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Rob Griffiths

Where did the vent go?

It’s a simple question, though some context might be needed. You see, when I first started driving (many eons ago), every car I had any experience with had a setting on the heating/cooling control panel labeled Vent. When you set the system to Vent, you basically opened a channel from the dash-mounted air vents directly to the outside airflow. If it was 60F degrees outside, you got a stream of 60F degree air. If it was 30F, you got 30F degree air. The car’s system was basically bypassed, though you could also turn on the fan to increase the speed of the outside air. In many less-expensive cars, air conditioning wasn’t even an option; Vent was it as far as (theoretically) cooling airflow went.

Hence today’s ranting question — where has the Vent gone? No car that I recall driving in the past 10 or so years has had a vent setting. If you want airflow, you have to have the air conditioning or heater on. The newer the car, it seems, the worse this problem is. Cars with so-called automatic temperature control are perhaps the worst. My car (since sold) had such a system; you’d simply dial in the temperature of the air you’d like in the cabin, and the system would do the rest. Fine in theory, but in practice…if I picked a temperature below 65F, the air conditioning system would switch to ‘Max A/C’ mode, kicking the fans up to full speed. I couldn’t set a lower temperature than 65F, and why, oh why, is the speed of the fan tied to the temperature of the air? I didn’t tell the system I wanted a full-power blast of 65F degree air, I just wanted 65F air at the current fan setting.

But that’s actually not what I really wanted. What I really wanted was to not waste gas and horsepower running the A/C system when the outside temperature was 63F. I just wanted to vent some of that temperate outside air into the cabin. Alas, no such choice is available, not on my car, and not on any car of recent vintage that I’m familiar with.

So where oh where did the Vent go, and are there good reasons for its demise? Or am I mistaken, and there are lots of cars still out there with Vent settings on their A/C panels? Anyone who can enlighten me, please do so. In this era of looking to save gas whenever we can, this seems like a simple way to do so. And since I’m presently auto shopping, I’d love to know if the option still exists.



Review: Bose Quiet Comfort 2 heaphones

Bose QuietComfort 2Sometime last year, someone told me about the Bose QuietComfort 2 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones, which I'll just call the QC2 from here on out in the interest of saving my fingers! The selling feature of the QC2s is active noise cancellation, which I won't even attempt to explain--I'll let the collected experts at Wikipedia handle that task. I had my doubts, but finally made my way to an Apple store to try a pair out just before Christmas.

The store was quite busy on the day of my visit, with lots of background noise. I put the headset on, but left the active noise cancelling disabled at first. Though things got notably quieter, there was still a very audible level of bacgkround noise in my ears. Then I turned on the noise cancelling. Wow. There's really no way to describe just how quiet it got, but literally all of the lower-level rumbling from the crowd vanished, leaving a near-silent environment. Then I started the iPod, and was further amazed that there was no apparent loss of sound quality when compared to a non-active-cancellation headphone (the Bose Triport). Keep in mind, my ear is far from audiophile quality, but the QC2s sounded great to me.

Now the QC2 is not a cheap set of headphones--at $299, they're the same price as a new 30GB iPod. However, I use my headphones a lot (every day, hints are posted while I'm under the 'phones, as the household is still sleeping), and I value a comfortable, high quality product. So after some discussion with my wife (hope she enjoys her Christmas present!), I purchased a pair of QC2s just after Christmas. Having now used them relatively extensively for a couple weeks, I thought I'd share my impressions, in case anyone else is considering a purchase. Note that Playlist also reviewed the QC2s, and probably in a more thorough and professional manner than what you're about to read :).

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How I back up my websites

I’ll start off with an admission: I’m a relatively clueluess user of the command line in OS X. Sure, I know my way around the basics such as ls, cp, mv, and I have a working knowledge of vi, and a basic understanding of some of the more advanced programs. But that’s about it—minimal shell scriping skills, no knowledge of regular expressions, and only the most basic understanding of pipes, redirection, combining commands, etc. So I find myself regularly amazed by the power of what (for a Unix wizard) would be an amazingly simple task.

Such was the case yesterday. Earlier in the day, I’d had a bit of a scare with our family blog site (like robservatory, it runs on WordPress). Due to a mix-up on the administrative end, the WordPress database for the site was deleted. Historically, I’ve been very paranoid about backing up the macosxhints’ sites. But for whatever, reason, that same paranoia didn’t extend to my two personal sites. Hence, I had no backup to help with the problem. Thankfully, the ISP did, and the family blog was soon back online without any loss of data. But I resolved to not let this happen again without a local backup of my own.

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Taking creative license

Recently, I gave in to the urgings of a friend (and my father, who’s been after me for years) and started watching Season One of the Fox drama 24. I had never seen an episode, but had been using my past experience with Fox television as a reason not to watch—the only thing on the network that I’ve ever liked was their football broadcasts. Nontheless, I gave in and asked for the first season of 24 for Christmas.

After I got home, I fired up the first show, and…was hooked in about 20 minutes. Since then, I’ve been staying up later than usual, and waking up even earlier than usual, and have managed to work my way through the first season and part of the second. But this post isn’t really about 24; it’s about ‘artistic license’ as applied by directors of TV shows and movies. In particular, one of the opening scenes in Season Two really caught my eye (click for larger image):

Shot of Lake O in 24 opening

You see, Lake Oswego, Oregon is about 10 miles from where I live, and I guarantee you, it looks nothing like the above image.

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Thanks for buying AnyMovie on DVD!

Congratulations on your recent purchase of AnyMovie on DVD! You are just a few quick steps away from enjoying this fine feature on your home theater system. To get started, here's all you need to do...

  1. Remove the AnyMovie DVD from the bag provided by the store.
  2. Remove the shrink wrap from the AnyMovie DVD. Note that this step will require either exceedingly long and sharp nails, a pair of scissors, or a knife of some sort. Take care when using the scissors or knife that you don't accidentally damage AnyMovie's packaging--we spent hours creating those glorious photos and writing that flowing text. It'd be a shame to damage the package before you even have AnyMovie open!
  3. Remove the decorative slipcover that protects the AnyMovie DVD case, which in turn, protects the AnyMovie DVD itself. Don't misplace this slipcover, though, as you'll want to keep it handy when storing the AnyMovie DVD in your DVD rack. During this step, you may notice that the slipcover and the actual DVD case have identical artwork, front and back. This may lead you to wonder why we included the slipcover, since it appears redundant, increases shipping costs, and eventually increases landfill usage. Don't worry about such things; that's our job. Just rejoice in the knowledge that you'll soon be enjoying AnyMovie on your own theater system.
  4. Using either your sharp fingernails, the scissors, or the knife from step two, remove the sticky anti-theft wraps that we have thoughtfully placed on the top, right, and bottom edges of the DVD case. You may find these annoying, especially as they have a tendency to either tear apart or rip off portions of the DVD case artwork, but rest assured--they're there for your protection. Really. See, if they weren't there, then we'd be forced to charge more for the AnyMovie DVD due to increased piracy. You see, there's no telling how many people would stand there in the store, rip the shrink wrap off the package, remove the slipcover from the DVD case, pry open the DVD case, and remove the disc(s) before slipping out of the store unnoticed. Thanks to these plastic peel-offs, though, we don't have to worry about such things.
  5. Turn the DVD case on its edge, and look at the long side of the case. Notice the two tabs with the words "Open" and the small arrows pointing up. Insert your sharp fingernail, or other suitably pointed object, into the nearly-invisible crack at the top of these tabs, then pry in a downward direction. With luck, the tabs will pop open. If you're out of luck, though, your fingernail will pop off, or your sharp object will break. If this happens, please find another fingernail or sharp object to use to complete this step. If you're bleeding, first apply a bandage to prevent any blood from staining the AnyMovie DVD. (Our warranty doesn't cover malfunctioning discs caused by consumers' bleeding onto the media).
  6. Open the DVD case, and quickly scan through the valuable movie discounts and other advertising we've included to keep your costs down. Again, we're acting in your interests here. Without these inserts, your cost would be notably higher. If you splurged on the Special Edition of AnyMovie, then you may find some interesting-looking related extras. If you bought the standard version, you're now staring at an empty black case, devoid of anything useful other than the disc itself.
  7. Remove the disc from the carrier. Note that this will require at least two hands, and possibly three, especially if you have small hands. Do your best not to touch the disc in any way during this step; you may get a fingerprint or scratch on it, which will, of course, not be covered under warranty (we cannot be responsible for damage caused by the consumer).
  8. Insert the DVD into your player, and then sit back and enjoy AnyMovie!

Yes, I received a few DVDs for Christmas. Yes, I think the packaging for DVDs has gone beyond ridiculous to the point of idiocy. Do I think things will change anytime soon? Unfortunately, no. But I feel better now, having ranted about it a bit!



Macworld: 2005 writings

Macworld logoThe following is what I could find online of my 2005 articles for Macworld. I wrote more than what's shown here, but these are the ones I could find…



On the strangeness of electrons…

Happy Holidays!

As you may know, I'm in Colorado for the holidays this year, visiting with the family. If you've never been here, the air is extremely dry, especially in the winter. And dry air makes a great breeding ground for static electricity. Coming from humid Oregon, I'd pretty much forgotten about that fact. Until this morning, when I touched the trackpad on my 12" PowerBook G4 and watched a very large, very bright spark travel between my finger and the pad. Zotttt!

Immediately, the trackpad was rendered next to useless. The cursor was generally restricted to a square area of about 200 pixels in the top left corner of the screen--though I could occasionally coerce it into other locations. Knowing what little I know about electricity (stay away from it!), I thought for sure I'd fried some key electronic part that controlled the track pad.

Nonetheless, I tried my usual first troubleshooting step--a restart. While things changed a bit, the trackpad was still basically unusable. I could drag it all over the screen, but only in huge jumps. When I lifted my finger, the cursor would jump to some other spot on the screen. I was now pretty convinced I had a hardware issue.

Then I remembered that I had SideTrack, the replacement trackpad driver, installed. SideTrack is such an essential piece of software for me that I had totally forgotten I had it installed. In the 'why not try' category, I downloaded the newest version and installed it. One restart later, and...presto...I once again had a fully-functional trackpad.

So the question of the day for any of you technical types is: How could a jolt of static electricity permanently affect a software application? It seems very odd to me, especially given that SideTrack isn't the kind of thing (I wouldn't think) that would be writing anything permanent to disk (which might get scrambled by a shock). Any ideas?



10.4 + 0.3 = 311.6??

megabytes to upgrade

Well, it does when you're talking about installing 10.4 from the retail DVD, and then upgrading it to 10.4.3. I re-partitioned a portable FireWire drive tonight, so that I could put both 10.3 and 10.4 on it for testing purposes. I haven't clean installed 10.4 since the release back in April, and I hadn't really noticed just how many megabytes of updates there have been. Suffice it to say, there've been a lot! Seven packages the first time around, then five more after that.

To Apple's credit, I guess?, it only took two restarts to get the system up to date. But I shudder to think about those who lack broadband access to the net; even a moderately-speedy DSL connection would groan under the weight of these updates. Approximate download times for 311.6MB:

Connection SpeedDownload Time (Hrs:Mins)
28.8Kbps25:12
33.3Kbps21:36
56.6Kbps12:50
128Kbps (ISDN)5:40
512Kbps (DSL)1:25
1.5Mbps (Cable)0:29
6Mpbs (Fast Cable)0:07

So what does one do if you only have modem access? From my memories of my 56Kbps days, the modem more routinely connected at about 44Kbps, meaning probably something like 15 hours of download time. And I don't believe Apple allows user groups to distribute update CDs any more (do they?). Anyone out there still on a modem connection? If so, how do you stay current with 100MB+ updates becoming routine nowadays? (Note that this doesn't just apply to Apple's updates; even updates for things like Quicken, Acrobat, etc. are swelling into the multi-megabyte size).



Strangest OS X screenshot …. ever?

Last weekend, I was working on a relatively large--OK, a huge--17.8GB QuickTime movie. This was the raw capture of 35 or so minutes of flying time in X-Plane.

strange screenshotI had the original movie open in QuickTime Player, and I had also exported a notably smaller (200MB) H.264 version, which I was playing with in Motion. Then, for no apparent reason, all heck broke lose--both screens on my system suddenly went 70s psychedelic on me, as seen in the grab at right of a portion of the screen (click for full-size).

In addition to the messed-up colors, things were also not in the right spot on the screen--you can see this with the location of the Smart Folders object in the large screenshot. The system seemed to be working fine; I just couldn't make anything out on either screen--except the menubar (but not the menus themselves). So I used Command-Tab and the 'Q' key to quit various running apps, including QuickTime and Motion.

After quitting nearly everything I had running, the screen returned to nearly normal--the only remaining issue was that objects' shadows were really messed up, showing pieces of other windows instead of a fuzzy gray/black shadow. I logged out and back in, and that fixed that issue.

What this reminded me of, more than anything, was mucking about with my Apple ][ back in the day--if you "poked" some data into the wrong memory locations, you could mess up your display in quite a creative manner! It almost seemed like that's what OS X was doing--I had used all the available RAM, so it started using the video card's RAM for storage instead. Yes, I know this isn't possible, and it's in no way what happened.

Anyway, in five years of OS X usage, this is by far the oddest visual distortion I've ever seen, so I thought I'd share. I was quite impressed that the system itself was still usable--I have yet to restart since that incident, in fact, and all has been fine after the re-login.



New comment tools installed…

Today's lunch hour project was to enhance the comment engine here on Robservatory just a bit. To that end, there are now two new features active:

  • Instead of a generic Recent Comments tracker in the sidebar, a new Unread Comments tracker (thanks to the Smart Unread Comments plug-in) shows only the comments you haven't personally seen. There's also a link to mark them all as read, in case you'd like to catch up right away. (Since the plug-in uses cookies to track the unread comments, everyone's starting point is the same--they are all unread, since the cookies haven't yet been created on your machine). This should make it somewhat easier to keep up with comments posted here.
  • Posting comments is now easier, thanks to the LivePreview plug-in. As you start typing your comment, you'll see a real-time preview (JavaScript required) below the text area. This is pretty slick, as it will preview HTML on the fly, so you can check bold, italics, and links before you hit the Submit button.

Not earth-shattering changes, but they should make working with comments a bit easier for everyone...