As I’ve mentioned before, INSTEON is a new home automation technology from the folks at Smarthome, Inc. But up until today, Mac users couldn’t join the fun because all of the software support for the protocol was happening on Windows and Linux. Perceptive Automation has changed that with the release of a public beta version of Indigo 1.8.0 — check out the announcement here.

If you’re ready to dive in, the best deal is the Insteon starter kit and the PowerLinc V2 USB computer interface.

If you left home automation because of X10’s quirks, now is a good time to rejoin the fold; by all reports INSTEON is much faster and more reliable. Or, if you’re just getting started, you might as well get the very latest so you can start out on the right foot, eh?

Are you ready to get on board with INSTEON?

After my newly purchased Dresden Dolls album finished downloading from iTunes this evening, an unfamiliar dialog box popped up:

Is that new? I don’t remember seeing it before. Maybe I’ve just hit return too quickly in the past and I’m forgetting.

DRM opponents will of course raise the question: is this really My Music now? ;) The Terms of Service outline the rules, naturally, yet after a brief scan, I don’t see anything about backing up.

Of course I know the physical method of how to back up the song files, but it’s remarkable to me that I actually thought of the bigger picture. Legalities and legalese are an integral part of this new world of digital rights and intellectual property and virtual consumption — a world where the text of a helpful dialog box could get you in trouble with lawyers.

Sometimes it makes me want to crawl into a friendly xterm window and shut out everything after 1990. This is the same urge that makes me occasionally boycott megacorporations and threaten to harm my television. Buy a record player from a thrift store and live off vinyl for the rest of my life. ;D

However, I enjoy being able to instantly access pretty much any song ever and so will curtail the urges. Balancing the technophile and the luddite is hard.

If I were an Apple executive, I’d be feeling very pleased with myself at the moment. As the company heads towards 2006, it seems to be riding a wave of good news and optimism about the future.

And it’s not me saying so. Lots of folks are taking opportunities to big up the big Apple.

Walt Mossberg, for example, declares the new iMac G5 to be “the gold standard of desktop PCs”. He goes on: “To put it simply: No desktop offered by Dell or Hewlett-Packard or Sony or Gateway can match the new iMac G5’s combination of power, elegance, simplicity, ease of use, built-in software, stability and security.” This from a man who’s been objectively reviewing computer kit from all kinds of manufacturers for years now. He’s not some random Apple-gushing Mac evangelist (like, uh, me); he’s someone who’s spent a large chunk of his professional life trying out all sorts of computers. He knows good stuff when he sees it.

Then there’s analyst Shaw Wu, who’s been quoted saying: “We believe Apple is well-positioned to continue above market growth rates with arguably the industry’s most powerful and complete stack of hardware, software, and service.” He thinks Apple will reach $21 billion revenue in 2007. By comparison, the most recent quarterly revenue figure was $3.68 billion.

Another analyst, Citigroup’s Richard Gardner, is quoted predicting 2007 revenues of $24.3 billion. He’s told his clients that he’s convinced an Intel PowerBook will show up as early as January.

Gardner’s not the only one expecting new stuff shortly after New Year’s Day. There’s been a series of rumors for weeks now about how the Intel machines are coming along faster than anyone ever expected them to. Think Secret says it’ll be an Intel Mac mini Tivo-ish media center. With Front Row. Mmmmm.

Put it all together, and it makes for quite a pleasing little package of news and opinions for the Apple management to chew over. I’d say it was more than enough to make up for the SANS Institute’s odd assertion that Mac OS X is one of the 20 most critical internet security vulnerabilities of the moment. I’m the first to admit that OS X has holes, just like other operating systems, and that it needs to be kept up-to-date. But to declare it one of the 20 most serious security problems around strikes me as inappropriate, to put it mildly. In my (admittedly limited) experience, it’s my neighbours and friends running Windows whose computers tend to require frequent repairs and re-installs as a result of picking up nasties from the net; I’ve never heard of any of my OS X-using friends having the same problem.

Anyway, here’s to the (presumably) happy guys over at Infinite Loop. Let’s hope the next couple of years turn out to be as good for them as all the financial gurus are predicting.

While you wait for the next episode of Lost to appear in the iTMS, you can bolster your video collection right now for your big-screen iPod (and PSP). A new service called FLiXPO is offering free downloads of funny ads, comedy bits, indie shorts, and a variety of other goodies.

I just tested the service by grabbing a Jerry Seinfeld routine on “Milk.” Very funny stuff and a nice addition to my iPod. You can read how to do it here. The only shortcoming was that the ID3 tags were a little sparse. But that was easy to fix in iTunes.

Overall, I think FLiXPO will be a welcomed service for iPod and PSP video fans. Check it out.

Another day, another browser to play around with. I’d be astonished if Firefox has improved enough to draw me away from Camino, but let’s spend some time with it and see what’s new…

Auto update is an interesting new feature, though I won’t be able to put it to the test until there’s a new version of Firefox to download. I’m curious to find out what happens when an autoupdate is downloaded; does the app quit and restart itself - and what warning does the user get that this will happen? What happens to open windows or tabs? I’ll have to wait for an update to find out.

The preferences pane now looks and behaves like many other preferences panes you find on OS X. It appears as a separate window, rather than a sheet as it used to, and to my mind is fractionally more responsive than before.

Rather to my surprise, because I’m sure it didn’t used to work, the Command+Option+Left/Right Arrow keys work to move between tabs.

Another behavior that seems new to me (but might not be, because I’ve not been using Firefox regularly for a while - in which case, please put me right in the comments) is use of the Tab key to move around the application. Say you move from one tab to another - initially, the focus will be on the page itself. Press tab once and you’ll move to the location bar; again, and you’ll be in the search box; a third time (and this is what I think is new), and the tab itself will be selected. Now you can move tabs just with the arrow keys. And you can re-arrange tabs at this point, too - hit Command+Left/Right to move a tab around. Tabs can be dragged to new positions with the mouse, of course.

There’s a new “Report Broken Web Site” button, whose icon looks oddly out of place when added to the Toolbar. This is not a tool for admonishing lazy webmasters, but rather for alerting the Mozilla team about sites that still break in this version of Firefox. The more such un-cooperative sites they know about, the better things will be in 1.6; at least, that’s presumably the theory. Clicking the Broken button takes you through a short wizard-like interface in which you’re asked to explain a little bit of context, and provide some detail about the error you saw.

Backspace now works as a Back control. Indeed, as claimed by the release notes, moving both Back and Forward through the history is nice and fast. The .dmg artwork has been spruced up (the work of Jon Hicks, I think). You can now import your stuff from Safari (File -> Import…). Under the Tools menu, there’s two new email-related commands: Read Mail and New Message. I use Mail.app, so for me these commands just switch focus to Mail, and open a new message in Mail respectively. I’d be interested to hear what their behavior is when used with other mail clients.

I’ve been playing and browsing with Firefox 1.5 for about half a day now, and so far I have no complaints.

Had a chance to try it out yet?

Over the weekend, my wife received two emails that contained the W32.Sober@mm worm. Since I run Norton antivirus, my computer was able to catch the worm before it propagated to my wife’s contacts. So what does this have to do with backups? Well, when I got this worm it made me realize that there is a lot of precious data on my PC which is extremely vulnerable.

Prior to receiving this worm, I mainly backed up my data because I was concerned with having a hard disc failure. This past weekend made me realize that my data is also vulnerable to an attack from a virus. For example, what if I were to receive a virus that wasn’t caught by Norton? What if this same virus went ahead and removed all JPEGs or MP3s from my machine? What would I have done then?

The amount of important data that an average PC user possesses is astonishing. I currently have about 39 GB of MP3s and 16 GB of pictures on my PC. I don’t consider myself the norm however, if the “average” user has even 25% of the amount of data that I own, this would still be a lot of digital content. If I were ever to loss this data, I would feel horrible. Especially since as of four years ago, I haven’t taken a picture using traditional film. Needless to say, I’ve captured a number of great moments that I would never want to lose.

I myself perform backups to an external hard drive on a regular basis. If I were to receive a virus like I described above, I would more then likely be ok. That being said, nearly none of my friends or family members have any type of backup system in place!

Now more then ever it is important to backup your precious data. We as a culture are becoming more and more dependant on digital content. I hope that this post makes you realize that backing up your digital content is extremely important. Don’t let an incident such as a virus or hard disc failure teach you a lesson. Backup your data before it is too late!

What do you do to protect your data? Do you already have a backup procedure in place?

Last year, I worked out a method to create custom Mail.app announcement sounds by using the say program on Mac OS X, a CLI utility that converts text to speech and can output aiff sound files. And while nowadays I’m of the opinion that a totally hidden email program is a better way to go, it occurred to me earlier this week that it would be cool to have the equivalent of cellphone ringtones for Mail.

I wrote up a relatively simple AppleScript, which you can view below. You can also download ringtone.txt, which you will need to rename to ‘ringtone.scpt’ and open in the Script Editor application. (If you’re unfamiliar with it, a description of Script Editor can be found within the article Hacking iPod and iTunes.)

At the top of the script are five options for you to set.

the_title is the exact title of the track you want to start playing. Likewise, the_artist is the exact name of the artist field.

the_playlist can be customized if you want, but it is set for the main Library and will most likely work fine for these purposes.

start_here allows you to select at what point in the song you want the ringtone to begin, in seconds; set at 0 (zero) to begin at the beginning. The stop_after property is how many seconds you want the song to play; set at 0 (zero) to disable and just keep on playing.

That’s it for the AppleScript. Save the .scpt file wherever you like.

Within Mail, open the Preferences window and go to the Rules tab. Click Add Rule — give it a Description, then choose whatever criteria you’d like — most likely, it will be a From Contains username.

Under ‘Perform the following actions’, choose Run AppleScript from the popup menu, then find your ringtone.scpt via the Choose button. Hit OK and you’re done.

And that’s it! Now whenever an email from ‘username’ comes in, iTunes will switch on and let you know. Whether this is a good thing or not is, like cellphone ringtones, debatable ;) but it’s a good exercise on getting Mac GUI apps interacting together.

To set up separate ringtones for different people, just duplicate the ringtone.scpt file, one for each, and customize the properties as desired. Then set up a Mail Rule for each as above.

property the_title : "Gouge Away"
property the_artist : "Pixies"
property the_playlist : "Library"
property start_here : 23 -- set to 0 to begin at the beginning
property stop_after : 0 -- set to 0 to disable
tell application "iTunes"
 set the matches to (every track of playlist the_playlist whose name is the_title) as list
 if the (count of matches) > 0 then
  if the (count of matches) = 1 then
   set the_track to item 1 of matches
  else
   repeat with t from 1 to the (count of matches)
    if the artist of item t of matches is the_artist then
     set the_track to item t of matches
     exit repeat
    end if
   end repeat
  end if
  play the_track
  set player position to start_here
  if stop_after > 0 then
   delay stop_after + 1
   pause
  end if
 else
  display dialog "No song matches. Please confirm details." buttons {"Yikes!"} default button 1
 end if
end tell

I should probably put in a disclaimer that this worked on my combination of versions: 10.4.3, Mail 2.0.5, and iTunes 6.0.1, and thus may not work if yours differ, or if you’re not a Capricorn, or if Venus is in retrograde.

(Thanks to Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes for some direction.)

In my last post, I covered learning to program with a dialect of Lisp, called Scheme, from resources freely available on the internet from the SICP course at MIT. In this post, I plan to continue this theme by going over a few reasons that I have found for learning Lisp and to offer a few more resources for those of you out there who would like to add Lisp, or Scheme, to their programming repertoire. I want to begin this post by going over some of the advantages Lisp holds for the majority of the programming population—i.e., those of us who will probably never use Lisp professionally.

To start off with, Lisp is a functional programming language (well, ok, not purely functional, but pretty darn close). Now, while there are several reasons for wanting to learn a functional programming language, I’m going to cover just one. The reason for learning a functional language (such as Lisp) that I want to talk about here is the one that I have seen make the most difference to me personally—namely, it makes testing (and, as a side-effect, creating more secure code) easier. I basically picked up Lisp for an AI class I was taking this past Summer, and I immediately fell in love with it. While it can be frustrating to learn, and at times downright impossible, it does eventually reward those who persevere and finally learn to program in Lisp. So, after a couple of failed attempts before this summer, I was pleasantly surprised when I finally found myself starting to grasp the concepts and I was actually able to start writing programs in Lisp. And, to my surprise, in a very short period of time, I was able to write programs faster and more bug-free than in other languages with which I was much more acquainted (e.g., C/C++, C#, and Java).

Now, I’ve never used Lisp in my professional life, however, I began to notice that some of the habits I picked up while programming in Lisp were creeping into my daily programming and were actually helping me out quite bit. In functional languages, side-effects are “generally” avoided. (I say “generally” here since, to my knowledge at least, some side-effects seem to be unavoidable—such as I/O operations, for instance). For anyone new to the term, a side-effect occurs when the state of your program is changed from within a function (procedure, method…whatever). This happens quite often in normal procedural and OO programming, but in functional programming it is avoided as much as possible. After programming in Lisp for a month or two, I noticed that in my daily life I had begun to avoid side-effects in my programs whenever I found it possible to do so. This allowed me to create programs that were much easier to unit test, since all I had to do was check the function’s output to know that it worked correctly. Also, since no undesired changes occurred inside of my functions, my software immediately showed a vast reduction in bugs, not too mention that purely functional code is also immediately thread safe. Being able to test each function as I wrote it, and prove that it worked correctly without exception, meant that my programs would work almost the first time I integrated everything and ran it.

All of sudden everything was working within a try or two (and, sometimes, even on the first try), rather than with several attempts and debug sessions. It was easier to follow the logic of my programs and it became much easier for me to guarantee that changes to my programs in one place would not produce undesired outcomes in others. Suddenly, my learning Lisp was paying off in the real world, and what seemed like just a fun excuse to learn a new language was actually making me more effective in my professional life.

Don’t believe me? Perhaps you need more assurance from more creditable sources. Well then, let’s take a look at some endorsements from some much more lauded hackers. Eric Raymond, author of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and former president of the Open Source Initiative, probably put it best in his essay, “How to Become a Hacker”, when he made the following statement:

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

Richard Stallman—creator of GNU Emacs and the GNU C compiler and the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project—felt so strongly about the language that he embedded a version of Lisp, called Elisp, into his Emacs text editor making the editor infinitely extensible and is one of the main reasons why a text editor written nearly 30 years ago still enjoys such a large following today.

Finally, Paul Graham, author of “Hackers and Painters” (and one of my own personal role models) is constantly writing on the importance of Lisp as more than just an exercise in acedemia. He believed in the efficacy of the language so much that he has spent several of the past few years creating a much awaited new dialect of the language called Arc. He also bet his very own financial future on the language by using it in his own startup—viaweb. In fact, he goes so far as to attribute much of the success of his startup to his use of Lisp.

So, with the backing of such important people in the programming community, the question is no longer why would you want to learn Lisp, so much as why wouldn’t you. Yeah, sure, your boss most likely will not let you use it in your day-to-day tasks, and actually finding a job that does use Lisp (especially one that uses it on a regular basis) is next to impossible, but I think once you get a good grasp of the Lisp language, you’ll be happy you decided to learn it. You’ll see the benefits in no time in the way your programming evolves and becomes much more bug-free, reliable, maintainable, and fast (both in testing and in creation).

In closing, I hope I’ve gotten some of you interested in learning Lisp. Before I go though, I wanted to share with you all a few more resources for learning Lisp just in case you should happen to feel so inclined to do so. All of the links to online resources I’ve included below are free (as in speech). The first two, are actually full texts available free on the internet for download. “On Lisp” is considered to be one of the best texts for learning Lisp, although it is geared more towards programmers already familiar with Lisp (Paul Graham’s other book—“ANSI Common Lisp”—targets Lisp newbies, so it may be better to read it first). “Practical Common Lisp” is a great book for introducing you to using Lisp in common programming situations. It’s largely a giant tutorial, by the end of which you will have created CD and MP3 databases, a spam filter, and many other fun and useful applications. This is a very good read for anyone wanting to use Lisp as a general purpose everyday language. DrScheme is a fully featured programming environment (including an IDE, debugger, GUI library, and more) for the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It was created at Brown University and is freely available for download on nearly any OS. A nice feature, on OS X, it is an extremely simple install. Finally, the last item in the list is a link to my last post. The reason I’ve include this one is simply because I’m lazy. In my last post, I included several links to free resources for taking an online class from MIT on programming in Scheme, and I just couldn’t be bothered repeating them all here (plus, I’m absolutely shameless, and I’m trying to develop a nice following of repeat readers). In the last post, I included links to an online book, class lectures (both regular downloads and iPod compatible versions), and sample questions and other course materials. If you’re truly interested in learning Lisp, check out this post, you’ll be happy you did.

Sources on the internet for learning Lisp:

• Paul Graham’s “On Lisp”
• Peter Seibel’s “Practical Common Lisp”
• DrScheme
• My last post

Well, we’ve finally come to the very end. I hope, after reading this post, that each of you will find yourself with an insatiable desire to learn Lisp. This post, and the one just before it, have concentrated on instilling this desire within you—the reader—and in showcasing some good resources on the internet for satisfying this desire. I’ve introduced just about all of the resources that I know of for teaching you Lisp for free. Any new posts that I make on Lisp following this one will try to concentrate on actually learning or using the Lisp language rather than just linking to other online resources. So, enjoy the links, have fun learning Lisp, and come back again very soon for some interesting tutorials on programming in Lisp.

Oh, and by the way, if any of you out there are using Lisp in your daily life, personal projects, professional projects, whatever, please, post a comment below giving us some of the juicy details. Feel free to talk about how hard it was, what advantages/disadvantages it provided, and/or provide links to websites about your project (especially those containing interesting source code). I know I would love to find out more about how others are putting the language to use.

See you next time.

Please, feel free to post comments on how you’ve used Lisp in the past or are currently using Lisp right now.

There’s a new version of Sinbad out, offering a bunch of neat new features.

If you’ve not used it before, you can think of Sinbad as the alt.Sherlock. It uses a series of modules to help it find information from various web sites and services.

The new version comes with a decent list of pre-installed modules, including access to Craigslist, Wiki Country Facts, and Google Define. I also enjoyed browsing through Wikipedia and the CIA World Fact Book using Sinbad.

Some modules work better than others. In some instances, searching is not possible and you are forced to browse instead. Browsing the Craigslist module worked fine for US locations, but less well for UK cities.

My favorite feature is the preference that lets you choose which Amazon store is searched. Any list of results from any module can be used as the basis for a new Amazon search, and being able to select Amazon UK, rather than Amazon.com, was a major plus for me.

Sony released a firmware upgrade (2.6) for the Sony Playstation Portable.
This update came pretty quickly considering that the 2.5 upgrade was made available in the US on October 13 (just over a month ago).
Here’s what the update includes:

• RSS Channel (in the Network menu where the browser is found).
  This addition is named a bit misleadingly since it does not add RSS text feed support.
  What it does add is the ability to subscribe to podcasts.
  The added wrinkle is that it does not download the podcast file to a memory stick.
  Instead, it streams the podcast.
  I’m listening to a podcast about the PSP while writing this blog and the WiFi light on the PSP is blinking constantly as it streams the MP3 file to me.
  If you want to take a podcast audio file with you for disconnected listening, you will need to download it your PC or Mac and then copy the file over the the PSP.
  
• A WMA (Windows Media Audio) CODEC was added for locally stored (Memory Stick) and streaming audio.
  
• Simplified and Traditional Chinese were added to the browser encoding options.
  
• Volume Adjustment was added to the LocationFree Player.
  
• The browser now supports downloading copy protected video (this was in 2.5 too).
  

And, yeah, yeah, I know it is uncool to upgrade my PSP and remove the ability to use the various PSP hacks. :-)

Got 2.6?

Apple’s latest and, if not greatest, then at least “highly anticipated” application Aperture is on the verge of shipping out.

I’m typing this up as my PowerBook is automatically putting the finishing touches to the final release of FlickrExport 1.3. I’m trying to clear the decks for the next couple of weeks in order to make time to explore Aperture.

I’m interested in this application from all the angles a keen amateur photographer would normally be, but also from the angle of a software developer. I’m keen to see how Aperture is put together and very much looking forward to pulling it apart to see where I can hack around inside.

Of particular interest is finding out whether and how it would be possible to augment Aperture’s export capabilities. For over a year, I’ve been maintaining and releasing FlickrExport, which is a plug-in for iPhoto that extends that application’s export features to add the ability to send pictures directly to Flickr.com.

It will be an interesting detective exercise to see if it’s possible to do something similar for Aperture. Can’t wait to start.

Are you a Flickr fan looking forward to adopting Aperture?

Bare Bones software has issued an update to its free text editor, TextWrangler. The 2.1.1 update is mainly about bugfixes, although there are a couple of new minor features, one of which is a “Register” menu item. Before you scoff about that being not much of a ‘feature’, consider that registered TextWrangler users are in a position to buy BBEdit at a significant discount, so it’s something that could well appeal to a fair number of people.

The list of squashed bugs covers a lot of problems, so if you’ve suffered from any of these, this update should be good news for you.

This follows last week’s BBEdit update to 8.2.4, which was a broadly similar bug-fixing update.

I’ve said it before, and it bears repeating now: TextWrangler remains one of the best bits of freeware currently available for OS X. Few other free applications offer such a wide array of features and such reliable performance.

I was just reading about the rumored Disney Insurance Plan for Lost episodes. The timing of this story is interesting, having just spent a big part of my holiday shoring up my backup strategy so that my pictures, movies, music, and text are protected against hard drive crashes and laptop theft.

In short, a good archiving plan is the best insurance of all. We’ve covered this on Mac DevCenter, with articles such as Automated Backups on Tiger Using rsync and Web Apps with Tiger: Backups and Speed. I’ve also written about Apple’s current solution: How to Set Up Backup 3 and Save Your Data.

Yes, I’m all for creative business approaches such as the plan Disney may be offering for Lost viewers. But the best insurance is a well-planned and vigilantly maintained backup strategy.

So, that leads me to wonder… how are you backing up your stuff?

Anybody working in the PR and marketing field will be able to tell you how much of a pain it is to put any kind of electronic device on an image. Indeed, not only do you have to pay for the right to show the device, you have to pay for the right to show what’s on the screen of that device.

Fonts, icons, titles, menus: almost everything on a computer screen is copyrighted. Unless the screen you show is running OpenBSD, there are very few chances you will be able to simply design it and go to print.

The same holds true when marketing a music player. Putting a song on the screen opens up the doors for endless lawsuits just as much as it does for juicy partnerships. Most advertising agencies and companies are simply not willing to pay a high price for such details and, therefore, end up putting a placeholder that they hope nobody will see.

The result? We commonly see ads featuring players tuned to “Creative Demo Track” by “The Creatives”. How original… In comparison, Apple always shows its iPod playing something real or, at the very least, displaying the best alternative: an Apple logo.

Sure, this is a small detail but it accounts for differences in perception between a product consumers will deem finished and one they will deem half-baked, an ad they will find thrilling and another they will regard as just OK.

Next time you look at a picture, take a few seconds to peek at the screen: its contents reveal more about the company you are about to purchase from than the rest of the ad.

Though I am thankful for many things, these are just a few technologies that I am very thankful this year:

Flickr - It’s where I put all my photos online these days. The set structure, the tagging, the multitude of communities and friends that I have on there, it’s a wonderful piece of tech that’s evolved into an integral part of my online life.

BaseCamp and BackPack is project management I just couldn’t live without. Whether it’s to start planning a wedding, or tracking some of my client projects, this stuff is brilliant and the guys at 37 Signals are just plain wizards.

SpamSieve & Mailsmith - Who here really likes Spam? No one. SpamSieve keeps me 99% spam-free and Mailsmith keeps track of some 30,000 emails over two years. Thanks much to Michael Tsai and Rich and the gang at BareBones for making some really awesome technology that work together so well.

NetNewsWire & RSS - How else am I supposed to read over 150 site, flickr groups and blogs? Seriously?

Technology is an expanding frontier, each year bringing more people in touch with one another. Between Flickr, IRC, email, blogs and RSS, the world is growing to be a smaller and smaller place. With communication comes dialogue and understanding, and those become the ties that bind. Those are what I am truly thankful for this season.

What software are you thankful for?

Laptops are never going to be cheap to repair, but if you’re someone who depends on one as your primary work machine (like me, John Gruber, Jon Hicks - although his plan has fallen apart rather suddenly - and plenty of other folks), you might like to keep note of some of the hardware hacks you can use in case of breakdown.

There’s a natural fear of opening up the case of a computer, particularly a laptop. Fear of “am I just going to make things worse?” Many repairs are not that difficult, but do require a methodical approach and a steady hand. The most attractive feature of home-grown repairs is the astonishing amount of money they can save you.

I particularly like the post by Gregory Dudek on Macintouch, which describes how the backlight bulb in his Powerbook went dead. Getting it replaced professionally would have cost a thousand dollars (might as well buy a new machine); but Gregory tracked down the replacement part on some Yahoo store for just five bucks.

Of course, the procedure for replacing the dead bulb was anything but simple, and his re-assembly lacked the professional finish; but the end result was a machine that worked, and a considerable cost saving. I’d say that was a success.

Do you fear the insides of your computer, or are you a fearless tinkerer? What’s the most complicated repair you’ve ever attempted?

Related link: https://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/23/2128219

There’s a new Ask Slashdot today with a subject dear to my heart: ‘Balancing Use Between Keyboard and Mouse?‘ in which the poster talks about a preference for hands staying on the keyboard. Of course, there are certain tasks when a mouse or other input device is easier, but for a lot of geeks, myself included, the keyboard is usually the way to go.

As a rabid Quicksilver user, I felt the need to post about it in that Ask Slashdot. You’ll find I mention it, oh, probably every other entry here or on my own site. ;) That may be because I seem to be using it every other minute, all the time. It’s that useful.

What’s most profound to me is its dual nature, combining the best of GUI and CLI, not to mention connecting the two worlds. Though arguably not alone among operating systems in this regard, Mac OS X sure does seem to have real power in both, and Quicksilver (among other utilities) help you to exploit that.

Another poster in that Slashdot story wrote that, while switching from Windows to Mac, they missed the ability for the keyboard to access pretty much every menu or widget. This is an area that I’ve found Linux apps often follow along in the Windows model. However, here’s what I wrote in reply:

Not *quite* the same thing, but if you go to the Keyboard & Mouse System Preference, then to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, you’ll find at the bottom ‘Full Keyboard Access’ — change that to All Controls and you’ll be able to tab to most controls. In that same Preference tab you’ll find a metric crapload of navigation shortcuts for moving keyboard focus among windows, Dock, menus, etc.

Also, there are a ton of sometimes poorly documented Mac UI keyboard shortcuts that even long-time users don’t know about, but which will speed your usage tremendously. There are various places to learn about them — the Help menu in the Finder is a start, but also see https://www.macosxhints.com/ for the occasional gem.

Naturally, fine technical books are available by certain publishers that are great references as well. ;D

The point is that with the latest technologies built in to OS X, combined with various third-party utilities, as well as the Brave New World (for Macs at least) of the CLI, the GUI vs. CLI debate can be limited to — as the original inspiration for the Ask Slashdot was — a question of usability for a given application, rather than an OS debate.

What’s your take on this?

Hi. It appears that there’s more of you than there used to be. It would seem that lots of you have bought Macs because you’re fed up with Windows, or just because you bought an iPod and you thought it was cool, or a mixture of both.

I just wanted to give you a bit of advance warning about some things that might start happening to you now you’ve got your Mac.

Scenario 1: You’re enjoying a coffee somewhere, with your new Mac laptop open on the table in front of you. You’re just surfing randomly. But you notice, over the lid of your computer, some guy giving you a funny look. He’s … smirking in your direction.

It’s OK, you don’t need to worry. This guy isn’t some weirdo, he’s not hitting on you. He’s one of us. He’s another Mac user, and he’s looking at you because (a) he wants you to notice his Powerbook when he pulls it from his bag in a few seconds from now, and (b) he wants to come over and talk Mac stuff with you. He might want to find out what’s on your Dock, or maybe he wants to ask you for tips on launchers, or Getting Things Done, or if you have a favorite outliner, or how you solve The Email Client Problem.

If you’re in the mood for company, by all means engage him in conversation. But if you’re shy, or pressed for time, now is a good moment to avert your eyes. Look down at your own screen, and make a point of not ogling his 17″ Powerbook when it emerges from its protective pouch. He’ll get the hint.

Scenario 2: You’re giving a dinner party, and guests naturally seem to gather around the iMac G5 that is in charge of playing music for the evening. All of them are fascinated by iTunes; one guy keeps minimising windows to watch the Genie effect in action; his girlfriend has taken charge of the Apple Remote and keeps invoking Front Row, then making it disappear.

These people aren’t crazy, they’ve just not had a chance to play with a new Mac before. Put the oven on low to keep the food warm, and let them have a play. Just before you serve, give them a two-minute demo of Photo Booth - then insist that they eat before you let them play with it. If there’s any sign of disagreement, logout of your account with a quick Shift+Command+Q. Your guests will behave like lambs until after dessert. Now, login with a spare “Dinner Party” account and let them go crazy…

Scenario 3: After a particularly depressing and overlong meeting at work, you return to your desk to find your computer (not a Mac) crashed shortly after the meeting started. All attempts to bring it to life fail, and you end up having to bring in the tech support guys. They take your computer away, and you spend the rest of the day desperately trying to track down a spare machine from someone.

Finally, in desperation, you sneak into an empty meeting room and pull your personal iBook from a bag. You’d only brought it to work because you were heading off to see family for the weekend, and planned to show them some movies you’d made; but it’s with you now, and it’s the only chance you’ve got to get anything on your todo list done before the end of the day. You hear that familiar bootup chime, and a smile appears on your face. It feels odd using this machine - something you can rely on, something you depend on all the time at home - here at work, but as soon as you’re logged in you can dive into your work as never before. You spend the final hour of the day working like a demon, and head off for the weekend feeling like you’ve accomplished something.

Add your own scenarios…

Another day, another ethical breach by the music business.
 
Not only has Sony BMG put malicious malware on customer’s computers but the music business in general, of which Sony BMG is an aggressive part, but another record company, this time Warner Music, has reached a settlement with the Attorney General in New York regarding the modern version of payola. From the NY Times; Attorney General “Mr. Spitzer said that Warner executives had obtained play time for songs through “deceptive and illegal” practices, including making payoffs in the form of personal electronics and tickets to the Grammy Awards, the World Series and the Super Bowl”
 
This shows how willing companies like Sony and Warner are to violate the law and trample on the rights of consumers. Not only will they try to buy radio programming, but they try to crack our computers. We need to stand up to them, even though their software will probably not hurt Apple users. Indeed, it may turn out to be yet more evidence that the Apple platform is the safer platform – add corporate back-doors to the list of malware that Apple users don’t suffer.
 
While Sony BMG is now facing a class action suit, much of this could have been avoided if Sony had a strategy, particularly a strategy for the digital world. The mighty electronics giant came late to the computer game, they never saw how popular computers would be. They did not predict the digital music market either and as a response they are furiously trying to catch up. But you can’t catch up, software moves too quickly, simply look at the development of file sharing for an example; kill Napster and a hundred bittorrent sites bloom. If you are a corporation you have to develop strategic thinking to handle the digital world, you have to have an understanding of software. Sony just doesn’t get it.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong . . .

It’s official. Apple has declared Gold Master for Aperture and the first shipments should go out next week. Word has it that the shrinkwrap box will include a printed manual and tutorial DVD.

The first thing I’ll be reporting on is how well it performs on a PowerBook. I’ll use a 17″ 1.5 GHz model for testing. To tell you the truth, my biggest concern isn’t Aperture’s performance as much as it will be managing all of my Raw files on a skimpy 80GB drive. So I’ll be looking at alternatives such as iPods and other portable hard drives to store my data.

More soon…

Now, here’s something you don’t see everyday: Python (IronPython) being discussed and demonstrated on MSDN TV by Jim Hugunin (IronPython’s creator and now a Microsoft employee).

IronPython: Python on the .NET Framework

The show’s description on the MSDN TV web page is described as:

“IronPython” is an implementation of the Python language on the .NET Framework. Jim Hugunin introduces IronPython by showing interactive exploration and GUI building from a command prompt as well as simple embedding as a scripting language in an existing Windows Presentation Foundation application.

Jim shows how to both use and create .NET classes.
If you are interested in using Python in a Microsoft Windows environment, take a look at this video.

Python for Windows software development anyone?

The results are in for our informal comparison of four microphones. If you’d like, compare the mics for yourself before reading the rest of this as I’ll be telling you which mic is which and sharing the thoughts of the reviewers.

Many of the reviews came via email or IM from people I know. An interesting trend is that broadcasters tended to like Microphone B (which is a classic in their field) and musicians tended to like Microphone C. Not only that, but both groups tended not to like the other one. People who liked Microphone B described C as “tinny” and people who liked microphone C described B as noisy. For a studio mic I think I am still going to choose between B and C but the choice is difficult. Rematch below Oh, and yes Ron - I’ve been drinking a lot of coffee.

The Microphones (spoiler)

The mics were: (A) a Shure SM 57, (B) an ElectroVoice RE 27, (C) a Heil PR-40 and (D) a Heil PR-20.

These are all dynamic mics that were recorded into an MBox and into my G5 using Audio Hijack Pro with no processing (other than a pop-filter on the mics).

Microphone A - An old standard

The shows so far have been done with the Shure 57. It’s a great reliable mic and is famous for taking a beating. Here are some paraphrases of the comments we got on A “A nice all-around sound, although a bit flat.” “A is a bit flat but has less noise than D.” “More bass, pretty hot from two inches away.” “Distorted up close.” “Mic A at 2 inches sounded good. Deeper for some reason.” “A second choice, but it has a good proximity effect.” “Excellent noise rejection, quite a bit of bass effect with proximity effect.” “Thin and crispy at six inches, distortion and a huge proximity effect.” “Middle of the road at six inches and boomy without much clarity at three inches.”

By the way - my boss and my wife liked A the best.

Microphone B - Broadcaster’s Favorite

The person who initially recommended I try B gave some of the most interesting feedback on it. “The ambient noise rejection was bad. It will probably be too much trouble even if you take steps to reduce computer noise.” Online feedback added, “A lot more background being picked up, including a slight hum.” Another identified “some noticeable vibration. I’d go with B if you can determine what the vibration is at the first part of the loop.” “B is the clear loser of the bunch.” The RE 27, like all mics in this test, was on the same surface as my G5 and not in a shock mount. It may have been picking up vibrations that way.

So the negatives tended to focus on the hum, the noise, and the bass. The positives were “more treble and midrange, good overall.” “Sounds good at close range.” “B is pretty good all the way around.” “Boomy, full bodied feel, but that may not be the best choice for everyone’s voice.” “B has more bass response than C, which is good, but more ambient noise.” “Mic B, no question. I like the extra bass a lot. At 3 inches, it’s NPR city.” “Best mic at six inches by far.”

A guy I used to work with in radio wrote “B sounds clean and crisp and there was only a slight difference in the dynamics from a distance and close-up.”

Microphone C - Musicians’ Favorite

The Heil PR-40 is clearly marketed as an alternative to the RE 20 and the RE 27. The positive feedback we got for this microphone could go in a press release. The negatives were that it sounded thin or tinny. “Weakest one so far and a bit up on the treble side. Sounds better and rounder at 2″.”C is too treble sounding. You can hear the breath hitting the mic too.”

“Mic C, 6 inches: Very clear and precise; I felt like I heard all that was there to be heard. Great sound, but better be a controlled environment.
Mic C, 3 inches: Yeah, lovely sound here. I even heard what sounded like your chair squeak as you moved away from the mic at the end.” “Mic C seems to have good clarity at 6 inches and still gives a nice rich tone up close. It should perform well in a variety of situations.” “C is the winner — richer sound, less noise, clear.” “C seems best of the four with a little distance. It seems to have a broader spectrum than the others. There is also a
slight noise canceling component in C. It was not as clean up close and I
actually heard a little clipping.” “Excellent noise rejection, slight and pleasant proximity effect, prone to picking up p-popping.”

My sister wrote “I like mic C best–at both 6″ and 2-3″. Your voice sounded clearest with this one, and I heard the least background noise.”

Microphone D - A stage mic

The Heil PR-20 worked much better when worked close than far away. “At 6″ the sound was a bit tinny but with some of the lows accented as well. At 2″ the sound becomes rounder and sounds better. ” “Another middle-of-the-road for me. A little less clarity, and a little fuzzier, although still not as boomy as Mic A. There was slight improvement closer on this one. As an alternate for field work, I’d look at D, and keep it close (or post-process it more).” “Less bass. a little poppy 2″ away.” ” D was a bit thin at 6″ but fattened up nicely up close. ” “D has a richer sound than A but lets more background noise in.” “D is very flat sounding, but is the cleanest sounding (no hiss).” “D felt like it had more background noise than the others” “D: A little tinny at 6″; pleasant at 3″ (probably more proximity
effect than any other).” “I like B overall. But D has a solid clean sound close in.”

The results

The favorites were clearly bimodal. Most people liked the RE 27 or the PR 40. Many of the respondents didn’t even comment on the other mics. Many identified that the decision was clearly between those two while others who championed one of them despised the other. I still find myself on the fence. I like the way I sound better in the RE 27 and yet there is the issue of noise.

REMATCH ADDED To address the noise issue, I moved the microphones ten feet away from the G5 and ran them through the Aphex 230 with a little compression and some gating. Here is a rematch for the

• Heil Pro PR-40, and the
• Electro Voice RE 27

So, did you change your mind?

Related link: https://barebones.com/products/mailsmith/

For a long time, like most users, I have been waiting for the perfect e-mail client. I played with Mail, Thunderbird, Mailsmith and a couple others that shall remain nameless. Of course, that perfect client never arrived and, like everyone, I was forced to curse at my application on a regular basis, no matter what that application was or how much AppleScripting I was willing to perform to add the few features I was the only one on this planet to deem essential.

Yesterday however came the time to take the plunge and invest in a second e-mail client. Why a second might you ask? Because I wanted to keep personal and professional matters strictly separate and thought this was the only true way.

After many months of looking applications up, I had finally declared Mailsmith the best runner-up client, tied in with Mail.app, for very different reasons. So today, I finally downloaded Mailsmith and paid my license fee, silently hoping I was not purchasing an end-of-lifed application — we shall see but I have a bad feeling about that one.

While setting the preferences, I couldn’t help but think at the price tag that so many users find unjustified, especially for a client that does not do IMAP. Well, after checking and unchecking boxes for a good 10 minutes, I now fully understand where that comes from: Mailsmith is, by far, the only e-mail application I know that thinks of a user’s both online and offline workflow. How much work that must have required I can’t imagine.

Want to print and bind your mails, as so many offices still do (yuck!)? Well, you can setup a special “binder” margin. You like to read your e-mails in ProFont but know your boss insists on the Company Font whenever you print them? That can be arranged as well. You yearn to watermark your mails with a custom header? Easy as pie. Plus, Mailsmith integrates beautifully with Address Book and other Apple niceties.

Mailsmith is not perfect but neither is any other e-mail client. It lacks some features that now make Mail.app very powerful such as Spotlight search — which, considering it already has its own searching system, I entirely understand but will without doubt discourage some users. It could use a few optional visual effects, just for Aqua’s sake and it could use, without a single doubt, some IMAP goodiness.

All these little faults however do not prevent Mailsmith from being one of the best clients I have met so far. I’m just crossing my fingers, hoping BareBones thinks the same! There is plenty of life left in Mailsmith, that’s for sure.

[Update 2006-02-24] I have posted some more in-depth thoughts on the topic on the Soup, for those of you who inquired.

The Microsoft Office 12 Technical Beta released last week includes at least one cool goodie for Windows Mobile Smartphone users: OneNote Mobile. One of its many cool features: Take a photo with your Smartphone’s camera and have text in the photo turned into searchable text on the desktop using OCR technology. Check out Chris Pratley’s (a OneNote designer at Microsoft) blog for the details.

Out and About with OneNote Mobile

If you are not familiar with OneNote, you can find out more about it on its Microsoft information site at:

Microsoft OneNote Online

Have some mobile wireless related Office 12 tips? Let us know here.

Ok, so every once in a while, we (as in you and me) get these funny mail messages that just don’t seem quite right…and then it dawns on us — hey, this must be another one of those Windows viruses/worms/covert operations going around again.

I’ve pasted in a screen shot below of the latest one I just received. After trying to Google search for some context, I didn’t get anything back, so maybe I’m privileged enough one of the first unsuccessful targets?

And just in case you’re wondering, after copying the attachment to a safe location and unzipping it, the Windows executable “File-packed_dataInfo.exe” was revealed. Hmm. I don’t remember e-mailing that to anyone recently.

I’m curious as to what investigative process you use whenever you get junk like this. (As if the token “zip” extension isn’t enough to give it away.)

Have you or anyone you know ever fallen victim to one of these things?

How much longer before the first big Mac-based outbreak?

Anyone with the need to write daily notes should take a serious look at Journler.

The name suggests its use is restricted to writing a journal, but it offers much more than that. Written by Philip Dow to meet his own needs, Journler uses every Cocoa trick in the book to bring you additional features and clever ways of organizing your data.

First off, yes, you can use it just to write a journal. Your journal can include styled text, images, audio you record directly into Journler, and links to almost any kind of file you like. Journler includes browser controls for accessing your iPhoto, iTunes and Address Book databases. Wow, this is the kind of clever stuff you expect in commerical apps like Pages, not in freeware.

There’s more. Tabs (keep multiple journal entries open at once), tags (called keywords, but it’s the same thing), smart folders (called Collections, but works just like smart Finder or Mail folders), smooth integration with weblog services Blogger and LiveJournal, a normal or brushed metal window style toggle, and built-in encryption. Even a plug-ins API.

Everything is doable with keyboard shortcuts, of course. Phil even included a “Go to random entry” command. He really has thought of everything. If you’ve been looking for a note-taking application for keeping a personal diary, or for jotting down everything you do during the working day, or just something to manage your weblog with, I’d recommend you give Journler a try.

Comment on this weblog

Related link: https://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/8525

Back in the day (say, five years ago), tech pundits would posit every other day that to really cut the cord with Microsoft, Apple needed to provide its own alternative to the Office suite. Now, in the Amazing Future, we find that this process has already begun.

People are daring to dream bigger, though. With the advent of OpenOffice.org, often trumpeted as an Office-killer, not to mention the resurgence of Apple as a brand