Category Archives: Geek-Speak

Geeky spaces lie within — be careful where you step!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

New Gear: Apple Magic Mouse

When Apple announced their newest mouse a couple of weeks ago, I thought it sounded intriguing. They’d developed a Bluetooth mouse with a clean design, matching nicely with the recent offerings from the Kids from Cupertino. Normally, a ho-hum thing. I mean, Apple’s had a Bluetooth mouse available for a while, and there are tons of other folks out there with them.

This one’s got one extra step of cool on them though.

First, there’s no real buttons. There’s a click when you press the surface, but there’s no delineation between a left-click and right-click. You just click on the appropriate side, and the right thing happens. Cool.

The bigger coolness though is also delivered by the top surface. The top surface is also a trackpad, and man is it cool. The slick surface just begs to have your finger (or fingers — yes, it supports gestures) sliding across it, making for a really neat augmentation for any Mac.

For me, I’m finding that it’s a great addition to my regular use of my MacBook Pro. I like the glass trackpad on the MBP, but there are times when I’ll set the unit on the coffee table next to the La-Z-Boy. Doing that and twisting around enough to use the trackpad was a bit of a pain. With the new Magic Mouse, I can slide my mouse anywhere, making casual surfing pretty dang easy from the comfort of my easy chair. It just doesn’t get better than that!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

New iMacs

I have a certain sentimentality for the iMac. My first Mac was a 20″ G5 iMac, acquired just a bit over four years ago, and I thoroughly enjoyed cutting my teeth on it. I guess there’s always a certain nostalgia for your first love, eh?

This morning, the twitterverse is all agog about a potentially new iMac on the near horizon. The buzz is that it would be thinner, and include Blu-Ray.

Myself, I’d welcome that.

I have a great attraction for an all-in-one environment like the iMac, but I also see some pitfalls. The latest gen of iMacs allow for easy memory upgrades by the user, but a nearly impossible internal harddrive replacement. Last I saw, that operation involved removing the screen from the chassis, and that’s not a comfy spot for most, myself included. That leaves you with only USB or FW800 externals drives. Where’s eSATA? That would definitely solve the need for replacing the internal harddrive, as eSATA bays are available all over the place.

Another thing missing from the current line is a second Ethernet port. While I don’t have an immediate need for that extra port, it’s interesting to see companies like Drobo begin using that for faster-than-eSATA iSCSI drive connections across a second Ethernet port for their DroboPro high-end storage solution. For a data junkie like myself, that’s a real attractive path, despite the quite high entry pricepoint.

However, I think an iMac might be the only way to foist the last Windows machine in the house my spouse’s clutched fingers. She’s been on Windows for better than a decade, and I suspect that moving her to a Mac is unlikely. We’re running into some issues where she can’t browse my photo archive easily from her machine. Microsoft and RAW files still don’t get along with a piece of software to act as referee. She’s been going through an incredibly convoluted series of steps to view, select and print images from the datastore, and I’d no idea she was doing all that. An iMac would solve that in a snap, but I don’t know that she’s ready for that leap.

With new announcements coming though, anything is possible!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Video… Finally!

I was finally able to get video from my new iPod Nano to upload to YouTube. How’d I get there?

While researching the problem, I found that loads of folks are having problems like this, and for some of them, it appears to be related to Google Gears. I tried to install Gears, and the installer and Google Gears site indicate that OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard ain’t supported. 🙁

In one of those notes, however, someone mentioned that they had success using their YouTube credentials, rather than GMail-based credentials. Sure ’nuff, that seemed to work.

It’s a sample size of one, so YMMV, but below is our first video from the Nano to YouTube. Enjoy!

Entertainment, Geek-Speak

Death a Medium

We recently changed our landline phone number, and have been getting a boatload of calls for the previous number possessor. Some have been obvious credit card calls, some are obviously calling from an outdated cold call list. Despite having registered with the federal Do Not Call list, we continue to get these. Not the end of the world.

Today, I received a call from the local paper, looking for the folks we aren’t. Once we were all squared away that we weren’t them, the person on the other end of the phone said she could talk with me, and began to give me a breathless spiel about the local paper, subscription rates, and left me an opening when she asked if I’d noticed how the cost of the paper at the newsstand had been increasing. I told we don’t get or read the paper.

To hear the disappointment in her voice, you woulda thought I had just killed a puppy.

Quietly, resigned to the fact that I was not likely to be a sales target, she slowly gave me the number for the paper’s customer service line, just in case I changed my mind. In reality, I’m not likely to. See, we get a local paper for our part of the metro. It comes for free in the mail, talks about things that are within five miles of my home, and is targeted to the world I spend more than half my time within. The city paper can’t do that — they need to appeal to a much broader regional area for their “local” news, as well as covering national events. If our little area gets part of a full page in all that, I’d be surprised.

The world is a changing, and printed newspapers are suffering for it, but that’s the way it goes. I think those that have blended their print and online options are probably the most likely to survive in a digital world. If not… well… it’ll be Attack of the Show and Gizmodo for me.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

OnOne : An Update

Man, the folks from OnOne seem to be all over this Snow Leopard issue with their license activation.

Waiting for me this morning was an e-mail from customer support (sent about four hours after I reported the problem) indicating that my license had been reset. I jumped into Photoshop, and sure enough, I was able to get my license working again.

Thank you OnOne — that’s some mammoth customer service!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

New Gear: iPod Nano 5G

At lunch on Wednesday, Jay and I had lunch with Becky, spending much of the time looking at our iPhones, watching the blow-by-blow of the Apple announcements on Twitter. We had a great time. I’m not so sure about Becky. 🙂

Jay had three predictions:

  • Steve wouldn’t be there.
  • There would be no camera on the iPod Nano.
  • There would be no Beatles-related announcements.

Jay was one for three.

On Wednesday, Uncle Steve did appear on stage to a towering ovation, having beaten yet another life-threatening malady. He was still thin, and his voice sounded gravelly compared to a presentation he gave late last year, but he was still alive, much to the thrills of Apple’s shareholders, I’m sure. Frankly, I’m glad he made it. I think he’s a visionary, and maybe his shiny new liver will give him some shiny new ideas.

After going through a ton of announcements, the event ended with “One more thing…” — a Jobs trademark, and frequently means that the best was saved for last. Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of the iPod Nano — Touch, Classic and Shuffle all got some love during the presentation, but nothing about the Nano. One more thing. Steve talked about video, and how handheld solid-state video devices were grabbing up a big chunk of the market. And he said Apple wanted a piece of the action.

And they’re gonna give it to us for free.

Enter the new iPod Nano, now outfitted with a camera that’ll shoot video at 480p at 30fps. The free part? It’s free because Apple built the camera into the Nano, and kept the price the same. And added an FM radio. And a speaker. And a pedometer. And voiceover. And voice recording. And a slightly bigger screen. Same physical size, same price. Crikey. And it was available immediately.

In reality, it was available for order immediately, and only showed up at the local Apple Store on Thursday. A quick dash from work to the Galleria during lunch has put a nice electric reflective green iPod Nano in my hands.

I love the new finish on the 5G Nanos -– very nice. However I’m inclined to think it’s a fragile finish. In fact, despite it being aluminum, the slick feel reminds me of a plastic case. And I don’t know if it’s that my hands are telling my brain that the thing is plastic, but the 5G Nano feels lighter than my 4G Nano. That’s gotta be some kinda subliminal thing from my fingertips to my brain’s weights and measures division. Speaking of fingertips, the slick feel of the case keeps making me feel like the little thing is gonna squirt out of my hands — it’s the same kind of feel my iPod Touch had.

The FM radio works well enough, although the big ol’ building I work in blocks a lot of signals. BTW, you have to have the headphones plugged in for the radio to function -– it uses them as the antenna, and is aware when they aren’t attached. I’m using non-standard-issue Bose earbuds, and they seem to work just fine as the radio antenna, so it appears there’s no Apple voodoo going on requiring the use of the Apple headphones in order to use the radio. That’s a pleasant surprise after some the headphone wackiness that’s gone on lately from Apple.

The video camera functionality is fun and actually seems to work pretty well. Uncle Steve said that there was one-button publishing to YouTube, with the implication that this would come through iPhoto. However, even in his presentation Wednesday, iPhoto didn’t have an icon for YouTube, and we never actually saw him upload a video anywhere, despite playing some YouTube hosted video shot with the 5G Nano.

I’d wanted to post a new video on YouTube from the Nano, but have yet to get it to work. First off, I found no place for one click publishing to YouTube from iPhoto. Instead, I copied my videos to my desktop, and tried to upload one through YouTube’s web interface. To quote Janie Porsche, “Eeeehhhhnnnntttt!” I didn’t save Christmas, nor did I get a successful video upload. While the video appeared to upload, the backend processing never completed, and finally errored out.

Not being satisified with that — and having a blockbuster video shot with my iPod Nano that I wanted to share — I tried uploading the video via Quicktime Pro. It does have a menu item for uploading to YouTube. Filled in the boxes, and once again, the upload finished, but there was no completion. In fact, I left it churning for about 10 minutes (for about 30 seconds of video) before mercifully ended the process’ life.

I’m not a YouTube video expert, but to me, it seems like YouTube doesn’t like converting the Nano video stream into whatever it prefers. I like the video shooting capability, but so far, the one-click publishing to YouTube seems to be falling on its face for me. YMMV.

Speaking of pulling video from the Nano, it appears that the only way you can access your video gems is to put the Nano in “disk mode”. I tend to slam my iPods in docks when I’m done with ’em, and pluck ’em out at a second’s notice as I’m headed out the door. In disk mode though, you can’t do that. You have to do an orderly eject from the Mac desktop or iTunes. While that’s not a real big deal, it does take longer, and it definitely doesn’t fit with how I’ve been using my iPods for years. A prediction: I will foul up that sequencing at some point, and toast the load on the new Nano, forcing me to go through a restore.

One thing of note. The camera will not shoot stills — it’s motion only. My understanding is that that’s not uncommon in fixed-focus, fixed-zoom solid state video cameras, but it still would’ve been a nice thing to have. (Pardon the pun.)

The built-in speaker was a surprise the first time I accidentally hit play on a music screen while showing the thing to co-workers. The sound is tinny, of course — on a movie of my Bernese Mountain Dog, playback made her sound like Chihuahua — but the fact that it’s there at all is cool and is great for quick and dirty video sharing.

The slightly bigger screen is nice. When playing tunes, the thing displays artist, album and title with no scrolling — a nice UI improvement. Not a big deal, but nice.

I really thought the form factor would be different with all the new toys, but Uncle Steve says it’s the same form factor. The photos I saw early on made me think that the new Nano was a little thicker, and more squared off on the sides. That doesn’t appear to be the case. Obviously, there are changes to the case in order to accommodate the bigger screen and the camera on the rear. And in a brilliant move, the headphone and dock connector have swapped positions on the bottom, meaning new accessories if you have a toy that is strict about that sort of thing.

Also, the capacity isn’t stamped on the case anywhere. That tells me Apple can stockpile cases, and put them on whatever capacity comes down the line. (C’mon Apple — 32GB would be sweet!!!) My guess is that the new case manufacturing process probably doesn’t lend itself to a quick turnaround. This way it doesn’t matter what comes next as long as the form factor is the same.

Two paws up on the Colinomometer. 🙂

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

More Snow Leopard Weirdness

As part of my day job’s schedule, I have Friday’s off. Typically, it’s my day to run around town, visit the bookstores and execute some coupon action. This morning’s no different.

However….

I went to print my coupons to my crusty trusty Okidata B4100 laserprinter from Doc Oc this morning only to find…. there’s no printers installed! Yep, it appears that when Snow Leopard installed, it scrogged both my Oki and my Epson R1800. Bummer.

The Oki’s got a really flakey driver install path — don’t use the drivers that Apple provides, use ours — so I always have to remember that little step, lest I have printing heartaches.

So, no biggie. The Oki’s printing, although I haven’t reinstalled/checked the R1800 yet to see if it’s printing is better than it was under Leopard. More on that, I’m sure, to come this long holiday weekend.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Another Leopard Wart

I have VMWare Fusion on my Mac for one reason, and one reason only: connectivity to my day job’s office. I don’t use it often, but when I do, it’s usually important.

Tonight, I’ve been trying to hit some of my lesser used applications after loading both my MacBook Pro and Doc Oc with Snow Leopard, and switching both of them to 64-bit mode. When I hit VMWare, it yelled at me:

VMWare Warning

We are not amused.

I went to VMWare’s site, and found them proudly touting experimental support of VMWare on the 32-bit kernel, and apologetically saying that VMWare running on the 64-bit Snow Leopard kernel is hard: “The transition to the 64-bit kernel of Snow Leopard is a major undertaking and something that we are taking seriously as we plan future products.” I’m sorry that it’s hard, but I expected more.

And I’m sure this is coming across as whiny, but I look at it this way. I have 64-bit ready hardware that I paid a gob of Benjy’s for. I have a 64-bit ready OS that’s been at the public dev forefront for many, many months. Yet, still I can’t get the kind of 64-bit love for my tools and toys as I could on the Windows platform. (Shudder.)

I get that not every app needs to be 64-bit. I mean, do I really need a 64-bit LOLcats screensaver? (OK, so maybe I do, but that’s a problem on my end!) But when big tools like VMWare and Photoshop are lagging on this front after so much lead time, well, I guess I expected a bit more than nebulosity at this stage of the game. I’m not knocking the tools — they are great — but I do have a bit of a struggle with the product planning. None of this 64-bit stuff should’ve been a surprise to anyone.

It’s simple. I drank the Kool-Aid, and want my gear to live up to the hype. I want it to just work.