast to a live net talk show called net@nite that is later released as a Podcast. TalkShoe (currently in Beta release like pretty much every other web based service) provides the ability to host similar net talk shows that lets multiple people call in to talk to you during your show.

SilverKeeper 1.1.4: Freeware Mac OS X Backup Software
LaCie (the manufacturer probably best known for their external hard drives) provides a freeware Mac OS X backup application called…

SilverKeeper 1.1.4

SilverKeeper is a freeware application from LaCie that automates backups to external storage devices like hard drives, and other removable storage devices that have IDE, ATA/ATAPI, SCSI, USB, or FireWire interfaces.

Details and picures can be found here at the Make Blog. Reader “Dave” wins the “guess the time of warranty violation” sweepstakes and earns eternal bragging rights via this update post. For the curious I cracked the case about 5 hours after receiving it.

More details and experimentation after the jump…

Hey all you guys in reader land, I could use a hand. I need a 2.5″ disk drive and USB-2 enclosure and I need to get them both quickly and at a reasonable price (i.e. fast, reliable shipping). I need at least 80G for the drive and the enclosure has to be very Macintosh friendly. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

(And yes, this is for the Apple TV. And yes, I do not know why I was convinced it was going to have a 3.5″ drive–which I did have all ready but now can’t use.)

Update: I ended up going to CompUSA, paying far too much, and getting a rotten enclosure. I’m having a lot of trouble with my disk duplication and I think it may be the enclosure–or Apple TV may be using some strange error correction. Dunno. Thanks to everyone for the tips!

According to FedEx, my AppleTV is on FedEx vehicle for delivery, even though the estimated delivery is tomorrow by 10:30 AM. I’m now taking bets as to how soon I’ll be voiding my warranty. Closest guess to the actual warranty violation will win bragging rights and eternal fame. (I’ll update this post with the closest guess.)

This is a work in-progress. I will continue to update it.

Apple TV User’s Guide [PDF, 1.1MB]

Apple TV Safety and Regulatory Compliance Information Manual [PDF, 573 KB]

Networking

Where do I find the Media Access Control address? On the Apple TV, select Settings -> About. You can also find the Wireless and Ethernet network IDs on the UPC label on the Apple TV case.

How do I set the name of my computer for AppleTV? In iTunes, open Preferences, click General, enter the computer name in the “Shared Name” field, and then click OK.

How do I check to see if the AppleTV is properly connected to my network? On the Apple TV, select Settings->Network and make sure that you see an IP address listed for your unit.

What ports are used by AppleTV? TCP 3689 communicates with iTunes. UDP port 5353 finds networked computers via Bonjour. TCP ports 80 and 443 communicate securely with the iTunes Store over the internet.

Can I stream using 802.11b? No. You need 802.11g/n to stream.

Can I sync using 802.11b? Yes. You can sync with 802.11b/g/n and over a wired Ethernet connection.

How do I connect AppleTV to my network? Select the network from Network -> Configure Wireless or Network -> Configure TCP/IP. If you’re not using DHCP for your TCP/IP network, you may have to manually enter your IP address, subnet mask, router and DNS addresses.

More FAQs after the jump…

Apple is failing in Open Source and Free Software. It fails to understand the movement, its principles, and how to leverage it to make money. This would not be such an issue if Apple had not based their operating system OS X on Free Software in the form of NeXT/FreeBSD. Since OS X has taken its place amongst the other flavors of UNIX it is expected to behave as a responsible citizen in this community. Apple has failed to do so and its behavior is getting worse resulting in loss of goodwill from the community. If you think loss of goodwill is negligible, as apparently Apple does, you should consider its implications, many of which are already being realized in the ecosystem that Apple lives in. Not least of these is security and that is no trivial issue. Apple’s reputation has already been damaged by the Month of Apple Bugs and in its attempt to whitewash security issues that were published last summer. Fixing these problems was what the last, huge, processor-eating “security update” was all about. Now security researchers are wary of Apple and zero-day exploits may be published before fixes are ready, potentially exposing Apple’s customers to remote exploits and loss of data.

Panic are up to something, and they need your help.

Daniel Jalkut has released crossword helper Black Ink 1.0.

BlogMate is “the missing blogging palette in TextMate, kinda”, and comes with some warnings:

If you are looking for something more full-featured, I highly recommend Red Sweater Software’s excellent MarsEdit application. MarsEdit is mature, polished, full-featured, and well-supported. Four things that BlogMate is not. Yet.

Walt Mossberg on AppleTV:

We’ve been testing Apple TV for the past 10 days or so, and our verdict is that it’s a beautifully designed, easy-to-use product that should be very attractive to people with widescreen TV sets and lots of music, videos, and photos stored on computers. It has some notable limitations, but we really liked it. It is classic Apple: simple and elegant.

How to stop the eject button delay that was introduced in 10.4.9 affecting your use of the Control+Eject shortcut for bringing up the Shutdown dialog.

The English county of Somerset is not noted for its high crime rate, but if you’re ever using your Mac in public there, be careful.

And finally for today, another great British widget:

Mike Bremford’s Tube scrapes information from the official site of London’s Underground system, providing not-far-off real-time information about delays and line closures.

Red Sweater Software continues its resuscitation of dormant applications (most recently, MarsEdit) with today’s announcement that they are taking over development of Advenio’s MacXword.

Called Black Ink, this crossword downloading and solving program should be an excellent addition to Red Sweater’s stable of apps.

New licenses are $24.95, but they have provided a special upgrade price for existing MacXword owners.

Like I said before, I’m really glad to see an independent developer keeping great programs going.

Now if only I could get someone to make Ancient Art of War Tiger-compatible. ;)

I just read Louis Gray’s post How Smart Are Your Playlists? over on the The Apple Blog, where he describes the Smart Playlists he uses in iTunes. I have a large music library in iTunes and have recently been playing around with Smart Playlists myself, and find they can really enhance one’s listening experience. I especially liked Louis’s idea of creating a “neglected” Smart Playlist to help him hear music that he would otherwise be missing.

In “The Neglected”, I feature songs where “Last played is not in the last 6 months”, with Live updating checked. Sometimes, this playlist can fill to the point where I have 12 hours or more to go through before it is empty. But if I make “The Neglected” my starting point, I’m sure not to be repeating songs I heard recently.

I’m going to go create a playlist of my own neglected tunes, which sounds like a much more effective way of getting to listen to all of the music I add to iTunes than my previous method (which was to try and regularly visit my “Added in the last 3 months” Smart Playlist.) I should probably also consider implementing something like Louis’s “Bad ROI” playlist, which tracks tunes with a low number of play counts for possible weeding out.

What are your favorite Smart Playlists?

One of the brilliant things about a TiVo is that it watches all that TV for me that I intended to watch but never got around to sitting down to view. (Some people call this the “TiNo” phenomenon.) It’s very comforting to know that my PVR took the time to record those shows because it demonstrates what excellent intentions I had as a person. I have a season pass to Friday Night Lights that I consistently fail to watch–but my TiVo does. Somehow this makes me feel like a better, more cultured person.

And when my TiVo runs out of space, it kindly deletes all those back episodes for me and I have the satisfaction that the shows aren’t cluttering up my unit’s hard drive forever.

iTunes is another matter entirely. I’ve downloaded all sorts of crap shows–from that Danny Bonaduce one to “My Bare Lady” (thought it would be a giggle) to “Learn with Sesame”–thinking that I or my husband or my kids would eventually get around to watching them. And we don’t. We live in a BSG-Heroes-Spongebob-Mythbusters world, and there never really seems to be any time to catch up with the “maybe I’ll try out an episode” shows that iTunes offers for free every Tuesday.

So on Sunday, I was backing up my computer and I really took note of all those gigabytes of iTunes unwatched freebies, as well as several shows that I downloaded and paid for because I’d missed them on TV and wanted to catch up on, but didn’t really feel like watching again.

I have no problem tossing magazines. If I pick up a magazine to read at lunch or on an Airplane or while waiting at a Doctor’s office, I don’t mind throwing away the $2.00 or $3.50 I’ve invested after finishing reading it. Sometimes I let it age on the coffee table or in the bathroom for a few weeks, but it still gets tossed or occasionally bundled up and donated to the local pediatrician’s office.

So why did I feel like a murderer on Sunday when I trashed that episode of Bones where Brennan gets blown up after dancing in Bones’ apartment? And all those free, unwatched garbage shows that I deleted? (And yes, I’m looking at you, Real Housewives of Orange County.) Why did I feel I was doing something wrong and irrevocable.

Somehow it seems to be an iTunes thing. When I buy music at the Zune store, I know that my license extends to 3 or 4 more downloads of the same item. I don’t need to keep copies on my computer unless I want to. But Apple’s somewhat draconian “download it once and then it’s all your responsibility” approach to digital purchases makes me want to hang onto certain items with more vigor than they’re really worth.

Sure, Apple will replace your entire library in the event of a catastrophic loss. Once. And should such a day happen, my Housewives of Orange County, and my Danny Bonaduce, and my “My Bare Ladies” will be there, ready to come back to life in the worst zombie fashion, ready for me to stake them through the heart once again. But are these items and even more worthy items like “Bones” worth keeping around on recordable DVDs or hard drive storage? Probably not.

My problem is that I have to start thinking about these digital assets like like my TiVo. My TiVo knows when to trash those old episodes of Friday Night Lights. It doesn’t hang onto them saying, “I’ll get around to watching them eventually because the show is really, really well made.” I’ve got to learn that lesson. Certain digital assets–family photos, movies, recordings over the baby monitor of my kids singing their ABCs in bed–are forever. The pilot of that awful Vampire series “Blade” is not.

The review is here

Michael Amorose has assembled a list of Fun Unix commands. Don’t miss his Refurb-on-tron either.

MacASCIIinvaders is nice, but if I’m honest, Desktop Tower Defense is nicer and much more fun.

Forgedit is a new, free programmer’s editor for OS X. Nice tabbed interface, and customizable keyboard shortcuts for every menu command too. It’s small and lightweight and might come in handy for some of you. Let me know if you find it useful.

Andrew Grygus writes passionately about the failings he sees in Windows Vista, but concludes with this curious statement:

I find it hard to recommend Apple - applications are limited and it’s a closed proprietary environment run by a person of proven greed. It seems like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

My Apple TV is currently sitting in Shenzhen, China, where the package was apparently received after the FedEx cutoff. Weighing in at 7.1 kgs, the package is “In Transit”.

Click image to open at full resolution.

Our friends at Make just noticed this write-up of how to use a nifty little OS X app that detects Bluetooth proximity (not surprisingly, called Proximity) to create custom Applescipt-based actions based on when a user with a Bluetooth-enabled device comes in or out of range of a Mac’s bluetooth sensor.

Jesse David Hollington’s post describes how he uses Proximity to secure his Powerbook when he’s away from the machine, as well as how to keep his OS X Address Book connected and to iSync his phone whenever it comes back within proximity of his Mac.

Activating the screen saver and performing an iSync are both tasks that are trivial to perform via Applescript. Reconnecting the Address Book and enabling and disabling the screen saver password protection is considerably more complicated, however, as I quickly discovered.

I should point out that most of what I am documenting here has been gleaned from various corners of the web, and therefore most of the ideas are not specifically my own. However, I decided to try and document some of this in one place in order to hopefully save others the several hours of searching that it took me to put it all together.

If you would like to implement the screen-saver security feature based on Bluetooth proximity, go check out Jesse’s post, he presents all of the code and details needed to pull that off.

This reminds me of some telecom hacks I’ve seen recently using Asterisk and Bluetooth proximity detection. With the latest version of Asterisk, you can configure it so that your office phone detects the presence of your cell phone’s Bluetooth signal, so you can achieve things like having your office number automatically forward its calls to your cell phone when you leave the office, or turn off the forwarding when it detects you are back.

Neat stuff. What kind of Bluetooth proximity hacks would you like to see?

Tracking numbers and order status information have been e-mailed to customers. So far, no units have been sighted at any Apple Stores. I’ve called around to the local retailers, who haven’t received any. They’re expecting theirs “by the end of the week”.

The list of WWDC sessions is up, and here are some of the ones that caught my eye:

Discovering Wiki and Group Services in Leopard Server

Leopard Server delivers powerful collaboration and group communication tools to help you define, create, and administer groups in your organization–whether you are a new business just launching, or a workgroup in a large enterprise. The new Wiki in Leopard Server lets you gather, tag, and coordinate resources, people, and assets.

Before Christmas, my mind was very nearly made up. Shortly after the Macworld Expo, I would buy myself a new Mac, my first Intel machine.

I haven’t bought it, though. And the longer I wait, the more I think I’ve made the right decision. Because some really meaty Mac news is long overdue from Apple, and I won’t want to be in the position of buying the an “old” machine just before a newer one is announced. And I’m certain that I’m not the only one feeling this way.

My inclination is towards a MacBook Pro, as recommended by many friends. But I have a feeling that an update for this machine is coming soon, perhaps something radical like a new case design.

So I’m holding on for a bit longer before I buy. And besides, this old G4 PowerBook has a lot of life in it yet…

Nine Inch Nails has made available the multitrack session for the song Survivalism as a GarageBand file download (March 13 Current Entry). The track comes in a 104MB Zip archive file.

I first unpacked it on my first generation Mac mini. Sure, this was not a great idea. But, I wondered what would happen. The answer? Not much. I got the too many tracks message after a few seconds into the song. So, next stop, my 2GHz MacBook. Ah, much better.

The nin.com website says that you will be able to upload your mixes back up to the site soon. So, rev up GarageBand, and remix Survivalism.

Sometimes, I can’t help playing the “what-happens-if-I-do-this” game on my Mac, and more often than not, there are neat little features to be found that are scarcely documented, if at all. Here a two finds of this kind:

You will already know that command-dragging the title bar of a window that’s in the background lets you move that window without making it active, i.e., without bringing it to the front. However, this also works for re-sizing: by command-dragging the window’s bottom-right corner, you can resize the window while it stays in the background. Very useful alternative to moving the whole window if you need to get a quick view of what’s behind it.

Another well-known feature of OS X’s UI is that you will see the folder hierarchy that leads to a Finder window’s contents when you command-click the title of the window. This works similarly in most document-based applications like TextEdit, Preview, etc., but some apps use this feature in unusual ways: command-click on the title of a Safari window, and you will see the URL’s hierarchy, instead.

Do you know any applications that do unusual things when command-clicking on their windows’ titles?

Interest in the messaging service Twitter is clearly on the rise (see this Wall Street Journal article if you’re not already familiar with it), and while most people are figuring out how to use Twitter for its intended purpose–social networking–I’d like to share a few notes on my more prosaic experiment of using it as part of my home automation system.

Home automation enthusiasts, particularly those of the hobbyist bent, have come up with several clever methods of having their systems send them notifications of household events when they’re away from home . For example, the home automation system might send a message to their cell phone when the kids arrive home after school, or when the UPS delivery person has left a package at the front door. (For more about the usual methods for doing this, and other examples, see my MacDevCenter article: Macintosh Home Monitoring. )

Why Twitter?

I’ve been experimenting with using Twitter for automated notifications, and so far I really like the advantages it provides over other techniques.

First, Twitter supports several methods of delivering messages (which are called “tweets” in Twitter-speak). A tweet can be received via SMS to your cell phone, via several instant messaging services, by visiting a web page, or by using specialized apps such as the terrific Twitteriffic.

The best thing about this flexibility is that the recipient chooses how they want to receive their tweets, and changing this setting is easily done “on the fly.” The sender of the message doesn’t need to know which delivery mechanism is currently active, it’s all handled by Twitter. This simplicity is a boon for home notifications which typically either take a shotgun approach and send notifications to several places at once (home, office, and cell phone email), or try to guess (based on time of day or other data) what the best destination might be. Letting the recipient determine where they want to receive messages, at any given moment, makes delivery much simpler and more reliable.

Finally, Twitter has a simple HTTP-based interface for sending messages. Instead of having to script an email program, or an SMS utility, sending a tweet is as easy as having your home automation system open a URL.

My First Implementation

This is an example of a notification sent to me, from my XTension-based home automation system, indicating that someone has been on my front porch.

Here’s how the same message appears on my personal Twitter web page:

When I’m away from a computer, I change my Twitter preferences to send tweets to my phone, instead. Twitter can also relay messages using iChat (AIM), GoogleTalk, LiveJournal, and Jabber but I’ve had mixed success with the reliability of delivery over IM systems, so I don’t use those options.

Getting Started

You’ll need two Twitter accounts. A personal account, for yourself, which you’ll use to receive the messages sent by your home. If you want to receive messages via SMS and IM, you’ll have to configure, and confirm, those details in your Twitter account settings.

The second Twitter account is for your home automation to use when sending the notifications. When you create this account, you will probably want to select the “protect my updates” option so that your notifications aren’t available to the public at large. Then, add your personal account as a “friend” of the home’s account so that you can receive the messages.

Implementation Details

Here’s how I currently have this working. Some of these details are specific to XTension, one of the home automation applications I use, but the concept is adaptable to other systems. (See Hacking the Hack, below.)

When a visitor comes to my front door, XTension receives a signal from a motion detector. (Readers of Smart Home Hacks will find the full details about how the visitor is detected beginning on page 271.)

The motion detector activity causes XTension to run a script that constructs a message telling me what happened, and copies the message to the Description field of a unit called “Notify Twitter.” (This is one method of passing variables in XTension.)

In the example below, which shows XTension’s Master List window, the Description of the Notify Twitter unit has been set by this script to “Somebody is at the front door!”

Next, the motion detector’s script sets the value of Notify Twitter to “On,” which causes the script attached to the Notify Twitter unit to execute. This script does the following:

1. Retrieves the message text from the Description field.
2. Formats the message and Twitter login information.
3. Sends the message and login info to Twitter’s status API.

Here’s the script, which borrows some code from Tilman for using curl to send a Twitter status message:

set theMessage to description of me

set TwitterID to "yourID"
set TwitterPassword to "yourPassword"

set TwitterLogin to TwitterID & ":" & TwitterPassword

set TwitterStatus to quoted form of ("status=" & theMessage)

set results to do shell script "curl --user " & TwitterLogin & " --data-binary " & TwitterStatus & " https://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"

You’ll need to enter the login and password for your home’s Twitter account, as noted in the script.

Shortly after running this script, the message is delivered via Twitter, as illustrated earlier. It’s a simple as that.

Hacking the Hack

There are several ways in which this script can be used and adapted. For example, I’m using a variant of it with PhoneValet, to send CallerID information when someone calls my office phone. (See Growling PhoneValet for a starting point if this interests you.)

If I had a security camera on my front porch, it’s easy to imagine including a URL, in the tweet, that would lead to a snapshot taken at the time the motion was detected. Although, depending on the length of your URLs, you might need to utilize something like TinyURL to shorten it before sending. Twitter limits the size of tweets to 140 characters.

If you use Indigo, another Mac-based home automation application, the above script will work just a few modifications. Instead of passing the message text using the Description field, use an Indigo global variable.

If you use MisterHouse, an open source home automation application for Mac, Linux, and Windows, you’ll need to adapt this technique only slightly, replacing the AppleScript portions with Perl.

I’m continuing to tweak and adapt the basic idea here to new applications, if you have a suggestion or enhancement, please let me know what you come up with. Thanks, and have fun tweeting!

If video exported from your iPod is playing on your PAL TV in black & white, you probably need to set your video output settings to PAL instead of NTSC. For whatever reason, I’ve been contacted by several different people about this problem in the last month.

Hope this helps.

Welcome to this week’s edition of Friday Napster Freebies. These un-DRMed MP3 files are free for a limited time and can be downloaded from just about any country. Enjoy!

“Time2hitdaclub (Explicit)” by 8Ball
Representing half of legendary Memphis rap duo 8Ball & MJG, this 8Ball solo outing does the legend proud. All downtempo boom, hairy synths, and lyrics devoted to everyone’s favorite activity after a long week, it’s a track tailor-made for your TGIF moment.

“September Falls” by The Little Heroes
Often compared to groups like The Stills and Death Cab for Cutie, these alt rockers are making a name for themselves thanks to their lush melodies and radio-friendly sensibility. Hear for yourself what the fuss is about with this track from their new album, Cinematic Americana.

“Congratulations (Explicit)” by Defari
With a love for both music and education, this former high school teacher with a master’s degree in history has appeared on albums by Xzibit, Tha Alkaholiks, Dilated Peoples, and Dr. Dre in addition to three albums of his own. This is the latest single from Street Music.

“Get Steady” by Jonny Lives!
Jonny Dubowsky is an NYU literature and philosophy grad. He also fronts a rock band that’s knee-deep in the same music scene that spawned The Strokes and Interpol. Today’s download is the single from their debut album, Get Steady.

“Into Pieces” by Roark
Though he’s worked for a Fortune 500 company, this singer/songwriter from New Jersey says he’d rather be a struggling musician. Good choice, considering he’s got perfect pitch and well-honed melodic instincts. Today’s download is from his debut album, Break of Day.

“Roll to Me” by Jeff Baker
Hailed as an “important, emerging new talent” on the All About Jazz site, Jeff Baker won the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival’s vocal soloist competition when he was only 16. Get a taste of his wide-ranging talent with today’s free download.

“Burn” by Amber Rhodes
“Country music is all about the stories,” says this 25-year-old crossover artist, whose writing reflects her Lexington, Kentucky roots as well as time spent honing her skills in the Big Apple. Hear the result on this track from her album, Goodbye Yesterday.

Here’s my weekly summary of Freeware, Open Source, and free web services mentioned in my personal blog last week.

GPSPhotoLinker
GPSPhotoLinker is a freeware app for Mac OS X that pretty much does what its name implies. From the website: GPSPhotoLinker can be used to save location and GPS position data to a photo. The latitude and longitude recorded by your GPS unit while you were taking photos can be linked, and saved, to the photos. GPSPhotoLinker automatically enters the city, state, and country annotations into the metadata. I still think of myself as a relative Mac newbie (first Mac was the 1st generation Mac mini). So, my question to Mac expert

Roadnav 0.17: Multi-OS GPS Navigation System
This, I think, is a rarity… A multi-OS (Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows) Open Source GPS navigation application.

Roadnav 0.17

Roadnav can obtain a car’s present location from a GPS unit, plot street maps of the area, and provide verbal turn by turn directions to any location in the USA. Roadnav uses the free TIGER/Line files from the US Census Bureau to build the maps, along with the GNIS state and topical gazetteer data from the USGS to identify locations.

The current version was released on Feb. 24.

Mozilla Camino 1.0.4 Web Browser for Mac OS X
Although Firefox is available and works just fine on a Mac, there is also a Mozilla Mac-specific browser project. The latest version just was released today (March 8).

Camino 1.0.4

I Firefox nearly exclusively on my Mac (I rarely fire up Safari). This is a good fit for me since I bounce between Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. But, since I haven’t tried Camino since somewhere around the 0.9 release, I think I should give it another try sometime soon.

GrandCentral: Free Net Voice Mail Service
I haven’t tried this free web voicemail service…

GrandCentral

However, a number of friends have and say good things about it. One of the interesting features GrandCenral offers is a WebCall Button (free during the beta period) that lets people leave messages for the website’s owner without revealing the called number.

Should I place a GrandCentral WebCall Button on this site? Why would anyone want to leave voicemail for a site like this one (not a social network site, etc.)? Let me know what you think.

Tumblr.com: A Micro-blog? Blog-ette? Something Else?
Tumblr.com (no “E” as with other Web 2.0-ish site names). The free web service’s slogan is: Tumblelogs are like blogs with less fuss. You might say, well any blog can be maintained with less fuss using any of the various blogging services. And, I tend to agree. But, Tumblr makes it easy to perform common blogging tasks in a single minded way: Add a photo (from desktop or phone), add a link to an interesting web site, add a video feed from some video website, etc.

Visiting Seattle for a Week: Check out my TumbleLog
I’m flying to Seattle on Sunday (Mar. 11) and will spend the week there attending the Microsoft MVP Summit. I’m planning to update this blog while visiting Seattle. But, hang in there if I don’t post as frequently (daily) as usual.

Check out my Tumblr.com TumbleLog (read the previous blog item about Tumblr.com). I’m planning to update it at least a couple of times a day with cameraphone photos while in Seattle.

See you on the net!

I’ve owned my Series 1 TiVo since around ‘99 or ‘00. The little guy is still ticking away. It’s on its third hard drive (started out with 14G), hasn’t had a working warranty since shortly after its purchase (voided it early, voided it often), and has long, long passed the cost/benefit inflection point for its lifetime service.

I’m going to keep using that sucker until it drops dead, which heaven willing, will not be for a long, long time.

So recently I looked into upgrading to a High Def TiVo. After checking out (and nearly passing out at) the price, and checking out the features, I passed. I decided to build my own TiFaux with a Mac mini, an eyeTV hybrid, and AppleTV. I just couldn’t see where the near-thousand-dollars of cost would be worth it, even with the Series-1 upgrade discount.

Still, there are many things I love about my TiVo–things I don’t get with my TiFaux. Here are a few of the more important ones off the top of my head.

I’ve been thinking of buying a Bluetooth mouse for my MacBook for a while now to let my MacBook be dongle-less when using a wireless mouse (I use a regular RF Microsoft wireless mouse right now). So, I decided to buy the relatively new Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 that is a Bluetooth mouse that also has PowerPoint controls on the bottom of the mouse as well as a laser pointer at the front off it. It seemed like a good combination of features for me. The box did not indicate Mac compatibility but its product web site mentioned something about how its magnifier works under Mac OS X. This seemed somewhat promising.

I’m using the Presenter Mouse 8000 with the MacBook now. But, all is not as you might expect. Here’s what I did…

The documentation does not talk about setting up the mouse for either Windows or Mac OS X. So, it was no help. The CD that came with the mouse included a Mac OS X DMG file to install. That was a good sign. I installed it and rebooted as directed. Then, I brought up Systems Preferences, went into Bluetooth settings and tried to detect and pair it with the mouse. I tried this several times (including going to the Bluetooth settings menu through the Keyboard and Mouse settings area). Unfortunately, it did not seem to find the mouse no matter what I did (and, yes, the mouse power switch was on). Finally, I turned off the MacBook’s integrated Bluetooth radio and plugged in the Bluetooth USB dongle that came with the mouse. The mouse started to work immediately without any configuration. So, much for the dongle-less Mouse idea (yes, it would have been safer to buy an Apple bluetooth mouse).

I brought up Microsoft Office 2004’s PowerPoint next to test it with the mouse. Unfortunately, it PowerPoint controls on the bottom of the mouse do not work with PowerPoint for the Mac. Surprisingly, the volume control buttons do work.

The product’s one saving grace is that its USB dongle is not in the same odd wide shape as the regular Microsoft notebook mouse that partially blocks other USB devices from being plugged into the MacBook’s other USB port. So, I may end up using it as my primary MacBook mouse. But, it does not get me the dongle-less state I was searching for and the PowerPoint features aren’t any use on my Mac.

A friend called the other day. She works at a web development company where most things are done on Windows, but a lonely eMac is kept sitting in a corner to ensure that the sites they produce look good in Mac browsers.

My friend had downloaded a new version of Firefox for OS X and was trying to install it.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I’ve downloaded it and got a dmg file on the desktop. I opened that but now I’m really confused.”

What my friend was looking at was this:

The death of US Analog TV is scheduled to take place on the 19th of February, 2009. After that date, all US TV programming will be broadcast digitally. AOL reports that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration will offer every US household up to two $40 coupons that residents can apply to purchasing set-top converter boxes that will translate digital signals into analog format, so people can continue to watch their TVs using free over-the-air signals.

The article suggests that the NTIA plans to offer up to 33,750 coupons. That’s just a wee bit short of the 73 million TVs in America–even if most of those TVs are already hooked up to cable or satellite.

My parents and most of my relatives and friends are completely unaware of the upcoming analog-to-digital revolution. I wonder how well this NTIA plan will help them make the transition.

So I decided to give the new QuickTime 7.1.5 AppleTV export format a whirl. I wanted to find out what kind of size and bitrate would be produced by this QuickTime preset and see what kind of conversion times we’d be talking about.

I needed something pretty high quality to begin with so I started off in EyeTV with a relatively small (7 minute, 760 MB) High-Def recording. As you might recall from earlier articles in this series, EyeTV stores video as raw MPEG-2 transport streams. You cannot read these directly into QuickTime Pro, so you need a good quality intermediate format particularly because you cannot export directly to AppleTV in the current (2.3.3) version of EyeTV. I decided to export to 720p HDVideo as a first step and then use QuickTime to convert for AppleTV. For the curious, EyeTV’s 720p HDVideo is 1280×720-pixels at 29.97 fps.

I then imported the several gigabyte result into QuickTime Pro and chose File -> Export and choose Movie to AppleTV from the Export pop-up. There are no further options or settings to customize the output. (The Options button is disabled and you can only use Default Settings.) Enter a name and click Save to perform your conversion. The conversion for this clip took over a quarter-hour on my 1.66 GHz Intel Core Dual with 1GB RAM. I gave up and hit “cancel” long before it finished on my aging 733 G4, but we were at over an hour at that point.

The resulting video looked very nice indeed. Clocking in at just under 200MB (about a quarter of the size of the original HD video, and way, way smaller than the intermediate HDVideo video), the quality was excellent. (You can download sample screenshots here.)

Details:

Format. H.264, AAC, 44.1kHz, 29.97fps

Data Rate. 3884.70 kbits/sec

Frame Size. 960 x 540 pixels

“How the vi editor would seem if it has been made by Microsoft”

It’s not exactly safe for work, but I found this animated GIF hilarious.

So I asked the question: is AppleTV going to be a new kind of iPod? Chuq Von Rospach, replying by e-mail, suggested that as an iTunes-slaved appliance, AppleTV will be similar to but in a different class from the iPod. Neither one is meant to be a central processing hub and both serve stored data but they’re used in very distinct ways.

Readers last week will remember my mentioning Journler as a favorite app for journaling and miscellaneous text accretion. Thus it will not be surprising that a new application just announced from the same developer has got me excited: “Lex: Project based informating management”

Lex is Journler but document centered and document based instead of entry centered and single database. The tagline is “project based document management.” The idea is to organize your documents using the same technologies available in Journler but organize them according to completely independent projects with the documents at the center.

Also, Phil has committed to a March 22nd release date for Journler 2.5, come hell or high water, which I would assume means irregular sleep patterns between now and next week. ;) Good times.

Cool tip discovered just now whilst watching a video podcast in iTunes.

I am getting a little jittery here. I’ve just checked the Apple PR archives and it’s true: The last significant Mac news dates August 7th, 2006 when Apple announced Leopard and the MacPros. (The Apple TV is not Mac news, it’s iTunes news.)

That’s 7 months!

Since then: iPod, iPhone, iTunes. Ah, and, before we forget, iMac, MacBook and MacBook Pro each got a slight update.

The MacBook Pro shipped over a year ago in February 2006. The MacBook has been introduced in May 2006, 10 months ago. Each received a small revision, swapping out a pin compatible processor, hardly a major engineering feat. Certainly not worth a special event to introduce.

So where are the great new Mac products Steve keeps talking about?

It’s been almost a decade since Apple introduced a new Mac product category with the iBook. Remember the 4 Squares? iMac, iBook, PowerMac, PowerBook. That was circa 1998 and to this day, Apple has kept more or less inside these 4 squares with Mac products. (There was the Cube, the eMac - both discontinued - and there is the Mac mini - which hasn’t been updated in more than a year and, although cheap, is not very good value for the money if compared to the low end iMac - as notable exceptions.) This has helped Apple to focus and it was good for business, but it leaves out a lot of customer segments. When Apple switched to Intel, it paved the way to target these but has so far chosen not to.

The reason why I bring this up now is that I just discovered that the Intel GMA graphics system in my cute black MacBook can’t handle some of our upcoming products, so I will have to get a better machine for demoing to customers. I do have some ADC hardware assets left over and they expire in April. My only choice now is a MacBook Pro, but I don’t like the idea of carrying around a larger and heavier laptop than my MacBook.

So, for the first time in many years, Apple doesn’t seem to have a product for me. I would love to try the ModBook but it is based on a MacBook with the insufficient graphics.

So, what’s cooking?

Will we forever have to make do with two laptops and two and a half desktops? Will I have to byte the bullet and buy a MacBook Pro? Or will the infamous Great New Mac products make a surprise appearance some day after all?

Computerworld’s Scot Finnie has switched to Macs and OS X after years of using Windows. He’s presently going through the now-familiar pattern of trying out dozens of Mac apps to find the ones he likes.

Scot has begun drafting what he calls the “A-list of Mac software”, apps that he considers the best in each category.

His article makes for an interesting read. Some of the gripes he has with various apps (such as Mail lacking support for rules applied to outgoing messages) are well-known and perfectly valid. Others are a little more controversial. Here’s what Scott has to say about BBEdit:

It’s woefully inadequate for HTML editing. BBEdit is extremely powerful, but I’d rather use the Unix command line than its clunky, sometimes ridiculous user interface. BBEdit continues to be my primary text editor because it does things no other program does, but there’s no way this product is a useful HTML editor. Those of you who are using it that way, you’re using a tool akin to an iron maiden — it’s just painful. Give yourself a break and find something else.

Steve Borsch’s tale of how he swapped his father’s malware-ridden PC for a Mac mini, to make his own life easier, exactly mirrors my own experience.

I made the icons huge so he can see everything, it’s easier to navigate, and the spyware and adware are now a complete non-issue. There’s nothing that he cannot do on this computer and I rarely have to do any remote logging in to fix something.

Some years ago, my mom was given a cheap eMachines PC as a gift. As time went by she got very interested in digital photography, and became a keen web user. But every time I went to visit and sat down in front of the computer, it got slower and slower.

“Colors and Prompts in BASH” is a quick how-to on putting some color and utility into the otherwise austere command line prompt for the popular shell.

Bourne Again Shell offers a lot of power, flexiblity and fun. Many new Unix users do not realize the flexibility of the shell environment; indeed; many new Unix users regard the shell as primitive and too restricted: nothing could be further from the truth. With very little time investment a new Unix user can learn how not to just make their work environment in the shell more productive but even a little fun.

Since bash has been the default shell on Mac OS X for at least a couple of cats now, this guide does the trick for us as well.

At the end, the post links to the mother of all prompt articles, the aptly named “Bash Prompt HOWTO” at faqs.org. Coming in at 140KB and over 17,000 words, this awesome guide will enable you to make all kinds of useful tweaks.

Most Linux systems have a default prompt in one colour (usually gray) that tells you your user name, the name of the machine you’re working on, and some indication of your current working directory. This is all useful information, but you can do much more with the prompt: all sorts of information can be displayed (tty number, time, date, load, number of users, uptime …) and the prompt can use ANSI colours, either to make it look interesting, or to make certain information stand out….

While you’re messing around on the command line, go grab a download of the “new” iTerm beta, version 0.9.5. I say “new” since it was released at the beginning of February, but I didn’t come across it until yesterday. :) Unfortunately, I kinda got distracted and otherwise occupied right about then, so I missed the update. Only been a day, but it seems to be operating better already. I did trash the old 0.9.0 preference and Application Support files before launching, but I don’t know if that was strictly necessary.

(Via rootprompt.org)

Welcome to this week’s edition of Friday Napster Freebies. These un-DRMed MP3 files are free for a limited time and can be downloaded from just about any country. Enjoy! In other news, ever hear of Michael Brennan? Nope, neither had I. Apparently eMusic had this contest where Mr. Brennan made their 100 millionth eMusic download. The Barenaked Ladies composed a song in his honor, which you can download for free from the eMusic site for the next month or so. Like the Napster freebies, it is MP3 without DRM. I’m not sure whether the download works internationally or not, so let me know in the comments.

“Different Than You” by The Exies
Formed in Los Angeles in 1997, The Existentialists have seen the ups and downs of the music industry from touring with Mötley Crüe to losing their record contract after returning from that very tour. Today’s download is a sneak peek at their new album, due out in April.

“Wouldn’t Wanna Go Without You” by Dalminjo
This Norwegian producer, who now has four albums to his credit, cites inspirations including the the synth sounds of Orbital and Masters at Work and the drum ‘n’ bass of 4 Hero. This downtempo track is from his current release, One Day You’ll Dance for Me Tokyo!.

“Ghostriders” by The Rewinds
After opening shows for established acts such as Snow Patrol, Eisley, and My Morning Jacket, this power-pop group from Birmingham, Alabama signed with Universal Records. Today’s download is from their recent self-titled album.

“Heartbreaker’s Hall of Fame” by Sunny Sweeney
Country’s newest starlet realized her calling only after exploring a variety of occupations including dog walking, waitressing, and improv comedy. Hear her do what she does best on this track from her debut album, Heartbreaker’s Hall of Fame.

“Feel the Sway” by Matt Wilson
A lifelong percussion student, this jazz drummer/composer has just delivered his seventh album, The Scenic Route. Wilson was recently voted Downbeat’s “rising star” drummer for the fourth year in a row. Download today’s track and find out why.

“Mojito” by Times 4
This San Francisco jazz quartet provides the perfect sounds to ring in the weekend with this dedication to their favorite libation. Today’s free download and other fresh modern jazz compositions appear on their sophomore album, Relations.

“When We Were Golden” by Crush Luther
Warped Tour audiences may already know the fresh pop/rock sound of this five-piece band from Toronto. With such unexpected influences such as Lyle Lovett and Tom Waits, their self-titled album is already a hit with critics. Hear for yourself on today’s free download.

Slife 1.0: Personal Awareness Browser
I’m a little afraid to install this freeware on my Mac: Slife is a new application for the Mac OS X that lets you visualize and organize your computer activities like never before. Slife observes your every interaction with applications such as Safari, Mail and iChat and keeps tracks of all web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more.

Slife 1.0

It sounds interesting. The price is right (free). But do I really want to know that much about my Mac habits? :-) BTW, please note that this requires Tiger on the Mac.

FreeCol: Colonization Clone (game)
Here’s another Open Source multiplatform game inspired by a Sid Meier game. This time the game is Colonization. And the FOSS game is…

FreeCol 0.5.3

This most recent version was released on Dec. 5, 2006. It is written in Java a requires Java 1.5.0 or newer.

MicroManager: Automated Microscope Control
I haven’t peered into a microscope in many many years. But, check out the description for this Open Source app: MicroManager is an Open Source software package for imaging and control of automated microscopes on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux). Together with ImageJ, a popular image processing package, ?Manager provides a comprehensive imaging solution - comparable to commercially available ones. You can find it linked below:

MicroManager: The Open Source Microscopy Software

Google Apps APIs
I’ll admit this might be a little bit of a stretch for this blog’s topic area. But, what the heck, it’s my blog :-)

Google Apps APIs

So, why mention this web API? I’ve been using Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets web apps quite a bit for the past few months. I’ve even trying, as an experiment, to write an entire article for publication (on another web site) using Google Docs (it is interesting but I think a client-side word processor or editor is faster, btw). If the web is the new computer, then we need to do things like backup Google Docs and Spreadsheets to the PC or Mac (is that a switch or what?).

I apologize in advance for disjointed nature of this post. I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few weeks about how Apple intends you to use AppleTV and my time spent going over the new AppleTV strings in iTunes 7.1 has made me explore some new areas of thought.

It all comes down to this. Apple seems to think that AppleTV is an iPod:

• They display it as part of the iPod store:
  
• The AppleTV strings in iTunes 7.1 show functionality that’s very close to the standard iPod strings: playlists, syncing, movies, songs, photos, etc.
• It’s only got a 40 GB hard drive! For video. Even presumably high-quality video. That’s iPod-levels of space, not media center-levels of space.

More after the jump…

In what is easily the most concise tutorial I’ve seen on this topic so far, Melvin Rivera explains how to enable support for email signing and encryption in Mail.app. All that’s required for basic encryption is to request a personal security certificate and add this to your Mac’s keychain. No need to install additional software or configure anything, as Mail and Address Book support these features out of the box.

Its underlying basics like the concept of public-key cryptography haven’t changed, but email encryption has come a long way in terms of usability: add that certificate to your keychain, and encrypting your emails is as easy as clicking a button. That’s a big change from the early command-line tools, and it makes encryption accessible even to less experienced users. Why, then, is it that so few people actually encrypt their emails?

Consider this: as you may know, standard email is sent along the Internet as plain text, so that anyone with access to one of the computers along which that email travels from sender to recipient could theoretically read what you’re sending. The often-used comparison between an email and a postcard is very appropriate. In the analog world, though, we tend to prefer mailing a letter in a sealed envelope unless we send greetings from our far-away vacations, in which case postcards come in handy to make even the postman envious…

“Postcards” in the digital realm, envelopes in the real world. Where does this discrepancy come from? How about you, dear reader: do you use email encryption? If so, what kind of encryption (i.e., PGP, GPG, S/MIME, …) are you using, and which kinds of messages do you encrypt? And how many of your friends use encryption, too? If you do not use email encryption: is there a specific reason — like difficulty-of-use, lack of trust in the system, etc. — that keeps you from doing this?

Let’s find out what it takes to make email encryption more popular. Or is it already more popular than I think?

P.S.: I learned about Melvin’s article via Hawk Wings.

P.P.S.: For a much more detailed look at encryption and certificates, have a look at FJ de Kermadec’s article “How to Set Up Encrypted Mail on Mac OS X“.

It’s been an incredible two weeks of field testing in beautiful locations. So, which is better: Aperture or Lightroom? Micah Walter says in his sumation, Aperture vs Lightroom - An O’Reilly “Inside Aperture” Field Test, “I really like Aperture, on a number of different levels. I think it’s a well-rounded program that’s much further along in its development than Lightroom is at the moment. Aperture gives me an environment I can really enjoy working in, and one that makes perfect sense to the non-linear way my brain likes to work.”

The Lightroom interface with the Develop module open

Michael Clark sees it differently in his wrap-up, Lightroom vs Aperture - The Results, “A big part of why I chose Lightroom in the first place, and why I will continue to use it for my workflow, is because I came from using Adobe Camera Raw, so I’m comfortable with the sliders. I prefer Lightroom’s simplicity of design and its user interface.”

So which one is for you? I think you’ll have a pretty good idea after reading these two excellent field reports.

A few days ago, Apple has released iTunes 7.1. There’s no doubt that the most important addition is support for AppleTV, but there is also a new full-screen mode for Cover Flow. Album artwork has never looked this good on a computer screen.

An idea that immediately springs to mind: why not let the user flip the cover around to discover what’s on the back? Playlists’s Chris Breen came up with this idea, too:

Now that I can see the front cover in such detail naturally I’d love to turn the cover around and see what’s on the back—or at least flip it around so I can view the tracks on the album and choose the one I want to play while in full-screen Cover Flow view.

Then again, why stop there? You see, the one thing I’ve been missing the most when buying music from the iTunes Store is the album booklet. When listening to a CD, reading up on the record’s background story, the musicians involved, and what went on during the recording session adds a lot to the listening experience. Wouldn’t it be great if you could browse a digitized version of the full CD booklet by flipping through its pages right there in iTunes? Let’s take this one step further and add album navigation via clickable track list entries inside the on-screen booklet, and maybe include some links to websites with more information on the artist, etc., as well. Say hello to your full-featured virtual jewel case shelf!

We will probably see some implementation of this in an upcoming update to iTunes, and I’m very curious to find out just which feature set the Apple engineers will add, and what the UI will look like.

What’s your take on such a feature, and what other things are on your wish list for iTunes’s user interface?

I know they’ve been out for a while now, but this weekend I got my first face-to-face encounter with one of the 24-inch iMacs.

Wow. I hadn’t appreciated quite how huge these things are. It was displayed alongside its smaller brethren, and made them look like pathetic toys. The scale of the screen made me stop and think hard about my ongoing (and unresolved) plans to buy a new Mac this year.

Here is a list (in PDF format) of the localizable AppleTV strings from the 7.1 update of iTunes. There is a whopping amount of stuff (10 pages worth) added to iTunes that’s AppleTV specific. Highlights include support for AppleTV games (presumably along the same lines as iPod games), mounting and ejecting AppleTV, manual versus automatic synching, voice memos, photo album support (Aperture, Photoshop Elements, more), support for the Nike + iPod voice kit (how is that going to work with AppleTV?), calendars & contacts, and AppleTV-compatible video (same as iPod): Download file

Wow! It’s been exactly three years since I purchased my PowerBook. This metal beauty is my first Mac ever, and has forever changed my life for the better. OS X, Cocoa, Mac DevCenter, the Apple Store, and the overall Mac community have been nothing less than incredible. What a great investment!

Woo hoo! AppleTV is nearly here. QT 7.1.5 and iTunes 7.1 are both available via software update.

Using iTunes 7.1, you can now enjoy your favorite iTunes movies, TV shows, music, and more from the comfort of your living room with Apple TV. iTunes 7.1 also supports a new full screen Cover Flow and improved sorting options to let you decide how iTunes should sort your favorite artists, albums, and songs.

Last year, I talked briefly about iPodcasting, by which I mean hooking up an iPod to an A-to-D converter and using iChat AV to broadcast a video over the Internet. Over the last few months, I have found this is something I do pretty regularly and one of the nice tricks I’ve discovered along the way involves sending video to someone who does not have a camera hooked up at their end.

By control-clicking (right-clicking) a buddy’s name, a contextual menu pops up offering the option to invite that person to a one-way video chat. This means that they can watch your video but will not send video back to you in return.

Probably one of the nicest things about a one-way video chat is that when you’re playing a video off your iPod, you don’t have to watch the other person watching your video. You don’t have to see them adjusting their hair, performing nasal maintenance, or any of the other unconscious things people do when they get involved in watching TV as opposed to engaging actively in a social situation. If you plan to iPodcast video, I suggest that your buddy switches off their camera. Do a one-way chat instead.

Update: Brian Sawyer over at HackZine thinks one-way video is a great match to teaching skills like knitting. Thanks Brian!

One of the myths about OS X that pervades among Windows users is “There’s no right-click options, because you can’t right-click on a Mac.”

Well, of course you can right-click on a Mac, if you just plug in a standard USB mouse. Or you can Control-click, or use any of the default clicking-and-tapping arrangements on offer in those new-fangled Mighty Mice. Whatever means you use, a contextual menu is never very far away.

Windows users have all sorts of options to expand what the computer offers them when they right-click, and might think that the same expandability is not available in OS X. It’s easy, though, thanks to Automator.

Ever since Tiger was released, I’ve tinkered with ideas for Automator-based contextual menus. None of the workflows I’ve created has ever been very complex (most of them are just two or three actions long), but several have been incredibly useful. Especially because they can be saved as Finder plugins, and therefore made available in every right-click contextual menu that appears.

Ah, interruptions. These days, when the phone rings or someone butts in, I hit the F13 key on my Mac. If music is playing, iTunes smoothly fades it down to silence and pauses itself. After the coast is clear, I hit F13 again and the Mac asks what volume I’d like playback to resume at. Hit Return and the music fades back up. The effect is more pleasing than simply stabbing the Mute key, and it means I don’t lose my place. Further, being able to enter a volume directly is often nicer than messing with the volume up/down keys.

Launch the script when iTunes is playing, and you’re prompted to enter a new volume level. The default is 0, creating a fadeout.

It’s all done through this AppleScript I assembled from snippets at OSX Hints and Doug’s AppleScripts, plus some experimentation. I mapped it to the F13 key using the no-longer-available LumaCode Key Xing, but it should work fine from other AppleScript launchers.

I tend to go through phases when it comes to the programs I do my writing in. Everything from bloated word processors to the geekiest of text editors will at one point or another have me in its throes.

What I’ve found recently is that as my writing life is fragmenting into a myriad of different projects, my writing toolbox has grown to encompass several different programs at the same time. Unconsciously at first, now on purpose, I’ve begun using several individual applications as distinct writing “areas,” where before I would likely have been using only one or two apps.

For example, I’ve contracted my use of favorite journaling program Journler by Philip Dow from being a catch-all repository for blogging, fiction, research, and personal journal to “just” the personal journal.

Journler has blog-editing capabilities in its current version 2.0.2, but I had some difficulties getting some of my more specialized site configurations to work (Drupal, especially); I eventually got the blog authoring app MarsEdit to work.

As I mentioned here recently, MarsEdit was handed over from Brent Simmons at Ranchero to Daniel Jalkut at Red Sweater. I’m looking forward to seeing what advancements Daniel makes, but for the time being MarsEdit has become my blogging environment, from which I post to ten different sites. Version 2.5 of Journler is in beta, tentatively scheduled to be released mid-March and promising a host of great improvements, so I might revisit this arrangement soon.

Simple writing isn’t the only necessity for me — research and “knowledgebase building” is another activity where a specialized application like Gus Mueller’s VoodooPad becomes invaluable. The ease with which a wiki can enable accumulating and cross-relating of info is awesome, whether it’s for administrative procedures at work or as a mini-encyclopedia for my latest fictional world. Powerful stuff.

The super-popular TextMate by Allan Odgaard has become my great all-around coding environment, for everything from HTML to Python. And thanks to the “Edit in TextMate” addition, I can pull text from just about any Cocoa app and edit it in TextMate.

Mere outlines in OmniOutliner is the least I can create — organizing and brainstorming is what I love doing in this program. And I can’t wait to check out the upcoming productivity app OmniFocus.

I haven’t purchased one yet, but there are a couple of apps I’m trying out for writing fiction — so far, I’m enjoying Scrivener more, but Avenir is still making my decision difficult.

GUI Phase

This is definitely a GUI phase I’m going through. I’ve spent time in CLI phases, with pretty much everything going through Vim.

What I’m finding rather amusing about all these programs is a tendency for at least some of them to move toward a common set of features and technologies. Wiki-like links. Smart folders. Full screen modes. Tabs sprouting everywhere, even in Vim!

But given this, why shouldn’t I keep it all in one application? Wouldn’t that be more efficient?

Efficiency

Well, efficiency isn’t always the most important thing, especially with all this computing power at my fingertips. Taking that old-school limitation away, why not run six apps instead of one?

The way I’m operating now is almost like the Contexts from Getting Things Done — having discrete repositories for different kinds of writing helps me to focus.

What I won’t say is that this is the best way to operate for me, forever and ever. I’m sure in six months or a year, I’ll be in some new phase, maybe doing all my “writing” via podcast. ;)

Welcome to this week’s edition of Friday Napster Freebies. These un-DRMed MP3 files are free for a limited time and can be downloaded from just about any country. Enjoy!

“Love Fades” by Amnesty
Providing a counterpoint to early Parliament, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Sly & The Family Stone, this relatively obscure Indianapolis outfit’s previously unreleased early ’70s recordings, now available for the first time, bring a heavy funk all their own. Get a taste with this free download.

“Death of Me” by Tony Lucca
Despite being named the Best Male Singer/Songwriter at the 2001 L.A. Music Awards and opening for such acts as *NSYNC and Marc Anthony, this guitar-playin’ bard has kept a level head. Today’s free download is from his fourth album, Canyon Songs.

“Against Myself” by Joel Kroeker
On a quest to expand the boundaries of pop music, this well-traveled songwriter from Winnipeg has released his sophomore album, Closer to the Flame, which includes this insightful tune about seeking inner harmony.

“Magic City” by 2XL
This twin-brother rap duo has overcome childhood adversity and is now climbing the charts, thanks to this track produced by hitmaker Scott Storch. It’s the lead single from their debut album, Neighborhood Rapstar.

“I Love This Game” by Master P
If you’re a fan of professional basketball, you’ve definitely heard this ode to the game by the No Limit rap mogul, who also happens to be a former NBA player. Downloading today’s track will help you root for your favorite team between games.

“Peoples” by Sabotawj
Hailing from the rich and storied underground hip-hop scene of San Diego, CA, Sabotawj’s mission is to “bring the originality back to the culture.” Check out today’s free download from his new album Key 2 Da City.

“Getting Clean in the Dirty South” by Sparks The Rescue
These teenage phenoms have been rocking shows all over Maine and New Hampshire, sharing stages with contemporaries such as Hawthorne Heights, Saosin, and A Change of Pace. Today’s free download is from their five-track EP, The Secrets We Can’t Keep.

Here’s a summary of Mac Freeware & Free & Open Source Software (F/FOSS) discussed last week in my personal blog.

MediaFork 0.8.0b1
According to comments on the HandBrake site, this…

MediaFork 0.8.0b1

…release is authorized fork of HandBrake and that the two projects intend to join forces sometime in the future. Like HandBrake, MediaFork is an Open Source DVD to MPEG-4 converter. The site says it is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. However, as far as I can tell only the Mac OS X version is currently available for download.

Blender 2.43: 3D Modeling & Animation
The Open Source multiplatform (Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows) 3D modeling and animation software…

Blender 2.43

…got both an upgrade and a new site on Feb. 18. The announcement page only talks about the website :-). But, it looks like you can see what’s new in the 2.4 point release on…

this feature list page.

Flip4Mac(tm): Use Windows Media Files on Your Mac
Microsoft stopped providing Windows Media Player for the Mac a while ago. Fortunately, they made some sort of agreement to provide the play only version of Telestream’s…

Flip4Mac

…that lets you play Windows Media audio and video files on your Mac. This is really useful since many sites only provide Real or Windows Media streaming. I use it, for example, to listen to NPR streams.

PostgreSQL for Mac
I wrote about installing PostgreSQL on Windows yesterday. So, it seemed like a good idea to talk about the Mac today. The PostgreSQL website doesn’t show any native Mac OS X binary download. However, there is something called…

PostgreSQL for Mac

This is not a ready-to-run server for the Mac, however. Instead, it is a… Collection of GUI tools and installations for the day to day use and administration of PostgreSQL servers both on and from a Mac OS X environment.

To satisfy my curiousity, I downloaded the source code for PostgreSQL and unpacked it on my MacBook.

Frets On Fire (game)
Frets On Fire is a game of musical skill and fast fingers. The aim of the game is to play guitar with the keyboard as accurately as possible.

This Open Source game is available for both Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows (as well as Linux and BSD).

You can find a demo video (19.7MB AVI file) available here: Frets On Fire demo video. It is quite entertaining (though slightly not work-safe).