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Good riddance, haunted house!

We've lived in our present home for a bit more than two years, and we're generally quite happy with it. However, the floor has always been very squeaky, especially in the carpeted areas. When someone was walking around, it really did sound like a haunted house at times, what with all the eery squeaking from the floor.

Although the noise annoyed me, it never did so enough to merit moving all the furniture, pulling up the carpeting, and fixing the problem with some nails. Nor was I much interested in trying to solve it from below, in our roughly 18" tall crawl space. So I just put up with it. Until this week.

A while back, someone told me about this ingenious device that would help you fix squeaky floors without pulling carpet or entering the crawlspace. I was doubtful, and just never seemed to have enough time to investigate further. But with some time off the last couple weeks for the new child (and family in town to help babysit), I finally tracked down the device at Home Depot. It's called (I am not making this up) Squeeeeek No More, and it looks like this (click for a larger version):

Squeek tool

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Trust me, they won’t even notice…

So let's assume you're a big, powerful, corporation, generally viewed as "customer centric" with very cool and useful products. Sometimes, though, you have the occasional 'what we're they thinking?' moment with a product. Let's further assume your name is, oh, I don't know, how about...Apple? Here's yet another of those moments they seem to have with some regularity:

iPhoto icon

That, in case you're not familiar with it, is the button in iPhoto toolbar that lets you publish a selection of images to your .Mac homepage. Click it, and a wizard comes up that helps you select the theme, layout options, and other features for your photo page. You then click Publish, and presto, your images are published on your .Mac homepage, complete with a very nice slideshow feature. Presto, bango, simple!

So what's the problem? Well, that button (and the wizard it launched) has simply vanished in iPhoto6. There's no discussion about it in the manual, nor in Help, nor in the Read Me, nor in the Knowledge Base. It has simply disappeared into the ether.

Instead of using the handy wizard, you're now supposed to send all your images through iWeb, which will then force you to create an actual site, just to contain what should be a simple slideshow page. Yech. There is a workaround, which I'll write up in detail for macosxhints next week. (Short version: export and resize to 800x600, upload the folder to your iDisk, then use the .Mac homepage to create the photo page.) But the workaround is a far cry from the ease of use of the old wizard.

Now personally, I never used this feature, as I don't use .Mac for my photo pages. However, after recommending the iLife upgrade to my mother, I definitely got an earful about this "new and improved" iPhoto when she found her single most used feature missing in action! Since I feel responsible for the problem she now faces, it's the least I can do to try to help spread the word about this, and hope Apple can see fit to return a basic feature to the application.

I'll probably be writing about why this is a Really Bad Thing on macworld.com next week, but I wanted to get something up about it now, while it was fresh on my mind. Of course, based on Apple's treatment of the discussion I linked to above, I don't have a positive feeling about the chances of this feature's return...

Locked!

Perhaps, though, if enough people make enough noise about it, they can bring back what was a powerful and easy-to-use feature.



You’re downloading what?!

Firefox download

I saw this as I was downloading Firefox for Windows XP (running in Parallels Workstation on my Intel mini). Needless to say, given the horror stories I'd heard about Windows' security, my first thought was 'my XP box has been hacked!' A bit of research, though, proved that this is a legit Firefox mirror...albeit one that may cause issues for those downloading from, say, government agencies, large companies, or anyone else likely to have an Internet filtering solution in place.

BTW, if you have an Intel-powered Mac, do yourself a favor and check out Parallels--it's really pretty amazing being able to run any number of guest operating systems at near-native speeds, all within the friendly confines of OS X. I wrote about my experiences with it for a recent Macworld piece, and included a video that shows XP's speed on the Core Duo mini. Today's release of Parallels beta5 included basic USB device support (flash drives only for now), as well as the beginnings of a nice shared folder solution for sharing data with the host OS X machine.



An April Fool’s Day reject

Tiny iPod imageFor the past few years on April Fool's Day, I've run some sort of prank announcement on macosxhints.com--everything from switching to WindowsXP hints to the triple-CPU G5 Cubed to running OS X on an iPod to this year's 30th Anniversary Mac.

When thinking about what to do for this year, the Apple Music/Apple Computer lawsuit was getting a lot of press. Using that as the setup, I thought I'd run a cool story about a new Apple/Apple agreement that would finally put Beatles music on iPods. I even went so far as to mock up a line of special edition iPods created just for the occasion. Ultimately, I trashed the concept and went with the Intel/PowerPC Mac, but I thought I'd share the Beatles Special Edition iPod designs here (click the image for a larger version):

Beatle iPods

I had written up most of the story, too, but that's long since gone. The only other thing I have left is the sales flyer sheet I put together with some specs on the units--you can see the full-size flyer by clicking on the small image at the top right of this story. You'll see a full view of each iPod, along with some tech notes about the units. Be aware that the full-size image is a 173KB PNG file, so those with modems (are there any of you?) may wish to avoid doing that.

In the end, I felt the Intel/PowerPC thing would be more interesting, so that's what I went with. But when I look at the custom iPods, I think "geez, if Apple offered some sort of custom iPod image silkscreening feature, I'd probably buy one." I think they'd look much more interesting than the current plain black or white versions, based on looking at even my relatively poor Photoshop work. And it'd be a nice way to customize your unit, by including an image of your choice directly on the machine itself.





Don’t try this at home…or do!

tiger imageI'm working on an article for Macworld that requires installing and removing a number of programs on my Mac--programs that include kernel extensions, frameworks, etc. Since I prefer to keep my core OS X install relatively clean, I created a new 10.4.6 installation on a FireWire drive, and I've been using that for all the software testing.

To make things even easier on myself, I did this all on the PowerBook, so I could continue working on the G5 while the PowerBook was involved in the testing process. When I put the PowerBook to sleep, the FireWire drive stays powered up--since the FirewWire port gets power even when the PowerBook is sleeping. Since the drive makes a bit of noise, and leaving it powered up bothers me, I've taken to unplugging it when the PowerBook is sleeping.

This morning, I woke the PowerBook as usual...but completely forgot it was booted off the FireWire drive, which was peacefully resting next to the PowerBook, unplugged. Uh oh. As soon as I realized what I'd done, I was ready for instant death in OS X. But no such thing happened. Of course, nothing much else happened, either--mouse clicks seemed to be ignored, Command-Tab didn't work, etc. In short, the machine was effectively locked up, though I could move the cursor. This makes sense, given that the system was sitting there without any way to access its operating system.

Since I was sure I was in deep trouble at this point already, I did the only logical thing--I plugged in the FireWire drive and crossed my fingers. Amazingly, it just worked--even the mouse clicks I'd made were 'remembered' and all activated as soon as the drive came back online, and everything was fine from then on.

This may be old news to many of you, but I was pretty impressed that I didn't immediately kill my PowerBook when I woke it up without a boot drive attached.







How to (not!) Fast Play a Disney DVD

Sorry it's been so quiet around here lately, but I've been doing a lot of big projects for Macworld. Last week, I wrote a series of articles on the new Intel Core Duo mini. I even wrote about why I'm sometimes SO DIMM, concerning a small (or not so small) mistake I made when purchasing RAM for the new mini.

This week, I took that same mini and turned it into a dual-booting OS X / Windows XP box, and detailed my experiences during the project. So that's why things have been a bit slow around here lately; after finishing up my daily duties, the fingers and brain have been too worn out to blog about some of the things on my mind. But this particular item was too good to ignore, so I worked on it last night and I'm posting it now for your enjoyment...there's even a bit of a tip in here, though not an OS X tip.

A couple weeks ago, we bought Disney's Lady and the Tramp DVD for our daughter. When I put it in for the first time, it was hard to miss Disney's new feature--Fast Play:

DVD Fast Play

While you're looking at this pretty screen, whose buttons don't show up for several seconds, you're listening to the announcer say:

This Disney DVD is enhanced with Disney's Fast Play. Your movie and a selection of bonus features will begin automatically. To bypass Fast Play, select the Main Menu button at any time. Fast Play will begin in a moment...

My first thought was, wow, cool, a way to skip all that cruft they load our DVDs with nowadays?! Too cool! A not-so-quick experiment, however, proved my initial thought wrong...very, very wrong! Select Fast Play on Lady and the Tramp, and here's what you'll get:

  1. Little Mermaid Special Edition DVD preview
  2. Shaggy Dog movie preview
  3. Chicken Little DVD preview
  4. Brother Bear 2 movie preview (there was a Brother Bear 1?)
  5. Airbuddies DVD preview
  6. The Disney DVD "oooooh" splash screen and sound effects.
  7. The Disney DVD Enhanced Home Theater Mix splash screen and sound effects.
  8. Piracy warning #1 - general 'you are a thief and we don't trust you' message.
  9. Piracy warning #2 - 'The FBI doesn't trust you either. We know you're stealing stuff.'
  10. The movie!

Add it all up, and it takes roughly seven minutes and 10 seconds!! to go from the first time I saw anything onscreen to actually seeing the movie. Fast Play? They call that Fast Play? How long does the Slow Play alternative take to start the movie, three days?

I restarted the disc, and clicked the Main Menu button as soon as I could. From there, I chose Play Movie, then Widescreen. Next I got to see the two Disney splash screens and the two piracy screens, then the movie started. Total time required, only one minute and twenty seconds. But you can actually do better, much better, than that. And this tip works with pretty much every DVD I've tried it with.

After inserting a DVD, press the Menu button on your remote, or an onscreen button, whatever you can, to get to the Main Menu as quickly as possible. From there, click the Scene (or Chapter or whatever they choose to call it) Selection button. Then choose the first scene in the movie, which is almost always the opening credits. Then select your screen format (if necessary), and you're done. The movie will simply start playing. No Disney splash screens. No FBI warnings. Nothing but movie, the way things were meant to be.

For Lady and the Tramp, this process takes only 28 seconds, from initial screen activity to viewing the actual movie. Now that's what I call Fast Play!



A maximum look at a mini Mac

Macworld logoAfter receiving my first-ever Intel-powered Mac, a new Core Duo mini, I spent the better part of a week testing out the machine in nearly every aspect of performance I could think up. This started as a three-part series, but based on feedback from the first three parts, we added two additional sections. Here's how the entire series came out:

  1. Setup, configuration and application tests
  2. General observations, audio & video, gaming
  3. Testing methods, Intel transition and conclusions
  4. More RAM, more tests
  5. HD issues and final thoughts

While not at the technical level of an Ars Technica report (I won't even pretend to have the skills to go there), this is a very detailed look at the machine from a somewhat typical user's perspective.