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Stuff that doesn’t fit in any other category

Just the iPod facts, ma’am

Macworld logoLast Friday, a relatively huge article in the Living section of The Oregonian caught my eye. As you can see in the picture at right (hover and click for a larger version), it was hard to miss this article.

Paper imageExpecting to find a shocking exposé on the hidden faults of the iPod, I started reading...and started getting angry. The article was nothing more than a writeup on one user's connectivity issues between her iPod nano and a Toshiba laptop. That alone would have been fine. But the article attempts to bring in other "evidence" of iPod nano flaws, and that's where I feel it overstepped the bounds of reasonable journalism (even for something in Living).

So I wrote up my thoughts for Macworld's site, as I felt it was unfair to let something like this sit without some form of response. I have also sent the paper a copy of my writeup, though I'm not expecting much in the way of follow up.



Why isn’t macosxhints.com a wiki?

A couple mornings back, while browsing my collection of feeds in NetNewsWire, I came across this entry about macosxhints.com in Chris Clark's excellent blog, decaffeinated. Chris writes:

MacOSXHints is a community-driven site operated by Mac Publishing LLC (of Macworld and Playlist renown) whose sole purpose is to collect and archive--wait for it--hints pertaining to Mac OS X...little tidbits you probably won’t find in the help files or product pages.

... ... ...

What we have is a thriving community site that houses a great number of hints, some percentage of them broken or redundant, most of which could be improved upon (and are, if you bother to read the comments) with the aid of a few dozen eyes.

This isn’t what blogs are for. This is what wikis are for.

So why isn’t MacOSXHints a wiki?

An interesting question to read, especially just after waking up. And it would have been interesting to reply in a comment on Chris' site, but...it seems there's no ability to do so. (Perhaps I should post a story about why decaffeinated should really be a blog that takes comments? :) ). So I'm posting my reply here, in case anyone's interested in the answer to the question.

The question about macosxhints.com is a valid one, and one that's potentially even more interesting when asked at a higher level...

Important note: The following thoughts are my opinions (and historical knowledge) only. They are in no way associated with any official MacPublishing, LLC company policies or plans. Anything I write about what I'd like to see on macosxhints.com is just that--what I'd personally like to see happen to the site going forward. They are not statements of official plans by MacPublishing for the macosxhints.com site (but we are discussing many of these same things internally).

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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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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.



Strange things afoot at the San Luis

weird waterI was playing around with Google Earth (a recent Pick of the Week over on macosxhints) tonight, when I stumbled across the very odd image you see here.

For those of you who have Google Earth, here's a location file that will take you right to the spot. It's the San Luis reservoir, located in California off of highway 152, between Highway 101 and I-5. (I used to drive this road often when making the trek from San Jose to Los Angeles.)

The oddity is--what's with the bottom third of the reservoir? Has it really frozen solid along an arrow-straight line? Has it been converted into salt flats? Some strange cover to prevent the satellites from seeing what's hiding in the lake?

If you zoom in using Google Earth, you can see that the odd fill color runs precisely along the edge of one particular 'piece' of the overall image, so it's clearly just a glitch in the satellite or the software that processes the images. It definitely caught my eye, though.



This is going to take a while…

Expander box

2,023,406,814 hours! Wow! By my calculations, that's roughly 84,308,617 days, or 230,824 years, give or take a half-year or so. I hope the dual dual-core Intel-based Pro desktops are released soon; it seems I really need a faster Mac!

In all seriousness, this archive actually expanded relatively rapidly. However, I think the structure of the archive really messed up StuffIt's estimating abilities. The archive was a 220MB file containing Italian scenery files for the X-Plane flight sim. After expansion, it contains about 1,350 files, spread across 74 folders. While that doesn't seem overly excessive to me, apparently it's enough to greatly confuse StuffIt!



A Valentine’s Day tale

heart pictureAnd now, for something completely different, although it is somewhat technology related. I've known my wife Marian for close to 30 years. We've only been married for six, though, as we somehow never connected as 20 some-odd years passed. We wound up on different coasts, leading different lives, until fate figured it was time for us to get together.

When we finally did start dating, things moved rapidly, given that we already knew everything about each other--we were married less than six months after our 'first date.' We knew early on that we were going to get married, so that left me with a huge challenge: how do you surprise someone who's 100% certain they'll be getting an engagement ring? To add to the complexities, our relationship was also being carried out via United and Southwest Airlines--she lived in Arizona, and I in Oregon. So I couldn't really just show up on her doorstep with a ring, hoping she'd happen to be home. Or could I?

Read on for the details on how I used my Mac, an instant messaging client, a cell phone, and a good bit of deception to surprise Marian with her engagement ring. Caution, some syrupy romantic stuff will be included. It is, after all, Valentine's Day!

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New comment spam blocker installed

As a follow-up to the captcha post, I think I've implemented a near-ideal solution to allow fast and easy commenting while still blocking the spambots.

I took the advice of Andrew Wooster, linked by Simone Manganelli in comment #3 on the original captcha post, and created a personalized spam blocker using an additional field on the comment form. I also tweaked it just a bit, to provide some benefit to registered users. So as of today, here's how comments will work going forward:

  • If you're logged in: There's no change from how things worked before. Just fill in your comment and submit it. I'm going to assume that the spambots aren't going to take the trouble to register prior to spamming the site :). If that turns out not to be true, I may have to make the below process apply to everyone.
  • If you're not logged in: You'll see one new field on the comment submission form. This field is required, and it's a text field to hold the answer to one of five very simple questions. How simple? They're so simple that the answer is given in the questions themselves. Here's a sample question: "What is Tommy Sample's first name?" Type in the answer, and the comment will be published just as before.

I think this is about the most painless spam solution available, so let's see how it works. Registered users will feel no pain at all, and everyone else will have just a slight (a few characters typed into one text box) hassle, with none of the captcha's side effects. Please let me know if you have any troubles with this new solution.

Update: There are now five randomly-presented questions, as well as a cleaned-up layout. Hopefully the questions are all as simple as they should be; if you're thinking about the answer, you're trying too hard!



Annoying captcha added (sorry!)

Update: The annoying captcha has been replaced.

no spamToday I took the long-avoided step of adding a captcha to the comment submission form. It seems my blog has been discovered by the spambots, and (even with Spam Karma 2 installed) the flood of meaningless spam has gotten too large to ignore. Most of you probably don't see the postings, as I get notified via email whenever they appear, and I do my best to delete them immediately. However, as the number of meaningless comments increased, this process was becoming too time consuming.

So I was left with two options. First, I could allow only registered users to post comments. I don't like that solution, since this is an informal, hopefully fun place to just drop by. If someone feels like leaving a comment, I'd like them to be able to do so without the hassle of registering for an account. So that left the second option--adding the captcha to the comment screen. This is far from ideal, as I know sometimes the stupid things are nearly unreadable, and they present issues to those who have problems with their vision. I wish I had a better solution (a future update to Spam Karma may solve the problems, I hope), but right now, I don't.

So for now, we have a captcha. It's not like there are a ton of comments here anyway, but hopefully this won't cut down on the dialog as much as would happen if I were to add a registration requirement. Please let me know if you have any issues with the captcha; I'm using SecureImage, which is fairly widely used, so hopefully the problems will be minimal. This plug-in does have one nice feature--if you are logged in, you won't see it (so there you have it, one minor reason why you might wish to register). And spammers, please find a better target for your vileness. There's no way I'm going to let any of your drek stay on these pages for any length of time!

And yes, there is more content coming here in the future--I've just been a touch busy with Macworld and macosxhints.com stuff lately!