My father still uses dial-up. I signed him up for an AllVantage dial-up account because it was only $5 a month. Recently AllVantage got bought by PeoplePC. There were two problems. PeoplePC charges $11 a month, and they require you to use their Windows only software for connecting. It seemed like a no go, so I called to cancel. The woman offered to only charge $4.47 for six months, I said no thanks, so when the woman said, $4.47 a month indefinitely, I figured it was worth figuring out a way around the requirement for the Windows software.

I first emailed their tech support address. I asked if I could just use PPP on a Mac. This is the response I got:

“Regarding your concern, we suggest you to reload PeoplePal Toolbar.”

I wrote back saying I just wanted to know about PPP and Mac support. I got this back:

Regarding your concern, we would suggest you to first connect to PeoplePC Online service using the PeoplePC dialer and then try accessing Internet explorer and Outlook Express.

That route was clearly a dead-end. I decided to just try it. First, I tracked down a local access number. You get a list here. (I had erroneously been looking for them in the support documentation.)

The rest turns out to be remarkably simple. Your username is simply your PeoplePC email address (username@peoplepc.com) and your account password.

With these three items in hand, PPP dial-up works flawlessly.

Testing out iMovie ‘08 using my entertaining visit to Gray’s Auction in Fairlee, VT.

YouTube video. Photo Gallery.

I went to the nearby Apple Store to check out the new MacBook today.  I only got to use it for a couple minutes.  I’d have to try it in different conditions to see how the new glossy screen deals with glare.  As you can see in this picture, the glare is definitely visible.  The new keyboard is sort of retro looking.  The keyboard on the old iBooks had tendency to be “mushy”.  The new one is rigid and consistent for all keys.

The employee keeping an eye on it said they received an early shipment which was sold out.  But they then received a second shipment.  Plenty of the second shipment were still in stock.

How long will PowerPC based Macs be first class citizens? That is, how long will the OS be released for both platforms, and how long before Applications start to be Intel only.

Facts and Factors:

• Apple has said their entire line-up will be Intel based by the end of 2006.
• Mac OS X 10.5 is due near the end of 2006 beginning of 2007 (I’m predicting will be released November 24, 2006) Apple has stated that both Intel and PPC will be supported. If you look at the most recent release cycle, 10.5 will likely be the “current” release for about a year and a half. That means PPC will be supported until somewhere around June 2008.
• The first PowerPC based mac was released on March 14, 1994. The first version of Mac OS that did NOT support the older 68K macs was Mac OS 8.5 which was released on October 17, 1998. That means 4 years 7 months and 3 days elapsed while 68K macs were officially supported.
• Despite grumbling from consumers, Apple has managed to only add new features to the very latest iPod generation without making the feature work on older generations… even though in most cases there is no technial reason to do so. (They could use a similar approach to their computers.)

Unknowns:

• Once an App cleanly works as a Universal Application, what future modifications will developers have to make for it to continue to be a Universal Application?
• How much additional work is it for Apple to maintain PPC support for the OS, their Applications, and their Development tools?

I don’t think Apple will support PPC as long as they supported 68K macs, but the real event that will make the PPC based Macs second class citizens won’t be Apple. Rather it will be a third party that creates a whiz-bang peripheral that lots of people will want, but the company won’t bother writing PPC drivers for it becuase they don’t think it will make financial sense.

Taking everything into consideration, and then disregarding most of it, I think it won’t make sense to own a PPC based Mac for just about everyone once Mac OS X 10.6 is released. I predicted that to be around June 2008 which is almost two and a half years from today. So if you are in the market for a new Mac and plan to use it productively for more than 2.5 years, buy an Intel based one. And if you want a consumer laptop (iBook or whatever it will be called), that means waiting… probably until Spring.

Ignoring for a minute the numerous reasons that I “need” a new MacBook, here are reasons that keep me from the Apple store:

• Will it Run Linux and Windows along side OS X? I presume so… but how long will it take?
• No more PCMCIA slot (have to buy new adapters for reading CompactFlash and SD cards)
• Stupid name.
• need to buy a new AC adapter for home.
• Going to be a while before native Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc.
• Will the haxors figure out how to run OS X reliably on other brands of laptops?
• It costs money
• I always tell myself never to buy the first revision of a piece of Apple of hardware. Let everyone else work the bugs out.
• No Firewire 800 (Okay, I’ve never used the FW800 port on my PowerBook, but it is the principle)

The only justifiable reason to upgrade is that Corin really needs a new laptop and I could brainwash convince her to take mine as a hand me down.

I’ve returned from the Third Coast Festival in Chicago. Added more pictures from the trip in the gallery. PRX Party album. Around Chicago album. The second album is mostly from when Seth and I took a quick walk around our hotel. It was close by the Apple store so we went and took a look at the new iMac. Turns out the remote is held on to the side of the computer magnetically. It may also re-charge via conduction. Haven’t noticed it mentioned anywhere.

OnLife is pretty neat OS X application that keeps track of your application use (currently supports Firefox, Mail, iTunes, Safari, TextEdit and iChat.) I fired it up, and kept it running today. It plots points on a graph of actions you took with an application (ie. visit a web page, listen to a song, read an email.) It then caches the contents of those items and allows you to search for them later. It is what a browser history should be. You can search for words found inside all the web pages you’ve visited, not just looking/searching titles by time like most browsers. The graphing piece allows you to get a good idea how you work and what you were up to. Click the picture to get a graph of my application use from the time I installed it until 5:00 pm.

iTunes 5.0 is out. All I wanted was the ability to specify Podcast preferences at a per feed level. Some podcasts should be checked once an hour, some at a specific time of the day. For podcasts that aren’t really date/time sensitive (This American Life, Car Talk) I’d like to keep the 5-10 most recent shows, others like Morning Edition, I’d only like to keep the 2 most recent. Fingers crossed for 5.1.

I played with syncing my photos to my iPod. It is a handy way to have my photos backed up. You can also look at the photos on your iPod which is potentially useful. Unfortunately there is a annoying side effect. Derivative photos get created which are optimized for the iPod. Makes sense since the iPod doesn’t have the processor power to display the full resolution 6 megapixels photos. The annoying part is that it also stores these derivative photos on your mac. My laptop’s hard drive is full. While trying to figure out where all the gigs went, I realized there was a 9 GB (!) folder called “iPod Photo Cache” inside the iPhoto Library directory. My entire iPod library (12,500 photos) is 19 GB. 9 GB of derivative files is a little excessive. Not sure why the derivatives can’t ONLY be stored on the iPod. Must have something to do with speeding up the sync time? What is worse, when you disable photo syncing, the cache directory doesn’t get removed. According to this knowledge base article, you can just delete the directory by hand.

MP3’s on an iPod (with firmware 1.2 anyway) now have the ability to be bookmarked. You start to listen to a file, go to another file, then come back and it will start back up where you left it. However, they’ve been a little shady by only making it work on mp3 files that are in the official Podcast section of iTunes/iPod. So if you use another client to download your podcast and then import them into iTunes into a self-created playlist, it will not be bookmarkable. I’m sure Apple would call this a feature since you might not want your songs to be bookmarked. However, as far as I can tell, it is impossible to put any file from your Library into the Podcast area of iTunes. That means, if you want to be able to bookmark an MP3 podcast, you are stuck using the iTunes download functionality.

With the purchase of a, yet to be delivered PowerBook, I managed to get in on the latest iPod deal from Apple. Essentially, if you buy a computer you can get $180 off an iPod. I took advantage of the deal before my official day at Marlboro expired and got a shiny new iPod with color display which arrived this morning. They aren’t calling it a “Photo” anymore, so I’m not sure what to call it.

During lunch today I tried an experiment. Apple’s new ChapterTool allows you to embed photos inside AAC files. I was disappointed, but not surprised that this won’t work with MP3’s. I decided to experiment with it anyway.

Recalling Engadet’s hack to get video to play with audio on an iPod Photo, and also seeing screen shots of how the iPod displayed chapter art on this page, I thought why not give it another shot by embedding still frames in an AAC.

I downloaded the Apple 1984 Commercial, converted the audio track to an AAC, and saved a frame each second as jpeg’s. Next I created an XML file that had 60 chapters (one for each second of the video.) For each chapter, I embedded one frame. Ran the ChapterTool command and it spit out my AAC audio file with an embedded movie… Well, a movie with only one frame per second. The chapter tag uses a starttime attribute to designate when the photo should be used, however, the examples only show it used in “mm:ss” format… so I’m assuming you can only have one frame a second. However, I haven’t actually tried adding microseconds to the mix.

I opened the AAC file up in iTunes and sure enough it plays like a crappy video with one frame per second in the “now playing” box.

Next I transferred the file to my iPod and fired it up. This is where a crappy hack turned into a pathetic one. I played the song and the photos actually moved frame to frame, in a tiny little square. Pressing the center button (I think) made the embedded frames larger and they did change. Unfortunately, after a few seconds, the larger photo returns to the normal view (with the tiny image, song title, and position in the song.) I couldn’t figure out how to make it stay with the large image. Even worse, several seconds into playback, the embedded images just stopped updating. No idea why.

If you want to try the file in iTunes or on your iPod you can download the file: 1984_video.m4a (1.1 MB)

And in case you want to try fiddling with stuff, here is an zip archive (1.1 MB) that contains the individual frames as JPEG’s, the extracted audio track, and the XML chapters file.

I was getting really annoyed at the mess that my podcast playlist in iTunes had become. I then realized that one of the columns you can have in the playlist window is “Date Added”. Select “View Options…” from the Edit menu and check the “Date Added” checkbox. Sort by this column and you can then see your podcasts chronologically.

This may become even better once iTunes 4.9 is released. I don’t typically listen to Adam Curry’s podcast. I don’t know why, but he just gives me the willies. But I did tune in today to see if he spilled any beans about his visit with Apple. Yesterday he met with Apple to look at and talk about the podcasting integration. I’ll spare you the willies. He rambles about it, but gives no specifics. All he really says is, “As it comes to iTunes as a podcatcher… an ipodder… yeah, they got it fuckin’ right, totally.”

From my last post, the O’Reilly Radio article states that Jobs dismisses podcasting as “Wayne’s World” for radio. I can’t help but laugh at the irony. Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2 grossed over 200 million dollars worldwide according to IMDb. Not every Podcast is going to be interesting, but the beauty is there is no longer a limited number of channels for content. And not every podcast has to have a million listeners or make millions of dollars.

Well Podcasting is about to grow some legs and become easily accessible to a Mom near you. O’Reilly Radar reports that Steve Jobs himself stated that iTunes would have Podcasting capabilities built-in within the next 60 days.

This is really the critical move to bring Podcasting to the next evolutionary step. I’m personally pretty happy with NetNewsWire’s implementation. Because I have a slow connection with limited bandwidth at home, I’m able to go through podcasts like news items and only download the ones I’ll actually listen to. But I was totally uninspired by iPodder and iPodderX.

I’ve been running Mac OS X 10.4 (or Tiger as the kids are calling it) for 2 days now and am unimpressed.

Mail.app seems to need another month of development. The whacky toolbar buttons don’t bother me as much as the general bugginess and lack of useful new features. Why oh why can’t I do a nested boolean search!?! When I search for an email, I almost always know who wrote it and keywords. No can do. (I’ve been waiting for this feature for years.)

Spotlight so far is a joke. On the two systems I use (a Dual 2.0 GHz G5 w/ 1.5 GB of RAM and a 867 MHz Powerbook G4 with 1 GB or RAM) spotlight is slow. Sometimes it seems snappy, other times (I just did a search and it took 25 seconds to display the first result!) Something is definitely not right. I guess I’ll try rebubuilding the index when I go home tonight. The interface is downright embarrassing. The results in the drop down menu are almost useless to me. When you click “Show All” in the menu, it opens this window that isn’t attached to ANY application (the finder has a different 3rd interface for searching). When the window appears, it starts the search all over again!

Dashboard seems like a good idea, although it feels a little like bizzaro world (all overlayed in and separated from the rest of the desktop). The calendar and calculator may be handy but a web browser seems just as quick and better suited for many of these other widgets that take input.

They need to just ditch the system preferences interface. I can never find the preference I’m looking for. If you need the ability to search for the preference, you know your interface is terrible.

The RSS capabilities of Safari are uh, useless. NetNewsWire has nothing to fear. If they incorporated RSS capabilities into Mail.app then that might make sense.

It certainly isn’t all bad. There are a lot of under the hood enhancements that look interesting (arbritrary metdata for files, ACL’s, unix tools that can deal with resource forks, core image, etc.). But the features that have been hyped just seem unpolished.

I’m busy reading John Siracusa’s latest article on Mac OS X (for work purposes of course). This time of he’s (obviously) focusing on Mac OS X 10.4. His pieces are always incredibly detailed, and well written. They must just take him forever to write. I’m only half-way through, but some really intersting technical details are finally available. Maybe I’ll write more when I’m done.

Until then, I bring you Firefox Annoyances that I’ve had as a draft for a while and never published. There are a couple features (mostly extensions) that keep me using Firefox, but man are there a bunch of annoyances, mostly user interface related. If only Firefox extensions could easily be ported to Safari.

Annoyances with Firefox 1.0.3 running on Mac OS X 10.3.9:

• When the download window is the only open window, command-n doesn’t open a new browser window.
• When new windows are created, the bottom moves down below the bottom of the screen (native cocoa apps resize)
• holding down the mouse button brings up a contextual window. I call it a bug not a feature. It can probably be turned off by modifying prefs.js?
• widgets look like crap on Mac OS X (even with Firefoxy or whatever it was that I installed a while ago.)
• no spell check as I type in text areas (Matt sent me a link to a spell check extension which I haven’t tried, but it doesn’t do on the fly checking, which is super helpful, because I’m too impatient to deal with all my spelling mistakes at one time.
• downloads window doesn’t have the ability to reveal the file in the finder
• flash items have all sorts of drawing issues when scrolling, rolling over, etc.
• credit card number fields are remembered
• passwords aren’t stored in the keychain
• adblock plug-in can’t block images by size
• plug-ins generally kinda suck (quicktime and java seem to have similar drawing issues as flash)
• I’ve never found a graphic way in the preferences to tell it how to handle a new file type that isn’t already in the list.

Update: Huh? Why the heck isn’t that showing up as a an unordered list? Guess I’ll deal with it later.

With on-line retailers shipping out Mac OS X 10.4 early (oops), more and more hands-on information is being made available. I came across a video of the RSS screen saver (qt movie). I personally just have a “black” screen saver installed because all the others consume too much CPU, but I thought the RSS saver was intersting. Then as I continued to watch it, it seems like perhaps the developer wrote it while hanging out in a strip club. The feed swings around like a stripper on a pole. I swear.

Okay, I showed it to Corin and she said it reminds her of a blender or a revolving door. Oh well.

The tab browser extension for Firefox always seemed to have issues. These directions do a great job of making firefox tabs just like Safari’s.

Safari tabs for Firefox updated : journal : // hicksdesign

When I last explained how to hack Firefox to get Safari style tabs, there was a missing element - close buttons on each tab. There is an extension to do this called Tab X, but it only seems to work on the Mac when using certain themes, not including the default mac theme. Fortunately, a nice fella called Chad has now created a mac version, which you can install directly from here, and it works a treat.