Geek who loves 2 bike

Given the tragic events in south Asia this week it is hard not to be sympathetic. As part of my going Apple raves I note that Apple changed their entire home page in support of the tsumami victims Apple.com. Not true of HP or Dell. Another classy move by Apple.

Earlier I reported what appeared to be a problem with the Griffin RadioShark server program that caused my PowerBook to behave incorrectly while in sleep mode. At the time I provided a small AppleScript script to manually close the radioShark server program to prevent it from causing an error in the sleep operation.

It now appears the radioShark server program works fine with the sleep mode (and you do not need to use the manual quit AppleScript). Just before the problems occurred I had replaced my laptop battery with a replacement from BTI (see prior article). Subsequently that battery proved to be defective and was replaced. I have not experienced the sleep problem since. While my testing is not complete i am currently NOT using the manual shutodown and am operating fine.

Once again, the Griffin RadioShark is a wonderful accessory. I very much enjoy using it and listening to radio shows I regularly tape.

One Apple PowerBook = $2500 or so. One 3.5 year old girl typing an e-mail to a parent = priceless.

Mac OS X has tons of useful functionality and keystrokes. Many take awhile to find but become indispensable. Here are two of my favorites:

Cmd+Tab – Selecting the Cmd (or Apple key) + Tab key brings up a dock-like transparent window in the middle of your screen containing all your open applications. You can easily tab through each to select which one you want to make active. Even cooler, you can select commands while continuing to hold down the Cmd key and manipulate the selected program without switching to it. This includes Cmd+Q to quit that application or Cmd-H to hide the application. If you haven’t tried it, do. It is a very fast way to switch applications.

Cmd + Drag – This is another one of my favorites. To understand its value you must first know that dragging objects works great in Mac OS X. Two prime examples are dragging images from web pages in Safari to create a file in a folder or dragging URL from the Safari command line to other documents or applications. With Cmd + Drag you can drag out of an application that is not the front window into another application without bringing the initial application forward.

Here is an example. Let’s say I find a web page whose URL I want to e-mail (or IM) to a friend. With my e-mail active, I can just select the URL (assuming part of it is visible) and Cmd+Drag it to my e-mail. The browser (Safari generally) does not come forward and my e-mail is not hidden. Works wonderfully.

I am continually amazed at how much you can have running on a Mac and still work great. Earlier today I had: iChat (IM), Safari, Entourage (e-mail), Newsfire (RSS reader), MS Word, RadioShark (listening and recording), and was printing a document (wirelessly). Pretty damn good.

Well a short while later, I started Virtual PC and was hijacking audio with Audio Hijack (recording software) with all the previous software still running. My VPC session was running Internet Explorer and playing streaming audio. The Windows stream was poor, but it has been poor with any configuration. I believe that was a result of problems with the streaming server and not my Mac.

No crashes, hang-ups, stops, blue-screens, just everything working as intended.

As I have previously written, Apple periodically provided online updates to their software. Generally you are notified when an automatic update program is run. As noted, the software is only downloaded and loaded after you approve it. This works wonderfully.

Today, Apple provided Mac OS X update 10.3.7. This is an incremental update to the operating system software. While I will not go into the details of the changes, I want to comment about the experience. The download and install went quickly and flawlessly (approx 26MB). While this particular update required a restart, not all do. At any rate, as I was reminded from some recent Windows boots, Mac OS X starts pretty fast. Most importantly, the update provides incremental, postive upgrades to the software. As well as updating several items that are not of immediate concern to me, the update seem to have increased the speed of Safari, Apples web browser. As Safari was quite fast (much more so than Internet Explorer) I am really pleased.

I read about a good coupon at Dell today. The coupon was to be good to 11:59pm today. So I decided to order a new Canon digital camera. Earlier today I put in the code. My order showed the discount so I save the cart for later. When I came back to finalize the purchase, the discount had been removed and no explanation was given. Re-entering the discount code did not change the order (once more with no explanation). I tried calling Dell’s 1-800 number. I was put on hold forever, so I finally hung up. Dell’s customer service is poor, no wonder Apple gets rated higher all the time.

Most Mac users are proud of their units. Accordingly they take extra care with them and try to maintain them. Recently I started using two products that have worked really well. The iKlear Apple polish works great on LCD screens, the titanium case of my PowerBook, my iPod, and my Palm T3. In conjunction with the cleaner I use the “micro-chamois” cloth from iKlear. Unlike many microfiber cleaning cloths, this is large at 16in x 16in.

Both products cost approximately $10 and will make a great stocking stuffer for any Mac enthusiast.

The past week has been bad for my Palm T3. Twice in that period, my handheld has gone dead. In each case I was forced to reset the Palm, erasing all my data. But, the point of this article is to praise the Palm OS wonderful ability to recover your handheld data. After each reset/erase all I needed to do was put the Palm in the cradle and select the sync button. After asking which user I wanted to restore the computer, the software automatically restored all my data and programs to the Palm. This included user settings. No additional third-party software needed. Awesome!

Two tips that were reinforced:
1. When using the voice-memo function, absolutely make sure that you turn the recorder off after you are finished with your recording. Check twice. I believe my crashes were the result of memory filling up when I left the recorder on.
2. Sync your Palm often and regularly. Because of the stability of the Palm platform I have become lax about synchronizing my Palm handheld. Remember that the restore can only include data from last sync.

Walt Mossberg, one of my favored technology pundits writes, “The Macintosh, with its OS X operating system, is rock solid” in a recent article. This corresponds with my often repeated statement that the Mac rocks.

Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Joy Fawcett of the U.S. women’s soccer team retired from professional soccer yesterday. These women were excellent for sport and wonderful examples of sportsman. I share my best wishes for their futures.

I hope that my daughter, Sophia, shares some of the wonderful qualities that each of these ladies demonstrated.

I am still groovin’ on my Griffin RadioShark. This is probably the best Christmas gift, Mac accessory for Mac Geeks this year.

One small problem has arisen. The Griffin software consists of two parts. The RadioShark program that allows you to manage radio stations, control the RadioShark, and schedule recordings. A second background program called “radioSHARKServer” is always running to wake up and record scheduled event.

Unfortunately, the “radioSHARKServer” program interferes with the Mac excellent sleep setting. According to Griffin (and very reasonably), the radioShark server program prevents sleep so that it can wake up to record scheduled events. Per Griffin, if you manually force sleep mode, the computer will work fine.

Unfortunately, with my PowerBook I have found that if I manually force the computer to sleep (by closing the lid), I still get an aberration in the sleep pattern. Normally, the computer will wake right up when I open the lid. Now the computer goes into “deep sleep” and shuts off at some point during sleep. This requires a restart.

I hope the Griffin resolves this issue. In the meantime I have developed a usable workaround by ending the “radioSHARKServer” program manually when I want the computer to go to sleep for transport.

The following applescript will kill the radioShark Server process. Note the process will start automatically the next time you run the RadioShark application or start the computer from a shutdown.

-- Utility script to kill radioSHARKServer

-- Use for trouble-free sleep mode

tell application "System Events"

	if exists process "radioSHARKServer" then

		try

			quit application "radioSHARKServer"

		end try

	end if

end tell

Update 12/9/04 - Finally recovered my music. Ended up restoring 407 tracks from 117 different artist. This included favorites from artist like Van Morrison. So it was worth it.

I synced my iPod today and was on my way out when I couldn’t find a “podcast” that I had downloaded this morning. “That’s weird”, I thought. So I checked a few other things and found that I was missing some other music such as radio shows that I had recorded recently.

Then the light goes on. Earlier that day I had deleted a smart playlist that I had called “Never Played”. This was all songs with a play count of zero. I thought I was very careful when I did this to not select the actual files on my hard drive. I just wanted to clear that playlist and leave the music in my “Library”. This was semi-traumatic as I cleared about 2GB of music. With the amount of music I have it would be hard to figure out what was gone. Recovering would not be a problem as I own the CDs but could take a long time.

Well with a little research, I confirmed that the music files are still in my Music Folder under the iTunes folder. Now, how to determine which songs were gone from iTunes? Here is my steps:

Step 1:
Recover music that was recently added (and possibly not played yet). This was easy using the Finder’s (Explorer to you Windows users) search capability for files by modified date.
a. Do a file find for files under iTunes Music folder that had a date later than 3 days ago.
b. Drag and drop the files (from the resulting window) into iTunes.

Step 2:
This may be a little harder. I had to do some programming and database work.
a. Create a program (Applescript) that writes track location for every item my iTunes Library to a file. Store the file into a database. I used the free MySQL DB for this.
b. Create a program (Applescript) that writes the file location for every file in the iTunes Music folder (including subfolders) to a file. Import the file into the database.
c. Use a database query to find all the files that are in the “iTunes Music Folder” data thar are not in the “iTunes Playlist” data.

Step 3:
At this point, i am taking each file listed in the result of Step 3 and manually dragging and dropping the file into iTunes. Thsi is relatively fast. Since the actual file is already under the iTunes Music folder, this only adds the song to ITunes. No copy of the file is needed. I am doing to manually to verify what was deleted and potentially leave out items I am sure that I do not want.

A side note about the Applescript programs. Applescript is a non-intuitive but powerful scripting language which is available free and installed in all Mac OS X machines. The actual programs are easy to read and quite short. A downside is that Applescript executes relatively slow. The ITunes track program took a long time to run (but worked fine in the end).

With the impressive storage of the iPod you may find yourself using your iPod more and more. While my primary use of the iPod continues to be listening to music, I discovered podcasting several weeks ago. I hope by now most of you know what podcasting is. For the uninitiated, podcasting is independently made “mp3” radio shows. You download these via the net of the many RSS-based ipodder type programs. Check out ipodder.org for more information. One of my favorite podcasts is Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code. Note: I would rate this podcast as “R-rated” and not for children.

But with my latest purchase of the Griffin RadioShark, I now have a radio “time-shifting” option available. With the RadioShark i can do two very useful things: 1. Set up a schedule and record specific radio shows. This is excellent for several NPR radio shows I like. 2. Record music that I find in the time-shift buffer.

With the time-shift buffer, the RadioShark software stores music for a user defined time period (for the radio station you are tuned to). The buffer is circular. Therefore after you have hit the end of your buffer time period, the software starts writing over the first part of the buffer. I have my buffer set to 4 hours (which equates to about 2GB of space). Now with the time-shift buffer I can do two things. First, if I am listening to the radio and something (such as a song) that I want to record come on, I can go back to buffer and start a recording. The RadioShark continues to store the current radio so I can get the entire song. A second way to use the time-shift buffer is to just go back and scroll through it. By dragging a slider (or using forward/reverse buttons) you can speed through the content. You hear the scroll so you can find different songs or sections. When you find the desired section you can just hit the record button to start recording it. There are many details of the RadioShark software that some have complained about in other forums. An example is that if you change channels, the time-shift buffer starts recording the new station immediately from that point. For me the software works simply and effectively.

Separately, I have used other programs to record Internet streams. Some of these will even split songs into individual tracks. I highly rate Audio HiJack from Rogue Amoeba which allows you record anything that can play on your Mac. This includes Real Player, Window Media Player, and QuickTime.

So I encourage you to investigate alternative methods to get source material for your iPod.
1. Podcasting – For alternative radio shows. Great to find new, undiscovered music and tech news.
2. Time-shift recording – Best with the Griffin RadioShark. Awesome method to record your favorite radio shows. Also great way to sift though many so-so songs played on the radio to find the gems.
3. Internet stream recording – Great to record some of the extensive audio content available on the net. Particularly good for NPR if you do not have a RadioShark.

We are driving around viewing the Plaza Light the other night. I spot one of tnose extended Lincoln stretch limousines. “Hey Sophie, look at the limo over there.” Her immediate response: “No daddy, that’s a school bus”.

Playlist Magzine online just posted this article reporting how Apple is selling a charity song at their normally low price while supporting the higher price demanded by the recording artist. Revenues to go to a charity.

Awesome. Makes me proud to be a Mac and iPod user. This is just the way the company should work. Take care of your customer and have a conscience also. The others are just "sour apples" (pun intended) that they didn't think of it first.

Note: this is a quick update and not a review. I will post my review after some use.

I have been excitedly waiting to get the Griffin RadioShark for awhile. Today I finally was able to purchase one. This will come to great relief of several local retailers who I have regularly queried about the unit. Surprisingly, many of the Apple Store employees seemed to not know what this was over the past weeks that I have been asking.

My initial take is that this thing is GREAT! It may be the ultimate Christmas gift for anyone with an Apple Mac and iPod.

So far the installation, setup, and use has been easy and flawless. I was especially surprised based on a very poor review on Engadget on December 1st. (Note: It appears that the Engadget review was removed from their site.) It does appear that while the unit and software is supposed to work with either a Mac or PC, it may more oriented towards Macs.

The Griffin EarJams are simple iPod earphone accessories that attach to the standard Apple “earbud” type earphones adding a silicon pad that fits into your ear. Griffin’s marketing hype claims that they improve sound and comfort.

I purchased a pair of these $15 accessories to increase the effectiveness of the standard Apple iPod earphones (especially while motorcycling). The following are my findings.

First, let me set the stage. The standard iPod earbuds offer moderately good sound but are terribly uncomfortable. A problem with the iPod earbuds is that I (and many others) find them physically irritating to the ear after a short period pf time. This irritation is the physical size of the earbud pressing your ear not the sound. I regularly use the Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones with my iPod. The Bose offer far superior sound but are bulky and not appropriate for certain activities. For me this includes motorcycling and kayaking.

The Griffin EarJams come with three different sized silicon ear inserts and a small carrying case. In trying the EarJams I determined that contrary to claims the EarJams do diminish the fidelity of the iPod earphones. This is easy shown by playing the same track with and without the EarJams attached. In addition, while slightly more comfortable than the naked earphones I would not say that the EarJams are comfortable.

On the plus side, I believe the EarJams will be useful for a specific use of my iPod earphones. When traveling on my motorcycle (on the highway mostly) I enjoy listening to my iPod. With the regular IPod earphones placed under my helmet there is quite a bit of wind noise and outside noise. The EarJams reduce the outside noise that is allowed in. The loss of fidelity is not a big issue in this case because the wind noise and loudness of my motorcycle reduce the ability to hear minute details in the source anyway.

The case included by Griffin is really too small to be of much use. With effort I can stuff my Apple wired remote, earphones, and EarJams in it. The case is so small it will be easy to lose.

So bottom line. If you have (or better yet are) a iPod using motorcyclist the EarJams could be a low-cost accessory to improve your motorcycling listening. I believe a dedicated set of high-quality in-ear earphones will probably have much better sound but will cost much more. Durability of the high-end earphone may be an issue. I have ridden a couple of thousand miles wit my iPod earphones with no problems. This included riding in the rain.

Recommended: Christmas stocking stuffer for motorcyclist iPod user.
Not Recommended: All other uses.

As noted in an earlier article, one of my PowerBook G4 Ti batteries went bad. The KC Apple store was no help. Most disappointingly the “Genius” at the store informed me that they do carry the battery in the store and I would need to order it from the Apple online store. This really does not make sense, as this model PowerBook was the top-of-line machine a year ago.

That evening, I went to the Apple online store to lookup the battery. The site informed me that the battery was backordered and would ship in 3-4 weeks! Unbelievable.

The next day I called a local Apple Reseller and authorized service store, MacHardware. There I was informed that they were out of stock, but always keep some in stock. I assumed that I would have to wait a few days. I told the store employee that I would call back in a couple of days. At that point he said. “Oh, you could try back tomorrow (Friday). If it is not here then it will probably be Monday”. I called today (Friday). Sure enough, the battery had arrived; the store put it on hold for me (name only, no need for credit card). I picked it up. Also, unlike CompUSA (where the store said I would also have to order online and the price would be more than retail), MacHardware sells the battery for regular retail price. Kudos for great service.

As a small aside, apparently according to various sources, Apple no longer manufactures this battery. A company name BTI is the new vendor. This is extremely surprising as the battery is for a laptop that is not that old.

As someone who is a Mac zealot and generally promotes Apple to everyone I meet I have to report a contra-argument experience today. I recently had one of my laptop batteries act very weird. After working fine, the battery went from fully charged to very low in no time. The battery refused to charge. Please note that for business reasons I have redundant and identical PowerBooks. This allows me to test items on different machines. One of my batteries worked find in two PowerBooks. The bad battery did not work in either PowerBook.

Now I have been responsible for evaluation, purchase, and management of many, many PC laptops in the past. With all these machines I have never had a battery go from working to immediately bad in no time. A typical situation is gradual to rather fast degradation of holding a charge.

Now, Apple in their wisdom has a “smart” battery. The PowerBook battery has a microprocessor in it. Inexplicably there seems to be no way to reset it.

After searching the Internet, reading the message boards, and following a knowledge base article on Apple’s site, I had no luck in resolving the battery issue. At this point I decided to visit the Apple Store. In an earlier article I spoke of my pleasing experience in the new KC Apple store.

This time, I noticed some differences. First, Apples earlier policy was that “walk-in” customer were served at the Genius bar on a first come, first served basis. Reasonably, you had to wait behind AppleCare customers that had previously scheduled appointments. Well the new policy is that you had to sign in on an online form (available on the many computers in the store). Read my Bose store article for a much more customer friendly policy. But note that I stood at the Genius bar with another person for over 10 minutes before anyone told us we needed to sign in. This notification was only after I noticed another person, who had just walked in, being instructed to sign-in and when I asked the Apple employee.

More importantly, the “Genius” that eventually helped me did not really seem to know much. First he searched the Knowledge base. He did not find any relevant entries. After having me demonstrate the battery problem, his only responses were: Well that shouldn’t work that way. I have never seen that. I can’t explain it but even if you had AppleCare we would not warrant that.

When I inquired about purchasing a new battery his response was that Apple Stores do not stock that battery. This despite my model being the top-of-line PowerBook less than two years ago.

I still love my Macs, But buyer beware. This and previous experience have taught me that Apple’s warranty sucks. I believe AppleCare is worthless and Apple does not consistently warrant their products. I have previous experiences to prove this. I sincerely hope that future Apple store visits are better and that this was more an experience with a single poor employee.

For all the friends I have recommended Apple to, I still recommend Macs with the following caveat. The Mac IS better, but it can be expensive.

My 3 1/2 year old daughter, Sophie, and I were sitting in our office (the subject of a future article) while I was writing a letter on my PowerBook. Sophie asked me if she could use the computer proclaiming “you have been using it for a very, very, long time, it is my turn”. She does this whether I have been using the computer for 5 seconds or 5 minutes. As I patiently explained to her that I was writing a very important letter that I had to post very soon, she replied “Fine I will make my own letters”. I continued to finish my letter in not much time. As I turned around I found out that Sophie had created at least 10 to 12 letters. Each letter was a piece of computer paper that she had written on and carefully folded into an envelope. My immediate reaction was, honey, try not to use so much paper. Almost immediately I realized how ridiculous my statement was. The paper cost almost next to nothing. I have wasted far more in drafts of documents. Most importantly, Sophie had used ingenuity in coming up with her own alternative to using the computer. The folded “envelopes” were quite good.

At a similar time Sophie asked to use the scotch tape. I handed her the roll that we use. Of course it was nearly empty and ran out. We searched for another roll, found it, and Sophie completed her task. My earlier experience taught me that Sophie, while using a relative large amount of tape, would not be using that much in the big scheme of things. I encouraged her creativity. She now has her own tape dispenser and rolls of tape.

A note to the environmentalist. I am teaching my daughter to not be overly wasteful. But a gallon of gas cost far more and uses way more resources than the paper and tape Sophie used. As someone who tries alternate methods of transportation but still drives quite a bit I can not ask my daughter to not use small things when I could easily just save that single gallon of gas.