Useful Bulk

Google Docs now does OCR

2010-11-03T13:11:00.000-07:00

In June of this year, Google added an Optical Character Recognition feature to its free Google Docs service. This allows users to upload PDF or image files (.jpg, .gif, or .png formats) from which Google Docs attempts to automatically create an editable text file.

This is an excellent free resource for casual users who need to occasionally convert an un-editable PDF document, or (with a flatbed scanner or camera) need to include text from printed media in an electronic document.

Google Help Document: Uploading and exporting: Uploading image files with text to Google Docs

Save the iPad's Orientation Lock

2010-10-27T17:56:00.000-07:00

I just started this online petition. It's a first for me, but this change in what I heralded as one of the best ideas on the iPad is just stupid.

Update 1/12/2011: Apple's iOS 4.3 version update now allows users to choose whether the hardware switch is an Orientation Lock or Mute switch. Hoorah!

The Future Arrives... in a Theater Near You

2010-10-07T04:05:00.000-07:00

by Ellsworth Chou, October 7, 2010

In 1999, my wife (a TV/film professor) and I (also a media professional) saw Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace three times in two days. Not because it was so great (we learned that when we saw it twice on opening day, which involved sleeping in our car on Hollywood Boulevard down the street from Mann's Chinese Theater - but that's another story), but because we had the opportunity to see it projected digitally on two competing systems that were vying for what was expected to be the future of the cinema. We saw a traditional 35mm film projection, a Hughes/JVC D-ILA projector, and a Texas Instruments DLP projector. In the latter two presentations, 20th Century Fox had provided an exotic hard drive array with a digital, essentially high-definition video copy of the movie - in the form of a then-impressive 340GB of files, if memory serves. In these special Los Angeles area screenings, I took binoculars along, then brazenly walked up to the screen itself during the movie, where I was joined by others who shared my curiosity.

After seeing those presentations, as well as digital projections of the 1999 animated Tarzan, Pixar’s Toy Story (which was fully digital from production to projection - meaning that there had never been any light involved in the production at all) and a handful of other motion pictures, these points of observation and speculation emerged:

Motion picture distributors would absolutely want this as their future. Motion picture prints cost thousands of dollars each. Prints cost distributors a lot to ship. Prints scratch, break and wear out. Trailers - those previews of future movie releases - and commercial ads are hand-spliced to the beginning of the movie print by on-site staff. If a multiplex theater finds a movie performing unusually well, they must wait for additional prints to be shipped (if extras are available at all).

In a world of all digital theaters, it would be possible for movie files to be delivered electronically, via Internet or satellite. Need to add additional screens to accommodate unexpected capacity? Click on a button and license another projection. Replace your projectionist with an I.T. guy, and never handle film again. Additionally, any or all the screens in a theater could be booked to show live content - think Pay-Per-View for hundreds of people at once, or simply television content.

Though modern digital projectors looked fair to very good, they did not effectively produce similar images to film prints (in 1999, those digital cinema projections had only 2/3 the resolution of today’s HDTVs). Though this might improve over time, the political and commercial forces at play in the cinema distribution business would place little priority upon aesthetic merit. Cinematographers, whose entire artistic endeavor is to know and discreetly affect what the image will look like in your neighborhood theater, collectively cringed at the coming massacre of their craft.

Perhaps most profoundly, who would pay for these projectors? At the time, the projectors cost well over a hundred thousand dollars each. Theaters, who had invested in expensive film projectors when their facilities were originally built, would not benefit financially in the way that distribution companies would. But distribution companies didn’t have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend to upgrade the theater chains with which they had business arrangements.

As the inevitable transition from an all-film distribution network to all-digital took place, how awkward would it be to deliver both forms? How would it work when only a small percentage of theaters had made the change?

Living in Los Angeles, we were privileged to see many of the pilot programs. Our neighborhood AMC theater in Burbank, California installed a single prototype theatrical DLP projector next to the film projectors in its booth, and when digital “prints” were made available of selected movies, presented them in that theater. We saw as many of those presentations as possible in both film and digital projections. In time, AMC added a few more digital projectors to its three Burbank theaters (totaling 30 screens). In the last two years, they installed a Digital IMAX theater. Keeping with the current trend, the Burbank AMC theaters installed several digital projectors in the past few years to project "3D" releases using the RealD stereoscopic projection system, which depends upon digital projection rather than film.

A little over a year ago, a friend who works for a major movie studio in distribution told us that they were approaching 20 per cent digitally-delivered “prints,” and that the studio was offering discounts for digital delivery as a way of incentivizing theater chains to foot the bill for the projector conversions.

A press release back in March of 2009 announced Sony’s signing a contract with AMC to replace all of its 35mm film projectors with so-called “4K” (having four thousand pixel resolution horizontally - considered by some to be the subjective equivalent of the detail reproduction of 35mm film) Sony digital projectors by 2012. It was a surprising announcement, but 2012 seemed a long way off.

And yet, when we were at the AMC Burbank theater tonight, and I was idly perusing the electronic marquee of this evening’s offerings, a sudden realization rather shocked me. At the end of 13 or so of the 18 listings were the characters “-D.” As in “Digital.” I’m sure I blinked, then skimmed the marquee. The only shows NOT bearing this code were listed as “IMAX” (which in this case is digital, and NOT the massive film format upon with the IMAX corporation made their name), and a live pay-per-view event - obviously video. I asked the teller, “What do the D’s at the end of the listings mean?” “Digital,” said the teller.

I quietly gasped. We’d been away this summer on a 40-day trip, and upon our return, found a lot of things changed - as though people had actually waited the previous 20+ years we’d lived here before making big changes. This one was the capper. No managerial staff in sight, I tried asking the ticket-tearer at the AMC whether all the theaters had digital projectors now - her answer wasn't satisfactory, and I'd still like to know how many film projectors remain in the complex. But the marquee spoke the message clearly enough: No film here.

It will take some time for this change to reach the far corners of this country, as it will the rest of the planet who have been using 35mm film since Thomas Edison patented it 115 years ago. Film will remain an acquisition medium for as long as the currently-working cinematographers - some of whom claim that they will retire when film does - can argue for its existence. That chemically-coated, light-sensitive film offers a durable, high-quality archival medium with a 100+ year history isn’t lost on film executives. These movers and shakers of the entertainment world still value keeping original negatives of motion pictures in vaults. These same executives are even now generating revenues by authorizing the re-scanning of movies which were originally projected in film; later telecined to video for television, home videotape and DVD release; and now re-scanned in high-definition for sale to the same public who previously purchased or watched the movies in the theater and on their standard-definition televisions.

The handwriting is on the wall for film. Despite its current superiority at reproducing the subtle tonal values of a given scene, film’s future is surely at risk. For one, much of the aesthetic qualities still uniquely credited to film acquisition is a cultural phenomenon. Those of us who have watched cinema for the past century were accustomed to the not insignificant “frame blur” of motion picture film exposed at 24 frames per second (try taking photos of any kind active scene with a still camera set to something near the 1/48th second of motion pictures). Likewise, we’re accustomed to just how film “looks,” including the nearly limitless abstractions that visual craftsmen have applied to alter the contrast, color, grain, and texture over the decades.

In a world without film acquisition - our near future - generations of humans will likely learn to think of the “look” of film as something representing the past - as we already do with black and white motion pictures and television programs. In our new “HDTV” world’s 16:9 “widescreen” aspect ratio, even slick television productions of just the last decade can’t hide their squarish 4:3 shape. Any contemporary arguments for the technical and artistic superiority of film acquisition will be moot points to most human born in the last decade or so.

Consider, too, that the technology behind film projection - aside from the lens and illuminating lamp - is the strip of film itself. As film manufacturers Kodak, Agfa and Fuji have improved their print stocks, their innovations are shipped out with subsequently-released motion pictures. Improvements to digital projectors will surely come, but will require the replacement of expensive projector components, or the entire projectors themselves - at exhibitors' expense. What incentive will the local theater chain have for improving the image quality of their huge investment in digital projectors?

Today, an increasing number of television programs and motion pictures are being produced without film. Television programs destined for high-definition distribution, even so-called “prime time dramas” which have been the last bastion for the prestige and “quality” associated with film, continue to transition to video production as cameras and techniques have more closely approached the perceived images produced by film.

Film’s demise may have been hastened by an unexpected source. Two years ago, a friend who works for the Screen Actor’s Guild (the labor union which represents performers for film and television), related a current issue within the union which was to have significant impact on the use of film. When television was still in its infancy six decades ago, SAG and AFRA (American Federation of Radio Artists) met to discuss how the two performers’ unions would divvy up actors working in motion pictures and television. SAG magnanimously offered AFRA the television work - which subsequently became AFTRA, while SAG would maintain the prestigious clientele of the fully mature motion picture industry. Flash-forward to 2009, when the Screen Actors Guild had been mired in internal negotiations for new contracts for almost two years. Its constipated efforts had remained in entertainment-industry headlines constantly, and entertainment executives were increasingly uncomfortable with dealing with the troubled union, even though all the most desirable actors were and are SAG signatories. At some point, someone in the industry realized that there was subtle language in that half-century old contract still held by AFTRA that specified that if a production was shot on video - the technology of television from the 1950s and today - then any AFTRA performer was eligible to work on that production. SAG and AFTRA have agreements in which members of either union are eligible to work on shows covered by the other union. The upshot? If you shoot a television show without film, then you can sign SAG and AFTRA performers alike - essentially all working actors - to your production. Following this discovery, the 2009 television pilot season was predominately shot on HD video, and all those performers were signed with AFTRA contracts. SAG - still bickering internally to this day - was left out in the cold. But so was film.

For all of the technical and aesthetic arguments that industry artists and craftsmen have made over the past two decades about the future of film itself, few to none would have predicted that a major force of change in film’s survival would be the impact of a half-century old union contract for actors.

Despite my progressive attitude toward technological change, I am also a filmmaker. When at age 13 I shot my first narrative sequence on 8mm film, then waited a week and a half for it to return from the processor, then threaded that film into a projector and watched the results, it was MAGICAL. Even sitting in dailies on a major motion picture and watching footage we shot the previous day, there’s a fantastic, psycho-visual effect: it feels like someone else shot that footage, years ago, far away. Conversely, I can play a personal videotape I shot in 1981 and believe that we’ve just returned from that trip this morning, and are reviewing footage - so powerful is our cultural association with the visual qualities and historical uses of the two mediums. I will be sad the day the last motion picture is shot on film: for nostalgia; for the deep cultural impact that film has had since photography’s dawning almost two centuries ago; and because once closed behind us, that door will likely never be re-opened. I already miss the smell of cracking open a new can of film and inhaling the strangely appealing perfume of emulsion emanating from within.

My wife has told her cinema students that this was coming for years. We’ve known this was the future, like it or not.

The future is here.

facebook Announces Personal Content Archiving

2010-10-06T15:16:00.000-07:00

The press announcement from facebook today (CNN, TechCrunch, Forbes.com) addresses something I've really worried about (not for myself, so much): that all this effort people put into their fb profiles could some day vanish, or become unavailable to them. Facebook could be purchased, go out of business, or just have a massive data loss incident. You or your children might be interested in the life you shared online in 25 years - will facebook exist? Plus, this just appeals to the data manager in me.

From the CNN story:

With "Download Your Information," Facebook users will be able to create a zip file of everything they've done on the site.

From TechCrunch:

Facebook Product Manager David Recordon explains that you can access the “Download Your Information” feature from your account settings, hit the download button and Facebook will allow you to download everything off your profile, including your friends list, events, all of your messages, wall posts and all of your photos into a zip file.

Downloading your profile in this way does not delete it from the site, but simply provides you with a copy. Users wishing to erase their data entirely will have to go through the process of deleting their entire Facebook profile, separately from “Download Your Information.”

Recordon emphasizes that the product will be simple enough for laymen to use, a one click process.

More importantly, when asked during the Q&A whether a Facebook user could ostensibly download their information and then reupload it to a site other than Facebook, Zuckerberg answered:

“At a high level we’ve built two different things, Facebook Connect — which is our real effort to bring our sites to other sites, and “Download Your Information” where you can download your information and upload it to another site. Stuff that you put into the site, you should be able to take out.”

“Download Your Information” should be rolling out to all users beginning today.

As of this writing, the "Download Your Information" feature has not yet appeared on my facebook Account Settings.

Your Own AT&T 3G Tower for $150

2010-05-14T19:55:00.000-07:00

OK, so it's not actually a cell tower, but if you have a broadband Internet connection, the AT&T MicroCell allows up to four simultaneous users to make 3G data or phone calls within a 40 foot radius.

So if you are one of those people who says, "I can't get a signal on my iPhone inside my house/office," this might be just what you need. You just plug it into your network, register the device online, and you've effectively extended the AT&T 3G cell network to a 5,000 square-foot bubble around the MicroCell.

Though the device is portable and can be relocated, note that the AT&T website recommends "Installing your device near a window is strongly recommended to ensure access to Global Positioning System (GPS). A GPS link is needed to verify the device location during the initial startup."

Why does it need GPS? Based on the next quote from the AT&T site, I'm guessing that there are probably FCC restrictions about using these transceivers outside a geographical area in which AT&T is licensed for radio transmissions: "The device may be moved, provided the new location is within the AT&T authorized service area and properly registered online."

The Analog Hole Closes - BE VERY AFRAID

2010-05-09T17:27:00.000-07:00

When he was FCC Chairman, Michael Powell (son of Retired General Colin Powell) defended the rights of the taxpayers to retain the so-called "Analog Hole," which today continues to provide a method by which consumers can record television content from their cable boxes, satellite receivers and other devices to VCRs and other recording devices. Powell considered it a right of every citizen of the U.S. to be able to keep a recording of television programming which had already been provided to their home. That right is now in serious jeopardy.

Now, (idiot) entertainment corporations think that their customers (those of us giving them $100+ a month for the "privilege" of watching what programming they choose to provide) are pirating their content and depriving the corporations of income. To prevent us ALL from illegally copying and selling "first run" movies and television programs, the MPAA has managed to convince the current FCC to allow blocking the Analog Hole on selected programming.

U.S. Lets Hollywood Disable Home TV Outputs to Prevent Piracy (Bloomberg BusinessWeek)

This is horrifying.

The infrastructure for blocking the analog outputs on cable and satellite boxes has existed for some time, and software control of the analog video output ports on is already built into existing cable and satellite tuners and DVRs. Any given program could be "flagged" to turn off the analog video ports on these devices, thus preventing recordings from being made onto other media (tape, DVD, hard drive, etc.). Similarly, the ability to prevent any given program from being recorded internally on a DVR/PVR has been in place, potentially providing a mechanism for content owners to prohibit the delayed or repeated viewing of programming on DVRs, or even to force viewers to watch shows live. Consider the live voting aspects of today's performance reality shows - the call counts serve as collateral for advertising negotiations, and text-messaging may generate significant income. Some sources report that the 2009 season of American Idol generated 178 million text message for AT&T - an Idol sponsor.

American Idol sees 178M SMS interactions (MobileMarketer.com)

In 2007, media-ratings giant Nielsen Media Research adopted a metric known as "C3," which takes into account programs viewed on a DVR, but only up to three days from the original date of airing. Thus, forcing viewers to watch by "expiring" programs on their DVRs ensures a maximum rating.

The same advances of the Digital Age which promised (and in some cases, has delivered) higher-quality delivery of content is also perceived as a threat by those largest of entities which make their money from licensing media content. As a result, in a time when we should be able to make perfect recordings to view later, or share with our family and friends, we consumers are treated like criminals - and as a result may never again have the equivalent functionality of the lowly VHS videotape recorder again. Would Grandpa like to see that show about the Korean War that's coming on this week? Maybe, but unless he installs a cable service which carries that channel, or that show is eventually made available on DVD, or streamed on a paid Internet streaming service, you and Grandpa are out of luck.

Worse yet, those hundreds of millions of U.S. consumers who continue to use their analog televisions with cable, satellite and broadband carriers may be forced to buy new "digital" televisions, which by law incorporate hardware and software (HDCP) to make encrypted connections with set-top tuners and DVRs. Those consumers using legacy analog televisions are using the very Analog Hole through which "piracy" is considered to be such a threat. These taxpayers would be left out in the cold, unable to view "first run" programming unless they purchased a new television.

And is this stopping "piracy?" In the Digital Age, only a single source is required for an infinite number of identical copies. So does knee-capping the entire Planet of Paying Customers have any affect upon the Professional Media Pirate, who can pay off an employee of a movie distribution company to "borrow" a high-quality master recording, or hire a team of programmers to "crack" the latest encryption solution?

It takes me several hours of effort to archive a single hour of television programming extracted via the Analog Hole. The process requires:

connecting a video/audio digitizer and computer to their cable/satellite boxes
capturing programming in real-time (waiting the entire duration of the program to "digitize" to computer; and we've often already seen the program, so yet more time from our life is invested)
editing out the commercials
burning the resulting content to a DVD or encoding for playback on a portable device or computer

...a process I do several times a month to provide classroom material, which is presented to students (thus far) under the Fair Use Doctrine of U.S. copyright law.

How many people are going to this trouble? How many of those people, who have ALREADY SEEN THE PROGRAM, are going to choose NOT to buy the program, but rather spend hours of their life digitizing it? (We would and have bought programs on DVD when available - it's much easier and looks better.) And how many of these same people are going to distribute it to their friends, who will also then not buy that piece of programming? How many friends do they have? Where is the lost revenue for the industry?

Piracy is nearly unavoidable. Nearly every attempt to prevent piracy through technological means has been thwarted by even more clever humans - often more for sport than profit. I was amazed to discover almost three years ago that illicit, high-quality, high-definition copies of U.S. prime-time television series were available within only a few hours - barely time enough for doing the work - on Internet sites available world-wide. I repeat: only a SINGLE SOURCE - a single person - is required to devise a method to circumvent a copy-protection scheme. That single person can then provide perfect digital copies infinitely to the rest of humanity. Big Media knows this - they were the ones who paid for all the copy-protection schemes that have been "cracked." Their solution? Use The Law, so that it won't matter so much if the technological schemes are unsuccessful. Some aspects of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (Pub. L. 105-304, 1998) make it illegal to be in possession of implements (hardware or software) which might be used to circumvent anything described as a copy-protection device. So, for instance, if you had a piece of email which described a method to allow your cable box to continue to play video to your existing analog television, even when that program had been flagged to turn off the analog ports, you might be in violation of a Federal Law.

In response to this factory-style illicit sharing of current broadcast content, some large media entities have really come around. Big old-school TV networks ABC and CBS, for example, provide very high-quality Internet streams of their current and recent episodes on their corporate websites - free of charge. This was the Right Thing To Do. Give people an easier, better way to watch your TV shows than downloading an illicit copy from a file-sharing site. Better yet: they get to run advertisements - their primary source of income - in these Internet streams. Even better: unlike broadcast TV, where no one really knows who is watching what and when, you can guarantee advertisers that their "roll-in" commercials that run before and during Internet streams are being seen, with no options for fast-forwarding, and often being only 30 seconds, not long enough for a snack or bathroom break.

With the release of Apple's iPad in March of 2010, ABC Television released a free iPad app which just brings all the current ABC shows in very high quality to wherever you want to be with your sleek media tablet. These guys Get It. (The fact that Steve Jobs is on the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company may be significant here.)

Introducing the ABC Player for iPad™ (go.abc.com)

If more content-owners were savvy enough to provide easy, low-cost methods for consumers to pay for content - say, 25 cents for a TV show - they'd find more people willing to give them money. By choosing only to make this MORE constrained, content-owning corporations may ultimately be driving customers away for good. As it is, every time we ask a teenager if they watch television, they tell us they watch "one or two shows," but "mostly I watch YouTube." Old-school television had better be paying attention. I, for one, would really like to continue to see stories told, rather than more people being hit in the groin with flying objects.

Google Voice Update July 15, 2009

2009-07-15T22:07:00.000-07:00

Today Google announced a Google Voice app for Android and Blackberry phones.

Google announced last month that they would soon begin sending Google Voice invitations to those who submitted requests on their sign-up list.

Easier Multiple File Attachments in Gmail

2009-06-24T21:43:00.000-07:00

I missed this when it debuted in February - Gmail now lets you select multiple files for a single "Attach a file:" activity. See how on the Official Gmail Blog.

R.I.P., Kodachrome

2009-06-22T20:01:00.000-07:00

Kodak: Kodachrome Discontinuation Notice

MSNBC.com: Sorry, Paul Simon, Kodak’s axing Kodachrome

CNET.com: Kodak Winds Last Rolls of Kodachrome

L. A. Times Blogs: Kodak Discontinues Kodachrome Film

Battery-powered DTV Converter

2009-06-09T12:55:00.000-07:00

The Winegard RCDT09A digital television converter box is unique in that it can run on battery power. If you need the use of an analog portable television (provided that it has an external antenna jack), after June 12, 2009, this may be your only solution.

Here is a CNET review of the RCDT09A.

At the time of this writing, portable "handheld" DTVs have dropped to $150, so that may be a better option.

How to Display the Date in the Macintosh Menu Bar

2009-06-07T15:44:00.000-07:00

I finally got around to looking for a solution (after years of griping about Apple's changing this behavior) to having the date displayed in the menu bar without my having to click on the time display.

This page explains the simple procedure, which requires no software. Works in Mac OS 10.4 and 10.5, possibly earlier.

H1N1 Swine Flu Map

2009-05-21T15:07:00.001-07:00

The FluTracker website attempts to geographically visualize of cases of H1Ni swine flu during the outbreak which began in spring 2009.

I'm posting this not to alarm, but rather so we can all get a sense of the scale of this incident.

How Much Energy in a Google Search?

2009-05-19T18:09:00.000-07:00

I was just talking with a friend who said he'd heard something about a Google search taking as much energy as boiling a cup of tea.

I found this article which mentions the original reference, but then links Google's repsonse.

Bottom line: Assuming that the original estimate of 15 grams of carbon dioxide generated to boil "a kettle of water" was at all accurate, and using Google's stated 0.2g of CO2 per Google search, the kettle of water takes 75 times as much energy.

Google Voice

2009-03-31T18:55:00.000-07:00

Update 7/15/09: Today Google announced a Google Voice app for Android and Blackberry phones. Google announced last month that they would soon begin sending Google Voice invitations to those who submitted requests on their sign-up list.

Grand Central is Google's free telephone management system.

I've been a Grand Central user since 2007, though we haven't really incorporated it into our life in a big way. Whenever we need to submit a phone number in a public way (we have it engraved onto the back of an iPod, for example), I always use our GC number. Grand Central is being replaced by something called Google Voice.

Right now, the Google Voice service is only available to Grand Central users, but Google is offering a notification sign-up list.

I wrote the following about Grand Central in November 2007:

GrandCentral is a free service which allows you to route calls made one central phone number (which you get from GrandCentral) to your selection of destination voicemail boxes an other phones. Here are some features:

* Screen Callers - GrandCentral looks up callers from its address book and shows you who's calling. If they're not in the book, it asks the caller for their name and stores it.
* Block Callers - Just add numbers to a blacklist.
* Listen In - Hear people leaving messages, and pick up if you wish.
* Call Record
* Notifications - receive email or SMS voicemail notifications
* Ring Different Phones - ring different phones based upon who is calling
* Greetings - different greetings based upon caller numbers
* RingShare - custom rings for callers by their ID
* WebCall - people call you from a web page without showing your number
* CallSwitch - while talking to someone on any of your phone locations (cell, home, work, other cell, etc.), press the star (*) key - all your other phones will ring and you pick one up, the call is transferred - very cool
* Click2Call - while using the Web interface for GrandCentral to view contacts, click "Call" - GC will call you, and call the contact for you

GrandCentral is in beta, and currently on "by invitation" from other users, but you can request an invitation on the site. GrandCentral was acquired by Google in June 2007. Here is Google's description of the service:

GrandCentral offers many features that complement the phone services you already use. If you have multiple phone numbers (e.g., home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to ring all, some, or none of your phones, based on who's calling. This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location or job. The service also gives you one central voice mailbox. You can listen to your voicemails online or from any phone, forward them to anybody, add the caller to your address book, block a caller as spam, and a lot more. You can even listen in on voicemail messages from your phone while they are being recorded, or switch a call from your cell phone to your desk phone and back again. All in all, you'll have a lot more control over your phones.

GrandCentral will no doubt be monetized at some point. Perhaps it will become a pay service, or perhaps Google will find a way to insert ads in the onilne content or (hopefully not) in the phone messaging system. Perhaps it provides a solution for you.

On the Loss of FireWire from the MacBook

2009-03-10T21:00:00.001-07:00

(I'm writing this in early March of 2009, many months after the introduction of the "aluminum" MacBook. I'm sure many have written on the subject, but as I was writing this to Apple's Feedback form for the MacBook, the document grew in length, so I decided to post it here.)

With the introduction of the "aluminum" or "unibody" MacBook to their product line in October of 2008, and the MacBook air in January of that same year, Apple, Inc. has produced the first Macs in a decade without FireWire connectivity.

I must comment upon this disappearance of FireWire connectivity from Macintosh products - specifically the MacBook. I appreciate that, as in the past, Apple strives to forge ahead with new paradigms and protocols (i.e., the personal computer, the mouse, WYSIWYG, 3.5" floppy disk, ADB, FireWire). I also appreciate the practicalities and economics of manufacturing. However, I feel this single change in the product line had been a damaging one to Apple's loyal users.

Increasingly, personal computer users find the need to own a laptop computer. Most users seek to strike a balance between need and cost, so there is always a market for lower-cost alternatives. The MacBook's price point is far lower than the entry-level MacBook Pro ($1,000 vs. $2,0000 as of March 2009) - enough that a MacBook Pro is not a viable alternative to many prospective buyers.

Apple won an Emmy Award for FireWire's contribution to television. More importantly, the ubiquitousness of FireWire in digital video camcorders has provided a fantastic infrastructure for consumer video for nearly a decade, providing not only an easy way to transfer footage from camcorder to personal computer, but a way to losslessly move high-quality footage back and forth to tape. This infrastructure still works, and though most newer high-definition camcorders may eschew tape as a recording medium - and therefore the need for FireWire's unique suitability for ingesting realtime video streams - many consumers will continue to shoot their home videos on existing FireWire-based camcorders.

I have been a video professional for nearly 30 years, and naturally find myself discussing home-video production issues with family and friends. My wife is a college professor who teaches digital video production, and I've acted as the Mac consultant for her school's video production labs since 1995. Though we see many of her students purchasing HD camcorders which do NOT require FireWire, many still acquire FireWire-based cameras. This does NOT mean that they have the budget to spend an extra thousand dollars to purchase a MacBook Pro over a MacBook. Yes, video professionals who happen to be generating income (which is by no means the bulk of "video professionals") may consider it a business expense to spend money on whatever equipment is necessary, but a large population of prospective professionals must still be cautious with their budget.

Likewise, of all the friends and family we know with video cameras, we know NONE but ourselves who own an HD camcorder - and the HDV camcorder we own requires FireWire to ingest footage from tape. For that matter, of the few consumers we know with HDTVs, many don't even have HD content provided into their televisions. If a prospective consumer is unlikely to spend the extra $1,000 on a laptop, they are also unlikely to "upgrade" their camcorder for $600+ to a non-FireWire HD model because their new MacBook doesn't support it. Non-FireWire RAM-based camcorders may be the future, but the transition from tape-based DV camcorders will still take several years. Any notion that excluding FireWire from personal computers will "stimulate" sales of these new camcorders still excludes a large population of Mac-buying users.

Many Mac users who work or play with applications that generate large amounts of data have established collections of FireWire hard drives. These are fantastic repositories for media files, providing easy transportable storage. We have a large collection of drives, and their usefulness is proven every day. My wife's school owns hundreds of FireWire external drives, providing a durable and convenient method for students to store their own video editing projects, and work on them wherever an available Macintosh is located.

Thanks to Apple's "Target Disk Mode" (another endangered concept), my Macintosh I.T. work is made far simpler, allowing me to clone, backup, and copy entire Mac volumes quickly and reliably - using bootable FireWire hard drives. USB hard drive bootability only works on Intel Macs, and is a dicey proposition at best.

By coincidence, my family purchased the previous generation of MacBook only a few months before the non-FireWire MacBook released. We continue to say that we "dodged that bullet." My writing this was inspired by a friend who has currently reached an impasse, unwilling to buy a new MacBook because it has no FireWire, and even more unwilling to spend the extra money for a MacBook Pro.

Yes, progressive thinking and progressive business often means "moving on" and abandoning the past. Apple has done this heroically at many points over the years - sometimes successfully (OS X is the shining example), and sometimes not.

FireWire will undoubtedly pass into the mists of time, eventually. But now is not the time.

P.S. As of 3/10/2009, Apple still sells the "White 13-inch MacBook" in the Apple Store for $999, which does have FireWire, and is mostly identical to the 2008 MacBook. Here are details of the model at Everymac.com.

View YouTube High-Quality as Default

2009-03-04T14:15:00.000-08:00

In 2008, YouTube added "high quality" support (and more recently, high-definition) to their popular video-sharing site. Videos which were uploaded after this point are available to view in both "Normal" and "High Quality" modes, switchable by clicking on a link below the video window.

By default, every YouTube video begins to play in normal mode, and requires the user to manually choose high quality. If you have a (free) YouTube account, you can configure your browser to always play in high quality (if available - again, this only applies to video clips uploaded since late 2008). Here's how:

Go to YouTube in your browser. (Make sure you are logged in to your YouTube account.)
Click the "Account" button in the upper-right corner of the YouTube home page.
In the sidebar of tabs on the left, click "Playback Setup" (click the image below to enlarge)
Choose "I have a fast connection. Always play higher-quality video when it's available.
Click "Save Changes"

Now, whenever you're logged in to your YouTube account on a computer, if a high-quality version of the video is available, it will automatically play.

Eliminate Ground Loop Hum for $17

2008-11-30T16:00:00.000-08:00

When connecting audio cables between two different AC-powered devices (i.e., computer and VCR), one sometimes encounters a low-frequency hum caused by a so-called ground loop.

This product, a short stereo RCA patch cable with a transformer capsule in-line, electrically isolates the two connected audio devices, sending only the desired audio information by inducting it between two transformers.

Radio Shack Ground Loop Isolator Model: 270-054

I've had one of these for years, and just loaned it to a friend to address a hum problem he's having connecting his USB turntable's line-level outputs to his audio receiver. I've used it in the past to connect various audio devices to computer audio inputs - a frequent source of ground loop troubles. Audio quality is good, though I've not critically evaluated the difference between this isolator cable and a straight patch cable. In every case, it was a matter of either accepting whatever impact this transformer might have on the audio or having completely unusable audio with 60Hz hum.

If you have a ground loop problem, this is the way to address the problem.

David Pogue's Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User

2008-10-04T16:58:00.001-07:00

New York Times technology columnist David Pogue is one of our favorite technology writers. My wife uses one of his "Missing Manual" books as a textbook in one of her classes.

David Pogue posted this collection of rudimentary computer hints - you're likely to find something that you can use in your daily life. As a computer consultant, I've learned that you can't take for granted any aspect of what any given user might know.

Why Facebook?

2008-09-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

You have probably heard of facebook, a so-called "social networking" site. But you may not imagine why you'd want to use it yourself if, like me, you're well beyond the typical under-30 facebook user. After spending a little time as a user, I've found some compelling aspects of the service which provide benefits not otherwise available with previous paradigms (i.e., email, instant messaging, blogs, personal Web pages).

Most of all, what you might find surprising and appealing is that FB provides a kind of "firewall" between you and the world, despite the "social" nature of the site.

A little over a year ago, I created a facebook account with the intention of seeing how social networking sites worked. After initially finding 5 or 6 people (by having FB search my email address book), I never got back to spend time with the site. Four or five months ago, one of the people who I hand "friended" wrote me a question through facebook. I was inspired to try a new search of my contacts to see whether there were more people I knew, and the list grew to something like 15 or 16. At this point, I have still have only a couple of dozen "Friends," but that's been enough to finally get a sense of what the site has to offer.

Facebook was initially available only to Harvard University students, where its founders were enrolled. Over time, it grew to allow any student, then (apparently as these students graduated but continued to want the site's services) to anyone over 13 years of age. It's generally acknowledged that FB was a response to MySpace, a social networking site which has famously become the domain of "tweenies."

Here are just some of facebook's features (the ones I've noticed):

FRIEND FINDING

Like all social networking sites, their goal is for users to find other users. To that end, the inital steps in creating a new (free) account encourage you to search for friends already on the site. FB (and other sites) provides a tool to search through your email addresses within popular email sites (AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) and informs you whether any site members' are in your contact list.
As another vector for connecting with others you may know, FB maintains a database of existing schools. If you choose to fill in your educational information, your exact school will auto-fill as you type. Consequently, you will be presented with "people you may know" lists which match educational and professional institutions.
You can optionally associate yourself with one geographical region defined as a "network." This also allows others to more easily identify you.

PRIVACY

Many of you choose to be private about your online presence. This is completely understandable. A cool thing about facebook is that unless your accept someone as a "friend," you can severely restrict how much anyone can know about you. At a minimum, you reveal only:

Your name
An "Add as Friend" button
A "Send a Message" button
A "View Friends" button

If anyone presses any of the buttons, you are privately sent an email informing you of the request, which you can choose to accept or decline. Your true identity and email address remain secret, unless you choose otherwise.
You can choose to display an image - presumably of yourself. A single tiny thumbnail is all that is viewable to non-friends.
Optionally, you can display more information - email addresses, geographic region, schools, etc.

FRIENDS

Once you have accepted another user as a "Friend," your personal profile information is now visible to that person. The profile can be as elaborate as you wish, including photo and video albums, favorites lists, and any facebook "applications" you choose to install.
Once you have "friended" someone, you will be provided with opportunities to review their Friends to see if you know them, so you can add them as Friends.
Friends can see thumbnails of profile images provided by your other Friends.
A very cool example of a fundamental FB feature is that if you upload a photograph, you can click on any point in the photo and type an identification of that person in the photo.If they are Friends, their FB name will automatically appear as you type. As a result:

...when others view your photos, they can see location-specific captions of every person in the photo
...any photos you have tagged as a facebook user automatically appear in that user's Photos space. Very slick.

COMMUNICATIONS

In addition to being able to send text messages between users, FB has some great ideas for less-demading ways of interacting with other users:

News Feed - A profound aspect of FB, the News Feed appears by default on your FB "landing page." Depending upon the privacy settings your friends have made, you can see some or all of all your friend's FB activity in a continuous list of exchanges. These reported activities include:

Adding Friends
Removing Friends(!)
Making changes to one's profile
Adding photos
Having/making comments on photos/text
Actions taken in facebook Applications (more below)

Poking - At many locations on FB where you can see lists of Friends, a "Poke (Friend's name)" button is typically provided. Clicking this simply sends a "You have been poked by (Friend's name)" message and an opportunity to poke back. I like this as a way of saying "I'm thinking of you," but not having to invest time or energy in an actual topic. Third-party applications like "pillow fights" and "food fights" provide alternative wordless interaction fun.
Wall Writing - Every user has a personal "wall," on which their friends can write. This provides a person-to-person note with the tacit understanding that no response is expected.

I really like these mechanisms. For years, I've been looking for an alternative to email for sharing information with others without the expectation of a response.

SHARING STUFF

There are myriad ways to share photos and video, as well as URLs and just text.

APPLICATIONS

These are online services which do anything, from communicating, to creating quizzes and surveys to playing games. I've only installed two:

TravelBrain - Lets the user populate a world map with "pins" of locations they've visited, and shares/compares this information with other users.
Movies - Lets users discuss and rate motion pictures.

Two examples of extremely popular "fluffy" FB Apps are the various "pillow fight" and "karma" apps, which allow users to "hit" other users with pillows and "send" karmic wishes.
Here is facebook's Application Directory.

EMAIL ALERTS

I certainly don't feel like the typical facebook user. Only about a half-dozen of my Friends are over 40 (two so far over 50), and many are under 20 - mostly children of my (f)riends. I don't expect to meet new friends this way, though I have re-connected with some old friends. I'm not sharing every moment or every personal thought with others, but it's proving to be a neat way of casually staying in touch.

Update 3/3/2009
Since I wrote this original post back in September 2008, I've observed a noticeable rise in the use of facebook. Whenever I happen to have facebook search my email address book for users, there are always new matches - not because I've added those people to my address book, but because those people have joined facebook. Most significantly, the "over 50" demographic of my facebook friends continues to increase, so apparently the compulsion of family and friend users is continuing to cause growth in the user base.

Digital Rights Management and Citizens' Rights' Managment

2008-09-13T15:24:00.000-07:00

I wrote this email to friends and family in November 2005 and just re-discovered it. The issues discussed continue to challenge our rights as citizens and consumers.

On November 1, a story broke about certain copy-protected Sony BMG Music music CDs surreptitiously installing software on the hard drives of Windows computers. This software, intended to control the number of copies a legitimate user of the CD was allowed to make of the original (an increasingly common practice in the intellectual property business), used a strategy known in the computing world as a "rootkit" to hide the location and presence of this installed software. Rootkits are typically considered to be devious mechanisms for computer processes and files to be "cloaked" from the operating system itself, and therefore most software tools which might be utilized to detect such undesirable organisms as viruses and "Trojan Horses."

The rootkit was discovered by a Windows consultant who posted his discovery of the rootkit (using special rootkit detecting software) on his weblog on October 31.

The special music CDs (not conventional audio CDs, but CDs which require installation of a software "player" on a Windows computer to be played) did not disclose to the purchaser that the Digital Rights Management (DRM) software was being installed on their computer. Furthermore, it appears that the rootkit process uses a small but tangible amount of processing time whether the music CD is being played or not - essentially costing the user some computing power.

Within days, malicious virus authors exploited the rootkit's already-hidden nature for their own purposes, cloaking their viral mechanisms on computers already "infected" with the Sony DRM software (actually written by a British company, First 4 Internet).

The backlash has been enormous.Sony released free software to detect the presence of the rootkit on November 2. Class-action lawsuits have been filed against Sony, citing damage to users' computers, poor consumer disclosure and deceptive trade practices among the allegations.

Sony had been distributing these CDs for at least 8 months. Friday Sony announced that it will terminate production of the CDs. Microsoft has announced that it will update its malicious and spyware detection tools to detect and eliminate the rootkit.

DRM issues will continue to intrude upon our lives. I've been commenting for a couple of years now that just as we enter a technological era when consumers could have the best media experience of all time (consuming, making and distributing print, audio and video), that very nature of this digital revolution (especially that media can be perfectly duplicated and rapidly distributed) is so upsetting content distributors and producers that we can expect only to have hobbled tools and media.

As disturbing are legal trends, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1998. This law challenges, and in many cases, explicitly prevents "Fair Use" of many activities, such as making a backup copy of a software or music CD which a user has legitimately purchased, or simply recording a program from the television to watch at your convenience. In many cases, this actiivty is specifically illegal under the DMCA. "Fair Use" activities, such as making a recording of a television program to give to a friend or relative to view, are becoming increasingly threatened as we enter the age of digital tape and disc recorders.

Recorder manufacturers are already being pressured by organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) or distribution studios into making consumer recorders into incorporating such tactics as which only allow playing of discs recorded by the purchaser of the DVD recorder on that same machine. More frightening is that its possible for content providers to, for example, subsequently decide that a recording that a consumer made of a show aired on television will no longer play. So a program you recorded yourself, on a recordable disc for which you paid money, would simply stop working. This information identifying what recordings could or couldn't play might be received into your DVD player via phone call or embedded in television signals. Let's say in this fictional example that a weekly automatic phone call from your DVD recorder (our TiVo makes phone calls for programming info) downloaded a database which indicated which programs it could and could not play. Your unplugging that phone cord to prevent that database from updating - in order to extend the time that your programs might play, and therefore circumventing a DRM mechanism - might just be in violation of the DMCA, and therefore a Federal felony.

As ill-conceived as the DMCA is the Federal Communication Commission's " Broadcast Flag" mandate. This provides television providers a mechanism to "flag" any program (by embedding a tiny "bit" within the digital television stream) with viewer permissions. The FCC could (and has already) mandate that any newly manufactured recording devices (hard disk, DVD, digital tape) sold in the U.S. incorporate the mechanisms which honor these flags. Here are some possible attributes - some of which I've heard, some which I'm speculating:

-inhibit recording of any kind on any device honoring Broadcast Flag
-allow playback for a limited number of times
-allow playback for a limited duration after the initial air date
-allow playback for a limited duration after the initial playback
-allow only standard-definition recording, even if the program is in high-definition
-delete from hard drive at an arbitrary date provided by broadcaster
-allow one recordable disc copy only - the disc will not duplicate

Note that for the last item to be enforced, both "set-top" DVD recorders and computer-based DVD "burners" would have to support Broadcast Flag infrastructure, so that copies could be "serialized." Furthermore, I've seen mention of uniquely IDed recorders being used to control whether copies were being used by the original owner or distributed to others. This suggests that all future media recorders will be uniquely identifiable as being recorded on a mechanism. Furthermore, evidence suggests that this "fingerprint" of the original recorder could be encoded into subsequent copies, leaving a "breadcrumb trail" in every copy ever made. Which means that you, the consumer, might be held personally responsible (and possibly in violation of a Federal Law) if a copy of something recorded in your home ends up in the wrong place. Pretty scary stuff.

But as scary as that stuff is, I'm extremely annoyed that in order to "protect" themselves from (perceived or real) piracy issues, content providers are prepared to take us 30 years into the past and prohibit consumers from "time-shifting" - or recording a program to watch at our convenience. On a hard-drive based recorder such as a TiVo - where there might be no normal way to extract the program from the hard drive (though there are many hobby hacking solutions), broadcasters think it makes sense to prevent TiVo users from recording programs. I can tell you that as TiVo users, less than 5 per cent of the television we watch is live. We have no idea when the programs we watch even air. If broadcasters prohibit us from recording their shows, we just won't see them. And this isn't just a threat - the FCC made a ruling in July that it was illegal to manufacture a Digital Television (DTV) tuner which did NOT have support for this kind of DRM. Thankfully, special interest groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation rallied to fight this FCC ruling, and got DC Circuit Court of Appeals to unanimously overturn the ruling, arguing that: "the FCC lacked authority to regulate what happens inside your TV or computer once it has received a broadcast signal."

http://www.eff.org/broadcastflag/three_minute_guide.php

There's a truth here that honest citizens will be inconvenienced or even lose some personal freedoms as a result of these attempts to protect commercial interests. That part of the (worldwide) population which is responsible for massively profitable piracy will NOT be thwarted by measures such as the DMCA or Broadcast Flag - there are clever people on the dark side as well as the light. Ideas about how media content makes money will have to change - perhaps by a radical change in the purchase/pricing model, or by providing some unique value to legitimate purchasers. There will always be people who want and get something for nothing. Penalizing those citizens who are willing to pay for their content isn't the answer.

"The Secret Life of Machines" Online!

2008-09-11T02:49:00.000-07:00

For anyone who is interested in how things work, and anyone who likes to be entertained, there's cause to celebrate.

Artist, inventor, tinkerer and thinker Tim Hunkin and motion-picture effects friend Rex Garrod hosted the British television series "The Secret Life of Machines" between 1988 and 1993. In eighteen 35-minute episodes, these two eccentric British wizards create practical demonstrations of everyday inventions which define modern life.

The mixture of grass-roots fabrication, dry British wit, intellectualism and charm of the two rumpled presenters make these shows some of the best television - and possibly the best educational material - ever.

Now, the best science museum ever (the Exploratorium in San Francisco) is hosting all eighteen episodes as streaming video and small-format downloads.

Is That Megabytes or Megabits per Second?

2008-07-15T14:51:00.000-07:00

I'm very conscious of the use of notation conventions when expressing data rates. For whatever reasons, I've settled on using "Mbps" for "megabits per second" and "MB/s" to indicate "megabytes per second." This works fine for my own purposes, but the many conventions can lead to disastrous misunderstandings. Just this week, I ran processes (encoding h.264 video) that took two days on three computers. If I'd mistaken someone's "MPBS" notation as "megabytes per second" when they really meant "megabits per second" when estimating the time for the jobs to complete, I'd have been waiting an extra two weeks for the three computers.

Engineer Lee Goldberg has written a nice treatise on the state of data rate notation.

For my part, I'll try to start using Goldberg's "old-school" electrical-engineering conventions, which are invulnerable to mis-interpretation:

xbits/s (with x = k, M or G as kilo-, Mega- and Giga-)
xbytes/s

Convert Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and 2007 Microsoft Office Files with Older Office for Mac Versions

2008-06-30T21:23:00.000-07:00

Apple's website began hosting a download page for the Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter 1.0 on June 25, 2008. The converter actually downloads directly from Microsoft servers. A couple of months ago, links to a similarly described converter download at Microsoft were dead from several days, if not longer.

According to this Apple Downloads page, this converter promises to convert "files that were created in Office 2008 for Mac or 2007 Microsoft Office system so that you can open and edit the files in Office 2004 version 11.4 or later and Office v. X version 10.1.9 or later. Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations that are created in Office 2008 for Mac or 2007 Microsoft Office system are saved in the Open XML Format."

Jumpcut, a Great Clipboard Manager for Mac - and It's Free!

2008-06-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

I previously sang the praises of Jumpcut here at Useful Bulk, but today when discussing utility software with my wife, she said, "You know what piece of software I use every day? And I know you do too, because I've seen you using it." It took me a couple of guesses, because we use a lot of software, but also because Jumpcut is so transparent to me in its use. Jumpcut is now as natural for me to invoke as the Undo, Cut, Copy and Paste commands I've been typing for 20 years (Command-Z, X, C and V).

What is the Clipboard?
Modern operating systems provide cut & paste and copy & paste functionality to users. When the user selects material for the copy or cut operation, that content (which can be text, images, sound, video, or even 3D objects, depending upon the operating system and the current application) is placed into a temporary repository known as the clipboard. The clipboard's contents can then be pasted into any compatible document, even in a different application. Further, the clipboard retains the last copied contents even after a paste operation, so the same contents can be pasted multiple times. When the user next invokes a copy or cut command (copy leaves the selected material in place, cut removes it from the current document), the contents of the clipboard are replaced.

So conventional clipboards can hold the contents of a single copy operation. Jumpcut allows the user to "buffer" many clippings (by default, it's configured to save the last 40).

Using Jumpcut
Written by programmer Steve Cook and available as a free and open-source download, Jumpcut provides an elegant solution for moving many text "clippings" between documents. When I'm doing research online or quoting another document, I perform typical "Copy" operations on any pertinent URLs or text quotes in which I'm interested. Later, when I'm editing a document for publication, I simply recall the clippings from Jumpcut's "pop-up bezel" (invoked with a keystroke combination - the default is "option-command-V") or from Jumpcut's menulet in the Menu Bar, and the selected clipping is pasted into my document.

Jumpcut's current version as listed on its Sourceforge page as v0.61, but v0.62 is available for download at MacUpdate. Don't be scared off by the low version number - during several years of daily use, Jumpcut has been very stable.

We've found Jumpcut an absolutely invaluable tool, and a perfect extension to the Mac OS (this should just be part of the Mac OS). No one should be without it.

Geotag Your Photos Without a Computer

2008-06-01T16:22:00.000-07:00

The ATP Photo Finder is a GPS logger with a built-in SD/Memory Stick/MMC reader. After taking photos with your digital camera, users insert the camera's memory card into the Photo Finder, which adds the GPS data to the existing image files.

This makes this product quite a bit easier to use than previous methods, as in my previous article about geotagging on a Mac.

The ATP Photo Finder retails for $100, but at the time of this writing (June 2008), is available at Costco (membership required) for $80.

Logitech G25 Racing Wheel Long-term Review

2008-05-30T15:09:00.000-07:00

Is the Logitech G25 Racing Wheel worth $300?

If you're a serious sim-racing enthusiast, the answer is yes.

Read my long-term review.

Follow the Phoenix Mars Lander Mission

2008-05-26T01:25:00.000-07:00

I just watched the thrilling live coverage of the Phoenix Lander's successful touchdown on Mars (delayed 15 minutes by the signal traveling from Mars to Earth and by the 9 hours it took me to have time to watch the Science Channel HD live coverage on our DVR - but it was still exciting).

The Phoenix has deployed its solar panels, stereoscopic camera and some of its instrument packages. Now those teams of scientists who have been planning the mission for nearly a decade will attempt to make the most of the next 90 days to analyze the contents of the ice under the surface of the soil in the polar region which Phoenix now calls home. Phoenix will attempt to look for signs of organic life and analyze atmospheric properties. After about three months, the Phoenix mission will end as the lander is encased in one meter of frozen carbon dioxide during the Martian winter.

Follow Phoenix' progress on NASA Jet Propulsion Lab's Phoenix site and the University of Arizona's Phoenix site (the U of A is the first public university to lead a Mars mission).

Geotagging Photo with GPS Location Information on a Macintosh

2008-05-10T14:57:00.000-07:00

I've written and article of my experience with geotagging digital photos using a tiny and relatively inexpensive GPS logging device, any digital camera and a Macintosh. With these components, the location of each photograph can be embedded into the image file. A cool application: images can be displayed on maps in their relative locations.

Control Your Privacy by Preventing Reverse Lookup of Your Phone Number in Google

2008-04-25T14:47:00.000-07:00

If you type in your 10-digit phone number into Google's search field, you might be surprised to see that the names and addresses of the members of your household may appear.

Google allows you to remove your name and phone number information from their search engine. Below the search results where your name(s) and address(es) appear, click on the "Request to have your name removed from this list" link. This sends you to the Google Phonebook Name Removal page, where you submit your name, city and phone number to be permanently removed from Google's Phonebook database. Doing so will also prevent lookup of your phone number by searching for your name. Google notes that this can NOT be undone, and your number will never again be listed on Google's Phonebook. Interestingly, there seems to be no particular method of authentication, so it may be that you can remove anyone's name and address from Google Phonebook without permission.

Great $40 Hose Clamp Tool for Modern Constant Tension Radiator Hose Clamps

2008-04-25T11:48:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, the radiator of our 1999 Dodge Caravan developed a leak. Years ago, when we were considering the purchase of this minivan and I'd just opened the hood to look at the engine compartment, I'd proclaimed to my wife that I'd probably be doing far less repairs to this vehicle, if only because access within the engine compartment was terrible. Contemporary vehicles have increasingly made service access more complicated in attempts to package components in either more compact, aerodynamically efficient or aesthetically pleasing form factors.

Despite my growing reluctance to repair our own cars, I decided to do the radiator change myself. Typically one of the less complex procedures, this project took me two days of effort to complete.

Constant Tension Hose Clamp for 1999 Chrysler Radiator

Having owned no vehicles newer than 1986 prior to the Caravan, this was my first experience with the large-scale "constant tension hose clamps" used by many modern manufacturers. These clamps are apparently used to protect the $500 plastic radiators from the indiscriminate use of worm-gear style hose clamps, which could easily crack the plastic hose fittings when tightened. Further, these constant-tension clamps promise to self-adjust to the hose/fitting join as it heats and cools and is subjected to vehicle vibrations.

Our Chrysler factory service manual listed a "special tool" for the task of removing these hose clamps. In the monochromatic artist's rendition of the tool in the manual, I could see it was a longish set of pliers with some kind of shaped tip at the end of the jaws, and a locking mechanism of some kind (in retrospect, these pliers from Sears are probably similar to the Chrysler-specified tool). I decided to see what I could do with my various pliers.

I attempted to release the hose clamp that was most accessible, and with some difficulty I could get the jaws of a set of Channel-Lock adjustable pliers open enough to span the 1.5 inches between the tabs of the clamp. But it was dicey even with easy access. Some of the other clamps I could barely see, much less reach with a pair of pliers. I struggled for some time with various specialty pliers, achieving only enough to convince me that it was going to be impossible to release the least-accessible clamps.

Some online research revealed that the special tool pictured in the Chrysler manual might be only $30 - but I needed the tool ASAP. I also noticed on the Snap-On Tools website a pair of hose-clamp pliers with a flexible shaft for $77. While planning a trip to some local tool stores to seek out some variation of these pliers, it occurred to me that I had not visited the Sears website. This revealed a rich resource in hose-clamp pliers - at least a dozen products. Only two pieces were listed as being available "in-store" rather than online purchase, and one was the Craftsman Cable Operated Hose Clamp Pliers for only $40. The website reported that it was "in stock" in our local store, and I set out on my shopping expedition with high hopes.

Craftsman 28650-998 Cable Operated Hose Clamp Pliers

I was reminded that Sears hardware departments have fairly large automotive specialty tool sections, and located the cable-operated pliers easily.

This tool is fantastic. Initially, I was so focused on the idea of a set of pliers that I thought the remote cable "specialty" tool would be awkward for anything but difficult-to-reach clamps. But in fact, the cable-operated pliers proved perfect for any situation. Whether easy or hard to reach, I could position the working end of the tool on the hose clamp with one hand, then apply slight tension with the other. I'd then use both hands to compress the clamp until the tool's lock clicked, holding the clamp in its released position. I could then move the clamp around while compressed by the tool (always conscious that the tool might slip and release the clamp onto my fingers - quite dangerous - but no slippage has thus far occurred).

Hose Clamp in Tool End - No Tension

Hose Clamp in Tool End - Full Tension

If you live in the United States, there's a good chance that a Sears near you has these clamps. At $40, it's absolutely worth the functionality for one of the best specialty tools I've ever purchased. I've gotten my value from this purchase even if I never use them again.

Synchronize Digital Camera Time Stamps for iPhoto

2008-04-20T22:38:00.000-07:00

Whether it's for a family event or a professional shoot, it's useful to have the internal clocks on all the digital still cameras set to the same time. When combining those exposures in one digital album, the images can then be sorted chronologically to the second. With today's vacation outings often sporting a camera for each family member, it's fun to see all the photos taken by everyone in the group in order they were taken.

However, there will be times when you forget to do change the synchronization of the cameras' clocks, or forget to set their clocks after a battery change. Here is my procedure for addressing this after the fact (or during the shoot) when using iPhoto (v6 in my case):

With every camera involved, shoot a still photo of the same clock or watch which displays seconds.

It is not necessary for the photos from each camera to be taken at the same time. Just take a picture of the clock/watch with every camera sometime during the day.
If possible, use a timepiece that you know to be accurate.
If some of the cameras don't belong to you, just make sure at some point during the event to walk around with the timepiece and have everyone shoot a close-up of the current time.

Import all the images from each camera into iPhoto.
Isolate all the images from each camera, either by importing them into separate albums, or by using a Smart Album and using the "Camera Model" criteria filter.
Select all the images taken by one camera at the event.
Using either Joe's iPhoto AppleScripts for Date Manipulation (for iPhoto versions up to 6) or iPhoto v7's (iPhoto '08) built-in Adjust Date and Time function, adjust the time (and date, if necessary) of all the photos taken by that camera at once, until the time displayed by iPhoto's "information" pane is exactly correct for the image of the clock. This shifts the time/date for all the selected images. At this point, all the other photos' time stamps will be synchronized with your reference timepiece.

Repeat this step with every camera's albums, adjusting the time and date of that camera's images to the picture of the timepiece taken with that camera.

After performing the previous steps, combine any or all of the images from all cameras in one album. In iPhoto's "View" menu, choose "Sort by Date." All the images will appear in chronological order, regardless of the camera on which they were taken.

Note: These changes to time and date stamps are only reflected within iPhoto. If you export image files from iPhoto after adjusting their date and time, other programs that honor their embedded EXIF data will still reflect the original date and time setting of the camera at the time the exposure was taken.
If you really get lost with shifting times/dates, you can use the iPhoto Date Reset script in Joe's iPhoto Applescripts to revert the time stamps of any selected images to their EXIF data.

Restore Calendar Hard Button Functionality to Your Palm T|X

2008-04-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

Disappointed that your new Palm T|X's "Home" button can't be configured to launch any application, as it has for every previous Palm model?

ButtonsEx is a free utility (donation requested) by Pierre-Yves Tavernier to customize the "hard buttons" and the 5-way controller buttons on the Palm T5, LifeDrive, T|X and Tungsten E2.

How ButtonsEx Fixed SmartLauncher on my Palm T\X

For many years, I've used SmartLauncher software on various Palm Tungstens to
launch my favorite apps with just a couple of presses of the "hard buttons". So it was quite a shock when I discovered that the new Palm T|X's leftmost hard button (by default, the "Calendar" button in previous Palm models) is now the "Home" button, which can only be configured to launch either the Application Viewer or Favorites. This denied my configuring SmartLauncher to utilize this button, thus halving the number of two-button combinations (SmartLauncher can actually do three-button launching, providing hundreds of combinations - but I'm happy with the 24 apps I can launch with two-button mode). I find this change by Palm pretty bizarre - why alienate existing Palm users instead of adding Home as a Button configuration option?

Other hard-button launchers for Palm exist which can work around the Palm T|X home button, including TealPoint Software's TealLaunch and Ranosoft's HBX. I liked HBX very much - it is quick, simple and I like the full-color icon panel it pops up to remind you after the first button press which applications are assigned to the second press. As one of the first Palm launchers, TealLaunch remains not only incredibly awkward and clunky, but stupidly only allows two-button launching of unique pairs of buttons, and does not allow using the same button pressed twice. So for instance, instead of 16 combinations of 4 buttons:

1+1, 1+2, 1+3, 1+4, 2+1, 2+2, 2+3, 2+4, 3+1, 3+2, 3+3, 3+4, 4+1, 4+2, 4+3, 4+4

TealLaunch can only do six:

1+2, 1+3, 1+4, 2+3, 2+4, 3+4

Really strange.

TealLaunch is very elaborate, and allows launching with pen strokes and Graffiti characters, plus combinations of hard buttons and strokes, but I like my multi-button launching, so as I did many years ago, I passed on TealLaunch.

While reviewing which launcher I was going to buy (you can really nickel and dime yourself into some big numbers buying $15 Palm software), I discovered ButtonEx, and now I can continue to use SmartLauncher. SmartLauncher used to be free, but now appears only available from major Palm software sites as a $10 purchase. Its website no longer exists, so I see no evidence of the original developer - too bad.

Why Your TV Won't Work After February 17, 2009

2008-04-03T15:49:00.001-07:00

After 67 years, the United States' television standard is being terminated. Older televisions will no longer be able to receive broadcasts through the air after February 17, 2009, and new televisions can receive high-quality HDTV through the air.

I've posted an article about the impending DTV transition and its impact upon the consumer.

Physics Lessons Online

2008-04-02T16:09:00.000-07:00

The wonderfully rich Physics 2000 site hosted at the University of Colorado at Boulder features plain explanations and interactive demonstrations of a variety of physics concepts, from how television screens work to the nature of a Bose-Einstein Condensate.

Verizon Retires Analog Cellular Service

2008-02-22T01:51:00.000-08:00

Verizon officially retired analog cellular phone service on February 18, 2008. No further analog calls can be placed or received on the Verizon network.

For the past several years, they have been not-so-subtly encouraging their users to upgrade to "better" digital cellular phones, and announcing the impending termination of analog service as an incentive to make the change.

Verizon's analog services were utilized the original cellular phone system, Advanced Mobile Phone System, or AMPS. Cellular provider apparently Alltel has apparently shown the intention to convert the remaining analog regions of their network to digital by the end of 2008.

Verizon and Alltel will be eager to reuse these frequencies for digital cellular services - where digital compression and multiplexing strategies will allow a far greater number of calls to be handled in a given cell.

How Does a Teenageer Get Into Visual Effects for Film and Video?

2007-12-13T02:36:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, my friend's precocious 11 year-old son was obsessed with buying his first Macintosh computer, and was similarly interested in how he could create visual effects for video and film production. After being warned that the topic was vast, he begged me to write as long a letter as was required.

Well, I definitely think that the Macintosh operating system (Mac OS) is the right platform for "special effects and stuff like that." People are pretty divided and emotional about Macintoshes (Macs) and Windows, but I have intellectual motives for being a Macintosh advocate. Some are esoteric - and have to do with how I think and work with software tools, and how Apple Computer (who makes Macintoshes and the Mac OS) has always approached software and hardware design and implementation a bit differently. I'm not just a "Mac guy" because I want to be part of that cult - it just makes sense to me.

It's an important factor for you, being interested in media production, that the Mac OS is firmly established in the media community as the platform of choice. Though Macintoshes are a small minority of all the computers sold (around 7 per cent now), they represent the majority of people who manipulate still images, moving images and sound for a living. There is Windows software, and more of it, for doing pretty much anything you can do on a Mac. But if I have the choice, I'll still do all my production on a Mac. Part of the reason is kind of deep down in the Mac OS - a really slick kind of integration of a lot of things that mean, for instance, that you can just expect to be able to drag a video file on your Mac's "desktop" into an open window of a program you've never used, and expect that program to try to do the most logical thing with that piece of video. This isn't just the program, or just the Mac OS, but decades of a way of thinking, and people who program for Macs tend to consistently subscribe to these ideas. The Windows landscape is a bit more chaotic - no two programs behave, look, work, or "feel" the same, and you have no expectations about how you might accomplish a task.

OK - I didn't really need to *sell* you on Macs - you already said you wanted one - I was just telling you why I think it's a good choice.

I'm not the kind of guy who can usually tell you "you need to buy this," or "this is the best thing you can be doing." I can't make those kind of clear choices for myself - I'm just too aware of all the variables, and every thing is kind of a compromise. I also can't in good conscience tell someone to spend a lot of money - I'm very careful about that myself - so I'm always mindful when advising about purchases to keep things as economically sensible as I can. I tell you all this because I know that I'm going to end up telling you too much information, and probably won't have clear choices - especially since we haven't talked about this yet (except for your one email paragraph). I want your purchase to suit you, and to complicate matters, you don't yet know what you want.

So what follows won't yet be a guide to buying. For now, I'll just throw a bunch of thoughts at you about this. We need to establish some direction in which you want to proceed, and how fast you want to get there (which includes how much you can spend, or get for free from somewhere else). So here goes some first thoughts. Ask questions, and we'll keep going. We can talk on the phone, or even over the Internet (depending on what kinds of computers, etc. you have at home). Eventually, after you get a Mac, we can easily talk and even video chat.

WHICH MAC?

Assuming you're wanting to spend as little as possible, and assuming you want to buy a new computer (although you could buy a used one), there are a few obvious choices:

(This info about Mac models is obviously out of date now, but I'll leave it historically intact. This is a moving target anyway, and not the point of the article. -Ed)

Apple iMac G5 - http://www.apple.com/imac/ - This is the most powerful of these three choices, and the most expensive. It is the only one of the three to use the current state-of-the-art G5 processor, so it's faster, and a bit more "future-proof" (meaning that it will work with software not yet released). These start at $1300, but are a complete computer with software with which you can do a lot of cool stuff. They're ready for video editing (all you need is a digital video camera, which your family might already have), and for making your own video DVDs. Apple's iLife '05 (http://www.apple.com/ilife/) software suite is included, and lets you edit video, manage digital still pictures, make and record music, and create DVDs.

Apple Mac mini - http://www.apple.com/macmini/ - This is a tiny Macintosh computer based on the older G4 processor. It's still plenty fast enough for video editing and other media tasks (recording sounds, special effects, etc.). It starts at $500, but only the $700 model has the DVD-burning SuperDrive - which you definitely want. This doesn't include a keyboard, mouse, or monitor (they figured people buying them would already have these parts around from old Macs), but you could use it with a monitor you already have, so you might only need a USB keyboard and USB mouse. It's possible (with maybe $60 more) to connect a KVM switch (Keyboard/Video/Mouse) so that one monitor, one USB keyboard and one USB mouse share a Windows PC you already have and the Mac mini (or any Mac). The mini also comes with Apple's iLife '05 software suite.

Apple iBook - http://www.apple.com/ibook/ - These laptop computers are $1,000 and $1,300, but only the higher-priced model comes with the DVD-burning SuperDrive (it also has a bigger display, and is bigger overall). They also use the older G4 processor, but are similar in performance to the Mac mini. The difference, of course, is that they are laptops. So you could actually be editing video in the car going down the road (actually, you could do this with the other Macs, too, with a power inverted plugged into the car's cigarette lighter, but you can't put a big monitor and keyboard on your lap). You could take it to school with you - lots of cool stuff. Of course, it can get dropped or stolen, so that's a big trade-off for portability. Laptops used to be a lot more expensive than desktops. Apple's higher end PowerBooks _are_ expensive, and more powerful than iBooks. But iBooks are pretty good values, and don't necessarily lose a lot to "desktop" computers. One significant drawback (for me, at least) - iBooks only display 1024 x 768 maximum display resolution - that's how many dots make up the screen's picture. Even when you connect them to an external monitor (with an optional $30 adapter), they still only do 1024 x 768. In contrast, the 17" iMac G5 does 1440 x 900, and the 20" iMac G5 is 1680 x 1050. What this means is that when you are working in programs that have a lot of little windows for tools (called "palettes"), you can see them all at once instead of having to layer them all on top of each other. When you're working with more than one program at once (I'm actually running 8 right now), it means you can have their windows side-by-side, to allow for viewing both without switching back and forth, and "dragging" elements between the programs' windows. Despite this display limitation, many people are willing to compromise with a modest screen resolution to have a completely portable computer.

NOTE: You should know that Apple will be changing a very big thing starting at the end of 2006 - they will begin using processors made by Intel instead of the IBM "PowerPC" processors which they currently use in all Macs. At that point, the Mac OS and all major software will have to change dramatically, and some of your old software may not work, or won't work very well. They probably won't sell an Intel-powered Mac that you would be likely to *buy* until some time in 2007 - I think the first models will be very high-end expensive ones. So that's probably so far off it won't really matter - but I though you should know.

Apple's other computers are much more expensive, and some are much more powerful. But I don't think that will matter to you at this point.

WHAT SOFTWARE?

Since we haven't really established what you want to do yet, this is a little vague. As I mentioned, all new Macintoshes come with Apple's "iLife" software suite (http://www.apple.com/ilife/):

iMovie HD - Capture video from your digital video camera (or even footage from TV, or home videos your family already has), edit it, add titles and some (simple) effects and transitions, and output high-quality video back onto digital tape (or DVD, see "iDVD" below).

iDVD - Turn content captured by a digital camcorder (including video from other sources, like VHS or Hi8 tape, or live television) into DVDs you can play in (most of) your family's and friends' DVD players. You can make title menus with custom graphics and captions while "authoring" your DVDs.

iPhoto - Collect and organize photos taken on your digital camera (or collected from friends). Make DVD movies out of them. Print books with them. Make Web pages out of your photos.

Garage Band - Make music with pre-built "loops" of music. Play and record music on a MIDI keyboard. Record and mix live sources (microphones, guitars, etc.) with the loops and MIDI to make elaborate songs. Burn them to a CD and share them with your friends and relatives.

iTunes - Manage all your MP3s. Rip CDs you already own to smaller high-quality AAC or MP3 files on your computer and iPod. Buy music from the Apple Music Store. Buy videos on the Apple Music Store. Put your own home-made videos on your Video iPod.

The iMac G4 and iBook also come with Appleworks (http://www.apple.com/appleworks/), which is a program which does word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and other typical office/student tasks. Email, Web browsing, address book and other typical daily software is included, and all pretty excellent stuff - all published by Apple Computer.

Eventually, you'll find you need software *other* than what comes with a Mac. But you might not need to worry about that yet. If you get a new Mac and just play with iLife stuff, you'll start to get a feel for "production" - thinking of an idea, planning what you need to do (both of these are actually "pre-production"), shooting (production), and editing, effects and finishing (post-production). Joni teaches college students from 18 years old to 80 years old, and some of them take months to get good at this. I suspect you'll be way ahead of most of them in just weeks (most people aren't as good at learning things as they get older, for lots of reasons). But then you'll get involved with making DVDs, and that will keep you learning for a little while longer.

OTHER HARDWARE?

To really make iMovie do anything, you'll need a digital video camera which either records to MiniDV tape or Digital-8 tape. The camera must also have a FireWire, or IEEE-1394, or "Sony iLink" connector. If your family doesn't own one already, maybe they should (hint, hint). Or maybe you have a friend who has one. They can cost as little as under $300 (better ones can cost over $4,000). Some models let you connect them to _record_ video from an old "analog" (not digital) source - like VHS or Hi8 or Video8 tape, to digital tape. So you could edit old home movies together and make a DVD out of them, for instance.

If you really want to play music with Garage Band and you can play a piano-style keyboard, you can connect a MIDI-capable synthesizer (using a MIDI adapter) or a small keyboard made just for computers (using a USB plug). The USB MIDI keyboards start at around $50, I think.

SPECIAL EFFECTS

You say you're interested in "special effects." This expression has very broad meaning in the media business. There are "mechanical special effects," like building a real car than crushes itself when some computer-generated creature stomps on it. There are special effects guys who blow things up - both big (like a real building) and small (like a model spaceship). More and more, of course, "special effects' get done with computers, but even here, exactly what gets done, and who does what, varies tremendously. And a lot of the actual "work" people do in special effects is pretty un-exciting stuff. There are computer effects jobs where people just hand-trace the outline of a shot of a person moving in a scene, one frame at a time, 24 frames for every second of film. "Wire removal" jobs have people just using software and laboriously "painting out" heavy cables used to suspend actors or props, so they appear to float or fly through the air.

More and more effects are being done on computers, but I don't think that's always the best solution. For one thing, the best CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) sequences still aren't completely undetectable - and I think audiences can feel that, and they know, even if not consciously, that it's not really happening to the actors. For another thing, it's exciting to try to make things work on the set without resorting to CGI work. Yes, CGI has given us a fantastic tool for moving images, but it shouldn't replace getting to do clever things on the set.

Some people who are really smart, and really into movies eventually become "visual effects supervisors" (VFX supervisors). They have to not only know about every aspect of the craft, but they often have to invent solutions for things no one has ever done. Today, they are often involved during the production phase of a movie, and are actually there on the set with the director and actors, sometimes advising on the way something needs to be shot to make the final effect more convincing, and sometimes to make notes about what's happening on the set so that many months later they will have a good idea about how to manipulate the footage to best achieve desired results. Most VFX supervisors are probably serious movie geeks, and can tell you how every special effect in every famous "genre" movie (science fiction, horror, fantasy, etc.) was done.

You should learn about all kinds of special effects. You can get books about this, and you've probably already seen special features on DVDs of movies about them. You're only (almost) 12 years old, and so you won't be getting a job as in special effects for at least another year :-). By the time you're actually trying to *work* in VFX, a lot of the computer tools will have changed. So learning *specific* pieces of software isn't so important. Knowing what can be done, and what to call it, *is* important, and will serve you in years to come. Just start "playing." I do it all the time. You can't really get that far without actually *making* something, so come up with a project. Maybe small, at first. That will make you figure out how to do it. It might not be great, but you'll learn why, and the next time will be better - maybe a lot better. There's an amazing amount of cool technology right now that means that a 12 year old can do stuff now in his own room that took lots of people millions of dollars only a few years ago. Remind me, and we'll try to dig up some examples of things people have made with basic home equipment and a lot of cleverness.

Some of what people call "special effects" these days is computer animation. The Battle Droids and Gungans in "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace" are completely synthetic creations - entirely generated in a computer. Some of their movements may have been "captured" by analyzing how real humans or animals move, but ultimately, even their movements are controlled by software routines written by human programmers. There are some romantic and very unromantic parts of this process. Some of the people involved are doing serious computer programming. For the epic Invasion of Naboo, they created software that actually makes each of the thousands of Gungans move a little bit differently, not positioned by the animators, but actually following some of the key members of their group, without bumping into each other. They don't even move because of direct actions of the animators - they have kind of a library of possible behaviors, and each Gungan warrior has a little bit of randomness about how he moves.

Other programmers are just writing "code" to make smoke effects, or make things look like they're under water. Their contributions might be profound, but their work is extremely tedious work, trying to write strings of letters, characters and numbers which have the desired affect upon image files in computers. So some of these people are computer programmers, and not really doing what you'd call "art." They probably got computer programming degrees in college, and may or may not have ever thought they would be involved in show business.

Other CGI professionals work doing aesthetic work - designing. They probably studied art in school, and may or may not have used computers along the way. Over the years, software tools have developed to allow traditional artists to apply their talents in painting, photography and sculpture in the "virtual" world of CGI. These tools sometimes look and feel like traditional non-computer art tools - paint brushes, sculpting tools, cameras. These art professionals would have sculpted the first Gungan prototypes out of clay with their hands, then when the final ideas were approved, they tediously translate their sculptures to computer models.

Animators are another specialized kind of craftsperson. They have studied the art of a figure in motion. This is a very special craft, and involves being very observant and analytical about how people and animals move and act. Animation is done with many media forms - ink on paper, clay models, real objects, and computer models. Many experienced animators from the pre-computer days now work as animators in the computer world. Their skills are still valuable because they understand movement, and how it is simulated on film (which is really a bunch of still pictures played very rapidly in succession).

The the professionals that comprise a CGI "crew" on a movie have very different jobs and backgrounds. You may be interested in them all, or perhaps only one aspect of this seems interesting. Next time we talk (by email or otherswise), tell me more about what sounds like something you want to do, and we'll continue from there.

Do Ferrets Make Good Pets?

2007-12-13T02:11:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, a friend's then 11 year-old son found out that we had owned a ferret as a pet, and asked me to tell him all about ferrets. This was email written to him.

Ferrets are cool pets. My wife gave me a female sable (that's a color type) ferret for Christmas many years ago. I named her Sasha.

My observations and comments about ferret behaviors and characteristics are based upon having Sasha as a pet. I also read a few books about ferrets - there are plenty of books available in pet stores (even here in California, where they are not legal to have as pets).

Ferrets are weasels - I guess you probably know that. Other members of the mustelidae family include minks, skunks, wolverines, otters and badgers. Though ferrets are among the smaller mustelids (males of the domesticated species rarely reach 4 pounds, females typically don't exceed 2 pounds), they share a lot of characteristics with their family members:

THEY ARE CARNIVORES - They might look like the other small animals in pet stores (rabbits, chinchillas, rats, hamsters, gerbils), but all those animals are strictly vegetarians. Ferrets in the wild eat most of those other animals that pet stores sell. Ferrets have been used to hunt rabbits for humans, who send them down into rabbit warrens on long cords, then drag the ferret out with a rabbit in its mouth (which weighs twice as much as the ferret). Commercial ferret food, unlike rabbit, hamster, etc., is made of animal meat - like cat food. In fact, there tends to be more animal protein in ferret food than cat foot. Ferrets can and will eat cat food (and I fed some cat food to Sasha), but ferret experts typically suggest that you stick to the higher-protein foods custom-made for pet ferrets.

THEY ARE FEARLESS - I've seen film of a 30-pound wolverine chasing away a 250-pound black bear. Ferrets can be like this - they seem to have no sense of being smaller than other creatures. Sasha used to play with a cat of mine that was over twice her size, and they ran and wrestled and had a great time. Domestic ferrets aren't usually too aggressive to handle - they can actually be a bit affectionate (more about this in a minute), but they can and do bite, though I've never been injured by a ferret's biting.

THEY ARE HYPERACTIVE - Ferrets don't stop moving unless they're asleep. They're not like cats - they can't really focus their attention on one thing for a long time. A cat can watch a bird out a window for minutes - stalking it. Ferrets don't work like that. When we put Sasha in a room with an unfamiliar cat, the cat would hunker down on the floor and watch the ferret without even blinking, following it around the room, and not sure what to make of it. Sasha constantly moved around the new room, poking her head into every crack and crevice, climbing under every chair, table, sofa, etc. At the point where Sasha noticed the cat, she paused for maybe three seconds - then she kept on going. Eventually, she walked right up to the cat. The cat kind of arched it back, not quite sure whether to run or fight. Sasha just walked right up toward the cat. When she got six inches away, the cat whacked her on the top of her head with her paw. Sasha backed up about a foot and blinked a few times, then just tended to walk in a bigger circle around the cat from then on.

THEY ARE CURIOUS - On the Christmas morning I got Sasha, I put a cardboard tube from wrapping paper on the floor near Sasha (who was probably only 3 or 4 months old). When she noticed the end of it, she immediately walked through to the other end. When she popped out, she looked around until she noticed *that* end of the tube, then she went through again. She would do this almost indefinitely, until I removed the tube. I think you could do this to many adult ferrets, and they couldn't resist going through - it's how they hunt in the wild, so it's an instinctive trait, but it represents how they are inquisitive about their environment. I remember reading an article 25 years ago about scientists at a Particle Accelerator facility sending a ferret through the tiny tubular core of their miles-long underground loop to make sure there were no obstructions before they fired a high-energy stream of subatomic particles through it. The ferret would happily walk through the long tube until it popped out the other end of the giant loop.

THEY ARE TOUGH - Sasha was about the size of a small sock. But I stepped on her with pretty much my whole weight at least once, and it didn't seem to matter. She kind of squeaked (probably just the air getting forced out of her lungs), but was none the worse for wear. On more than one occasion, she fell from the second floor down onto the hardwood stairs below (she was always poking around between the railing around the stairwell) - but she'd just kind a blink a few times, and start running up and down the stairs again.

THEY ARE INTELLIGENT - Very much unlike all those rodents and Leporida (the family name of rabbits) in pet stores, these are pretty clever animals. They are hunters, remember, so they tend to need skills which exceed those of their prey.

IS A FERRET A GOOD PET? - This depends upon what you want out of a pet. Sasha wasn't exactly capable of affection - certainly nothing like the devotion of a dog, and not like the mutual affection which a cat can provide. But they do know who you are, and will come when you call. Sasha understood when she was being told not to do something - she'd stop, whine a little, then go do something else. We handled her a lot, and she was very patient about it, and I think she even liked it, if only because it was less boring than nothing. She'd always come to see what we wanted if we called her, and on rare occasions, she'd fall asleep in your lap. It's pretty cool to have any animal trust you like that.

Ferrets probably aren't really to happy being kept in a cage. If they were out in the wild, I think they'd travel miles every day on their short little legs. This means you have to give them a lot of attention - more than a dog or cat. I actually let Sasha run around on her own in one of my houses while I was home. Keep in mind that keeping a ferret contained is really tricky. I used to find Sasha in our hall linen closet, with the door closed. The first couple of times, I thought she'd run in while the door was open. Then I began to wonder. The gap under the closet door was maybe 3/4" of an inch high. Sasha was about 2" in diameter. So one day, I got in the closet, and called to her. First, she scratched at the floor, and whined a little. I called her again. She scratched some more. Then, I started to see her nose under the door. For about 20 seconds, she squashed herself under the door, squishing her body so it looked like a half-full water balloon, until she was inside the closet with me. The moral of that story is - you'd better be *very* careful about the space in which you think you can enclose your ferret. If the hole around the pipes under your bathroom sink have a 3/4" gap - a ferret might give that a shot.

Sasha had a great time with our cat Sonja. Sonja came into our household when she was just a 4 month old kitten, and pretty soon Sonja and Sasha were racing all over the house together. Sonja would run sideways along the back of an old sofa (in our bachelor's pad house) and leap across the furniture - Sasha could get to almost any place Sonja went by climbing or falling. They'd start to wrestle and bite at each other sometimes. Sonja could bite Sasha anywhere, and Sasha never seemed to care much. But occasionally we'd hear Sonja meowing, and see that Sasha had her cheek or ear or something in a vice-like grip. They loved playing rough, and never seemed to take anything personally.

Ferrets will use a litter box. This is great, and a pretty important factor that makes them potential pets. But Sasha wasn't above using a convenient corner if she was a long way from her box, so be warned if you leave a ferret unsupervised for any period of time.

Some people carry ferrets with them in public, in pocketbooks and handbags, and in custom-made ferret carriers that you wear like a chest-pack. So some ferrets are "tame" enough to be in that kind of hostile environment (some cats couldn't deal with this, for instance).

Ferrets have a strong, sweet, musky odor (remember, they're related to skunks). Domesticated male ferrets typically have some scent glands surgically removed when they are young (all pet store ferrets will have been neutered and de-scented), but they still have strong scent. My wife and I didn't mind it - it's actually kind of interesting. But you might want to test-smell a ferret before you decide to keep one as a pet. They're not so smelly that you can smell one at a distance - you pretty much have to hold them up to your nose, but you can do this in a pet store.

Ferrets can be more destructive to personal belongings that you might think. Sasha loved rubber things: she'd drag a video camera tripod (which weighs about 10 pounds - she weighed 1.5 pounds) all over the house by a rubber ring around part of the center post. She ate about 1/4 of a Nerf football over a year or two's time (it showed back up, sort of, in her litter box). She'd steal and chew up the insoles out of my roommate's running shoes, and chew through the end of his dirty socks (the smellier the better) until she came out the other end. So they need some supervision. We were just bachelors living in a mostly empty house, so we weren't too concerned (though my roommate didn't really like having to replace his insoles and socks all the time).

Sasha was a good pet. We had her until she passed away when she was eight years old. Ferrets can live longer - usually 10-12 years, and sometimes more, but Sasha also contracted feline leukemia from a feline leukemia vaccination when she was young. She wasn't expected to live - the disease is almost 100 per cent fatal to ferrets. But she survived, and was a great curiosity to North Carolina veterinarians. We suspect that might have shortened her life a bit.

Ferrets are legal in every state of the U.S. except California and Hawaii (as of the end of 2007). I'm not sure what these state's real objections are, but I think the fact that California is a huge state with enormous agricultural business and Hawaii has such a small ecosystem makes them sensitive to altering their ecological balance. There are certainly plenty of examples where man has introduced a species of plant or animal to a new environment with disastrous results. So far, pet ferrets have not created a significant ecological problem. Despite this, pro-ferret organizations in California claim that hundreds of thousands of families in the state own ferrets as pets. We've had many people in pet stores say that if we wanted a ferret, they knew who to call, and several years ago, all the major pet store chains in California started carrying ferret supplies - even though ferrets are illegal in California. They continue to campaign to state government to legalize pet ferrets here.

Ferrets can be interesting pets, but require a bit more attention than dogs or cats, and should be appreciated as being far higher-order mammals than rodents and rabbits. Perhaps a ferret would be a good pet for you.

More Misguided DRM

2007-12-12T22:01:00.000-08:00

The nasty case of "guilty until proven otherwise" in which a file-sharing utility included with Western Digital hard drives doesn't allow users to share video or audio over the Internet.

Discover Music You'll Like at Pandora Radio

2007-12-08T13:52:00.000-08:00

(I wrote this email February 2006, but when writing some friends about it again today, I realized I should post it here.)

UPDATE: Early in 2007, SoundExchange, a non-profit performance rights organization (created as an unincorporated division of the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA) convinced the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) to propose new, higher royalty rates for webcasts and streaming music sites, which is retroactive for 2006 and in effect until 2010. This may be the death knell for much of live Internet radio. Pandora's founder, Tim Westergren, says there is no way that his business can survive if this decision is not overturned. Here's an interview with Westergren about the impact of the proposed royalty rates on Pandora and Internet music.

Here's something great I just discovered, it's Pandora Radio. It's ad-based Internet radio which plays on your Web browser, but with a very cool twist. A staff of 40+ musical academics analyze songs based upon proprietary parameters about music - NOT song popularity - and this data becomes part of their Music Genome Project. When you create a "radio station" in Pandora (you can have 100 at a time), you "seed" the station with a song or artist. The station streams music to you based upon these characteristics. You can "guide" Pandora by indicating that you like or dislike the songs played, and (natch) you can click to buy from Amazon or iTunes. It's a very cool way to listen to free music, and to discover other music you might like.

My wife and I both enjoy using Pandora as a "radio" listening solution, and we've both found new performers which we would never had an opportunity to discover otherwise.

Some caveats and comments about running Pandora:

Pandora plays on any browser and any OS with Macromedia Flash v7 and above. Broadband is necessary to handle the 128Kbps (typical MP3 bitrate) streams.
Ads appear in a frame of the browser. Pretty unintrusive.
"Accounts" are free, and allow you to log in and play your Pandora stations anywhere.
The interface is less than intuitive. I didn't read any documentation (typical for me), and it was a bit awkward to get started.
Because the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits "on-demand" characteristics of free online music delivery, you're restricted about how many songs you can "skip" in an hour - the theory being that if you could keep skipping until you liked something, that would be "on-demand." If you just let Panora play (in a browser windows - Firefox works better than Safari for this), it just delivers 128Kbps streams all day long. As it turns out, if I listen to at least a minute or so of each song, I seem to be able to get away with skipping - so it seems that part of the arrangement is that artists get a certain amount of exposure. If you listen for 30 seconds or so and click "I don't like it" on a song's album art pop-up, it will skip automatically.
Once a song has played, or you've skipped a song, you can't return to play it again (that would be "on-demand," remember?). But you can still get a pop-up list of actions, including "add to favorites" and purchasing options.
We've found that entering an artist's name rather than a song title seems to yield better results sooner.
I can't say I've discovered that clicking "Guide Us" and entering another artist or title has been terribly effective, but I haven't experimented that much with Pandora, I just use it.
You can rename and delete Radio Stations, so I think it makes the most sense to go crazy and make another station when have a new idea of a song/artist to try. Again, trying to "tune" a single station by adding more songs I like has not be very rewarding.

All in all, if you want to discover new music, and like to have music playing around you, this is a fantastic solution.

I discovered Pandora listening to a Podcast interview with it's founder, Tim Westergren.

AIM in Gmail

2007-12-06T13:35:00.000-08:00

Google has introduced AIM in Gmail, allowing Gmail users to include AIM/AOL chat in their Gmail window (Gmail users have been able to text-chat with each other for some time) on most Web browsers. Pretty slick, and especially useful in workplace environments or on borrowed computers where installing an IM client application isn't allowed or practical.

Even though IM in Gmail isn't as full-featured as application-based clients such as AOL Instant Messenger, iChat or Trillian, one really cool thing Gmail can do is offline chat. You can send IMs to people who aren't online, and they receive them the next time they log in.

I appreciate that Google fosters continuous innovation in their products - it keeps me using them.

Why a Mac May be the Best Windows Computer

2007-11-29T13:52:00.001-08:00

Now that users can run Windows on Macintosh computers using solutions such as Apple's Boot Camp, Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion, it obviously provides flexibility to users wishing to benefit from multiple operating systems. (It's possible to have a single Mac configured to triple-boot into the Mac OS, Windows and Linux - plus users can directly access the Unix OS which is the underlying system for OS X for a fourth operating system.)

But I think there's a good argument that a Macintosh makes the ideal Windows computer. Why? Because in the vast world of Windows "clones," there is immense diversity in the combinations of hardware that comprise any given "PC." And though these components are theoretically built to common "standards" for the Windows OS, there are potentially frustrating and expensive consequences of incompatibilities between Microsoft Windows, various hardware components, and the software "drivers" written by their manufacturers or third parties to control and communicate with those hardware components.

I spent an enormous amount of time diagnosing a problem with installing a higher-performance 3D graphics display in a Windows XP machine which was ultimately an incompatibility between a four-model series of 3D graphics card and a tiny chip on the computer's motherboard (the "southbridge," or I/O controller hub). The video card worked fine on other motherboards, and the motherboard worked with other video cards. Ultimately, changing the motherboard was the solution (the video card was more valuable, and had been purchased as a performance upgrade), but I'd spent over 100 hours in diagnostics and research before recognizing a clue in an online post about a similar, but different problem. This would have been an impossible problem to actually resolve professionally (any service department would have determined that one or the other component was faulty and informed the customer to buy a replacement graphics card, which would have also failed, after which they would have replaced the motherboard, which would have failed, etc.) at any reasonable cost. This was my own PC, and I am a determined diagnostician, so I was willing to put in a huge amount of time over a period of many months to find the actual solution - but this would be a horrific and probably unresolvable problem for most of the population.

That this kind of incompatibility problem might only affect a tiny part of the PC buying public (those who happen to have the particular combination of southbridge chip-equipped motherboard and graphics card) doesn't provide encouragement because of its rarity - on the contrary, it means that fewer diagnosticians will have ever encountered it, much less shared a solution in the online community.

Compared with the vast market of PC clones, there are a very limited number of Macintosh hardware models, which have tightly-controlled component sources known to Apple, Inc., who also provides nearly all the Windows drivers for this hardware. The Macintosh user community is a vigorous, active culture of sharing information. These factors create a "Windows on Mac" microcosm in which there are far fewer mysteries than in the "other" 96 per cent of the computer-using world.

So there you have it. A Mac may just be the ultimate Windows computer. Whouda thunk?

Apple Boot Camp Beta Expiration

2007-11-29T12:03:00.000-08:00

On November 28, 2007, Boot Camp users received email notices that Boot Camp Beta will expire on December 31, 2007.

Apple's (unsupported) Boot Camp Beta, which provides software tools to install Microsoft Windows XP or Vista operating systems on Macintosh computers with Intel microprocessors. Apple's original end-user license agreement (EULA) for Boot Camp Beta cited that it would expire either on December 31, 2007 or when Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard shipped, whichever came first, but Leopard debuted on October 26, so Apple appears to have given users a brief extension. Apple had been issuing notice of this impending event for some time, citing that Boot Camp functionality would be included in Mac OS 10.5 "Leopard." (Here is the Boot Camp 2.0 page for Leopard.)

Following the expiration of Boot Camp Beta, a Mac running Windows installed using Boot Camp will continue to boot into Windows. However, the Boot Camp Assistant Beta (used to install and configure the Boot Camp partition) will no longer function, so Boot Camp installations are no longer possible without Mac OS 10.5. The license from Apple to run Boot Camp Beta expired as well, and Apple advises to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to continue using Boot Camp 2.0. The Boot Camp Beta downloads were removed from the Apple website at the end of September.

Interestingly, Apple's Support site hosts a technical note from October 22, 2007, "Removing a Windows partition after Boot Camp Beta has expired in Mac OS X 10.4." This is apparently to address the needs of users wishing to perform this action, but finding that the Boot Camp Assistant Beta no longer functions. Apple's solution is for users to set manually their Mac's clock to a date before September 30, 2007 and then launch Boot Camp Assistant Beta. I find no examples of whether it's possible to use this trick to install Boot Camp Beta - which would be interesting.

It's not clear at this time whether any solution for installing Boot Camp on a Mac running OS 10.4 will ever be provided - I'm guessing that there will not. For those who find Boot Camp useful, it's a compelling reason to pay Apple to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5. Having said that, alternatives for running Windows on an Intel Mac exist. Virtualization software such as Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMware Fusion allow Intel Mac users to run Windows XP or Vista applications transparently from within the Mac OS environment, and allows users to easily pass data between Windows and Mac applications, where Boot Camp functionality requires that the Mac be started in either the Mac OS or Windows. However, a Boot Camp-prepared Mac running Windows is a full-fledged Windows computer, where there may be some compatibility issues with some applications in virtualization software, particularly regarding hardware/software interaction.

Apple Releases Final Cut Express 4

2007-11-17T11:29:00.000-08:00

On November 15, 2007 Apple released their latest version of Final Cut Express, their "prosumer" video editing application based on Apple's Final Cut Pro software.

Notably, Final Cut Express 4 now supports the nascent AVCHD standard, which is used by an increasing number of "tapeless" high-definition camcorders. With this update, all three of Apple's video-editing programs (iMovie, Final Cut Express, Final Cut Pro) now provide (limited) AVCHD support.

NOTE: Apple's AVCHD support is limited to Intel-based Macintoshes. The Voltaic software utility allows both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs to download AVCHD files (except DVD-based - see below) and transcode them to files used by iMovie (HD or '08), Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro.

AVCHD DVD ON MAC OS X
At this point, Apple still does not support transfer of AVCHD files from HD camcorders which record directly to DVD, because Mac OS X does not support the UDF 2.5/2.6 file system used by DVD-recording camcorders. I have read reports that users have successfully transferred files from AVCHD DVDs using the ReadDVD!™ utility from Software Architects.

Gmail Now Has IMAP Support!

2007-11-17T03:38:00.000-08:00

Google began supporting IMAP access to Gmail accounts the end of October 2007. The Gmail IMAP help page details how to configure your Gmail account and your email client application(s) to access Gmail IMAP servers.

AOL Now Supports POP Mail!

2007-11-16T16:38:00.000-08:00

I don't recall exactly how I noticed this, but today (November 16, 2007) I realized that America Online email now supports the POP email protocol. After 15 years, AOL finally supports the most common email standard!

(AOL started offering IMAP support in 2004, and we've been accessing our AOL accounts using Apple Mail, after using AOL Communicator and Claris Emailer - we haven't actually used an AOL application in a decade.)

There seems to be surprisingly little about this the Web, perhaps because the geeky masses long ago forsook AOL as a provider. I did find this interesting forum posting from June 2007 where the poster includes a transcript of an online chat with an AOL tech in which the tech denies AOL has POP support, but instructions for setting up an email client for an AOL POP server are on AOL Help Pages. So I guess this rolled out quietly since June 2007.

My wife and I (as well as many friends) have had our AOL email addresses for over 15 years - and now that it's free to maintain an AOL email account, we have no intention of getting rid of them.

What's important to me about AOL's finally supporting POP:

I can now maintain all my email accounts from many different providers (including AOL) from within Gmail - my email "application" of choice for two years now.
I no longer have to use an IMAP client on my Palm (or any other mobile device) to check my AOL account when mobile. I'd had to use an IMAP client for this single task.

"Car Talk" Now Available as a Podcast!

2007-11-07T16:52:00.000-08:00

For many years, my thoughtful wife wake up on Saturday mornings to record Tom and Ray Magliozzi's fantastic automotive radio show on our local National Public Radio (NPR) station to an audio cassette. Whenever we'd take a long driving trip, we'd have tens of hours of Car Talk episodes with us - the perfect thing to keep me alert at the end of a long driving day.

Some years ago, we purchased a Griffin RadioShark, and used the USB-connected radio tuner to automatically record radio programs as MP3 files. Over the years, the RadioShark recorded hundreds of shows which we'd sync to an iPod for travel. It still records NPR shows every week - but it will soon be retired from this function, because...

Finally, Car Talk is available as a podcast. By clicking on this link, you'll be taken to their subscription page in iTunes - where it will then automatically download each episode as they become available. (Don't have iTunes? Get it free here for Mac or PC.)

National Public Radio now offers much of its programming as podcasts. You can view the NPR Podcast Directory at their website, or within iTunes on the NPR store.

Podcasts are subscriptions to audio and video content on the Internet. Nearly all are free, and many are simply "re-purposing" of radio broadcasts. You don't need an iPod or any kind of portable audio player to listen to a podcast, you can listen on your computer using iTunes or any other MP3-playing program. Learn more about podcasts here.

The Talking Moose Lives!

2007-11-06T12:55:00.000-08:00

All of us who were running Macs twenty years ago fondly remember the Talking Moose, who randomly spoke to you from your Compact Mac while you worked, and read your dialog boxes to you (a friend and I often recount that your Mac could "hard crash" - requiring a reset of the computer - and often the Moose would *still* read you the "bomb" error message, twisting the knife, as it were).

The Talking Moose lives on, thanks to the efforts of Uli Kusterer. It's even available as Universal Binary (for PowerPC and Intel Macs).

http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/moose.htm

The original author of the Talking Moose, Steven B. Halls, is Chief Radiologist at St. Mary's Hospital, Camrose, Alberta, Canada.

$400 Sub-notebook Laptop

2007-11-05T09:34:00.000-08:00

The Asus Eee PC Linux-powered sub-notebook laptop sells for about $400US, and has an impressive list of features, including:

900MHz Intel Celeron CPU
512MB RAM (1GB optional)
100BT Ethernet
802.11 B/G WiFi
4GB of solid-state storage (8GB optional)
MMC/SD/MS/SDHC media reader
300K pixel camera (on 4G and 8G models)
Microphone
USB 2.0
VGA output (1600x1280 max)
2.25 pounds, 9" x 6.5" x 1" closed
Xandros Linux variant operating system, plus many preinstalled applciations
3.5 hour battery duration (manufacturer's estimate)

The display is a bit dinky, of course - a 7" diagonal 800x480 LCD, but this is a "sub-notebook" - and what you lose in screen real estate you get back in terms of portability. For the purposes most people need a laptop while mobile (email, Web browsing, digital photo management), it seems fantastic. For many users with minimal computing needs, it may be all the computer they require.

While the Eee PC doesn't have a hard drive or optical drive, it does have USB 2.0 ports, so users can add these when necessary.

The Eee PC comes with Firefox for Web browsing and OpenOffice 2.0 (the free open-source office application suite, which is cross-compatible with Microsoft Office files), as well as instant messaging, media playing and game apps. Apparently the Eee PC can run Windows, and Asus may eventually offer is pre-installed.

This kind of thing isn't usually on my radar, but I watched this review on the recently-launched ChannelFlip site (I know of U.K. presenter/ChannelFlip founder Wil Harris as a frequent guest of Leo Laporte's This Week In Tech podcast) and was impressed enough to post here.

Search & Replace iTunes Song Names and More!

2007-11-02T20:31:00.000-07:00

Ever have trouble reading the titles of your Podcasts in a list because they scroll off the right side of your iPod's screen? When every episode is titled something like "This Week's Exciting Edition of the World's Best Fish Noodling Podcast Episode #124," all you see in your list is:

This Week's Exciting Editi
This Week's Exciting Editi
This Week's Exciting Editi
This Week's Exciting Editi
This Week's Exciting Editi
This Week's Exciting Editi

Pretty irritating, no? The truth is, podcasters should name their episodes with the number or date first. But assuming that isn't going to happen, I use this simple free AppleScript, Search/Replace Tag Script.

By using this Applescript and searching for "This Week's Exciting Edition of the World's Best Fish Noodling Podcast Episode" and replacing with "Noodling," my list now looks like:

Noodling #126
Noodling #127
Noodling #128
Noodling #129
Noodling #130
Noodling #131

Doug Adams hosts Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes, where over 400 (so far) free AppleScripts (most authored by Doug) add functionality to the ubiquitous iTunes on Mac OS X, using this built-in scripting language. Take a look, there's bound to be something there you've always wished iTunes did!

HD Camcorder Technologies - October 2007

2007-10-10T16:14:00.000-07:00

In early October 2007, a friend asked me about buying an HD (High-Definition) camcorder to replace their family DV camcorder. His primary application is shooting his son's football games for post-game analysis. He's an engineer, and our discussions reflect that.

CURRENT HD CAMCORDER RECORDING TECHNOLOGIES

Tape - We still like this. The consumer HDV tape format uses the old MiniDV tape format, and records MPEG-2 data at exactly the same 25Mbps (megaBITS per second) as standard definition DV. When you run out of tape while on vacation, you go to the store (even a grocery store, these days) or the photo booth at Disneyland to buy more. When you shoot to tape, it's a $5/hour archive of what represents 13GB of data. Camcorders can duplicate these digital tapes perfectly to each other over a FireWire cable, and footage edited on a computer can be written back to tape losslessly. Downsides: transferring footage to a computer for editing or transcoding ( i.e., for uploading to YouTube, putting on your cell phone) can only occur in real time. Also, tape is pretty mechanical, and may wear out in time easier than optical media (CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW). Of course, optical media might fail eventually, too.
Hard Drive - Perhaps handy and tempting because you can shoot several hours of footage without managing tapes, but when it's full, you'd better have a computer with lots of hard drive space handy, and some time to transfer the data. (On that African safari, you'd better have a laptop and a couple of external hard drives and batteries to transfer footage while bouncing across the veldt in a Land Rover.) HD camcorders shooting to HD use MPEG-4 H.264 "AVC" codec, just like DirecTV's new transmissions. The AVCHD standard provides for potentially greater fidelity than HDV. However, current implementations do not yet match the quality of HDV. Unlike HDV, AVCHD camera offer user-selectable bitrates to balance quality and capacity. This is a new paradigm for computer editing, so we're in the first generations of editing software which handle AVC. Unlike tape, footage can be potentially transferred to a computer in a fraction of the recording time. Obviously, footage must be archived elsewhere, but I'm assuming that you can simply use existing computer data management concepts to copy and "burn" data to DVD-Rs. I don't know if any HD camcorders allow using the drive as a mountable hard drive on the computer - that could potentially save even more time (though you really want your footage archived in another location for safe-keeping).
Recordable DVD - This product may appear promising, but is pretty awkward in reality. Using either 12cm or 8cm optical recordable DVDs, these camcorders can produce discs which will play in a consumer DVD player without the need of a computer at any point. DVDs are inexpensive and as with tape, the camera creates a physical archive of the data. However, some mechanisms are slow to respond and ejecting a disc requires a several-minute "finalization" of the media - pretty unwelcome when they call your kid off the bench for the first time and you've just filled up your disc. I think all the HD camcorders recording to DVD-R are using AVCHD.
Memory Cards - Astonishingly, Japanese giant Panasonic has been promoting solid-state broadcast HD camcorders for three years (I attend media production trade shows regularly). These shoot to " P2" cards, which are basically the old "PC Card/CardBus/PCMCIA" form-factor containing a RAID-array of four, matched, high-speed Secure Digital High-Capacity (SDHC) cards inside. These are very expensive, but provide many interesting technical benefits to professional video production. Knowing about that has lessened the impact of seeing the recent growth of consumer SD and HD camcorders which shoot to single SDHC cards. Again using AVCHD compression, this promises faster-than-realtime transfer of footage to a computer for editing. As with hard drives, the expense of memory cards means having to archive to another media form. You also have to consider buying multiple $80 8GB cards which might each hold an hour or two of footage.

BACKING UP

A wonderful thing digital technology has brought us is the ability to make perfect duplicates of our video footage. In the past, we could only make lower-quality copies of originals, and copies of copies were nearly unplayable. Today, your consumer video footage can be copied infinitely without any loss whatsoever. So if your parents make a copy of a DVD you sent them to your uncle, and he makes copies for your cousins, everyone's copies are identical. I find this particularly appropriate for protecting the family legacy of photographs and video recordings - if every family member gave every other family member a copy of their precious archives in digital form, then the chances of them surviving into the future are very high.

As with all data, even chemical-based photography, if you don't have duplicates, you risk the loss of irreplaceable of any information. So even if you haven't practiced it before, there's no time like the present to practice "safe data handling." Make duplicates of anything you wouldn't want to lose, and store the duplicates "off-site" in the event of a disaster at your primary storage site.

Actually making duplicates of video data is pretty time-intensive, because video takes up a lot of data space, and most methods take at least as long as the duration of the video. Here are some examples of how you might back up video data from the various digital forms:

Tape-to-tape: High-definition HDV, standard-definition MiniDV, and Digital-8 camcorders can "dub" digitally between camcorders and VCRs if both recorders are equipped with FireWire interfaces (Sony calls this "i.Link" and the technical standard is known as "IEEE-1394"). Typically, a "4 pin to 4 pin" FireWire cable is connected between the two camcorders, one is played and the other is placed into record (typcially in "VCR" mode, rather than "camera" mode). The resulting copy represents the quality of the original perfectly.

It's pretty awkward and impractical for most people to back up their videotapes while traveling, but if it's really a once-in-a-lifetime trip, you might consider packing along a spare camcorder or a couple of external hard drives for your laptop - never trust having all your data in one place.
NOTE: To dub from HDV to standard-def MiniDV or Digital-8, your HDV camcorder must be able to "downsample" or "convert" the HDV to DV during the dub. You can also dub from DV to some HDV camcorders, but the resulting dub will NOT be HDV.

Archive to hard drive: This might seem a bit expensive as a long-term archive solution, but hard drive prices continue to fall. At the time of this writing in October 2007 I just noticed a fairly compact 500GB external FireWire hard drive for $150 at my local "warehouse" store - that's over 35 hours of DV/HDV storage, and even more AVCHD. On the road, you could copy from tape to external hard drive in your hotel room at night, if for no other purpose than as a temporary backup until you archived back to tape later, or to optical media.
Archive to optical media: This process is typically performed by connecting a camcorder to computer via FireWire/IEEE-1394 cable and a video-editing program, then using a DVD-authoring program to "burn" the edited video to inexpensive recordable DVDs. Current technology encodes home videos as MPEG-2 video on recordable DVDs. This does NOT preserve the original fidelity of standard-definition DV, and so is certainly incapable of maintaining HD recordings. DVDs are "good enough" for most standard-def consumer applications. New-generation consumer HD camcorders that record HD video using the AVCHD/H.264 codec make files small enough to fit a little over an hour of their highest quality HD video on an existing DVD-R (4.7GB). At this time, AVCHD camcorders don't quite have the fidelity of HDV, but will likely change with time. In the next few years, we will probably transition to higher-capacity Blu-ray and HD-DVD recordable drives in our personal computers, and archiving to these may be able to preserve full fidelity of the original camera recordings.
Duplicating DVDs - If your camcorder records directly to recordable DVDs, then these DVDs (and any DVDs you make from tape, hard drive-based, or memory-card-based camcorders) can be duplicated in a personal computer with a DVD-burning drive.

VIEWING HD HOME MOVIES

Until recently, the only way you could view consumer HD footage on your HDTV was to play back on your camcorder directly connected to the HDTV via HDMI/DVI, analog component video cables, or (if your HDTV supports it) even 1080i over FireWire cable. Of course, you can watch HD footage in full resolution on a computer, provided it's powerful enough and you have a display capable of displaying 1280x720 or 1920x1080 pixels.

NEW HD VIEWING ALTERNATIVES?

I recently realized that it might be possible to put the files from an AVCHD camcorder (or converted from another HD format to AVCHD/H.264 files) on existing DVD-recordable media and play it back in a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player (which support H.264 as one of their codecs), but only if that player could read recordable DVDs, and if it recognized AVCHD files as being valid. I'd sort of automatically put out of my mind worrying about producing high-definition DVDs until we owned a Blu-ray or HD-DVD burner - but it's possible to make hour-long high-def DVDs now, provided you have a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player with these qualities. I found a couple of posts on Sony Playstation 3 forums where users had reported playing 8cm DVDs recorded in a Sony HDR-UX7 HD camcorder on their PS3 game consoles (which have Blu-ray drives and can play commerical Blu-ray movies). Here is a YouTube video of a user demonstrating this (we'll assume this is not a hoax). This blogger says that you can place H.264 files into a folder named "VIDEO" on a data DVD and the PS3 will recognize and play those files. Using this technique, it's possible to make and existing DVD-recordable which plays around an hour of HD content.

STREAMS VS. FILES

I had not really considered this until now - I have just sort of assumed we'd eventually have to bite the bullet and purchase a Blu-ray or HD-DVD burner for a computer (or buy a computer with a burner) *and* decide which of the HD DVD standards we'd buy into to match it. This is also a nice consequence of a rather obtuse concept I first became aware of over a decade ago - with the new tapeless camcorders, we're transitioning from "streaming" data forms (as with tape or live video and audio broadcasts, you have to be able to join in progress) to "file-based" data forms. To get footage from a tape to play on a DVD, you have to create a file from data captured from the tape. With AVCHD, there's the promise of using familiar computer file paradigms and just copying files from the camera media (RAM, HD, DVD) to some other place and having a piece of hardware decode it. This is pretty exciting to us, because until now getting footage from a camcorder to a (SD) DVD is a pretty painful process, including having to "transcode" from however the video was compressed by the camera to another way the DVD player recognized. Having cameras that record files that can be played directly by set-top high-def DVD players (if indeed they can) really makes the path short (provided you're not editing).

EDITING COMPLEXITIES FOR CONSUMER HD

Having said that, the algorithms used to store all that HD data in *less* space (some current AVCHD camcorder record up to 1920x1080 pixels@30fps at a data rate of only 15Mbps, while standard-def DV records 720x480@30fps at 25Mbps) have to resort to some devious strategies - namely using inter-frame as well as intra-frame compression. This means that unlike the old DV standard, these cameras don't record every frame. They record periodic full frames followed by the differences between the full frames and the current one. This makes editing pretty tricky, since trying to go forward (or worse, backward) one frame will likely land you on a frame that doesn't actually exist. Early HDV editing solutions (from just 2 years ago) required capturing all the footage at real-time, then waiting hours while the computer created temporary files of intra-frame compressed frames. At the end of editing, if you wished to record back to HDV tape, you waited for hours again while software re-created the long-GOP (Group Of Frames) stream to put back on tape.

MAYBE DVD-BURNING CAMCORDERS AIN'T SO BAD

There is some argument for using a DVD-burning camcorder if all you want to do is, say, review football plays without editing. As long as you strategized disc-changes at non-critical times (assuming the tales of long DVD-finalizing waits are true), you'd be able to pop these in a [compatible HDTV player or personal computer with AVCHD decoding software] without any intermediate steps. Plus, you get archival media right from the camera (which you can duplicate in a computer with a DVD burner).

MORE CAMCORDER INFO

Camcorderinfo.com is a site which attempts to provide objective reviews of available products through scientific process. Founder Robin Liss was 12 years old when she founded the site a decade ago.

Termite Tome: We Have Termites?!?

2007-10-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

In May of 2000, we had our first encounter as home-owners with termites. Our home is in the Los Angeles area. This article is extracted from email to friends and family.

Last Wednesday, while cleaning out our garage to install shelving, we discovered three cardboard boxes which had been partially consumed by still-present termites. I (stupidly) sprayed the boxes and area with insecticide and carefully disposed of the boxes, once again soaking them with Raid. The next day, I removed a layer of sheet rock from that part of the garage wall and discovered some small mud tubes, and that the termites had eaten a thin bit of the surface of the studs where they met the drywall, and some of the drywall paper where it met the wood. No termites were visible.

My wife found a couple of hundred termite services in our Yellow Pages. We called Terminix and Orkin for inspectors, deciding that we'd start at the top, and see how expensive it could get. I also reasoned that if there were such things as warranties against damage (I didn't know if they actually existed), then the huge companies would have the most clout to actually cover a claim. We know, too, that when you buy the biggest companies, you pay for their advertising budgets. Which, based on television airplay alone, must be enormous. For whatever it's worth, there were ten full-page Yellow Page ads in the San Fernando Valley Yellow Pages, only two of which were Terminix and Orkin. My wife remembered that Yellow Page full-page ads in our home town in North Carolina were $10,000 to $15,000 a year ten years ago - you can imagine what time and this location's impact has on rates.

We're still discussing this, but we've had inspections/quotes from the Big Two, Terminix and Orkin. Bottom lines are basically $1800 for treatment, which includes repair guarantees on structure and property within. Ongoing maintenance of their more expensive plans are $268 and $416/year, respectively. If there's good news, it's that the Orkin inspector/salesman found no significant termite problems in our home. On the negative side, we have termites within the structure. So what to do?

Keep in mind that these reps are selling something. Also keep in mind that termites are almost everywhere (Alaska is the only U.S. state unaffected), and are necessary to the planet's ecology.

The following text is partly information from the pest control reps. Much of it I've learned since Wednesday via the Web. So as always - Do Your Own Research.

TERMINIX - www.terminix.com

The Terminix rep, Greg, came on Thursday an hour and a half after their two-hour scheduled window. I took him immediately to the garage and showed him the site where we'd discovered the termites. I'd also removed a sheet of drywall in the garage and found some mud tubes along the joints between the studs and drywall. So obviously, there was nothing to sell to the customer for the rep - the customer discovered live termites and called the company for and inspection. We were informed that we had one of the two main termite pests, subterranean termites (the other kind are drywood termites). Subterranean are the more dangerous to structures, because they live in underground colonies numbering from hundreds of thousands to millions of termites. They must enter a structure from the earth, and can not be exposed to air or sun, as their soft bodies require constant moisture. If a piece of wood is in contact with the earth, it is at great risk. Subterranean termites will also exploit any crack in cement foundations leading to edible wood. They require a moist environment for their colony, and form the colony near the water table, as deep as 150 feet underground. So quickly killing subterranean termites in a structure only cuts off a single source of food from several they have likely established. The colony will continue to feed elsewhere. Greg said that subterranean termites averaged 5 colonies per acre.

Drywood termites can enter a structure anywhere when in their flighted reproductive stage. (Termites "swarm" to propagate the species - when some males and females born to a colony have wings and eyes - they are normally eyeless - and fly off to mate and establish new colonies. The swarmers have no mouth parts, and do not eat. Ants also have a flying reproductive stage.) Drywood termites live within the wood itself, and get all their moisture from the wood they consume. The colonies are much smaller, numbering only up to a few tens of thousands. However, the only treatment method for dwellings with drywood termites is fumigation - requiring "tenting" of the structure. Prevention against drywoods is not practiced, and reinfestation can occure the day after a fumigation. Drywood colonies grow slowly (reaching destructive sizes in four or five years), so they are not as great a threat as subterraneans, which can feed on multiple sources simultaneously and can grow massive colonies. The only method of treatment for drywood termites is fumigation once they have been detected. Fumigation is not effective against subterranean termites because the colony is safe far underground. Greg did not address whether or not we had drywood termites, nor did he inspect our home. While he measured the exterior perimeter of the home, he let us watch a 10 minute promotional video about the Sentricon product (see below). I accidentally dubbed this tape while we were watching it. We could accidentally dub a copy for you, as well.

We talked about treatments - he offered two:

BAITING - Terminix uses a DowElanco product called Sentricon. This is Terminix' main termite product since its inception two years ago. The active ingredient is hexaflumeron, an insect growth regulator (IGR), or chitin inhibitor (pronounced kite'-en, this is the material with which most arthropods make their exoskeletons) which inhibits the molting process which some insects (like termites and ants) use to grow. Unable to accommodate their increasing size by molting their old skin, the worker termites die. The installation surrounds the property with foot-long tubular plastic bait stations, placed both in the ground near wood structures and, if necessary, in holes drilled in cement pads. Indoor stations are available to attach to existing termite mud tubes, to reduce the time that the agent is introduced to the colony. Small vents in the side of the stations admit termite-sized guests. Initially, plain wood is placed within the bait stations to attract and detect termites. Terminix claims that it typically takes 30 to 40 days for a termite colony to discover the wood and begin feeding upon it. Terminix reps return periodically (two weeks to one month) and check the status of every bait station. Data about bait station progress is recorded by bar-code readers on-site and set back to DowElanco, who maintain a database of termite activity and regulate dispensing of their Setricon product. When a bait station if found to have active termite activity, the termites are carefully removed and saved. The the wood is replaced with Sentricon-treated cellulose fibers (termites eat only cellulose - which is actually digested thanks to microscopic protozoa in their gut - this is how most of the dead plant fiber on the planet is broken down into soil constituents). The live termites are replaced in the bait station on top of the treated fibers. They eat their way through the fibers and eventually return to the colony. There, they share their food with the rest of the colony, including the queen and king. In doing so, they pass along the hexaflumeron. Eventually, the workers are unable to grow, and die. Because only the workers leave the colony and forage for food, eventually the entire colony starves. Dow calls this "colony elimination," though Terminix literature reads "eliminates or substantially reduces" colonies. (Some sources claim that it is difficult to determine whether a colony has in fact been eliminated, or merely stopped feeding at a particular site.) Once the bait station shows no live termites, the treated cellulose is replaced again with plain wood and monitoring begins again. The Sentricon video was careful to note that there was little or no drilling in and around the foundation involved, and frequently presented images of technicians from "other" companies using jackhammer-sized drills in people living rooms, etc.

Terminix' warranty for Sentricon treatment covers any structural repair and the contents of the structure beginning six months after Sentricon treatment begins on "qualified homes". (Though Greg did not mention or explain this qualification, the Orkin rep which came the next day was careful to point out that not all homes qualified, and that ours did because he had performed an inspection and deemed our home "clean" enough to warranty. Which is a bit of a comfort - considering the reason for having termite folks at the house.) The warranty is transferable - it belongs to the address, not the owner. Greg said that most exterminators only offer re-treatment warranties. Rates are based upon linear feet of the wood structure's perimeter - doorways, for instance, are not included. Greg measured our home at 214 linear feet. The quote was $1785, which is a year of treatment and monitoring. The program does nothing else but manage Sentricon bait stations - which indicates Terminix' faith and/or commitment to the product. Ongoing maintenance of the program, which maintains the repair warranty, is $268/year for our house. The initial price was rather shocking - we'd seen website quotes of less than half as much for more conventional treatments. I'm impressed that the company offers a repair guarantee. Yes, they are entering into the insurance business preying upon a very vulnerable spot among consumers. But the risks are substantial in warrantying home repairs, so it's also rather convincing. $300 a year for termite insurance is really pretty reasonable, as far as I'm concerned - the $1800 startup is harder to take - my wife is much more hesitant about this figure than I. Greg said that he thought that Terminix was the only company to offer repair guarantees - this is not true, as we'd find out from Orkin the next day. I asked Greg if there were any cautions or indications about hexaflumeron, and he told us that the DowElanco rep would chew on a treated pad as a demonstration. Then again, I remember a DuPont rep pouring Freon on her dress in 11th grade in Mrs. Carter's chemistry class, telling us how inert the product was. Right.

LIQUID TREATMENT - Greg quoted $1313/$150 (startup/annual) for the more traditional "barrier treatment," which injects liquid termiticide into ground on the inside and outside of the foundation every foot. This may require drilling holes in cement pads or inside floors every foot. But Terminix does NOT offer a repair warranty for this this program, only a "Re-treatment" warranty - meaning that if you get termites, they keep treating. But he "recommended" the Bait program. As both Terminix and Orkin reps said, these termiticides are temporary, and dissipate into the soil with weather and water to ineffective concentrations in under a year. A long-lasting termiticide, Chlordane, was banned from use almost a decade ago. They require continuous re-treatment, and depend upon the efficiency of the installers to completely cover any possible access to animals sized about a third of a grain of rice. "Efficiency of Installers" is a concept I consider unrealistic.

ORKIN - www.orkin.com

"Jeff" showed up at the scheduled time. I showed him the garage site, and he told us that we had subterranean termites. He then said that he'd measure our property and crawl under the house, then talk to us about possible treatments. He spent nearly a half hour in our two-foot high crawlspace. When he returned, he told us that it looked fine, except for a single site where he found evidence of drywood termites. The site had been previously marked with the letter "K," an exterminator code for drywood termites. He saw termite "pellets," fecal matter pushed out of the burrow by drywood termites, which he thought were probably recent. He didn't know whether the site had been marked and never treated, or simply re-inhabited coincidentally. In any case, he said that "he wasn't worried" about the drywood discovery. He indicated that we had some plumbing problems in our 3/4 bathroom (we had our master bath's new toilet sitting in the hall, as part of fixing a plumbing leak which had caused some bulging in our bathroom floor and peeling of paint at the baseboard). And he pointed out that we had wood-to-eath contact in our rose bed in the front of our house, where the soil had been shifted or added. Subterranean termites can gain access unobserved at any wood-to-earth point.

When we sat down and discussed treatment with him, he outlined their plan, which included:

Liquid barrier treatment (termiticide) for ten linear feet on either side of the site I'd discovered in the garage. This involved drilling holes in the cement pad inside and out.
Liquid barrier treatment under our cement front porch and walkway, and back porch; where termites can build mud tubes from the earth to the wood foundation unobserved.
Liquid barrier treatment injected through holes drilled in the mortar between the bricks at the front of our house. These bricks apparently provide unobservable access from the ground to wooden structure.
Direct treatment of the lumber where the drywood termite evidence was found with liquid termiticide, injected through holes drilled into that lumber only.
Treatment of all lumber under our home where it contacts cement foundation blocks with Timbor, an inexpensive sodium borate solution which makes wood inedible to termites. Termites can climb up cracks in cement as narrow as 1/64 of an inch. (This treatment is advertised by many of the hundreds of termite ads in our Yellow Pages.)
Installation of bait stations, similar in application to the Terminix/Sentricon system, but using FirstLine, a product of FMC Corporation. This bait is not a growth regulator, but a toxin. The Orkin rep and DowElanco literature comparing their Sentricon product and FirstLine both call it a "stomach poison," but the University of Nebraska page below calls its active ingredient, sulfuramid, a "respiration inhibitor." In any case, this is also intended to affect the entire colony, though both the DowElanco (competitor) literature and U of N page suggest that the product does not eliminate colonies, it only suppresses them. These bait stations are also loaded first with wood, then monitored much as the Sentricon product. The Sentricon literature mentions (as a negative aspect of FirstLine) the necessity of also applying liquid barrier treatment for effectiveness.

Orkin also offers a Repair Warranty, guaranteeing against damage or they cover home repairs. I asked Jeff when the coverage began (Terminix was six months after treatment began), and he said it began with installation of the program. Interestingly, Jeff said that in his opinion, there was no reason to continue the program once the bait stations stopped getting termites. He said that termites never stop using a food source, so if they stopped visiting a station, they were dead. I remarked that it was unusual for Orkin not to encourage ongoing income by selling this as an ongoing program - and Jeff said that this was "his opinion, not Orkin's." Considering what a gold mine termite insurance surely is, I find this a bit odd. Of course, it's not exactly in these companies' best interest to eradicate termites. Nor the planet's for that matter.

Orkin's quote for our house (based upon 210 linear feet) was $1795 for installation and the first year of bait station monitoring. He indicated that if we never got a "hit" on a bait station in the initial year, we'd could choose to continue monitoring, with full repair warranty, at $416 per additional year. Again, he indicated that if a bait station ever got a hit, then received FirstLine treatment and stopped getting termites, he didn't consider it necessary to continue the program with Orkin. In fact, he told us that once the termites stopped feeding on the FirstLine bait, they'd remove the bait stations and fill in any holes in the cement pads, unless the customer opted to continue treatment. Terminix made no such suggestions (nor would you expect any company to).

Jeff also said that Orkin offered a Money-Back Satisfaction Guarantee - if for any reason a customer was NOT satisfied with service at any time, a full refund was offered.

CONCLUSIONS

Well, we're still thinking about it. Memorial day Monday is coming up, so we don't have to choose for a couple of days. I guess I'm impressed enough with the idea of repair warranties that I'm willing to pay more for a big-name company than a mom & pop shop. Halfway through writing this, I was leaning toward Terminix and Sentricon, despite the fact that the sales rep for Orkin did much more work (including detection of the drywood termites) and was generally more thorough (and pleasant), and despite the fact that Orkin would treat the drywood site. I may ask Terminix whether they would treat that site as well. The University of Nebraska page below makes Sentricon sound like a more effective product - and I also appreciate that it's actually managed and monitored by its manufacturer, Dow Agro Sciences/DowElanco. Unfortunately, we were in the middle of re-shelving our garage when we discovered the termites eating a couple of cardboard boxes. So we're stalled on that project (fortunately, we put up a vinyl shed before we started the project, so all the garage contents are packed in there for the time being) until we know whether we're going to use a company that needs to drill in the garage floor. And my wife starts teaching Summer School in a couple of weeks.

After reading much of the links below (while I was composing some of this letter), and after half a day of thinking about it (before finishing this letter), I'm now leaning toward the Orkin side. Several apparently impartial academic sources on the Web (I'm always cautious about Web sources - after all, I'm thinking about posting this letter on the Web, and the Web has been my only source) made positive arguments for sulfuramide, used by Orkin under the trade name FirstLine. (We did eventually do an Orkin treatment and one year of maintenance contract. Whether we needed to do either is debatable.)

(You can buy sulfuramide bait systems over-the-counter, and for 25 per cent of the price of FirstLine, but you wouldn't necessarily have the expertise to administer it, and you definitely wouldn't have a repair warranty. Since termite control is difficult to verify, it would be hard to know whether you were doing anything useful. Of course, the same is true for commercial services - except for guarantees.)

Since the rate is nearly identical for the initial treatment, Orkin appears to provide greater service (though I think the point is that Terminix has to pay a great deal of money to DowElanco for Sentricon) - addressing our drywood issue as part of the service, and performing some preventative measures.

I guess I'm leery of trying smaller shops to save money. This Dallas company claims that $8/linear foot is a national average, and that rates can go as high as $12/linear foot. At $1795 for 210 linear feet, Orkin quoted us at $8.55/linear foot, and Terminix' $1785 for 214 linear feet puts them at $8.34/linear foot. So I guess we're supposed to feel lucky.

Doing nothing at all, or thinking that we can control termites ourselves is out of the question now. Perhaps that's because I've been reading termite control propaganda. But some of what I've been reading is straight-up termite academia - and fact is, we build homes out of termite food. Why we don't build with anti-termite treated lumber is beyond me. By all accounts, treatment of lumber with sodium borate would be inexpensive.

When we first saw how many ads there were in the Yellow Pages, I kept saying, "Why would you open up a termite business? Why would you want to go head-to-head with the big guys?" Now I guess I know. Once a homeowner is shocked by the rates of the major companies, the smaller shops can under-price them for whatever service they want to provide. It's so hard to know what's actually going on with termite control, even for the exterminators. Much of the business can be so much snake oil. It's easy to eliminate the currently noticeable nuisance and blame future recurrences on "swarming" or "another colony." I'm considering paying Big Money for the backing of a major company and their repair warranties as a result.

Sorry if I've made some of you paranoid. But I hope that this helps some of you in future termite endeavors.

ONE MORE TIME...

In 2005, we had another termite encounter, this time with drywood termites.

While standing on our back porch, I realized I was hearing a faint, semi-regular sound. Our barbecue grille was under our porch roof, and on the grille's side-burner was a paper plate from a recent cookout. The plate contained what appeared to be about a half-teaspoon of sand scattered on its surface. Every few seconds, another "grain" or two would fall into the plate. I remembered the word for termite droppings, "frass," and looked it up. I then used a hand-held microscope and inspected the "sand." It looked like this:

Drywood Termite Frass

Actually, this image is cropped from the very photo I found online. And unfortunately, the particles in the plate were exactly these hexagonal granules. Drywood termite poop.

We once again called Orkin and they came out and locally treated the outdoor rafter from with the frass was falling, plus some adjacent wood. The Orkin rep determined that the problem was probably isolated to the single piece of wood (drywood termites generally stay within a limited volume of wood). We did nothing else.

MORE TERMITE LINKS

My favorite termite website is Dr. Don's Termite Page. Don Ewart is an entomologist in Australia, working as a research scientist specializing in termites. I trust his data mostly because I can't imagine someone without his credentials making such a page.

Here's an informative page from a Dallas/Ft. Worth exterminator.

Here's a link to a Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station.

See this fact sheet from the University of Nebraska Cooperative Extension in Lancaster County about termite bait programs.

DirecTV's Programming Packages Chart

2007-10-02T03:35:00.000-07:00

DirecTV's website is a bit less-than-clear when it comes to comparing the different programming packages. I've created a comparison chart to make it easier to see what channels are available for the offered packages as of October 1, 2007.

DirecTV Does 100 High-Definition Channels, But My HD TiVo Doesn't

2007-10-01T17:36:00.000-07:00

The satellite television provider DirecTV has been promoting "100 HD Channels!" for the better part of this year (having offered only nine HD channels for years), and the rollout has already begun. Owners of older DirecTV HD TiVo HR10-250 (discontinued) will not be able to receive these new channels. DirecTV offers a $99 upgrade to a new DVR which can record all the new HD channels - alas, there will be no TiVo-branded interface.

DIRECTV LAUNCHES NEW HD CHANNELS
I was somewhat startled this past week (late September 2007) when, on a whim, I visited the DirecTV website and discovered that a number of new channels had already been added.

We have been DirecTV and TiVo customers for six or seven years, and high-definition DirecTV TiVo users (with the aforementioned HR10-250) since February 2006. We knew at the time that DirecTV's transition to MPEG-4 transmission was in the works, but reasoned that DirecTV wouldn't alienate customers, and would replace our hardware if they "pulled the plug" on MPEG-2 transmissions.

DirecTV has only provided us with seven (7) HD channels (see "DIRECTV'S NEW PROGRAMMING LINEUP" below) for these past 20 months (this "HD Access" package adds $10/month). The HR10-250 also pulls eight local off-air HD channels from a roof-top UHF antenna and seamlessly integrates program listings into the TiVo's two-week program guide. We're still relative HD newbies, so we've been willing to take what we could get (though we didn't subscribe to HBO HD or Showtime HD).

The promise of dozens more of our favorite channels in high-def has us considering what what may be a painful switch from the relatively elegant TiVo interface to DirecTV's own DVR software.

WHAT ARE MPEG-4 AND MPEG-2?
MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 are codecs - short for "COmpressor/DECompressor." They are different schemes of encoding video information in a way that conserves space and reduces transmission burdens but preserves the fidelity of the original footage. MPEG-2 is an older codec, used in DVDs and (until now) digital television transmission, plus other applications. MPEG-4 is more recently developed, and leverages modern computing power to provide high fidelity at significantly lower data rates that previous algorithms. DirecTV is apparently using the H.264 standard, also known as Advanced Video Coding (AVC), a variant of MPEG-4 which promises even further efficiency over earlier MPEG-4 standards.

Before the digital media revolution of the past decade, carriers were not motivated to offer a high-definition (HD) television channel if it displaced as many as six standard definition (SD) channels - neither advertisers nor consumers would be willing to pay a 500 per cent premium for each HD channel. Because HD television contains several times the visual information of SD, modern video and audio compression schemes are enabling media carriers to provide similar numbers of HD channels using the same mechanisms (i.e., FCC broadcast frequency, copper cable, satellite transponders, consumer broadband Internet) they previously used for SD channels. They can also choose to use their existing bandwidth to provide many times the number of SD channels as with legacy analog transmission. (Digital carriers can also potentially change the data rate, and therefore the image quality, of any given channel - food for thought.)

If not for the bandwidth economies offered by digital compression, we probably wouldn't have HDTV. We've just arrived at a nexus of software and hardware technologies which enables us to finally move forward from a six decade-old television standard.

CAN I REALLY UPGRADE TO AN MPEG-4 DIRECTV DVR FOR $99?
Yes, sort of. "Sort of," because you don't actually own a DirecTV DVR - it's a lease - and you are contractually bound to return it to DirecTV if you discontinue service (read their Terms & Conditions). You also have to commit to a new two-year agreement. Though I haven't yet ordered a new HR20 DirecTV Plus HD DVR ($300 from retailers), I went through most of the process on the DirecTV website and confirmed that an existing customer can upgrade to a new MPEG-4-compatible HR20 for $99, including professional installation. If you want to see for yourself:

Browse the DirecTV website and log in as a DirecTV user (you must have previously established an online access account).
Click on "Upgrade Equipment."
In the resulting "Upgrade Your System" page which displays your account information, click "Continue."
On the next "Online Equipment Ordering" page, click the "Add to Order" radio button next to "DIRECTV Plus® DVR – up to 100 hours of digital recording."
At the bottom of the page, click "Continue Making Selections."
The next page informs the user that they can opt to self-install or have a professional installation at no additional charge. Select one and click "Continue Making Selections."
This page lists the price of the "DIRECTV Plus® DVR" as $99. It also explains "As part of the standard installation included in this offer, you are entitled to relocate one of your existing receivers to another room. If you want the newly purchased receiver to replace one of your existing receivers, please choose "NO" next to "Relocate My Existing Receiver." If you require a receiver to be relocated to another room, please choose 'YES.'" In this interview, a DirecTV spokesman says the professional relocation of the existing DVR to another room is included with the upgrade upon request - a checkbox is provided for this option.

In the research and writing of this article, I've pretty much mentally made the commitment to the upgrade. We haven't yet decided whether to keep our original SD TiVo along with our original HD TiVo and new MPEG-4-ready DirecTV HD DVR, but we've still got our original dish installed to accommodate all six tuners (each DVR has two), so it's a matter of paying $4.99/month more for an additional receiver. (Fortunately, TiVos and their remotes can be programmed for nine possible codes.)

BUT IT'S NOT A TIVO...
In April 2006, after a long dispute over patent rights, DirecTV and TiVo agreed to a three-year extension of a commercial agreement where DirecTV continues to support TiVo-based DirecTV DVRs (we pay DirecTV for "DVR service" rather than having to pay a separate bill to TiVo). DirecTV has never produced another TiVo-based DVR, instead partnering with another firm, NDS. TiVo has struggled for a market position, notably making a deal with cable giant Comcast to provide PVR and program guide technology for set-top cable boxes.

Though not perfect (nothing is), TiVo's product is robust and elegant. From brief encounters, I've expected DirecTV's PVR to be inferior to the TiVo in terms of interface and functionality, and a conversation I had today with a former DirecTiVo owner now using a DTV DVR seemed to confirm that. Alas, we have no choice if we're to remain with DirecTV. We've been pleased with our DirecTV service, and lingering memories of smug cable companies will probably keep us putting our TV programming dollars there.

DIRECTV'S PROGRAMMING PACKAGES
I've posted a chart of DirecTV's programming packages to make it easier to compare channel offerings than DirecTV's website.

DIRECTV'S NEW HD PROGRAMMING LINEUP
Here's DirecTV's current and future high-definition lineup:

Existing MPEG-2 HD Channels

Discovery HD Theater, ESPN HD, ESPN2 HD, HDNet, HDNet Movies, TNT HD, Universal HD, Showtime East HD, HBO HD

MPEG-4 HD Network Channels (from LA- and NY-based broadcasts in eligible markets)

ABC HD, CBS HD, Fox HD, NBC HD

MPEG-4 HD Channels Available as of September 26, 2007:

A&E HD, Animal Planet HD, Big Ten Network, CNN HD, Discovery Channel HD, History Channel HD, NFL HD, SHO TOO HD, Showtime West HD, Smithsonian Channel HD, Starz Comedy HD, Starz HD, Starz Kids & Family HD, TBS in HD, The Movie Channel HD, The Science Channel HD, The Weather Channel HD, TLC HD, Versus HD, Golf Channel HD

MPEG-4 HD Channels Coming in October:

Bravo HD, Cartoon Network, Cinemax East HD, Cinemax West HD, CNBC HD, Food Network HD, Fox Business HD, Fuel HD, FX HD, HBO West HD, HGTV HD, MGM HD, MHD HD, NBA TV HD, National Geographic Channel HD, SciFi HD, Speed Channel, USA HD

MPEG-4 HD Channels by the End of 2007:

Bio HD, CMT HD, MTV HD, Nick HD, Spike, VH1 HD, College Sports Television, Tennis Channel, The 101™

Google Maps Street View

2007-09-15T14:40:00.000-07:00

For selected streets of selected cities, Google Maps now features Street View. This allows any user to see the streets and buildings in a 360 degree panning view by simply clicking on a point on a map (of a city with Street View data).

I missed the introduction of this feature back in May 2007, but my friend Don excitedly called me yesterday when he discovered a new "Street View" button in Google Maps.

To use Street View, you must go to a map for a very large city in Google Maps, like Los Angeles. Then click the "Street View" button in the upper-right corner of the map (this button only appears on maps where Street View data exists). Any roads which appear outlined in blue have Street View imagery (zooming in and dragging around helps to see the roads with better detail).

Google's hosts its own video tutorial about using Google Maps Street View.

Though this article suggests that the camera shown from Immersive Media is used to collect data, I saw a van with a big box on its roof in a reflection of a Street View image. One of the comments from this article mentions that Google shot their own imagery in the San Fransisco area with higher quality using a van. A quick Google search of "google maps street view van reflection" got me an article with a screenshot of a great reflection of the van - I looked up the address (in Fremont, CA) on Google Maps so you can go directly to the location and see the van with impressive resolution (you can pan, tilt and zoom around in this image - try it!).

The debut of Street View raised a lot of eyebrows amongst privacy advocates, and Google has responded by allowing users to request removal of faces and license plates from image data. Originally, Google only allowed people to request removal of their own images or license plates, but apparently the policy now allows anyone to make a request. Here's Google's privacy page for Street View, which includes a link to a form to request removal of "inappropriate" imagery.

Hello, Computer?

2007-09-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

In the world of "Star Trek," you can speak into the air and a computer does your bidding. A couple of free services, Jott and reQall, provide a number of very useful services using nothing but your voice and a cell phone call.

Though there have been many solutions for doing home-automation by voice command for years, it's been less-than-practical to do complex voice-recognition tasks while on-the-go - the computing power demands are a bit too high. However, I've been expecting our ubiquitous cell phones to bring us this capability by interfacing with remote computers for some years now. These two services use a combination of computers and humans to allow you to send text messages, email, manage appointments and more through only your voice on a cell phone.

Text messaging between telephones using SMS (Short Message Service) is a very useful way to asynchronously (not at the same time, as in a voice call) communicate with others, but not everyone is comfortable with typing text messages, however short, on the 10-key pad of their cell phone. "Thumbing" text on your phone while driving is just plain stupid. Jott lets you dictate messages by voice, which are automatically converted to text and sent as SMS or email.

Once you've subscribed and configured the services with your cell phone number, you simply call the service number from your cell and talk to use the services. (In addition to automatically converting your speech to text, Jott also includes a link to your original audio.)
I like the idea of sending email to myself from a voice call as a note-taking system - it automatically puts a thought into a paradigm I already manage regularly - text in my email. One of the failings of keeping notes on tape recorders, tapeless recorders and note pads in the past has been the need to transcribe them to a central location - a computer. I use a PDA for this constantly, but there are times when I can't or shouldn't stop to write.

reQall is a bit more phone-centric, allowing users to manage and search stored audio notes through the cell phone.

PRIVACY
Both Jott and reQall also uses human transcribers in addition to machine, but they promise that there is full anonymity of the users. Still, this is a privacy issue that you'll have to consider. Read Jott's and reQall's privacy policies.

Finally, a Wireless Home-Theater Keyboard with Pointer

2007-09-09T23:09:00.000-07:00

This $40 wireless keyboard finally fulfills our long search for a living-room home-theater keyboard with a built-in pointing device.

THE QUEST
Since buying our first HDTV over a year and a half ago, we've had a back-burner project to add a Macintosh to our living room A/V rack. Actually, this has been a plan for a decade, since we first started looking at HDTVs in trade shows, wondering when their prices and performance would meet our budget and aesthetic judgement.

From time to time, there comes a task in which my wife and I need to participate concurrently on a computer, whether it's shopping for airfares, editing a new class syllabus or just researching something online. This is an awkward task at a desk, sharing monitors and finding a place to roll up a chair. Though we could be remotely viewing each other's computers over the network, this solution isn't practical when we watch long-form video on the computer together - something that's becoming more and more common in our life.

We keep an older PowerBook in our living room, and we use it daily to look up something we just heard about on television, or to continue working on a project in an alternate location to our office desks. In truth, using a laptop is actually a better solution to using a computer while watching television - if we use our television as a computer display, that precludes its concurrent use as a TV (our television doesn't support Picture-In-Picture, and this would probably take up too much desktop real estate anyway). Still, there are times when there's no substitute for big-display group-computing.

For whatever reason, there are very few wireless keyboards with any kind of pointing device (i.e., mouse, trackpad, trackball) built-in. Though there are wireless mice and trackballs, that means having to pass around, keep track of, and make room not one but two pieces floating around the living room. There are offerings with gamepad-like "rockers" cursor controllers, but that's not very appealing ergonomically.

EUREKA!
After years of shopping, buying and returning, we've found and bought a wireless keyboard with built-in pointing system that I like. It's the BTC 9019URF Wireless Multimedia Keyboard with Dual Mode Joystick Mouse. At $39.95, it's even a bargain.

THE KEYBOARD
The 9019URF has two big handles molded into either end - a fantastic design decision which works very well for cross-couch hand-offs. The 9019URF's pointing device is a mini-joystick. Reminiscent of the 1" tall analog joysticks on console gaming controllers, this is a perfectly usable mouse controller, falling perfectly to hand (more accurately, to the right thumb) when the user holds the keyboard by its handles. Also nicely placed are the left- and right-mouse buttons, which are positioned where the left thumb rests. Also surrounding the joystick are Scroll Up and Scroll Down buttons. Web page navigation is very natural, and clicking links and scrolling pages is accomplished with only the user's thumbs. A center-mouse button is in the extreme upper-right - very handy as I configure the Mac OS X's "Expose" window-tiling feature to this button.

The mini-joystick is a proportional controller, allowing the user to move the cursor at speeds from a crawl to rapidly zipping about the screen. Some adjustments to your system's mouse settings can help find a comfortable speed - in Mac OS 10.4, I found the maximum default speed a bit slow, and there was plenty of latitude for slower and faster configurations. I found the joystick very natural to use immediately. (BTC claims that the device can be used as a "joystick" as well as "mouse" controller, which would require installing the BTC drivers for Windows.)

The keyboard itself has pretty mediocre key switch feel - vaguely sticky. I wouldn't want to type for hours on the 9019URF, but it's serviceable.

Power for the 9019 is provided by two AA batteries - a pair of Duracells is included in the package. BTC documentation claims a battery life of "up to 5 months." They also claim a 10 meter (about 33 feet) maximum range.

WORKS FOR MAC... MOSTLY
The 9019URF is packaged as a Windows keyboard, but it works on a Mac, with only a few caveats. Many of the typical "multimedia and Internet" dedicated button array across the top of the keyboard have no effect in OS X. However, the Volume Up/Down, Mute, Eject, and Power buttons do work, as do all the aforementioned pointing and navigation keys.

Installation on a Mac (again, Mac OS is not mentioned as supported) was nothing - I didn't read the manual, installed two AA batteries in the keyboard, plugged the wireless transceiver's USB cable into a Mac (which asked to help identify the keyboard by pressing a few keys). That's it. Windows software on an included CD provides support for the multimedia/Internet keys.

MAC/WINDOWS MODIFIER KEY SWAP
As with all Windows keyboards on Macs (and vice-versa), the positions of the Option/Alt and Option/Command keys are reversed. In OS 10.4, Apple has cleverly added an optional Modifier Keys button and submenu to the Keyboard & Mouse pane of System Preferences (perhaps almost too clever - the Modifier Keys button doesn't appear on some systems unless an external keyboard is present). Using the Modifier Keys dialog, the user can reassign the four modifier keys to act as any other. Users of Mac OS versions prior to 10.4 can try utilities such as uControl (no longer supported, but still available) or fKeys to remap Windows keyboards for Macs.

NOTE: The 9019URF has no right-side modifier keys, but then neither do most laptops these days.

Manufacturer BTC also offers these wireless keyboards:

The 9019URFIII appears very similar to the 9019URF except that it uses a small USB wireless adapter (like a thumb-drive) rather than the 9019URF's box-and-USB cable wireless transceiver.
The BTC 9029URF III MCE, a sleeker keyboard with the same mini-joystick, but no handles (we immediately preferred the 9019's handles in the store).
The 9116URF is much more compact than the 9019 and 9029, but lacks the handy handles.

AT&T (BellSouth) DSL Connection Problems

2007-09-06T18:59:00.000-07:00

If you are a BellSouth DSL customer, have suddenly lost your Internet connection and have been presented with a "BellSouth Password Change Tool" page (when you haven't deliberately changed your password), you might need to remove the "@bellsouth.net" from your login ID. Read on...

My mother is an AT&T (formerly BellSouth) DSL customer in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. This morning (Thursday, September 6, 2007). she called me to report that she was seeing a strange message on her computer and that she couldn't pick up her (web-based) email.

The prompt was from her browser (Firefox 2 Mac) informing her that the certificate for the site "https://setup.bellsouth.net" could not be verified, and to be cautious. This appeared whenever she attempted to browse from either Firefox or Safari.

On the phone, I prompted her to continue past the certificate warning to the BellSouth page. This page is titled "BellSouth Password Change Tool." The page informed her that she was using an "unsupported browser or operating system" and that the page should be viewed with Internet Explorer on one of several Windows variants.

I walked her through checking her hardware setup: the DSL "modem," a broadband router and her computer itself. All seemed healthy. We experimentally restarted all the devices, but to no avail.

After two calls to AT&T Tech Support (in India), I was left pretty unsatisfied. I established that her account was in good standing on the first call (we'd recently had to resolve a payment method issue, so that was suspect), and the her status lights indicated proper operation. I made a second call to have them change to the password to something else, just in case the original password had been changed or corrupted without my knowledge. As expected, the Tech Support script began with suggesting that she "remove the router" - not really my first choice of operations to attempt over the phone (though I've talked my mom and mother-in-law through some amazing operations via phone call, including re-seating RAM and installing an AirPort card in an iMac/CRT!).

After having AT&T Tech Support change her password, I talked my mom through changing the AT&T password on her router (her router manages the PPPoE username/password submissions to the modem). This was not successful. We re-entered the password a couple of times. We re-entered the OLD password. No connection. Finally, with the new password stored but failing to connect, I had her change her login ID from username@bellsouth.net to simply username. SUCCESS! This original login ID (with @bellsouth.net) had been configured in her router for a year and a half since originally subscribing for service. We had not altered it until today.

I'm speculating that AT&T has decided to eliminate the "@bellsouth.net" part of usernames from the login IDs, but if that's true, then there will be a lot of people encountering this problem. If you're one of them, I hope you found this post. Let me know.

What’s an RSS Feed?

2007-08-30T11:47:00.000-07:00

Subscribing to an RSS feed allows you to determine at a glance whether there are new postings you've never read on a favorite information site. Using a "feed reader," or "news aggregator" allows you to follow many feeds at once, only visiting them if a new item catches your attention. A website must deliberately provide support for RSS (Really Simple Syndication), but today most major news and information sites do. Major sites such as Time Magazine's website host many different feeds on specific topic categories, such as Politics, Technology and World.

FEED READERS/AGGREGATORS
While there are news aggregator applications (programs) you can download to your computer and install, I recommend online feed readers which you simply use from your Web browser. You can use these readers from any computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser, freeing you from having to use any particular computer to read your feeds. Try Bloglines or Google Reader (especially if you've already got a Google/Gmail account) to see how a feed reader might serve you. Online readers are typically free and easy to use.

Most readers provide a view of all of your subscriptions. Selecting a subscription reveals a list of topics and (optionally) the first few lines of the article. Clicking on an article title reveals the full content of the article. All readers have a mechanism to help you quickly discriminate articles that you've either read (by clicking) or skipped (by scrolling past topic headlines) from unread articles - typically displaying unread titles in boldface. This allows you to quickly skim the titles for new content which interests you.

LOOK FOR THE RSS LINK
The orange icon to the left is the official icon for RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. If you look carefully at the home page of your favorite information site, you will likely find a very small version of this icon, or a link labeled "RSS," discreetly placed in a corner of the page. By clicking on this icon, your Web browser will ask you how you wish to subscribe to the feed, typically providing a list of online readers, and also giving you the option of indicating an application you have installed on your computer's hard drive to use as a feed reader.

Some sites may also provide links to specific online (as opposed to application-based) feed readers. They often use small buttons bearing the logo of the various online readers. (At left are examples of a few of the popular reader subscription buttons.) If they provide a link to the online aggregator you happen to use, this can be very handy, enabling you to subscribe in a few clicks. (You can try this yourself by clicking on the "Subscribe" link in the sidebar of this page.)

FEED EXAMPLES

All major news organizations’ sites offer RSS feeds. I subscribe to the Greensboro News & Record site to occasionally see headlines from my hometown newspaper. The News & Record site offers further fine-control, or granularity, by offering feeds for specific by-lines, topics such as sports or obituaries, and townships within their subscribership.
Many non-news sites provide feeds to some of their content. Car&Driver's website, for example, provides a Latest News feed (though I can't now find where I originally found this feed - I haven't found it on their site).
Manufacturers may keep customers or potential customers apprised of product news via RSS. Here are the many feeds Apple computer hosts.
The online classified ad site craigslist provides feeds of search results. So, for example, you could subscribe to a feed which only lists items matching "vintage bottle" for your geographic area.
Apple's iTunes Store RSS Feed Generator lets users customize feeds to, for instance, see the 25 newest German folk releases.
This blog and most others are available as an RSS feed (see "Subscribe" in the sidebar).

FIND A FEED
If subscribing to RSS feeds sounds interesting to you, take a close look at your favorite sites to see if they have RSS links. The Syndic8 site features a searchable directory of over 25,000 RSS feeds - try typing a word or two of your topic of interest to see what feeds might be interesting to you. To get you jump-started, blogging software publisher UserLand hosts a list of Top 100 Most-Subscribed-To RSS Feeds.

If you're an information hound and regularly visit a number of sites looking for topics of interest, subscribing to RSS feeds may make your online experience more efficient.

The Next Step in Media Storage?

2007-07-13T02:36:00.000-07:00

I'm fascinated with the new Drobo, a data-storage solution from Data Robotics, Inc. This $500 box is an enclosure which can hold up to four SATA hard drives (SATA I or II, half- or full-height).

Drobo connects to your Mac or Windows computer via USB 2.0 connection, and produces common USB 2.0 drive performance - up to around 20MB/second read/write. The fancy part is that if you put more than two drives in the Drobo, it automatically configures them to behave like a RAID type 5 array, but the action is nearly transparent. It's functionality is best expressed in examples:

If the Drobo starts to fill up, you just add a drive of any size to increase capacity.
If one of the drives fails, replace it with a drive of similar or greater capacity (even while the system is in use and moving data!), and Drobo will reconstruct the original contents automatically (from so-called "parity data" on the other drive[s]).
If the Drobo is fully populated with drives and starts to fill up, simply remove the smallest drive (again, drives can be hot-swapped with data in-use) and replace it with a new larger drive. Drobo automatically adds the increased capacity.

Watch Drobo's video demo.

I'm excited about this product. Depending upon how well Apple's Time Machine is executed when it debuts as part of OS X "Leopard" this coming October, a Drobo may become part of our home office, replacing a mirrored RAID on our server as a short-term data cache, as well as potentially hosting all our amassed data at once. I've heard a rumor than Ethernet and eSATA connection options are in the future - an Ethernet variant would make a fine NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution for anyone in this increasingly data-heavy world.

Turn your MacBook into a Lightsaber

2007-06-27T16:38:00.000-07:00

OK, this isn't actually useful. In fact, misuse of this application might cost you thousands of dollars, but it's absolutely cool.

Many modern laptop computers utilize a strategy where, if an internal accelerometer determines that the laptop is experiencing less than 1G acceleration, the hard drive's head is immediately parked in a safe spot to prevent damage to the head or the drive media. Apple calls this technology "Sudden Motion Sensor" and incorporates it into their MacBook family of laptop computers.

Back in June 2006, a fun-loving programmer named Ian Maddox wrote MacSaber, which uses the accelerometer data to control sounds of the most famous of Jedi weapons. The latest version even manipulates the keyboard backlight while waving your $3,00 17" MacBook Pro around the room in the air like these wanna-be padawans.

Use The Force at your own risk.

Use Secure Passwords Easily with SuperGenPass

2007-05-30T18:00:00.000-07:00

It's only natural to be lazy about using passwords for online accounts. I can't tell you how many people I know that use a four- or six-digit number for their passwords - typically their own birthday. But even if you have created one appropriately complex password, if you use it for more than one website, or - worse yet - for all your online accounts, you risk that if one site's database is compromised by malicious hackers, all your online accounts may be similarly compromised.

Today, passw0rd "cracking" tools can easily perform "dictionary" assaults, tirelessly testing combinations of real words, names, and combinations of numbers. Creating complex passwords is therefore a must. Robust complex passwords mix letters, numbers and cases (i.e., f7H8sca93kkZhH), but are therefore nearly impossible to remember. To be truly secure, you'd want to use a different password for each site you visit - but remembering many complex passwords is really awkward.

One nice solution is SuperGenPass. This clever piece of freeware from author Chris Zarate is stored locally on your computer as a Java "bookmarklet" in your Web browser. You need only remember one "strong" master password - SuperGenPass generates a custom, unique password for every website based upon your master password and that site's domain name (i.e., "amazon.com"). No one can "reverse-engineer" your master password. You can install SuperGenPass on every computer you use - even on other people's computers. (Author Zarate assures users that the bookmarklet transmits no information of any kind - and even if you choose to "store" your master password in the Web browser, it is securely encrypted.)

Using SuperGenPass is simple:

Use the SuperGenPass Bookmarklet Builder, answering the three questions (I'm using the "Enter your master password each time, but use a hash to verify it" option) and drag the generated bookmarklet to the "personal toolbar" of my browser (on every computer I might use). You only need to do this once for every Web browser on which you wish to use SuperGenPass.
Whenever I need to fill in password fields on a Web page, I simply click the "SuperGenPass" bookmark and a small dialog box pops up in the upper-right corner of my browser window, asking for my master password.
Clicking the "Populate" button will tell SuperGenPass to attempt to fill in any password fields it finds on the current Web page with your generated password.

That's it. Provided you type in the master password correctly, SuperGenPass will always generate the same unique password for the current website.

Fancy optional features allow you to embed your master password into the bookmarklet for convenience (although this would allow anyone with operational access to your computer to access any sites) or to double-check that you've typed in your master password correctly.

Using SuperGenPass means changing passwords at any site with which you're already registered, so it may require some effort to switch over, if you're determined to remove your old password(s) from all your registered sites. A caveat about using SuperGenPass is that it will *always* generate the same complex password from the same combination of master password and domain name - if you use any sites that require periodic password changes, you might want to avoid using SuperGenPass for those sites.

OS X Migration Assistant Works with USB Drives

2007-05-14T06:43:00.000-07:00

Apple's Migration Assistant software, included with OS X since v10.4, makes moving your personal data and applications from an existing Macintosh to a newer one a snap. However, if you are attempting to migrate from an older Macintosh which does NOT have FireWire ports, it may appear that Migration Assistant does not provide a solution. As it turns out, Migration Assistant will work with USB external hard drives - just ignore text prompts that suggest otherwise.

Apple Computer doesn't suggest that this is possible, and when the Migration Assistant is run, the only options presented to the user are to select a FireWire drive or an alternative internal volume. However, I was successful in using an external 2.5" USB hard drive to transfer files from a pre-FireWire 350MHz Mac (all iMacs with CPU speeds of 400MHz or higher have FireWire ports) to a newer iBook G4.

Note: For this to work, the USB external hard drive may require formatting as a Macintosh volume. I attempted to use the external USB hard drive formatted as an MS-DOS volume, Carbon Copy Cloner complained that no available drive could be found. Reformatting using Disk Utility (CAUTION! Formatting deletes all data on the formatted drive forever!) as a Mac volume made the drive visible to CCC.

Make Informed Decisions about Airline Seats

2007-05-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

Ever wish you could sit nearer the lavatory on an airplane? Or further away? Have you been given the opportunity to choose a seat number, but didn't know how many seats across your scheduled aircraft had?

A really cool site called SeatGuru has cabin layouts of the specific aircraft any given airline flies, so you can make informed decisions about seats. SeatGuru also lists galley locations, "undesirable" seats, and in-seat power availability, among other attributes. I found it very handy.

Telepresence

2007-05-01T04:24:00.000-07:00

This summer I traveled across the country to stay with my mom as she recovered from hip-replacement surgery. My wife - a college professor - was mid-semester, so we planned to video chat often to stay in touch. What actually happened in the first few days was, for me, a revelation/revolution in the human communication experience...

THE FUTURE WAS THEN...
During a visit with my father in 1967, we attended Expo 67, the World's Fair in Montreal, Canada. One of my few enduring memories of the trip was talking to my father on an AT&T Picturephone inside a glass-enclosed pavillion, next to a full-sized mock-up of NASA's Apollo Lunar Excursion Module on a simulated moonscape. My father was only about 50 feet away on another Picturephone, and it was only black & white (hey, my family didn't own a color television until 1979), but the promise was that some day, we all could not only hear but see our friends and family over great distances.

Forty years(!) later, we still don't have Picturephones. There are a lot of reasons, possibly the best reason being that much of the time we just don't want to be seen in whatever state we're in when the phone rings. We've gotten used to the paradigm of speaking to a disembodied voice injected directly into one ear - we've been doing so for well over a century.

Of course, there have been solutions for getting that past-future Picturephone into the home. I the past decade and more, there have been expensive consumer devices that connected to a user's phone line and provided choppy video and gravely audio by digitally compressing them to pass through the same "pipe" intended for only audio.

Today, of course, personal computer users can use inexpensive cameras (which may already be incorporated into their computers) in concert with a broadband Internet connection in their home or business to "video chat" or even "video conference" (with more than two people concurrently) with others anywhere in the world. Video quality can be quite good, depending upon the speed of one's Internet connection, and audio is excellent.

Like many, I have been regularly using video chat on personal computers since 2003, when Apple Computer introduced the "AV" version of their "iChat" text- and voice-chat client application. Starting in the early 1990s, I'd periodically played with Internet telephony, but with disappointing results. Attempting to establish test conversations with other geeky friends always resulted in burning up hours in futile troubleshooting, often with one party hearing the other but not vice versa - sometimes with audio skipping most of the words, and sometimes humorously spitting out 10 seconds of speech in a 2-second Chipmunks-style burst. When Apple introduced iChatAV for their Macintosh operating system, they presented a mature and relatively stable technology for easy audio and video communication over the Internet.

This maturation of teleconferencing was possible too because of the increasing penetration of "broadband" Internet access. Increasingly, consumers around the world subscribe to various methods of delivering 24/7 Internet access at data speeds many times greater than those achievable through the half-century old paradigm of the telephone modem.

TOGETHERNESS
When preparing for my trip to North Carolina, I discovered that the hospital where my mom was having her orthopaedic surgery had free WiFi in some parts of most buildings, but was still in the process of extending coverage campus-wide. I had no idea how much time I'd spend in the hospital, but I prepared for the worst, including acquisition of a WiFi range-extending solution. While in the surgical waiting room, I was delighted to discover that I did indeed have WiFi access in our wing of the hospital.

As soon as my mom was out of surgery and post-op ICU, she was moved to her room. I blogged her status for family and friends, and phoned the less tech-savvy. As soon as I was settled in her room, I set up my laptop and its video camera and discovered my wife online (very early in California). We started a video chat, and I updated her on my mom's status. My wife re-met a friend of my mother's who had stayed with me through the surgery. The laptop was on the rolling hospital bed table, and I showed my wife my mother sleeping off her anesthetic. In these critical first post-op hours, hospital staff popped in every 10-15 minutes, so I'd introduce my wife and each staff member to each other. In every case, the staff seemed delighted and surprised. When my mom first regained consciousness, she was very enthusiastic, if groggy, to be able to speak to her daughter-in-law before she again fell asleep.

The day of surgery was a Friday, and my wife was grading student projects on her computer at home all day, so we just left the cameras going. Staff would come and go and exchange pleasantries with my wife. When the nursing shift changed, new staff would be introduced. Later in the day, I walked my wife around the hospital floor (with her full face on the laptop screen facing forward) and introduced her to the nurses at their station.

After several hours, I was quite hungry, having never left the room. At my wife's encouragement, I went down to the cafeteria, leaving her to watch my mom with the plan that if anything needing my attention happened, she would call my cell phone. I took a break, confident that my wife was "watching" over my mom.

When I returned from the basement cafeteria 20 minutes later with my tray of food, I pushed open the door to my mom's room, and this is when I had an experience:

...the door opened to reveal the contents of the room and in that moment, when I actually saw the mostly-empty room around my mother's sleeping form - there was an expectation, a mental prediction, a mind's-eye image of my wife in the room - that vanished like an unremembered dream upon waking. For that moment, I believed that my wife was in the room. But she wasn't - and she was.

In all the years I've used telephones and Internet-based audio- and video-chat, it was always an "event." You call, you talk. You finish talking, you hang up. The difference here was that for 10 straight hours, my wife was virtually "in the room." For most of the time, we didn't talk. She was doing school work, and I was tending to my mom. When things happened in the room, visitors arriving, staff checking vitals, she interacted with them in the same way that a person physically in the room would, making conversation. I was just as meaningful when she'd go off to get a snack that we could see the empty chair in our office in California, as though that room were now just adjacent to the North Carolina hospital room. It wasn't a communications "event," it was just being there. "Telepresence" comes to mind. Usually referring to technologies that bring more sensory information than the familiar video and audio of our media world, it seems most appropriate here to describe this committed emotional congregation made possible through technological infrastructure more typically utilized for terse bursts of pure information.

Upon further reflection, I remember that in my youth, I did on several occasions watch television while not talking to friends for hours. We were watching the same show, and not really talking but for an occasional "you still there?" In truth, that's kind of the same thing - emotionally, psychically sharing a common, if virtual, mental space. And in the same way, it's similar to my hospital/video-chat experience because of the intent, or lack thereof, to actively use the communications technology for interaction. It wasn't about what we said - it was about spending time with someone.

The tech geek, futurist and creative thinker in me were all caught unawares by the powerful but unobvious meaning of this only recent possibility for mankind. It's something I think others would find similarly satisfying, particularly in the context of being able to provide long-distance emotional support for something like a hospital stay.

EPILOGUE
My mom's hip replacement went spectacularly well. She was completely off her walker and cane in seven weeks, and has more physical stamina than she's had in years. Most impressively, she's talking about having the other hip done.

Our laptop will be there.

Surge Suppressor Causes Temporary Cursor Freezing

2007-04-23T09:05:00.000-07:00

--A Fantastic Tale of Solving the Unsolvable--

If I hadn't witnessed this myself, I wouldn't have believed it. This is a computer diagnostician's horror story.

Some years ago, a friend decided to buy his first personal computer in the World Wide Web era (he had been and continues to be an avid WebTV user). Due in part to my encouragement, he chose to buy a Macintosh. Careful shopping resulted in the purchase of a year-old iMac 333MHz. I accompanied him on the trip to purchase the iMac from a private individual - I performed some rudimentary tests upon the hardware and affirmed the used iMac's fitness.

Not long afterward, the friend reported a problem: the cursor would intermittently freeze. Curiously, he discovered that in an unpredictable period of time (from minutes to hours), user control sometimes eventually returned. The symptoms appeared while he was running a variety of applications. The circumstances under which they appeared had no apparent commonality.

My friend's comment about this previous paragraph: "This caused incredible frustration with the iMac, even causing me to put it away and not touch it for about 3 months when I first tried to learn how to use it. It was my first Mac and after experience with bullet-proof DOS machines, a real disappointment until the problem was discovered."

Some known issues of the time exacerbated our inability to solve his problem. For instance, Apple had identified a problem with slot-loading CD drives which caused system freezing and had released a firmware upgrade for the CD drive. This produced no helpful results.

Many diagnostic experiments were performed attempting to solve this problem:

keyboard & mouse replacement
RAM replacement
formatted drive
installed OS 8.5, 8.6, 9.1, 10.2
firmware update per Apple

As with all intermittent problems, diagnosis was frustrating. On a couple of occasions, he brought the computer to my home and we would sit and talk while I aimlessly Web-browsed on the suspect machine, waiting for the symptom to appear. It never did. He reported that occasionally he would go a couple of days without symptoms, so nothing was concluded.

A couple of years passed, and this was always nagging at me: the problem I never solved; the friend's Mac that I couldn't fix; the friend's Mac I'd convinced him to buy and approved for his purchase.

Eventually, after formatting the iMac's internal drive and installing OS 10.2, the symptoms persisted. I gave up, assuming that the problem was hardware-related. Perhaps it was USB-circuit related - a motherboard swap as the likely fix.

Instead of replacing the motherboard (a decidedly unprofitable move, in the face of the changing state-of-the-art - and what would have been a disastrously unsuccessful move, given the final outcome), he decided to buy a new computer. I suggested an eMac. After some deliberation, he bought a brand-new eMac 700MHz.

Two weeks later, my phone rang.

Friend: "You'll never guess what's happening with my new eMac."
Me: "No way."
Friend: "Yep."
Me: "Are you using the new keyboard and mouse?"
Friend: "I'm using the keyboard and mouse that came with the new eMac."

We apparently didn't resolve the problem in that call. A few days later, when the friend experienced the problem again, he experimentally removed the surge suppressor from his computer, plugging directly into the wall outlet. He experienced NO further problems.

Ever.

Not only did he never see the problem again, but he fired up the old iMac and never saw the problem there again either. Re-installing the surge suppressor re-introduced the Temporary Frozen Cursor symptom. After running both machines for weeks with no symptoms, his conscience was clear enough that the iMac was completely fine that he eventually sold it for not much less than he purchased it two or three years earlier.

(NOTE: Surge suppressor model: “Surge2+”, model 30022, UL listed, bought at a Home Depot for about $10, with “$5000 equipment damage guarantee.” I don't recommend it.)

If he hadn't purchased another brand-new computer which was identically vulnerable to whatever characteristic was introduced by the surge suppressor, we'd never have had a solution. I've told this tale within my circle of technically-adept friends, and not one of them would ever have suspected this possibility.

Having said that, I hope never to suspect a surge suppressor again. It's just too strange. I can't believe it's even possible. In all my years as a computer hobbyist and professional (since 1981), I've never seen anything like this. Especially that whatever the mechanism of failure was, it caused a 1999 iMac and a 2002 eMac (which probably have completely unrelated power-supply circuits) to temporarily stop responding to the USB bus, only to completely return to normal functionality in time - without crashing the computer.

I've posted this, not with the expectation that it will actually be the solution to anyone's symptoms (but by all means let me know if you encounter this), but because this was also a painful learning experience. I had been thorough in my diagnostics of his iMac. None of the hardware or software infrastructure which I was able to test on his computer were at fault. But my mind was closed to the possibility that something _past the plug on the AC power cord_ could be suspect. When you're a diagnostician, you tend to adopt a process of elimination. Mistakenly eliminating a part of a system without can lead down a an inappropriate logic path - and I know that. I will frequently review the eliminations I've already made, to check for careless logic errors. And yet, I never even included the AC power source in my mental logic tree.

Send Larger Files with YouSendIt

2007-04-16T09:27:00.000-07:00

If you've ever tried sending a friend a file larger than 10MB or so, you may have discovered that your email service prohibits such large file attachments.

A Web service called YouSendIt allows you to send files up to 100MB for no cost by allowing you to upload to their servers, from which your recipients can then download from any Web browser. With the free service, your recipients will be exposed to advertising when they pick up your file. Several tiers of paid service eliminate advertising and raise maximum files sizes (up to 2GB) and monthly data limits (up to 200GB/mo).

CompUSA Stores Closing List

2007-04-15T14:55:00.000-07:00

In February 2007, CompUSA announced that it would close 126 stores - more than half. Sadly, our closest store (Burbank, CA) is one of those stores - it's half-empty now. Not that CompUSA was the greatest store, but the resource was remarkable - to be able to visit their website and tell anyone I know whether an item they needed was reported to be in-stock in a nearby store is fantastic (you can see retail location in-stock estimates with Radio Shack and Best Buy, among others).

Here is CompUSA's list of all the stores which are closing. The closing stores are currently selling merchandise at discounts of 10 to 40 per cent (more of the former) - I've been in two, and they're pretty picked-over at this point.

Apple to Sell Non-DRM Music

2007-04-09T22:04:00.000-07:00

In February 2007, Steve Jobs presented a treatise titled "Thoughts on Music" in which he wrote that Apple would be more than willing to sell music without restrictive and invasive Digital Rights Management (DRM) - citing that it was music companies that demanded this technological restriction.

On April 2, Apple announced that it will offer EMI Music's entire digital catalog DRM-free beginning in May. At $1.29, the EMI songs will be somewhat more expensive than the rest of the iTunes Store catalog (typically $0.99 per song), plus the songs will be encoded as 256Kbps AAC files - twice the sampling rate of DRM-encrypted iTunes offerings. EMI and iTunes will allow customers who previously purchased DRM-protected EMI titles to upgrade to DRM-free versions for 30 cents per title.

The non-DRM songs will be playable on any number of devices, as opposed to the Apple's original (but generous) limitations - 5 computers, unlimited iPods and unlimited (personal use only) CDs - though these have somewhat less fidelity than a commercial CD.

Apple and EMI may have really started something. Let's hope the music industry gets it.

Prepare for Hard Drive Failure

2007-04-09T08:50:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me has heard me say, "Hard drives will fail," and yet we will all be caught out eventually by a hard drive failure. The question is how much you're willing to lose when that failure eventually happens.

Hard drives, or hard disk drives, are the magnetic storage devices in your personal computer that perform long-term storage tasks. That is, anything you'd like to keep after turning the computer off. (Short-term storage is done on memory chips, which are hundreds of times faster and more expensive than hard disks, but which lose all their stored information when the computer is turned off.) All your programs and every piece of data you create and save are stored on this device. The operating system which makes your computer a computer is also stored as information on the hard drive.

But hard drives are mechanical devices, with not only a motor spinning a metal disk at thousands of revolutions per minute whenever the computer is on, but a delicate mechanism which moves a tiny magnetic "head" back and forth across a radius of the disk (remember vinyl record players? rhis is just like a tonearm), oscillating at rates which make the arm appear as a blur. It's one of the only mission-critical mechanical parts in a modern computer, and unfortunately, it's where all our stuff is (to quote George Carlin).

Internet giant Google published a paper in February 2007 to share the results of a study they did on hard drive reliability. They are certainly one of the larger users of hard drives, and the study was based on 100,000 of their drives (which may or may not represent a majority of the drives in their "server farms" - I suspect that information is "classified"). You can download a PDF file of the report here. Somewhat disturbingly, the failure rates they observed (without repsect to manufacturer) exceed 8 per cent in the second year of operation. As a household with (currently) 10 hard drives in daily use (including our TiVos, which run 24/7), that pretty much means we'll lose a hard drive every two years - and we do.

That said, I say again: hard drives will fail. Everything on your computer may go away forever.

Truthfully, you may be able to salvage the data on a hard drive after it fails. If you're lucky, the drive will act strangely enough to alarm you (i.e., the computer doesn't boot), but will work the following attempt. But it might not. There are data recovery services available - companies like Drive Savers who charge hundreds or thousands of dollars to recover data by means as elaborate as you can afford, including clean-room disassembly of hard drives and re-mounting the "platters" (which contain the data) in new drive mechanisms.

So establish a backup plan. If something you do on your computer takes effort (including just having a running computer), then it's worth effort to put the data in another place. Among the possible backup solutions:

burn data to CD or DVD

multiple copies, and some off-site in case of fire or theft

copy data to an external hard drive

USB or FireWire connected

copy data to an online data service (some free, some paid)

i.e., Xdrive, iBackup or Mozy
Mac users can use a .Mac account
this solution may be inappropriate for large amounts of data, as all data must pass over your Internet connection

Costco Fuel Locations

2007-03-29T17:04:00.000-07:00

If, like us, you buy most of your fuel at Costco locations (which consistently have lowest fuel costs), you may have wanted to refuel at Costcos while traveling. Unfortunately, not all Costco stores have fuel.

I've found a website (apparently owned by Costco) which lists locations with fuel. The current date on the bottom of the page is "April 2006" - this may or may not reflect the currency of the data. If you wish to print all five pages, click the "Print" button in the upper-right, then select the range of pages you wish to print.

Try a Podcast!

2007-03-28T18:47:00.000-07:00

What are podcasts? They're audio (and sometimes video) programs created by people looking for an audience in any and every discipline. There are millions of podcasts, and almost all are free (in fact, very few generate revenue directly). Even *you* could be producing and distributing a podcast - without spending a dime.

You can play podcasts on your home computer, some TiVos, a portable music player (even iPods!), on some cell phones, and even on some GPS navigation devices - pretty much anything that plays audio files.

A defining characteristic of podcasts is that are they they are distributed via subscriptions. You subscribe to podcasts using a piece of software called a podcasting client. Whenever a new episode of the podcast is available, it automatically downloads to your computer, and (if you have one) to your portable media player. The most popular podcasting client is Apple's free iTunes software, available for Windows and Macintosh. iTunes also has a simple interface for browsing through available podcasts - though the offerings listed are not comprehensive.

Your favorite radio program may be available as a free podcast - try searching online for "showname podcast." Many programs on public radio are available as podcasts.

The podcasts I listen to the most are from fantastic technology journalist Leo Laporte. He's a remarkable combination of professional on-air talent and hands-on geek. Here are some of my other current subscriptions:

Leo Laporte the Tech Guy - formerly a Los Angeles AM radio call-in show (2 hours every Sat-Sun), Leo recently got this syndicated
This Week in Tech (TWiT) - friends of Leo's from the tech reporting business, and guests from the tech world do a virtual "round table" about whatever is hot this week in technology
Security Now - an often very technical show about computer and online security, Leo's friend Steve Gibson is the best example of a Software Engineer/Public Presenter that's probably possible, and Leo additionally moderates for the layperson
For a change of pace, I enjoy listening to Science Friday Now! - a podcast excerpted from Ira Flatow's NPR show. There are hundreds of episodes available on many topics, with great guests from the sciences.

Listening to podcasts has been life-changing for me. It makes heretofore irritatingly mindless tasks (like washing the dishes, or driving around L.A.) opportunities for feeding one's brain. You don't have to have a portable music player, but being mobile while listening makes a difference. For example, here's a $32 player at CompUSA with 512MB capacity, which would hold about 17 hours of typical podcasts (at 64kbps). Add a $10 cassette adapter for your car, and you're stylin'. (I recommend that you get a player with a display to manage podcast listening - unlike listening to music, you'll often need to know what episode number you're about to play.)

Shield Your Family from Undesired Web Content

2007-03-27T19:49:00.000-07:00

The Internet brings a wealth of information into your home. But this same mechanism presents a minefield of content which may be inappropriate to users of any age. This device/service may help to prevent more sensitive Internet users from being exposed to this content.

iBoss Pro ($109.95) is a device and a subscription service ($14.95/mo or $119.95/yr) which connects between your broadband connection and your home's or business' computers. All requests from those computers are first passed through the servers of Phantom Technologies (iBoss Pro's manufacturer), where the requests are compared to both customer-configured preferences and Phantom Technologies' databases of suspicious or inappropriate sites. Designed for non-technical users, a web-based interface allows a user with administrator privileges to configure the iBoss Pro to control:

Blocking of Websites by Category (the service continually updates a database of sites with questionable content)
Application Blocking (controlling which online programs are allowed to connect to the Internet, such as chat clients, games and file sharing services)
Scheduled Internet Access (at what times of day any given computer on the local network can connect to the Internet, even what applications can run at certain times of day)
Access to sites which may present security risks due to scams or which host malicious software worms and viruses

iBoss Pro can apply these filtering concepts all your computers, or custom filtering on a computer-by-computer basis (this configuration requires an inexpensive network router, not included). You could, for instance, allow your kids to use their video chatting client between 8pm and 9pm. iBoss Pro can also record logs of inbound and outbound activity, and even email reports of both to the administrator. (Note that the iBoss Pro can be circumvented by simply removing it from the network's path, so total security would involve putting in a physically inaccessible location under lock and key.)

Phantom Technologies also offers the original iBoss ($89.95; $7.95/mo or $59.95/yr), which performs similar tasks to iBoss Pro, but does not offer scheduled access features.

Phantom's original product, iPhantom, creates an enterprise-level secure encrypted connection between you and the Internet. iPhantom promises security against someone monitoring your online activity, while also giving you complete anonymity while online (ordinarily, your activities online could identify your home or business network and even which computer from the information which travels all the way to the website's server and back). iPhantom is portable, and can provide a very secure method for connecting through wired access point over which the user has no administrative control. iPhantom can be used concurrently with iBoss and iBoss Pro.

The excellent technology journalist Leo Laporte is an iBoss user (he as an 11 year old son and 14 year old daughter) - he mentions iBoss operation in Episode 282 of his KFI Tech Guy radio show, which you can download here. This is a 90 minute show, and if you listen 42 minutes, 57 seconds into the show, you'll hear him talking to caller "Carlos" about using iBoss.

Sony PlayStation 3 Supercompting

2007-03-25T16:31:00.000-07:00

Today (3/25/07) Engadget reports that a group of 35,000 PS3 users who are participating in Stanford University's folding@home distributed computing project (where anyone can contribute idle time on their personal computer to participate in complex research into "protein folding" - which may eventually lead to cures for serious diseases) have rapidly jumped to the top of the folding@home leaderboard. Playstation 3s are currently contributing nearly 75 per cent of the 990 teraflops (nearly a petaflop) of what folding@home processes at peak.

Given the poor market performance of the PS3 to date, I wonder whether this would be a reasonable publicity stunt for Sony? It certainly has generated some front-page tech-ink this week. How hard would it be to get 30K+ PS3s (or perhaps even devices that *reported* to be PS3s) on the 'net? I guess it just doesn't jive for me that PS3 sales have been disappointing and somehow 35,000 owners decided to participate in folding@home (here's folding@home's FAQ for PS3 users). Nonetheless, we may all benefit as this sudden surge in massed computing power gets applied against some of our most reviled medical challenges, including cancer and Alheimer's, Huntington's and Parkinson's diseases.

If you wish to participate in a distributed computing by contributing a minor amount of electricity to run your Linux, Mac, Windows or PS3, here are some projects that might inspire you:

folding@home - protein research
SETI@home - help analyze radio telescope data to look for intelligent signals from extraterrestrial sources
distributed.net - an early distributed computing project, this project primarily focuses on development of cryptographic tools
climateprediction.net - weather forecasting
malariacontrol.net - attempting to understand and control this disease which kills over a million humans a year and affects hundreds of millions
The University of California at Berkeley's BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project allows users to choose from many projects and run them on their personal computers (and Sony PlayStation 3s).

Better Display Hardware Coming to Entry-level Macs?

2007-03-20T02:33:00.000-07:00

The video display chips that drive the displays of Intel-powered Mac minis, MacBooks, and the entry-level iMac are Intel's GMA950 "integrated graphics processor." Video performance of these Macs has proven to be quite poor, particularly doing 3-D graphics-intensive gaming. Some reports suggest that even 2-D video playback performance is affected on these models. I myself would have purchased two of these models by now had their 3-D performance not been so poor.

Peter Cohen of Macworld.com wrote on March 8, 2007 that Intel's GMA965 chip, currently shipping in Windows-based computers, has built-in "transform and lighting" hardware, though it has not yet been enabled for Windows (software drivers are apparently in the works). In a recent demo held by Intel, the GMA965 demonstrated respectable gaming performance with contemporary games.

Apple has made no announcement that they will use GMA965 chips. If they do, Apple's entry-level models will be even better values.

Update August 2007: Alas, the recent new models of MacBooks and Mac minis continue to use the GMA950. On a positive note, I've discovered that the GMA950-powered video of the first-gen Mac mini actually produces reasonable gaming performance for the less-demanding titles.

Mobile Mapping and Info from Google

2007-03-02T14:32:00.000-08:00

If you've got a smartphone running Java, Palm OS 5.x, or Windows Mobile or a color Blackberry device, you might be able to run Google's slick Google Maps Mobile application.

I've actually been running it on my Palm T5, connecting either via WiFi or through my Motorola v170 cell phone via Bluetooth (as one of the few crazies in the world proving that you can do Internet access via BT on a Verizon phone).

I think this will prove to be a useful tool when out and about, though I still find that doing Google SMS is a really quick way to find an address from any phone when on the road.

Add a Caching Clipboard to OS X

2007-02-19T12:20:00.000-08:00

If your regular routine involves a lot of cutting and pasting of text,
try the free open-source utility Jumpcut. In the months I've been using it, it's changed my working habits significantly. Particularly if I'm writing email or posting to this blog and including a number of links, I'll just copy all the links I find interesting as I go, then paste them all in one later session.

Software-based Keyboard/Mouse Sharing

2007-02-09T13:29:00.000-08:00

If you operate multiple computers concurrently on your desktop, and frequently switch between them, here is a free software-only solution to sharing a single keyboard and mouse between them. And it's really slick.

Synergy is cross-platform (Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP, Mac OS X, Unix) software solution for sharing a single keyboard and mouse between multiple computers. Unlike traditional hardware KVMs (keyboard/video/mouse switches), this scenario requires that you have a monitor dedicated to each computer, and that the computers are networked together.

The cool part is how Synergy is used: the user simply moves the cursor from monitor to monitor, and the keyboard works for whichever monitor the cursor is currently located. Synergy also automatically merges the clipboards of the systems (text-only for OS X), so users can cut-and-paste between computers transparently. Synergy also synchronizes the screen savers (except OS X) of the connected computers.

Switching to AOL's Free Plan

2007-01-16T15:02:00.000-08:00

(8/15/2005 Update: Apparently a user can switch to AOL Free Plan in this web page without the AOL application. See the bottom of this posting for details.)

Now that America Online offers free accounts to users who already have Internet access, what does this mean to existing users? Particularly:

I have had Web pages hosted at my AOL ftp space for a decade. Those pages have had tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of hits, and have achieved high rankings in search engines over time. Are these retained if I switch to "Free AOL" from a paid account?
We have not used the AOL application for over a decade. Apple's "Claris Emailer" application was the only application ever to communicate with AOL mail servers until the 21st Century, and we lovingly used this until it was quite long in the tooth. We then used AOL's own "AOL Communicator" application for Mac OS X for a little over a year. Early in 2004 AOL began offering industry-standard IMAP mail support, and we've used Apple's excellent Mail application to access our AOL (and other email providers) ever since. If we switch to AOL's free service, would we still be able to use an IMAP mail client?

We have been paying $6.95 for many years, which only included 3 hours of monthly access time. However, this has been more than adequate to send/receive our AOL mail via a broadband connection. We make no use of AOL's proprietary features, but having a 15 year old email address has its appeal. Likewise, I have wanted to maintain my Web pages. So we've continued to pay.

How does an AOL user switch from a paid plan to their free plan? What services are lost? What Services are retained? Let's find out together...

In 1992, after reviewing a number of email and text messaging solutions for our relatives and friends, I selected America Online. Their single application-based solution for establishing a dialup connection, doing email tasks and text messaging was the far and away the most elegant of the offerings I tested.

Now 15 years, a megabit/second and a World Wide Web later, AOL has dramatically changed their entire business model. Once the most popular method for consumers to connect to communicate "online" (not necessarily using the Internet), the company has determined that their future is no longer in connecting users to the Internet, but in being a content-based Internet company, like Yahoo! Maintaining phone lines and modems for dialup is apparently no longer profitable for AOL, so the company is moving away from being an Internet Service Provider (ISP).

In August 2006, America Online announced that it would now offer its services and software free to users connecting via broadband connections. They continue to offer paid dialup subscriptions.

I have not made an America Online dialup connection in several years. At one time, I'd use their ubiquitous dialup servers to stay connected while traveling. But for a number of years, I've been making Internet connections from our PowerBook through my cell phone. More recently, we find an increasing number of hotels offering free WiFi - especially in competitive markets.

Some months ago, I heard an unsubstantiated story on a technology podcast that an AOL subscriber could cancel their account, but continue to use their email. What wasn't clear was whether they could only continue to use the email account via Web interface - not a situation I was willing to risk. It appears now that AOL was discreetly allowing this to happen, knowing that they would soon announce their free service model.

Stories of difficulties in canceling America Online service have circulated for years. Within the last year, a very popular sound clip made the rounds online of an AOL subscriber (who made the recording) attempting to cancel his subscription with a customer service rep who clearly has no intention of letting him do so. Online postings suggest that until late in 2006, the only way to cancel AOL was via a live phone call - perhaps the company hoped to dissuade cancellations.

I used AOL's online live support chat to ask my two questions about switching to their free plan. However, when I started the session in two different browsers, nothing appeared in the chat session window. As you can see from the time stamps, it took almost four minutes before anything appeared (I'd left the window open and was working on something else). Here's the conversation:

6:13:38 PM PST

System
AOLTechNPG has joined this session!
6:13:38 PM PST

System
Connected with AOLTechNPG
6:13:48 PM PST

System
Hello, Ellsworth. Welcome to Live Technical Support. My name is Noli.
6:13:55 PM PST

System
Ellsworth stated the question or problem as: If I switch to AOL Free, what will become of Web pages I have hosted at members.aol.com?.
6:13:55 PM PST

System
Are you signed on with the same computer that you need assistance with?
6:14:03 PM PST

AOLTechNPG
To get us started, may I ask what your name is, or how may I call you?
6:16:44 PM PST

AOLTechNPG
Not to rush you, but are you still with me?
6:17:28 PM PST

Ellsworth
Hello - my browser window only started displaying the chat 15 seconds ago...
6:17:41 PM PST

Ellsworth
My name is Ellsworth.
6:18:02 PM PST

Ellsworth
...which I filled out in the "what would you like to be called" field to request this chat.
6:18:37 PM PST

AOLTechNPG
Pleased to meet you, Ellsworth! :)
6:19:04 PM PST

Ellsworth
While you're thinking about the answer to my first question, I'll also ask "If I switch to AOL Free, can I still send/receive AOL email using an IMAP client?"
6:19:07 PM PST

AOLTechNPG
To answer your question, that feature of AOL is not affected when you sign up for the free AOl service.
6:20:36 PM PST

AOLTechNPG
Still yes for your other question.
6:21:25 PM PST

Ellsworth
So if I change to AOL Free, nothing changes about the services I get from my AOL account except the loss of dialup services?
6:22:20 PM PST

AOLTechNPG
Yes, for detailed information for the services that will be affected, please see keyword CHANGE PRICE PLAN.
6:22:39 PM PST

Ellsworth
Thank you very much. Have a good evening/day/afternoon/life.
6:23:10 PM PST

AOLTechNPG
You're welcome.
6:23:15 PM PST

No really helpful responses, truly. In any case, if I find at the end of this current billing period that my AOL Web pages no longer exist, I doubt that "AOLTechNPG" is going to fix it.

So at this point, my perception is that when a user changes from a paid AOL plan to the new free plan, only two things change:

The user no longer has any dialup privileges with America Online.
The user is no longer eligible for online technical support.

Today, it may still be necessary to call AOL to cancel, but a user can switch to a free plan via the AOL application. (8/15/2005 Update: Apparently a user can switch in this web page without the AOL application. See below in this posting for details.) Here's how:

Run AOL application
Select Menu "Go/Keyword"
Enter keyword "change plan"
Respond to security warning (this may occur again during procedure)
View "The New AOL - We've Changed!" page
Click "Change to Free" tab
Click "Change to Free" button
Answer the security question to identify yourself as legitimate user
Asked reminder: "This plan does not include an internet connection or live customer support. To proceed with changing your account to free, click Continue. To view price plans that include connectivity and live customer support click Price Plans."
Click "Continue"
Presented with "Confirmation" page asking "Please confirm the changes to you account below." - but the mostly-empty page only displays "NEW PLAN:" and on another line "AOL" and a full-page of nothing. At the bottom are "BACK" and "SAVE" buttons (I tried this twice, and both times, a mostly blank page). This is quite confusing, but America Online apparently calls the new free plan "AOL" - and that is all. My current plan appears as "$6.95 AOL w/3 Online Hours."
Click "SAVE"
The resulting mostly blank page reads "Thank you! Your changes have been saved." A "Close" button appears at the bottom of the blank page.

Experimentally, I now went to Keyword "Billing." Then clicked on "Change My Price Plan." I was again asked my security question. The resulting "Change Price Plan" showed my old price plan, and the "pending price plan" as "AOL" and an "Effective Date" which begins after our current billing period.

When I clicked "Display Plan Details" next to the "Pending Price Plan," a window popped up:

"This plan gives you unlimited usage of AOL over a high-speed broadband connection (purchased separately from your local cable or telephone company) or a dial-up connection (purchased separately from another company)

This plan includes:
*AOL® Security Suite, including anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, parental controls, spam fighting, and anti-phishing. Downloads available at KW: Safety. Anti-phishing requires use of AOL Explorer or AOL software.
* 7 AOL screen names, and 1 AOL® My eAddress with up to 100 mailboxes

* Automated customer support. Note: this plan does not include phone, email, or chat customer support.
* 5GB of online storage, in addition to unlimited photo and email storage. AOL® My eAddress email addresses receive 2GB email storage.

* Video-on-demand and 20 XM radio stations

* FREE AIM Phoneline, including unlimited inbound calls

Notes:
• High-speed connection is not included
• Dial-up connection is not included
• Any changes to your pricing plan will take effect on your next billing date
• Premium services are subject to charges"

We'll have to see exactly what happens next: whether we stop getting billed; whether we can continue to read/write our email using Apple Mail as our IMAP client; whether my Web pages continue to be hosted; and whether I can add more pages to that Web space. I'll let you know. Check back here for an update in February 2007.

Update: January 19, 2007

Today I received the following email from America Online:

Dear Member,

Thank you for contacting Member Services about your AOL® service. This email serves as confirmation that we canceled your Paid Member Account and converted it to a Free Member Account on January 15, 2007. Because you're getting your connection elsewhere, as of February 7, 2007 the expiration of the service period covered by your last bill -- we will no longer provide your Internet access or live customer support.

PLEASE SAVE THIS CONFIRMATION EMAIL AS YOUR RECORD OF THE CANCELLATION AND CONVERSION OF YOUR PAID MEMBER ACCOUNT AND FOR FUTURE REFERENCE ON USING YOUR FREE MEMBER ACCOUNT.

How to Continue Using Your Free AOL Account:
Once your Paid Member Account is converted, you will still be able to use the AOL service for free -- which means that once you connect to the Internet through another provider, you will still have the same access to:
Your current AOL screen name, for email and instant messaging
Your familiar AOL software, for quick and safer Web browsing
Your AOL® Safety and Security Center, for comprehensive protection from viruses, spyware, and more
Your photos, emails, address book and everything else you've saved to your AOL account
Great broadband content like AOL® Radio with XM, videos, news, sports and more
For more information on our free features and content, go to AOL Keyword [CTRL+K]: Discover AOL or daol.aol.com. Please note: Use of AOL's free services remains subject to the AOL Terms of Service.

Account Billing Details
Cancellation confirmation number: (a 9-digit number)
Last bill date: January 7, 2007

Because your cancellation request was made after this date, your last charge will appear on your next billing statement. After that, you will no longer be charged any monthly membership fee, though you will be responsible for any other charges you might have incurred since your last billing date, as well as any outstanding balance on your account. To check the status of, or to make changes to, your Premium Services -- including Xdrive, MusicNow and Privacy Wall -- go to AOL Keyword [CTRL+K]: Help or help.aol.com.

Please Note: If you have a separate secondary account(s) created under your master account payment method, you will continue to be billed for these. If this applies to you, you will receive an additional email from AOL LLC to your secondary account with more details.

Please review your billing statements carefully and contact AOL if you have questions about billing or cancellation at 1-800-827-6364.

Thank you again for being a valued member. We hope you continue to take advantage of your free AOL service for a safer, more secure and hassle-free online experience -- no matter who provides your Internet connection.

Sincerely,

Todd Waletzki,
Senior Vice President, AOL Member Services

P.S. If you feel you have cancelled your Internet access with AOL in error, or want to explore other low-cost service plans, go to AOL Keyword [CTRL+K]: My Account, bill.aol.com, or call an AOL Member Services representative anytime at 1-800-381-4006.

Update 2/7/07: I checked my account status today, and though it's subtle, my account appears to have changed to AOL's free plan. When in the AOL application (Mac OS X) I go to keyword "billing," instead of going to a local window in the AOL application, I'm now directed to a Web page titled "My Account." Toward the bottom of that page appears this section:

Membership Details
Member Since: 08/07/1992
AOL Membership Fee: $0.01 /month
Price Plan: AOL
Billing Date: 07 March

Curious about that one cent - I'm wondering if that is a way of establishing that the user still has a business arrangement with America Online.

On an interesting note, I received email from AOL titled "Directions to get you connected to AOL" explaining how "To setup your AOL service to connect to the Internet using a non-AOL broadband or network connection." This email was sent by AOL at 3:12am, less than 7 hours before my free service plan was to begin. Had I been a dialup user, I'd have had only this tiny window in which to receive this information and re-configure AOL before - what? - being unable to connect via dialup to pick up this mail. Not very good timing on AOL's part, unless they charge users ad hoc by-the-minute who have the Free Plan for dialup access.

August 15, 2007 Update - No AOL Application Necessary to Switch to Free?

A friend writes:

I needed to get a Windows box working here to use my
flatbed scanner since there doesn't appear to be any
Linux support for it. So I finally had a chance to re-install
some aol host software and switch to free service...

I followed the instructions on your blog, but my host
software that I install wasn't able to open the page
that actually submitted the request. I got a message
to the effect of no SSL version compatible with both
browser and server available. This was with AOL 7.0,
the most recent disc I have, circa 2001. Apparently
it didn't support 128-bit SSL.

But I got enough info as the page attempted to load
to try this: I logged with my screenname and pass at
aol.com using Firefox, then pasted this url into the
location bar:

https://bill.aol.com/changePlan/changePlan.adp

That page seemed to fit your description, and submitting
it appeared to produce the desired effect. It'll be a while
before I know whether the charges actually stopped.

Using USB-to-Ethernet Adapters in OS X

2006-12-26T09:30:00.000-08:00

If the Ethernet port of your OS X Macintosh has failed (the motherboard-based port in my mother-in-law's iMac was damaged by lightning), or you wish to run multiple wired Ethernet ports (i.e., to use an old Mac as a router), you may have wished to use one of the many USB adapters for wired Ethernet available. Alas, there have been few manufacturers of these adapters who provided drivers for Macintosh - I know of no current products which have OS X support.

Peter Sichel of Sustainable Softworks (developer of networking software products for Macintosh) and Daniel Sumorok have developed open-source drivers for Mac OS 10.3 and 10.4 which allow the use of many, if not most, commonly available "Windows-only" USB-to-Ethernet adapters. Read Peter's article and download the free drivers here.

Happy Holidays!

2006-12-23T10:29:00.000-08:00

Hope you have a happy and safe holiday season (as appropriate to your culture and/or hemisphere)! Thanks for visiting Useful Bulk!

Spray-on Chrome Finish

2006-12-13T16:59:00.000-08:00

Just saw a segment of "Rides" on DiscoveryHD that featured this company's spray-on chrome finishing technology. In the show, the company chromes some composite replicas of 1966 Pontiac GTO headlight bezels for motion picture cars. Their on-camera demonstration was amazing to see, first spraying distilled water, then the company's proprietary finish from a traditional paint gun. The company claims the finish can be applied to almost any material. Impressively, the finish was demonstrated on thin flexible plastic, and was completely flexible itself.

The company sells a consumer product called Killer Chrome. You can see a video demonstration at this link. I don't know how durable this stuff is, but perhaps it will address a project or problem you have.

Bomb-sniffing Bees

2006-12-11T12:36:00.000-08:00

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory recently made a press announcement that they had trained honey bees to detect explosives.

By simply associating a sugar-water food source with samples of explosives, researchers have learned that they can program a "proboscis extension reflex" (their feeding mouthpart) for the bees within as little as 15 minutes. In one application, trained bees are placed inside a "sniffer box" in a tiny harness which holds their head in front of a video camera. Software detects proboscis activity and alerts operators as necessary.

This promises to provide a far more cost-effective solution for explosives detection than non-biologically based systems.

Bees sense of smell is said to rival that of dogs. Previous research efforts to use bees to detect explosives attempted to use free-flying bees as indicators, which required some method of observing their activities remotely.

Red One Camera Screening Account

2006-12-07T16:45:00.000-08:00

On November 14, 2006, I attended a screening of footage shot with the in-development Red One camera. The Red Digital Cinema company was founded by the founder of Oakley, Inc., a company best known for manufacturing outdoor eyewear and apparel. I was at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles to represent a friend who placed a deposit on the first 1,100 of these "digital cinema" cameras, expected some time in 2007. He lives and works in Asia as a cinematographer, and was unable to attend the screening.

The following is my account to the friend, which includes my impressions about the way the company presented itself:

12:58pm - We arrive at the Nuart for the 1:30pm screening (the "V.I.P." screening) and there were maybe 50-60 people in line. 40 or so more arrived before they started letting the line into the lobby as they checked off our names around 1:10pm. It eventually filled the Nuart to probably 85 per cent capacity - impressive. And when we left, there was a 30-person line started for the 2:30pm screening.

The crowd was impressively conservative-looking. Not too many "tourists." Not as many 20-somethings as I'd expect - a generally mature crowd, but not exceeding 60 years of age. On the way in, I overheard two guys crossing the street identifying themselves as "a wanna-be director" and "I own a post-production house" - so it's also not just potential buyers, either.

1:15pm - I was thinking about who I'd expect to attend this, since it was clear that a *lot* of people were going to show up. [I mention seeing a motion picture cinematographer with which we've both worked] and saw Allen Daviau (cinematographer of E.T., the Extraterrestrial and Van Helsing) ushered in past the line as a V.I.P.

1:20pm - As we were just about to get checked in by the girl at the custom Red podium set up outside the lobby, a guy wearing a Red shirt came out and looked down the sidewalk at the line. Grinning, he said to all of us something like "are you guys as excited as I am?" and received a modest response.

1:25pm - When we entered the theater, there was a full-screen graphic on-screen of the Red logo - turns out this was supplied from a PowerBook or MacBook on a podium at the front.
"Ted" (the guy from the sidewalk) introduced himself and announced that we'd start on-time, though we were waiting for people to still file in.

1:32pm - "Ted" starts the presentation. He's standing behind a podium, unlit except by the glow of his PowerBook, whose Apple logo also glows from audience side of the lid. With the Red logo still displayed on-screen, he talks a bit about how this entire project was given a green light 10 months ago(!!!), and a few bits of information about how no one has seen any moving footage until the last month or so. He explains that the clips we're going to see were all shot on-site at Red's "garage" facility, and comments that the operation is really that small in scale. The first clips are interior, the last two were shot somewhat more recently and were shot outdoors in their "driveway." He comments that no attempt has been made to correct for dead pixels in the Mysterium chips, nor other color corrections. He also mentions that we're watching on "the Sony 4K projector."

After maybe 5 minutes of somewhat non-informational comments, except to tell us "we were going to have fun," Ted calls for the screening to start.

The interior clips are brief, and all in limbo. There is no nat sound, but music plays throughout. Ted does not speak during the first round of clips. All of the shots we saw appear on the Red site as stills or downloadable movies. The interiors also apparently only feature Red staff as on-camera "talent." The interior clips were all 10-20 seconds in duration:

Extreme close-up of an Oakley Time Tank watch (naturally), which is slowly revolving on an unseen turntable. Except for red indicators, the watch is entirely grey. The shot is shallow-focus, and between that and the refractions through the relatively thick curved watch crystal, there are a lot of interesting grey tones.
Tight two-shot of an Asian girl blowing a bubble-gum bubble. A caucasian guy stands out-of-focus and out of the key light maybe four feet away. She's lit from camera-right by a large soft source - pretty close, and we probably lose a couple of stops or more by the time it gets to the guy in the background. As the girl blows a bubble, the guys steps forward and reaches out as though to pop the bubble. Nice shallow focus demonstration, and also lets us see how the Mysterium looks on the guy's face well below key, and it looks pretty good - very linear about responding to less light. [My wife, a cinema/television professor who worked in television production] eventually complains about skin tones for all the clips, but I never think they're that strange. The bubble gum colors for this and another clip are a disturbing shade of orange, but that's probably not the camera's fault.
Tight single of a swarthy-skinned young guy with dark hair wearing a black shirt who lights a cigar and blows some smoke. Nice lighting - soft key, super-subtle fill (maybe nothing) and very subtle kicker off the non-key side of his face. I think at this point about how high the black levels are in the limbo of the set - but that's probably a quality of the Sony projector. Like all the clips, the overall texture of the images is very smooth - nothing like "grain" or video noise.
Two young women in limbo - one tries to light a cigar for the other.
Extreme close-up (a down-res version is downloadable from the Red site) of a revolving pair of Oakley sunglasses. As with the watch shot, all greys, and nice-looking greys at that. In one lens of the glasses you can see a reflection of the soft light source and all the gradations within that bounce source.
A slow dolly shot of a silver or gunmetal grey Porsche 959 in which we see some lighting equipment: a 2K blonde behind a flag and eventually the face of another light. As you can see in the still on the Red site, where the light reflects off the back of the barndoors and when the shot eventually reveals the face of the backlight, the hot white part of the frame blows out perfectly, with no blooming and no clipping - just goes white. Even adjacent greys to the blown-out sections still read nicely.
A close-up of a blonde young woman blowing a bubble-gum bubble. You can download this as a BitTorrent file from the Red site. Resolution here is fantastic, where every fly-away hair reads perfectly with no aliasing. What little action there is for the few frames when the bubble pops looks pretty natural in terms of frame blur.

After the short interior clips, a 3-minute staged scene featured two women dressed in 1940s "work wear" (overalls and hair in a bandanna) outdoors doing repairs on an old city bus. You can see in the stills on the Red site the setting. The scene had no particularly hot spots - which makes me a bit curious. It looks overcast - and we haven't had many opportunities for overcast shooting in SoCal lately. Perhaps it was after sunset, or their parking lot was shaded from direct sun. The footage demonstrates nice shallow focus (using the Red 300mm prime) in daylight conditions, and very natural "film-like" frame blur while one of the women operates a floor jack.

While all the footage looked pleasant enough, it certainly begs for someone to really give the camera a rigorous battery of test-shooting. All of the footage demonstrated that the Mysterium and their lenses ([my wife] says that Ted said they were shooting some of the exterior with their zoom - I missed that) can produce smooth gradients of color, and delivers resolution rivaling (and maybe exceeding) a 35mm release print. But I'd like to see some more "dangerous" footage - like a daylight interior with full sun striking someone's face, and some night street exteriors with existing lighting. The audience applauded at the end of the brief viewing (less than 10 minutes total), but it's a very guarded amount of footage.

1:50pm - The Red logo reappears on-screen, and Ted goes through a computer presentation with slides of the Red workflow and the latest images (all CGI, I think) of the camera body and Red Rail. Early in the presentation, he puts up a graphic which says "everything is subject to change." As he describes the latest ideas about rail hardware, he indicates that this is constantly evolving. It occurs to me that the camera would look a lot less strange to people (I realize that they're trying to be "cool" to some degree, but it's clearly a love-it or hate-it kind of approach) if they'd just show it with a lens and matte box. I realize they're trying to indicate that they're really making a _camera_ (even though they will be selling lenses), but even a "ghost" image of a lens and mounted AKS would make people see this as a production body. After all, a Panavision body by itself is just a boring lump.

A slide reminds us that the price is still $17.5K US. A subsequent slide shows the $5,000 300mm prime and an "image not available" for their 18-85mm zoom. Interestingly, there's no price on the slide, though he tells the audience the zoom is $10,000, then "actually more like $9,500" - and this price is currently on the website.

Ted talks a bit about the Red RAW codec and shows graphics of the two styles of camera "door" (my term) - one holding onboard flash RAM (did he say 30 to 60 gigabytes of Flash RAM!?!) for shooting Red RAW and another to connect a (did hey say optical?) data cable to an external data recorder for shooting RAW.

Ted mentions that October 31, 2006 was a cutoff date for reservations, and asks for a show of hands if anyone in the theater got in "under the wire." A few hands go up.

Ted says that about 1,100 "reservations" have been made for Red Digital Cinema cameras around the world, and shows a map of the world which he says someone has recently prepared. He then says he's going to show us how "international" the reservations have been, and presses a key. I expect a bunch of little dots, but instead, entire countries are filled in with red to represent reservations. Both [my wife] and I figure you must have been the one guy who filled all of Thailand (actually, I won't be surprised if you tell me you know of more orders there). All of Russia is filled in - not a very good or fair way to represent the information, really. Ted then says something about some countries that *aren't* filled in, then hits another key and China a Japan turn red and he says something about there finally being reservations from there.

2:00pm - Ted asks the audience if they want to see the demo clips again, and the audience applauds. We watch the clips again, but this time, there is no music and Ted continues to talk, telling us to notice things: the nice shallow depth of field on this shot, notice this guy is wearing a black shirt, so there are a lot of different blacks in this scene, etc. We finish all the same clips again.

Then Ted says "I want to show you one of the clips one more time," and we see the exterior bus mechanic girls - one shot, twice, silent. I think there's a slight green cast to the scene, but I'm expecting some narration that never comes. After the screen goes dark and the Red logo comes up again, Ted tells us that we just viewed was shot using Red RAW (the rest of the demo apparently being RAW). While there might be something to be said for NOT telling us beforehand what we were supposed to be looking for, it would have been nice to see the clip again *after* finding out it was Red RAW, and if they were really trying to show off, they'd run both codecs back-to-back. I'm not saying they're hiding anything, but they shouldn't be acting too cagey at this point, either.

Ted finally says that they basically wanted us to know that their product was _real_, and really happening. He thanks us for coming, and there's more applause.

And we leave.

One of my first thoughts was, "how many of these things could they sell?" When you consider 1,100 reservations at $17,500, that's under $20 million - not a lot of money to recover from development and tooling. Seems like they'd have to sell a *lot* to really profit. To which [my wife] said, "maybe they don't want to profit." Based on how this project was described to me the first time, it does sound like a "vanity project" for the Oakley founder. Maybe it *would* be enough to put yourself in textbooks for the next 100 years as someone who was instrumental in the transition from film. On the other hand, at this price point, this camera could be purchased by every knucklehead (nothing personal) who planned on buying a pro video or film camera - but I can't guess how many that might be.

It's exciting, if still a bit of vaporware. I tried to imagine that this could all be scam - just because it sounds too good to be true. But I'm really NOT suspicious. This is how big changes often *have* to take place - a single influential individual exercises their desire for something, and it happens. Like the original "Skunk Works" - a small, politically autonomous group within Lockheed Aircraft tasked with developing secret military aviation without intervention from the corporation - Red might just be able to pull off something that giants like Sony could never push through their organization.

I'm curious about whether Red intends to make the operation and post-production processes push-button easy. No one, from industrial video productions to feature motion pictures, wants to have to train and/or hire a new class of technical specialist just to figure out how to run the camera, or make sure the data gets to the right place in the right form. I'll be very interested to see how that evolves.

[My wife] was disappointed with "Ted" - complaining that he wasn't technical enough. I'm not convinced there's a lot more technical stuff they want to share or can share. The whole presentation was maybe 35 minutes - short and sweet, or too short, and too sweet.

Sorry about the long account - but I thought you might care about how Red presented themselves, as well as how the footage looked. Finally - I sort of indicated this before - the footage may represent something we've all never really seen before - very low-noise, grainless high-resolution imagery (all at 24fps, by the way) with none of the negative characterstics of video. So while it doesn't look like video, it also doesn't look like film. I haven't really critically viewed 35mm contact prints while thinking about how different they are from 3rd-generation release prints - this might be more like a low-generation 35mm print than anything.

Time Travel the Internet

2006-12-03T23:41:00.000-08:00

Want to know what a given Web site looked like at some point the past? The Internet Archive Wayback Machine has been archiving Web pages since 1996. Check out your favorite site's headlines over the years.