In Our Time - how to subscribe to the podcasts

With a bit of effort, I was able to dredge up my my first blog reference to the BBC Radio 4 History of Ideas program In Our Time. It was early 2005, and podcasts were new to me.

Only a bit more than four years ago.

Later I wrote a very geeky post about how to turn the useless streaming archives into useful audio files, but it appears I never wrote a general introduction about subscribing to IOT. Until now.

This is bit a less technical topic than my usual blog fair, but I'm featuring an In Our Time display at my 50th bd party tomorrow and I figured I'd attach this post as a handout. I'll be playing the Best of IOT from my library of 187 programs in a moderately quiet corner of the house.

Yes, it's the party of the year. It's a good thing the younger me isn't around to hear of it.

If you use iTunes there are two easy ways to subscribe (either one works)

1. Go to the iTunes Store. Find the search box and enter "In Our Time". Pick the icon that says "In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg".
2. Go to the BBC podcasts page for IOT and click on the iTunes icon.

That should do it. Only problem is they're done for the season, so you have to wait until the new season starts. The BBC doesn't let you go back and get old podcasts. If you miss them, you're out of luck.

That's why I'll be handing out a starter set of 57 of my favorite episodes on DVD at the party with more available on request. That should carry listeners through the summer.

A word on the BBC's web sites. There are no less than 3 confusing pages related to IOT, but at least now they more or less link to one another (they didn't used to). The pages are:

1. The original page with archives (RealAudio, yech).
2. The aforementioned podcast page.
3. The new page with links to the above two.

Better Byline: Add a post to twitter button

I like the iPhone’s Byline Google Reader client and I like how it works with Google Reader Shared items (my shared item feed, standard view).

My Shared Items are all searchable, they're a collection of things I found interesting. Google records what I like and share, and it helps build their search network. Lastly any interested person can subscribe to my shares and add their own.

That's great, but there's one missing piece. Byline could fill it in perfectly -- or a competitor could do it and challenge Byline's supremacy.

The missing piece is Twitter. I don't do or get much from Twitter -- I prefer blogs. I wouldn't mind experimenting more though; "tweeting" on topics I find interesting. I'm not going to give up my Shared Item workflow to do that however. If only I could have everything ...

Happily, I could. Byline could add a button that would take my Byline Shared Item comment and post it as a tweet along with a shortened url pointing to the feed item. I could tap one button to Tweet my comment, another to post the same comment to Google Reader shared items. Tags would get hash marks in Twitter, labels in Google Reader.

Win win, and a big win for Byline. Or someone else who wants to challenge them ...

(This idea is hereby offered free of charge to the public domain -- so no stupid patents but anyone can use it.)

Buying my Chrome OS (XP) Netbook

Apple saved me some money the other day.

Apple persuaded me that I should forego a MacBook Air or new MacBook in favor of a netbook running Google Chrome atop creaky old Windows XP.

Thanks Apple.

I thought of waiting for Windows 7, but then reality spoke up. Regardless of what anyone might say, I know that Windows 7 won’t really work on a paltry Netbook. In any case Microsoft will pull XP from the market, jack up the price of the OS, and try to push everyone to high end machines (Ballmer has said as much publicly).

Makes more sense for me to buy an XP Netbook before Win 7 comes out, and just run Chrome and Windows Live Writer. It will be my preview version of Chromestellation.

I’m going to need a companion data service, but I’ll add that as a dongle or use the Verizon MiFi (No love for AT&T here) …

… the Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate). It’s a little wisp of a thing, like a triple-thick credit card. It has one power button, one status light and a swappable battery that looks like the one in a cellphone. When you turn on your MiFi and wait 30 seconds, it provides a personal, portable, powerful, password-protected wireless hot spot…

…The MiFi gets its Internet signal the same way those cellular modems do — in this case, from Verizon’s excellent 3G (high-speed) cellular data network. If you just want to do e-mail and the Web, you pay $40 a month for the service (250 megabytes of data transfer, 10 cents a megabyte above that). If you watch videos and shuttle a lot of big files, opt for the $60 plan (5 gigabytes)…

…If you type 192.168.1.1 into your Web browser’s address bar … the MiFi’s settings pages magically appear. Now you can do geeky, tweaky tasks like changing the password or the wireless network name, limiting access to specific computers, turning on port forwarding …

…The MiFi recharges from a wall outlet; it still works as a hot spot while it’s plugged in…

With the MiFi you can get your App Store-plagued iPhone off AT&T’s dying data network.

So, which Netbook to buy? Here Amazon, as usual, is my friend. The #1 seller in Amazon’s netbook category is the $380 ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-PU1X-BK 10.1-Inch Black Netbook (with $20 for an upgrade to 2GB)

Display: 10.1-inch 1024x600 LED-Backlit Widescreen LCD (Color-Shine/Glossy Screen Technology)

Intel CPU: Intel Atom N280

Wireless Data Network: WLAN: 802.11b/g/n (draft 2.4GHz n) & Bluetooth V2.1 + EDR

Camera: 1.3M Pixels

Audio: Stereo Speakers, High-Definition Audio CODEC, Digital Array Microphones

Storage Cards: 2-in-1 MMC, SD(SDHC) flash card slot

Input/Output: 1 x VGA connector, 3 x USB 2.0 ports, 1 x LAN RJ-45, 2 x audio jacks: Headphone & Mic-in

Dimensions: 10.31 (W) x 7.01 (D) x 1.02~1.44 (H) inches

Weight: 2.81 lbs (with battery)

Or what about the Acer Aspire One for $300? That one also comes with an evil AT&T service plan option (integrated 3G dongle) …

To be updated with my purchase decision …

Update 7/31/2009: In response to a provocative comment, I clarify my perspective on the logic of AT&T/Apple's actions.

Notice you're not getting any voice mail messages on your iPhone?

Turns out AT&T's visual voice mail is out of order for many users -- and they haven't mentioned anything ...

AT&T Is A Big, Steaming Heap Of Failure

... the most recent AT&T failure is completely inexcusable. Its visual voicemail system — which is the only way to be notified of voicemails on the iPhone — has been down for many users for days, if not weeks. And AT&T apparently didn’t bother to tell anyone...

I just tested, it's working in Minneapolis St Paul. In general though our AT&T network is not as lousy as many other cities.

Note this article was written before the Google Voice iPhone app debacle.

Fixed: My iMac was losing net access – but only for one account …

Some days, I feel like the aging Sheriff in a bad western. The bad bugs been walkin’ into my town for years, and I’ve been shooting ‘em down.

‘Cept I’m not as fast on the draw as I used to be, and the bugs are getting meaner. Sooner or later the bad guys are gonna take this town – unless a new Sheriff comes along.

Not today though. I dropped the latest bastard. It took a few shots though. Not a clean kill.

I’ll tell the story, but first some background. I’ve been weeding my network for months, dealing with a slew of problems that seemed to be software related but were probably more hardware.

I’ve replaced the NIC on my old XP box and an ancient AirPort Extreme. I worked my way through way too many AirPort Time Capsule issues with cobbling together 802.11b,n,g across multiple devices, but it seemed I had things fairly stable.

Wrong. I’d be working away happily, and my browser sessions would hang. Sort of. Well, actually, Safari would first give me weird error messages about being unable to obtain a secure connection “Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server...”. Firefox said something similar, though sometimes it would work when Safari wouldn’t.

A little bit later though, I’d lose all browser access.

At first I wanted to blame my DSL provider (Qwest), but I’d given them a hard time when the truth was my AirPort was dying. So I decided to be a bit methodical. It took a while but I found …

• Other machines were fine.
• Other accounts on my iMac were fine.
• I could ping things, I could do email, I just couldn’t use my browser.
• When Safari died completely, no other browser worked (Firefox, Camino).
  
• Sometimes logging out and in again would fix things, sometimes restarting the machine, sometimes restarting the Time Capsule …

So it was something to do with my user account and maybe with Time Capsule. My next step was to enable logging on the Time Capsule and to learn to use the OS X Console (equivalent of XP Event Viewer).

That was a revelation. There were lots of little system problems showing up in Console. As it turned out, I had to clean them out before I could find the real problem. So I fixed a MobileMe related bug, removed 2-3 Widgets [2] and learned about MenuCracker and cleaning that out [1], but I was still getting locked out.

Once I’d cleaned up the other Console messages though, I found the sweet one ..

7/22/09 10:50:13 PM com.apple.familycontrols 7470 failed to send kill to 7714. Err:3 No such process

Ahh, yes. Parental Controls, the bane of Apple. Of course my standard user account shouldn’t have Parental Controls, but this made sense. I use Parental Controls and the kids machine and I know how they work, they could cut off my browser access – though there’s supposed to be a UI notice.

I checked the PreferencePane for the problem account from my Admin account, but there seemed to be no Parental Controls set. On the other hand, when I viewed the Parental Controls Preference Pane I wasn’t seeing the big yellow icon and the notice that “Parental controls are turned off for this account”.

So here’s where things get even more obscure. Let’s say you have a User Account and you want to remove Parental Controls. Just enabling everything isn’t enough, there’s another mysterious step.

Here’s what you do

1. Log out of all accounts.
2. Go to an Admin account
3. Go to Parental Controls
4. Click on the (problem) User Name.
5. Look carefully for a small gear icon above the lock icon, window bottom\
6. Click on the gear and choose “Disable Parental Controls …”

It’s been several days now without browser failure, so it looks like I got another bad guy.

If only I knew this one was the last …

---

[1] It’s a hack that allows apps to put an icon in the Finder title bar; it’s not a separate app, it’s a “.menu” resource in the Application Package. If you decide you want to get rid of it, you have to find and uninstall every app that uses it, such as, in my case, MenuMeter. I don’t think MenuCracker was causing me serious problems, but it was producing Console error messages and it has caused grief to some in the past. I not only removed it, I removed Perian and a “Better Finder” Preference Pane. Trying to get simple …

[2] I was surprised by this. Looks like non-Apple widgets are problem prone, I’m sticking the Apple ones – don’t really use them anyway. In particular, I was surprised how many were active in the background – putting error messages on the Console …

iPhoto feature: drag folder create event or album

I've back on iPhoto 2008, but I suspect this is still true.

If you drag a desktop folder of images to an empty area on the iPhoto album list you get an album named after the folder.

If you drag the same desktop folder to the iPhoto Library:Photos icon you get an Event named after the folder.

I used to do the former, lately I prefer the latter.

iPhone development - an overview for the curious

via DF: Matt Legend Gemmell – iPhone Development Emergency Guide.

I'm not an iPhone developer, but I still enjoyed this. It's a great way to understand more about how the iPhone is put together.

Great article.

Time Capsule's nearly Fatal Flaw

Apple customers need more spine. This fanboy isn't nearly ballistic enough (emphases mine)...

Mac 301: Time Machine backups after your Mac's brain surgery

... Replacing the logic board is essentially like getting a whole new Mac; though all the data on the hard drive is identical, the new logic board will have different hardware identifiers (specifically, the MAC address) that will tell your Time Capsule, "This is a new Mac that's never been backed up before. Please treat it as such." The Time Capsule, doing as it's told, will fumble along and create a new Time Machine backup while ignoring the old backups completely.

Your options then are these:

1. Scrap your old Time Machine backups and start fresh. There may be an allure to this, but it's almost certainly unnecessary, and you can lose months of perfectly good backups. Plus, you then have to deal with the incredibly long first Time Machine backup all over again.

2. Hack your Time Machine backup using the following procedure, which will allow you to resume Time Machine backups as though your logic board was never replaced.

So you send your machine to Apple to get fixed, confident that you're fully backed up with Time Capsule.

Your machine returns in great shape with a wiped drive. No problem, you think, you've got Time Capsule ...

Oops. Your backup is worthless unless you can hack the backup image...

Excuse me, I need to breathe into a paper bag now.

Ok, I'm back.

Apple's forums have lots of threads on the topic, like this one. It seems poorly documented, but if you have the Time Machine icon in the menu bar (set via Time Machine preferences) and you option-click on it you get a "Browse Other Time Machine Disks" option.

I found one kb article with some information for Time Machine and another for Time Capsule ...

Restoring an existing Time Capsule backup to a new Mac
When your new Mac starts up for the first time, you are asked if you want to transfer information from another Mac or volume (in the "Do You Already Own a Mac?" window).
Click "From a Time Machine backup or other disk."...
... Time Capsule appears as a Backup Volume. Select it, then click Continue to proceed.
Enter the password for your Time Capsule...

Except that doesn't make sense. What if there are multiple machine backups on the Time Capsule?

I suspect there are workarounds, but it confirms my feeling that Time Capsule is half-baked.

BTW, there are interesting issues with FileVault such as ...

Note: If you use FileVault, your Home folder is backed up only when you are logged out.... If you use FileVault, you cannot browse for individual items in your Home folder. However, you can restore all files and folders by using the Restore System from Backup feature of the Mac OS X Installer

iPhone encryption is 3GS only – and how the data disappears

I read of iPhone 3 encryption at launch time, then heard no more of it.

I wondered where it had gone.

Turns out it's 3GS only dedicated hardware encryption, and it's invisible to the user ...

TidBITS Safe Computing: iPhone 3GS Offers Enterprise-Class Security for Everyone:

... According to Apple, all data on the iPhone 3GS is encrypted by default...

Great feature, though I'd like to see the ability of 3rd party apps to use it app-specific longer pass-phrases.

Update 7/21/09: I think Gruber pointed out that remote wiping doesn't require removing all the data, just the unique decryption key. So the data is still there, but it might as well be on the far side of the moon (unless there's a backdoor or a big math breakthrough ...). A NYT article on ‘vanishing’ data is relevant – the way to make data “vanish” is to require access to a centralized decryption key that can itself disappear. See also – DRM and the case of the vanishing Orwell.

MobileMe (.mac) and the OS X Console - bug and the console dock bounce

I've been trying to track down an odd 10.5.7 software bug.

Every 1-3 days, my user session browsers hang. I can ping the net and browse the LAN, but Safari and Firefox are unable to get secure sessions or access the net (I need next time to check if email works).

Weird.

Anyway, to investigate this I launched the OS X Console app (called ... "Console) and studied the output. I didn't see that much about the browsers, but I saw a series of recurrent ".mac" sync requests that were failing. I looked into my MobileMe PreferencePane (new name for .mac) and I still had the credentials of a MobileMe account I was trying. I'd canceled the trial account, but the OS was still trying to sync it. I clicked 'log out' (or equivalent) and the problem went away.

So there's a 10.5.7 bug with discontinued MobileMe accounts. If you discontinue your MobileMe account, be sure to "log out" of the old account in the MobileMe PreferencePane

The Console's an interesting place to look for odd problems, in much the same way as in XP one checks the admin event monitors. It does, however, have issues of its own. It transiently uses 100% of my G5 CPU, and it has a very obnoxious bounce behavior. Every time a line is written to the Console it bounces in the dock to get my attention. I admit, I can't ignore the bounce.

I'm sure there's a way to kill the Console dock bounce, but a Google search didn't turn it up. (You can, however, toggle all bounces via the terminal).

Now back to that networking/browser/http bug ...

Update: I have to laugh. There's a Console.app preference for "when an open log is updated" that toggles the bounce. My expectations were too low; I didn't even look.

Update 7/20/09: The weird bug struck again. I tried to hit an https resource and both Firefox and Safari couldn't get a secure session -

Safari can’t establish a secure connection to the server...

In the past the next step is losing all http access. It's as though something were consuming a finite http related resource ...

I switch users and there's no problem, so it's a resource in my user session.

Then I check Console and find this ...

7/20/09 1:56:21 PM DashboardClient[23283] (ca.aquabox.widget.twidget) file:///Users/jfaughnan/Library/Widgets/Twidget.wdgt/Scripts/prototype.js: SyntaxError: Badly formed JSON string ... Twitter is over capacity

Huh?!

Yes, sure enough, I once installed a Twitter Dashboard client, Twidget, -- then forgot about it. It's making http requests in the background - constantly.

I wonder if it's consuming some resource ...

I've deleted it. Never occurred to me that the Dashboard client was sucking cycles -- I rarely run the db.

Update 7/25/09: Fixed. Turns out it was a Parental Controls bug.

Firefox 3.5 slow startup: It's a big bug

Firefox 3.5 can take up to 15 seconds to launch the first time each day I use it at home, but at work it can take, literally, minutes.

Disabling update checking seems to fix the problem. It's in Tools:Options:Advanced:Updates.

I disabled all update checking. Of course this is not optimal, I'm hoping FF comes out with a fix shortly (I'll have to manually request the fix update though!).

(Credit to a work colleague for this fix.)

Update 7/24/09: After a few days I realized removing update checking didn't really fix things. Another colleague spotted the bug report. Wow.

It's remarkable how long it took the Firefox team to admit there was a serious problem, and how egregiously bad the original security related design decision was. Per my colleague:

Apparently the issue is that the Firefox 3.5 NSS (Network Security System) reads all the files in the IE cache and the Windows Temp folder to generate a seed for its PRNG. Not only is that expensive in and of itself but it also might (!) cause your AV scanners to re-scan every one of the touched files. Apparently clearing your IE cache and Windows temp files may or may not help.

This should be a wake-up call for Firefox. How did this design make it into production? Why was there so much resistance to admitting something was badly wrong?

Update 7/24/09b: The newest release may have a fix.

Update 7/24/09c: It was a bad design flaw, but I now see why I was so affected by it. Some IE install glitch had given me a HUGE IE cache -- one that was above the IE 8 1GB limit! I only discovered this when trying to reset it, and discovering IE shrunk it to 1GB. I set it to 50MB and deleted what was in there. As usual my Windows Temp folder also held quite a bit of junk, but it was the IE cache that was huge.

The five incomplete ways to search a Google Blogger blog

There are several ways to search a Blogger blog, including the search box gadget, Google Custom Search, Google Blog Search, and and the Blogger editor search.

I'm just starting to use the search box gadget, but I suspect it's similar to Google Custom Search -- it turns out to use the very mediocre Google Blog Search indexing.

Google Custom search coverage of my blogs varies from very good to fair. It all depends on how Google feels about my blogs on a particular day. Sometimes it's keen, sometimes not so interested. When it's keen the material is well indexed, when I'm out of favor the indexing is shallow. It's never comprehensive however. (Google's variable affections reminds me of my 7yo daughter, but that's another story.)

Google Blog search has extremely poor coverage of my blogs. It seems to largely index the popular blogs.

The search function that's displayed in Blogger's NavBar is sometimes better than Google Custom Search, but it's shallower -- biased to newer stuff.

Finally there's the search function that's part of the Blogger editing environment. I thought that one was really comprehensive. I'd never known it to fail -- until today.

Google Custom Search found one of my very old (2003) posts in Gordon's Notes, but the Blogger editing search couldn't find it. I did some probing and it looks like I'm indexed from 2004 on, but it fails in 2003.

So from Google alone I count five different ways to search my Blogger posts, but none of them is perfect. The Blogger editor search is most comprehensive, but the Google Custom Search will sometimes turn up posts it misses.

Of course if this material were all on my hard drive Spotlight would index it all. The Cloud is not always your friend.

Stack Overflow now has global computer question site (beta)

First Stack Overflow came for the coders. Then they came for the Sysops. Now the dynamic duo of “Joel on Software” Spolsky and “Coding Horror” Atwood are going for all the rest of the geeks. I’ve joined the Super User beta (how did they get that url?!)…

… Super User is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for computer enthusiasts – on any platform. It's 100% free, no registration required….

Stack Overflow’s children are the heirs to the pre-spam usenet. Experts-exchange is finished.

Fantastic work, and very much appreciated. I very much hope there’s a fortune in it for them somewhere – I suspect there is.

I love these guys.

DIY video baby monitor and video broadcast review

I've had limited success with low cost broadcast video (ustream.tv) , iChat, and Google Video Chat. So I was impressed by the tips and lessons in this do it yourself baby monitor project (emphases mine) ...

The mighty mini, take two: DIY video baby monitor

... In response to Dave Caolo's recent ode to the Mac mini, I figured it was time to step up. I had two things gathering dust: my old standalone iSight, a gorgeous example of Apple design sadly idle since the advent of built-in iSights, and a lovely new Intel Mac Mini that was recently scored on sale at MicroCenter with plans to set it up for my older two kids once I could get my hands on a small LCD monitor.

I figured in the meantime it would serve nicely as a baby monitor, since I couldn't find a matching transmitter/receiver pair among the various baby monitors I had accumulated over the years. My idea was that it would live discreetly, headless and tailless (monitor, keyboard, and mouse-free) in the baby's room, and broadcast both locally on my network and also wide-area so grandparents could tune in remotely.

For the initial setup, I needed a monitor, but fortunately my TV has a PC (VGA) port, which I used to configure the mini. I set it to login automatically to the main account and join my Airport network. In System Preferences, I enabled screen sharing and added iChat as a login item.

In iChat, I enabled Bonjour and instant messaging, added myself as a buddy, and restricted chats to preapproved users under security preferences. Because I didn't want to connect via screen sharing every time I wanted to initiate a chat, I typed the following into Terminal so that it would auto-accept any incoming video chats:

defaults write com.apple.ichat AutoAcceptVCInvitations 1

... While this worked great for my own local use, it had some inherent restrictions: remote users (aka "grandparents who love to watch sleeping grandsons") couldn't join the chat easily. Spouses at work had issues with company restrictions on AIM. Plus, it was iPhone-unfriendly; the holy grail for me was turning the iPhone into a video terminal that followed me around.

I went through a few different ideas: private channel on Justin.tv (great for multiple viewers, but awash in advertising, restricted at work, and unavailable on iPhone), Skype (great video, automatic call acceptance and limited iPhone capabilities, but terrible for multiple viewers), and complicated setups involving QuickTime Broadcaster.

Not wanting to reinvent the wheel (well, no more than I already was doing), I hit upon SJKM's iCam software, which is an iPhone application & accompanying cross-platform video streaming tool specifically designed for video monitoring, available in the iTunes store for $4.99....

When did Aperture get faster?

I was working with Aperture on my old G5 iMac today and I realized edit operations are significantly faster than they used to be. My hardware hasn't changed at all.

It's a noticeable difference. Kind of crept up on me.

I'm guessing it's something in 10.5.7 or in some RAW update.

Nice.