News from Great Castle Wilson

Category: Mac

Mac specific things

  • MacBook Air

    So the Macworld keynote has come and gone, and I must say, there wasn’t really anything that thrilled me. A new NAS? I guess. But they’re awfully late to the table, and it’s not cheap. Movie rentals? Not in Canada. An upgrade to get mail on the Touch? Great! But wait, you want to charge for it, even though it’s going to be free on all new ones sold? Come on!

    And then there’s the MacBook Air. Am I the only person who thinks this is way too expensive? It’s got only an 80Gig HD, no optical drive, no wired ethernet, only one USB port, no Firewire and a significantly slower processor than the other Apple laptops. I guess it’s nice that it comes with 2Gig of memory, but you’ll notice that they had to put 2Gig in at the factory, since there’s no way to upgrade it.

    Compare it to a black MacBook… Same size screen and the same graphics chip. The MB is cheaper, but it has less memory, so let’s say we upgrade the memory to 2Gig and throw in the 250Gig HD — we still only come up to the price of the MBA. And the MB does have an optical drive, a firewire port, a second USB port and a 2.0GHz processor (vs. 1.6GHz on the MBA).

    I’m sorry, but making it thin around the edges and backlighting the keyboard is not enough compensation for those limitations. Essentially, no one should buy the MacBook Air.

    Update: OMFG, it doesn’t even have a user replaceable battery! WTF?

  • 10.5.1 broke my FW audio.

    Not sure whether the consensus in the community is that 10.5.1 is better than 10.5, but several of the problems that hit me personally were not fixed, and I developed a new one: Now, my firewire audio interface disappears at random intervals using the built-in drivers, and attempts to run the official Yamaha ones were unsuccessful. bah! (and again I say, bah!).

  • Bah, 10.5 just blows.

    Originally, this post contained links to several other blogs that reported problems with 10.5, but sadly they were all gone when I checked the links.

    Ok, I’m clearly not the only person who is having problems with Leopard. But I have to say this is the worst Mac OS upgrade I’ve been through. Everything from random messages filling up the system logs (in at least two variations), to incompatibilities, to things that are just plain busted (e.g. neither Back to my Mac nor Time Machine work for me).

    I just spent another two hours fighting to get my (Apple) iSight camera to work again — this even though it had already been working since I upgraded.

    I really can’t keep wasting this much time on something that isn’t adding significant value. If things don’t stabilize soon, I’m going to have to downgrade to 10.4 again. And if you want to talk about something that would dissipate the Reality Distortion Field, boy, that would be it.

    Aside: On my MBP I did a straight upgrade, but I did a complete HD wipe and re-install on the server. Neither one is working well.

  • The iPod Touch is not an iPod.

    I keep reading posts where I’m told that it’s ok for the iPod Touch to be missing many of the applications from the iPhone, because it really is just a digital music player.

    To my mind, the thing that clearly puts the lie to that theory is the inclusion of the Safari web browser. As a music player, they could have included (with the built-in wifi) just the dedicated iTunes Store client, which would have brought them up to par with the Zune. Once they stepped over the line and included a full desktop grade web browsing client, they have clearly made something else. In fact, The iPod Touch is the first, true portable computer of the next generation. *

    I’m not exaggerating here.

    Apple has done what they almost always do: Looked at a hard problem, and found a thoughtful, elegant, effective solution. In this case, it was turning the wild west that is current web design into something that works on a small, keyboardless, information appliance. For the first time ever, I’m not tempted to look for my laptop to follow a link I heard on the radio — the iPod works just as well, and I’ve got it in my pocket.

    In truth, I almost never plug headphones into my iPod. I’ll admit to watching dl.tv on it while waiting to pick up a pizza, but in general I just use it as a conduit to the web.

    So, it’s in that context, that I find it so painful that they didn’t include many of the absolutely obvious apps from the iPhone:

    • e-mail client
    • note taker **
    • google maps

    And don’t get me started on the disabling of the ability to enter new calendar events.

    Let’s be perfectly clear about this: This was not an attempt to keep the Touch true to its primary function; it was a transparent play to differentiate it from the iPhone and thereby maintain the iPhone’s value proposition.

    Personally, I’m disappointed.

    * Yes, the iPhone fits that category too.
    ** I’m reduced to using the notes field of a contact named “A A”. (ugh!)

  • What’s new — Omnibus edition

    Lots of new stuff to talk about…

    DS Browser

    I picked up the Opera web browser for the DS a couple of days ago. It’s an odd mixture. I think they’ve done an excellent job of tuning the experience for the DS’s two small screens + pen. However, it can’t handle a lot of content (Flash, PDF, etc.) so it’s still closer to being a “mobile” browser than a real one. It’s no fun entering data on the tap keyboard either; I haven’t tried using the character recognition. Over all, it’s an acceptable tool for light browsing in the bathtub — yes, I do this — but that’s about all.

    Level 70

    Last night, while helping Heila — Randy’s character? — grind some quests, I ding’ed 70. I’d love to say it was at the end of some extremely heroic effort, but it happened while killing yet-another-Ogre. Heila didn’t even notice until I pointed it out when we were logging off. 🙁 Oh well, time to start saving for my flying mount.

    Missing Sync

    I sprung for Version 6 of Missing Sync for Palm OS last night. It has a few nice tweaks that together added enough value to make it worth the upgrade for me. The highlights are mostly new features for Treos: video import and export, call logging and SMS message history. The biggest win for me is the new Notebook app, which finally gives us Note import/export on the Mac.

    Parallels Desktop

    I have been using Parallels at work for a while now, so that I can run Lotus Notes on Windows, but use the Mac for everything else. There’s a new version out which again adds some nice tweaks, plus one huge win: 3d acceleration. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but my friend Pookzilla has tried Half-Life 2 on it and claims very positive results. I’m going to have to grab some of my back catalog of old games and try them out; It will be interesting to see how compatible it is.

  • Listening to “Ideas”

    [Long post warning: Read if you want to record internet audio streams on the Macintosh]

    I’m a big fan of the CBC Radio1 show Ideas. Over the years, I have found that it provides some of the most consistently thought-provoking content available on radio. My only problem is that the broadcast time for Ideas is weekdays from 21h05 until 22h00, a period when I am almost always busy. To circumvent this, I need a way to time-shift the program so that I can listen to it later (typically, either when I go to bed or on the way into work the next morning).

    As most of you know, I am a Mac-weenie. This website lives on my G5 server/DAW, as does my iTunes library. I sync my iPod to that library, so the easiest way to access the Ideas content is using the iPod. Given this, the problem statement becomes: How do I record CBC Radio1 (weekdays from 21h05 to 22h00) and convert the result into something I can listen to on my iPod?

    The Content

    Like all forward-thinking broadcasters (:-P), CBC Radio is available on the web, which means that I ought to be able to record it, without needing to physically hook up an FM tuner. Unfortunately, they have standardized on Windows Media Player, which they tell me is the “most commonly used” format. They would, of course, have been better off standardizing on the most compatible format, rather than the most popular one, but at least they make the content available.

    The CBC online listening page explains that Mac users should use the Flip4Mac Windows Media plugin to play WMA content. I have this plug-in, but for me at least, if I follow the Ottawa Radio1 link, I get dubious results. There is something wrong with one or more of…

    • the CBC stream,
    • the Flip4Mac plug-in, or
    • Safari’s caching strategy

    … that causes the resulting embedded Quicktime player to play the same 10 minute clip whenever I go there. That is, it will only play 10 minutes of audio before the “thumb” on the player reaches the end of the scrollbar, and returning to the same page at a later time will cause it to play the same 10 minutes of audio as last time — not very useful.

    I imagine others have had problems using the WMA streams as well, since despite the claim that they were going to standardize on one format, it turns out that you can also listen to an Ogg Vorbis stream of (at least) Toronto’s Radio1 feed. I would have prefered getting the stream from Ottawa, but given that Ideas is available on both, I am set.

    Or am I?

    Setting Up the Recording

    It turns out that iTunes is not able to play the “.m3u” wrapped Ogg Vorbis stream, but it at least recognizes that it is continuous (i.e. not just 10 minutes long). As usual, when faced with an audio or video file that I cannot play with the standard tools, I then pull out VLC, which is a very nice freeware audio/video player available for all major operating systems. I can’t say enough good things about VLC; if it wasn’t for some un-Mac’ish GUI choices, it would always be my first choice.

    VLC happily connects and starts playing the OV stream, but wouldn’t you know it, it too stops after 10 minutes. Very odd. It has worked fine for other streaming content I have tried, which seemingly adds credence to the theory that there is something wrong with the way the feeds are being created, but who knows?

    After trolling around on the web for a while, I discover that some problematic audio will play correctly from the command line VLC player, even though it will not play in the GUI application. Sure enough,…

    /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC \
    http://www.cbc.ca/livemedia/cbcr1-toronto.m3u

    … works perfectly, so I finally have something that I can use to listen to CBC. Whew!

    The next step is actually recording it.

    I believe the best application for recording the audio output of arbitrary programs on the Mac is Audio Hijack Pro. I purchased the Pro version because it has some nice features that I use more for digital audio work. There is also a non-Pro version, which seems like it would be perfectly fine if all you want to do is record something at a scheduled time. As of the time of this posting, it costs 16 $US (it’s a whopping $32 for the Pro version).

    You can configure Audio Hijack to:

    1. Start any program you want on a flexible, repeating schedule.
    2. Record the audio output of that program (and not any other sounds your Mac is making) to a file of your choosing, optionally appending a timestamp to allow multiple recordings to be kept.
    3. Mute the output of the program, so that you don’t hear it, even though it is being recorded.
    4. Automatically exit the program after the recording is complete
    5. Import the resulting file into iTunes

    As you can see, this is perfect for the task at hand. There is a wide range of format options for the recordings, including both MP3 and AAC at many bitrates. I use 48kbps AAC to record Ideas, which produces a listenable recording in an approximately 20Meg file (for 55 minutes).

    The program I run is just a shell script that has the above command line in it, and that’s all there is to it.

    A Final Note

    It would not surprise me at all to find out that there are simpler ways to get this process going. What I ended up with is largely a result of trial-and-error. It works, but it’s not pretty. If you have found a better answer, feel free to leave a comment.

  • Woot! Thanks, Apple!

    From the latest Apple Java Update:

    This release improves reliability of the SWT_AWT bridge implementation first released in the SWT Compatibility Libraries for Release 4, and is now installed as a standard part of J2SE 5.0.

  • VNC over SSH on Mac OS X

    I was trolling around the web last night and I found this page:

    VNC over ssh on OS X Tiger Server (link is dead)

    I set up a slight variation of this and, lo and behold, it works. Here’s a snapshot of me connected from work to my server at home.

    Of course, it’s too painfully slow to do anything real, but it’s nice to know that I can drive the box remotely in a pinch.

  • MacWorld was disappointing.

    Ok, I know, I know, the iPhone was cool. Of course, unless they actually make the SDK for it available, it’s basically a non-starter. I don’t care how amazing they are, if you can’t get eReader for it, it’s useless to me.

    The thing is though, I guess in the rush to make the “vision clear” for the iPhone (complete with company name change!), they steamrollered a bunch of things that I do care about. What happened to the disclosure of the rest of the new features in Leopard? What about the ’07 versions of iLife and iWork? the 8-core Mac Pro? the commitment to gaming? [ok, I didn’t really expect that one]

    Honestly, I’m pretty disillusioned with Apple Inc. right now. Just as they actually started to look like they might be truly back in the personal computer game, they decide to make it perfectly clear how little they care about the Mac.

    And you know what? It’s not going to be clear sailing for them in the other markets they’ve decided to play in. Microsoft’s mediacenter story is nasty, but at least it actually plays TV. It’s also improving at a ferocious rate; the whole SideShow thing looks very cool.

    And for that matter everything plays MP3s now. There are already devices out there that are nicer than the current generation of iPods. I’ve gone on record as stating that iTunes is not going to rule that world for much longer, and I still believe that. The industry (and even consumers) are not going to stand for that kind of monopoly long term.

    So where does that leave us hardcore Mac fans? Your guess is as good as mine. Hopefully, they won’t forget about us completely. 🙁

  • My take: A cool idea and a great deal too

    For Mac heads. Monday link-of-the-day:

    A week of celebrations.

    It looks like the MacHeist bundles notion is gone now? Regardless, that particular link was broken so I deleted it.