My iMac screen - dark band at the top of the display

Bad news! My July 2005 20" iMac now has a dark irregular band across the top of the display - thickest on the right side. It's most conspicuous against the login screen, or the blue background used on startup:



Superficially it looks like dirt on the display, but it's inside. I suspect some sort of LCD delamination or glue defect, perhaps related to the all the heat problems the G5 iMacs were known for. At 2.5 years this machine is out of warranty -- including my credit card extended warranty.

I can't find much about this on the net, so it's probably bad luck. We have a good Apple repair facility in Minneapolis (first Tech), I could try hauling the machine out there if I get the energy.

Update: Sounds like this.

Update 6/17/11: Three years later the band is about twice as wide. This is a kid and movie machine now, and we don't notice it much.

iPhoto 7.1.2 doesn't fix video export bug

iPhoto 7.1.2 was released tonight.

I checked to see if Apple had fixed the movie export bug.

Nope.

If you export a Movie (video) as "Current" iPhoto exports a thumbnail JPEG with an .AVI extension.

Nasty bug, in some circumstances it may result in the permanent loss of important memories.

Update 3/1/2008: It's not fixed in 7.1.3 either. I finally got fed up and filed a real Apple developer bug report:

5775826 iPhoto: default video export produces defective file 100% of the time.

Update 3/4/08: My bug was flagged as duplicate of Bug ID# 5613626. So at least it's known and documented as a bug that's being currently worked on.

Update 5/19/09: iLife '09 still has the same bloody bug!! See also a thread on this bug. Apple's refusal to fix such egregious data destroying bugs smells of Kafka.

Update 7/12/09: No fix. It occurs to me that this bug is a good HR test. Describe the nature and origin of the behavior to the candidate. Explain that the app is behaving "correctly". It's exporting the file that lives in the "current" folder. Ask them what priority they give to changing this behavior. If they say something like "That's crazy. It needs to be fixed immediately." hire them. If they say "it's working correctly" run like the wind.

Bike light breakthrough? The Ixon IQ.

I used to be a real rider. One day I hope I'll be back, maybe sooner than later.

From those days I have an old NiteRider light. It cost a fortune in 1999 and came with a massive NiMH battery that's now toast. Of course it used a proprietary connector (data lock isn't really a new idea) so I'd have to buy a replacement from NiteRider -- if one exists.

So I paid attention to the bike light that saved the world, a post introducing the German IXON IQ LED light. This excellent description tells us it uses conventional or rechargeable AA batteries -- no more "battery lock" issues. The imported device (German plugs) is about $100 US - a bargain for a serious bicycle light.

... Full power setting (14 40 [see comments!] lux) gives a 6 hour run time. Low power gives about 13 hours. Run times are for fully charged NiMH batteries. Full power is adequate as a standalone headlight for most cyclists in most situations up to about 20mph. Two Ixons at full power should be more than enough for any situation except perhaps a very fast downhill, say well over 25mph. Low power is more than adequate for low speed riding, up to perhaps 10 mph on dark roads or bike paths. For urban cycling with overhead street lights, the low power setting is perfect. These are my estimates based on my own experience using this light. Everyone's night vision is different!....

Note that NiMH battery power output drops precipitously in cold weather, these numbers don't apply to MN winters. Front wheel dynamo systems weren't big when I was in the market, but I suspect they're the answer for a MN winter rider.

Nokia 6555 plays iTunes AAC. Does everything do this now?

It wouldn't have occurred to me to try this, but I'd already discovered that Emily's BlackBerry Pearl plays non-FairPlay iTunes AAC encoded tunes.

When I learned I could mass storage mount and charge my Nokia 6555b with a mini-USB cable and a (well made) Motorola mini-USB to micro-USB adapter the next test was to drop a podcast, an MP3 song and an AAC song into the mounted music folder. I then opened the music player, selected artists, and from the options menu chose "update library".

The All Songs list showed all three files [1] and they all played.

What's with music players and AAC? I don't remember anyone mentioning that players that were once entirely MP3 now all support AAC as well.

Unfortunately our HOSA headset adapters work only slightly better on this phone than on Emily's BlackBerry. If I don't press the 3.5mm terminal entirely in I get good stereo sound on my Bose QC IIs, but unbalanced stereo sound on a pair of Apple earbuds. If I do entirely engage the 3.5 mm connector I get mono sound. I'm tempted to try the Bose mobile communications kit.

The sad news is that the fairly crude music player doesn't support bookmarks, so it's not an adequate podcast player.

Even so, this is interesting enough to make me go ahead and buy another Sandisk 2GB media card, especially because I'm able to get my headphones to mostly work.

--

[1] It also showed the "." (dot) prefixed files that OS X creates on FAT formatted media, an annoying quirk of OS X that cannot be readily managed. There are ways to remove these, but I ignored them for this experiment.

User group one: Winzip ignores NTFS attributes stored in alternate data stream

Occasionally I come across an issue nobody but me cares about.

Ok, more than occasionally.

These are "user group one" issues -- as in a user group with one member. (Thank you Andrew.)

I, for example, am the only person in the known universe who uses NTFS file attributes. I tweak my Explorer views to show the comment field in list view, for example. I even show the Title field! [1]

Being the only person who does this, I'm the only person to discover that WinZip 10 doesn't store these attributes. I'm guessing XP stores them in the NTFS alternate data stream [2] and WinZip ignores the ADS attributes [3]. I found this out when I unzipped some work and lost my metadata.

This is all very annoying.

To the user group of one.

[1] Not only does this introduce functionality that came with PC Magazine's DOS based dirnotes.com application in 1985, it also allows me to provide documentation on file shares about what certain data sets are good for. In addition Sharepoint honors these attributes (which Office apps reflect back into their internal attribute store), so I don't have to re-enter them when I upload files to my Sharepoint Libraries.

[2] Windows NT server had a very robust Macintosh file share service, it stored MacOS Classic resource forks in the NTFS alternate data stream. Later, some aftermarket solutions (DAVE) did the same thing. Worked great.

[3] I have a vague recollection that XP's copy command may ignore them too, and many backup products miss 'em.

macintosh pims (personal information management software) a Google Groups (w/ feed)

A hundred years ago I ran a mailing list called PIM-L - about personal information management. It was surprisingly popular, but I didn't have time to keep it up.

I remembered that, when Ted Goranson (The ATPM Outliner guy), bemoaning the reluctance of users to pay for good software, referred to the macintosh pims Google Group (feeds).

I think Goranson is sort-of-wrong about the software price issue. The real cost is cost of ownership, and cost of ownership of software includes the cost of data loss (or imperfect conversion) related to atypical file formats. Of course most people don't realize this is the real cost, so my point is probably academic. Still, it's a very good reason NOT to buy cool software with neat features that's supposed to hold lots of personal and unique data of lasting value.

On the other hand, the email list is wonderfully obscure. There's are feeds of course, though Google's presentation of them is very confusing. I went with the Atom 1.0 message feed.

Monitoring Dyer with ChangeDetection.com and Bloglines email subscriptions

Dyer is an iconoclastic historian journalist who, purely to spite me, refuses to create an RSS feed so I know when to visit his news page.

I may have him now.

My Bloglines feed reader supports "email subscriptions":

You can create an unlimited number of special Bloglines email addresses that are tied to your Bloglines account. The email addresses show up as subscriptions in your My Blogs page, and email sent to those email addresses appears as new items.

When you create a Bloglines email address, a subscription is added to your account. If you unsubscribe from that subscription, the email address becomes invalid and mail sent to it will bounce.

Email subscriptions are great for announce-only or broadcast mailing lists that don't provide RSS feeds. They are also useful as temporary email addresses.

To rename or move your email subscriptions, use the 'Edit' link under the 'My Feeds' tab.

I created one of these disposable email addresses for a new feed I called "Dyer" and stored it in the usual place I keep journalist feeds. Then I went to "ChangeDetection(tm) - Monitor any web page for changes" and set up a monitor on Dyer's 2008 article page.

Any changes, in theory, now trigger an alert -- almost as though Dyer had a real feed in place. Of course I only get an alert -- not the text. Still, that's all I need.

I'll update this post with news on how it works. In the event that the Dyer email address starts collecting spam it's trivial to remove it.

Sandisk 2GB microSD kit is impressive

I bought JR.com's Sandisk 2GB microSD Mobile Memory Kit

This thing is impressive. $25 for a 2GB micro-SD card, smaller than the proverbial fingernail. The kit includes a mini-SD and an SD adapter for the micro-SD card. The latter works in our camera, the card itself is in our BlackBerry*.

The combination of Google Checkout and J&R was likewise an excellent combination.

* I'm much less impressed with the BB, but that's another story.

Update 2/5/08: Amazon has 4GB versions for about the same price, and 2GB versions for about the price of lunch. Cue hysterical laughter, this is ridiculous.

Selling a cell phone without eBay: SecondRotation strikes out

SecondRotation is a classy looking site for selling devices -- cell phones, PDAs, digital cameras. One can get a better price on eBay (though I prefer to avoid them) or Craigslist, this site has the advantage of simplicity and convenience.

I may give it a try.

Update 2/26/2008: Didn't work.

I sent them my RAZR, but they neglected to include directions on ESN termination. This is well known to people who trade in phones, but not to the rest of us. Even though our Sprint relationship had ended, and even though the phone no longer works, the "ESN is still active". They sent an email offering to recycle the phone, the link to respond didn't work (programming error on their site). I was able to find the form to request the phone be sent back to me, then I'll see if I can get Sprint to remove the ESN lock.

How annoying. If Second Rotation really does return everything I won't ding them, but they really could have done a better job providing guidance on ESN unlocking.

Update 3/23/2008: After some prodding, SecondRotation returned the Motorola RAZR. It wasn't locked and I sold it on Craiglist. It has occurred to me what a great scam it would be to offer to buy phones, then claim they were locked, then offer to dispose of them for free. I am going to assume, however, that the phone was either transiently locked or that SecondRotation made a simple mistake. In the future though I'll use SR as a way to help price items I want to sell, but Craigslist is a much better option.

Headset adapters for 2.5mm cell phones - a problem

I bought a two "HOSA" 3.5mm to 2.5mm headset adapters -- they cost almost $9 each with shipping.

They don't work with Emily's BlackBerry -- we only hear sound on one channel.

I then checked the BB site -- they sell their own adapter. Alas, an Amazon reviewer found the same problem with BlackBerry's own adapter!.

Extremely annoying. I wonder what the iPhone does.

2/4/08: I had slightly different results testing on a Nokia 6555b. I also noted that the Bose Communications Kit comes with four different 3.5mm to 2.5mm adapters -- each for different phones. So a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter may have to phone specific.

Google Apps: Integration in the Start Page header

Google Apps consists of a set of loosely coupled services that can be more or less assigned to a custom domain name. The current set includes email, calendaring, very crude web page authoring and serving (limited file services), and Google Docs. There are also less well known mobile services for Google Apps.

It's great only because it's free. Mostly it's unfinished. It's not at all obvious how one provides users with any kind of unified view of available services.

Turns out, you're supposed to edit the header of the "start page" associated with every Google App custom domain -- for example: MN Sepcial Hockey Personalized Start Page.

Yep, the header. The gadgets don't quite do the trick.

It's very crude, but it's at least understandable.

I do hope Google returns to Google Apps one day. They're only half-way to a 1.0 release ...

Aperture 2.0 is MIA

This week's photo show was the obvious place to introduce Aperture 2.0.

No luck.

Macworld | Creative Notes | PMA notes: Whither Aperture?

...More specifically, the topic is: “Where’s Version 2.0 of Apple’s image management and editing app?” With the the show starting this morning, it seems pretty clear that we won’t see anything announced this week, and the disappointment I’m hearing is pervasive."

With each passing week it's more likely Apple is exiting the high end photo market.

Google BlackBerry calendar sync, the family calendar, and BlackBerry comments

We've had my wife's BlackBerry Pearl for about a week now. Some recent discoveries:

• The predictive keyboard text entry is slow for writing, but might improve with time. It's very tedious when entering usernames and URLs. I need to learn a shortcut to switch out of predictive mode into the standard multi-stroke letter selection.
• A Graffiti One (original Palm Pilot) text entry solution with predictive word selection would really be much better than this keyboard and would use space far more effectively. Sniff.
• The original Palm had hundreds of fine touches that mde working in the small 160x160 display efficient and even enjoyable. It's early, but I don't see anything like this on the BlackBerry.
• The AT&T personal BB service includes what I think is their "push" email. We use this instead of AT&T's costly instant messaging. We use Google's BB Gmail client for work with traditional email. We haven't tried Google Talk on the BB ... yet
• When I enabled the BB email I was directed to "att.blackberry.net" for a web interface. Ooops! Turns out that's not enabled for personal accounts. I've run into a few of these glitches. [1 - see update]
  

Our latest experiment was with Google Mobile's BB Calendar sync

Get calendar alerts - Using your BlackBerry� smartphone's native calendar, you can now access your Google calendar even when you don't have network coverage and be alerted for upcoming appointments with sound or vibration.

Always in sync - Your Google Calendar stays synchronized whether you access it from your computer or your phone. You can add or edit entries right on your BlackBerry� smartphone or on your Google Calendar on the web...

I was indeed able to configure a connection between our family Google Apps domain calendar and the BB. It's very slow to sync however, even with only a few test posts on the calendar. I wonder if this will turn out be a toy. If it works I might make another try to sync Outlook with Google Calendar, though I don't think there's been much improvement on that front.

We've not tried Google Talk yet.

Update 12/30/08: In the midst of a Blackberry debacle I finally figured some of the odd story with http://www.att.com/blackberrystart. AT&T doesn't document this at all. Most users don't need to know about this because when you first connect the phone to the network AT&T auto-configures the push email that's the only interesting feature of their "Blackberry plan" (which is otherwise a generic data plan).

Anyway, if you navigate to the BB Pearl app for "Blackberry Setup", then "Personal Email Setup", you will be taken to an AT&T web page for configuring your email account. Here you set up a password for your account. In the midst of these screens, as of 12/08, there's an option to "create a username". If you do that you will be asked for a password. Be sure to have the password for your email setup already, because you'll be asked for that too as part of this setup.

Once you do this you can go to http://www.att.com/blackberrystart and the username and password you entered via the phone will allow you access to a very limited page for configuring your BB email. The only novel function on this page is you can define email "filters".

I suggest you ignore this "feature", it's not worth the bother. Still, it's good to know what that absurd web page was supposed be for.

Good comment on Parallels versus VMWare Fusion OS X emulation

Nice discussion around an update announcement: VMware Fusion Updated to version 1.1.1 - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW). I really do need to install the copy of Fusion I bought, but I use Win2K so little that it's at the bottom of my to do list. I'm still on an early version of Parallels.

The Complete Guide to iPhone Car Integration

Via TUAW: The Complete Guide to iPhone Car Integration. Excellent work, clearly there are going to be a lot of products aimed at this issue. I guess Bluetooth headset is what Apple engineers imagine us using.