I get video output from my (old) video iPod. Finally.

Greed has a different meaning when applied to a corporation.

By human standards corporations are supposed to be greedy. "Greed is Good".

But there's still such a thing as a Corporate Greed. That's when a corporation takes bites that generate near term returns, but make customers bitter and lead to longer term losses.

Apple does that on occasion, most recently with the way they sell their current iPod video out connector. More on that in a moment, but first ...

I have an old fifth generation video iPod [1]. I've never done much with the video -- the few times I've tried to output to a TV I failed. We're heading out for a long road trip though, and I've loaded up the iPod with TV shows. Time to see if I can get video output working. A good Father's Day project.

The output will go to an incredibly cheap very low end 2 panel auto DVD player marketed using a recycled "Kawasaki" brand [2] with a min-jack AV.

It's probably been 3 years since I failed to get video out of the iPod. I'd forgotten ...

• you can get video output through the earphone jack as well as the dock connector
• there's a settings option hidden in the video menu that controls which connector gets the video stream. I use the "ask" option.

Both options require proprietary Apple video connectors [3]. Years ago, however, people discovered you could use a standard AV camcorder with the fifth generation (not current!) iPods if you swapped the output cables ...

O'Reilly Network -- Getting the Video out of Your New iPod--for Cheap! (Derrick Story, Nov 2005)

...In order to make your TV play back the iPod signal, you've got to redirect the outputs. You can't just plug the yellow RCA plug into the yellow RCA jack and the red into the red or the white into the white. No. Those geniuses at Apple send the video signal over the red RCA output. (Normally it arrives on yellow.) The sound comes through the white and yellow plugs.

I ended up going to an Apple store and testing this on iPod after iPod. They all have this quirk. It was intentional. But hey, it's proprietary. Woohoo. So here's what you have to do:

• Plug the red RCA plug into your TV's yellow RCA jack.
• Plug the yellow RCA plug into your TV's white RCA jack.
• Plug the white RCA plug into your TV's red RCA jack.

Except that never worked for me. Today I gave it another go, as the alternative was a trip to the Apple Store to buy the iPhone-compatible $50 DRMd, counterfeit-preventing, Apple-only dock connector video out cable set [4].

I tried 3 mini-jack to component cables, first against my TV's component inputs.

• white cable that came with my original iBook. It has the swapped cables Story describes, but it didn't work. I think it's a slightly different form of proprietary. It works with my camcorder if I swap its outputs!
• black camcorder cable: nope, just got hash
• another camcorder cable: worked perfectly.

The "Kawasaki" has a mini-AV input, so I used a short male-to-mini-AV adapter to plug in there, mating the connectors as per Story's description. Works very well, with a lovely image. If you turn it around, however, it doesn't work. Since it's a mini Av to mini-Av cable it should work in either "direction" but this hacked mini-mini cable is one directional.

My guess is that Apple's variation isn't just a cable swap, but differs slightly in connector layout as well. This may not be a simple attempt to make a steep margin on cables -- though Apple is certainly not above that. The analog output jack on the fifth generation iPod, like the analog output on the iBook, is serving two purposes. It has to work perfectly with standard audio output, but it also has to support a video channel. This is different from a camcorder output, which need not support a stereo audio cable.

So Apple's analog output from this device may be justifiably atypical. Even so, we know some AV cables work - albeit with swapped outputs. I've run into less defensible variations of this elsewhere, such as converters that claim to allow 3.5mm stereo headsets to work with "standard" 2.5mm phone earset (microphone) connectors.

If you're trying to get video from the 5G iPod headphone jack start with a good quality AV cable and test at the store if possible.

Of course if you have a modern iPod/iPhone/iTouch you're out of luck, you need to buy Apple's $50 connector kit.[4]

[1] You can figure out which iPod you have with this rather complex Apple support document.

[2] I can spend $2000 for Apple iMacs with heat problems and screens that last two years, and $200 for something from an anonymous Chinese factory that lasts forever and just works. Why?

[3] That's not the greedy part.

[4] Yep, that's the Corporate Class Greed. The kit includes a USB charger -- I have maybe six of those. If Apple had sold the cable for $25 without the charger I'd say they were greedy by human standards, but within corporate norms. I need to buy one of these when I get iPhone 2, I'll try to find a used one first or hope some counterfeiter has broken Apple's anti-counterfeiting scheme. Of course if Apple eliminated the charger and dropped the price to $25 I'd buy it from them.

Update 6/15/08

Apple is greedy with the way they package their proprietary AV output connector, but there is some justification for their proprietary approach.

For example:

• converters for connecting "standard" stereo mini-jack headphones to cell phone 2.5 mm outputs don't work.
• We're carrying a (cursed) Flip video camcorder too. It has a video/mono output jack. This won't work with the 3 component cable that works with the iPod. I have 4 different video/mono output cables that came with various cameras including the Flip. The first one I tested didn't work. The second did.
• As mentioned in my revised post above, supporting both stereo headphones and AV output probably requires some changes to the usual camcorder output.
  

In this world of seemingly standard audio-video 3.5mm and 2.5 mm mini-jack output my sense is the only reliable standard is the 3.5 mm stereo output connector. Everything else is more or less proprietary.

Burn: The best optical disk burn solution for OS X.

I love Burn.

I've tried tried other commercial alternatives, particularly trying to get rid of the invisible .DS_Store and other dot files OS X can put on CDs.

They flopped. I was back to using the built-in burning tool, but it doesn't let me readily enforce the lowest common denominator (PC Juliet) standard, and I'm not sure it fully excludes the treacherous dot files.

Today though, my OS X gave me the ridiculous 0x8002006D error message during a burn. That means something is wrong. Helpful.

I fired up Burn for the first time. Simple. Lets me set PC Joliet easily. Shows dot files so I can remove them. It also showed the error, but said my CD burner couldn't calibrate. That's really helpful, it suggests a hardware problem. I blew in some compressed air and used a different CD and it completed the burn.

Great app. Open source and free. If they provide something other than PayPal for donations I'll send money.

As for the burner -- well, this is a G5 iMac. Those machines should never have been made. Fantastic heat problems, especially with the buggy hardware control software Apple used for the first year or two of the G5 iMac life. I suspect the DVD is another victim of too much heat for too long -- this machine is heading for the scrap heap at age 2.7 years. Not happy.

I'll try more CD cleaning methods of course. The compressed air jet was a quickie.

Update 6/15/08: Rich T says Simply Burns is also very well done.

Another Google product bites the dust. That's good.

This is probably the third or fourth Google app I've used that's been quietly discontinued or effectively abandoned.

Google Browser Sync To Be Discontinued

...Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that synchronizes your bookmarks, web history, browser sessions and passwords across multiple computers by temporarily saving them to Google's servers. Unfortunately, this was the project of a small team at Google and it's no longer maintained...

I was think yesterday that Google Browser Sync was due to be abandoned. I'm getting psychic.

I'm glad they're at least officially shutting it down.

Google has been great at starting things, lousy at finishing them. They need to cut way back on new initiatives until they decide what they're going to be serious about, then fund maintenance properly. They also have to start recruiting people who like doing software fit, finish, and maintenance, and layoff hiring inventive types for a year or two.

For example -- either fix Google Calendar Outlook sync or abandon it.

I think all Google customers have a long list of apps that need attention (BlogThis!?). One cheer for a sign that Google knows they have a problem.

Cisco VPN Client for 10.5.3

Cisco VPN Client 4.9.01.0100 works for 10.4 and later, including 10.5.

It can be hard to find Cisco VPN client downloads, Andrew got this one for me.

Update: I couldn't get the image to download fully, and now it's offline. Comments tell us Cisco's distribution policy has not change, this was an unauthorized image and it's probably been removed.
I was able to download an image through my university account. It took 3 tries, I kept finding older versions on various U servers. The official site (UMN authentication required) had the version I needed: Cisco VPN Client 4.9.01.0100

I think for most people that's the best way to get an updated VPN Client -- find someone with access to an university account and ask them to get the client. Just be sure they know what the latest version is! I suspect many universities have multiple distribution sites.

Outlook 2003 treachery: revising recurrences wipes appointment data

I’m a hard core Outlook user.

I’m not proud of this. I wish Ecco Professional had survived, or even Agenda.

Still, it has some brilliant moments – especially when Outlook 2003 is combined with Windows Search (formerly Windows Desktop Search).

But.

Against good design, like the custom views (too bad the sort category view bug took ten years to fix!), must be set the the real nasties. Like one I just fully understood today.

If you change the pattern of a recurring appointment, you wipe all prior exceptions. That’s fine, but the “exceptions” are any appointment that has attachments, agenda items, category tags, etc.

Want to go back and look at a past agenda? Forget it.

Maybe you’ve attached attributes to appointments and keywords so the appointment record can serve as a lookup and index to printed notes?

Gone. Vaporized. All of it.

This is just plain evil.

Reduce SMS texting spam to cell phones

Cell phone spam costs recipients money – thanks to the insane charges carriers apply to text messages.

Pogues has some great tips - How to Block Cellphone Spam. The best at the moment is to change your SMS ID to an alias, spammers don’t bother to guess those and probably can’t process them with available software.

Clearly we’ll need better solutions though …

How to decide software is worth testing

I'm not that happy with Google's free web album plug-in for iPhoto, so I figured I'd try a commercial alternative.

If it passed a simple test.

The test?

It had to be easy to find the uninstall directions:

iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums F.A.Q. - Products | ubermind

How can I remove this plug-in from my system?
iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums can be removed by deleting the plug-in file located at:

~/Library/Application Support/iPhoto/Plugins/
iPhotoToPicasaWebAlbums.iPhotoExporter

(~ represents your home directory.)"

Not too hard, so I'll try it out.

This is a very good screening test for all OS X software ...

Update: 6/11/08

Testing concluded, software rejected because:

1. Licensing is by license server. So I can't backup my license, if their server goes down I can't recover it, etc. That's an immediately fatal flaw.
2. It's very, very, very slow to browse a large collection of albums. Something is broken, scrolling was awful.
3. It doesn't add much to Google's free uploader. In particular, there's no option to combine titles and comments to fit Picasa's single title field.
   

iPhoto '08: Grayscale images with color profiles appear black and inverted

I scanned old photos as 16 bit gray scale with Epson Scan on my V700.

The looked fine in Preview, but in iPhoto '08 (most recent) they had black previews and oddly inverted and faint views.

This has been a probelm since version 5.0.4: iPhoto 5.0.4 or later: Grayscale images appear inverted.

The scanner inserts a color profile, and they're not color images. iPhoto gets confused.

Preview doesn't.

One would think that over 3 versions Apple would have come up with better iPhoto behavior.

I removed the color profiles using the suggested AppleScript (see link) -- one at a time.

That worked. I'm sure there's a faster solution.

Very annoying, and it's only thanks to Google that it wasn't very aggravating.

iPhone doesn’t do tasks? Who cares. OmniFocus.

Who cares that Steve Jobs has a !#% religious objection to task management?

That’s why Babbage invented computing …

OmniFocus for iPhone will be location-aware - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

… OmniGroup says that by "using your location, OmniFocus can create a custom list of actions to complete nearby. Buying groceries? OmniFocus can show you the closest grocery store and create an instant shopping list."

Pretty sweet. OmniGroup expects that OmniFocus for iPhone will be available via the App Store around the launch date in early July…

One of the “GTD” principles is opportunistic execution of location specific tasks. OmniFocus is a GTD oriented task manager.

Location specific task reminders are necessarily useful, but they are very cool.

I expect to own an early version of this app.

Update 8/10/08: Not so fast. Scratch OmniFocus.

Buy iPhone today, swap for new one?

Via Ars Technica

...AT&T remains sole iPhone carrier in US, revenue sharing axed (Updated) ... If you purchased the original iPhone on or after May 27 and want to swap it with the 3G iPhone, you will be able to do so without having to pay an additional handset charge. (There is, however, a 10 percent restocking fee on your old phone, apparently.)...

So if I buy one today, can I swap it with the new one in July? Tempting, especially for a refurb.

Why Firefox 3 is a great OS X browser

My impression is that for users of the Google tool suite, FF 3 is the best OS X browser.

One of the lead engineers explains how that came to be …

Firefox 3 for Mac OS X: Under the Hood « Boom Swagger Boom

Firefox 3 will be released soon (get the RC here). While the release contains a huge number of new features and performance improvements for all platforms, it is particularly significant for Mac OS X users. We rewrote most of the Mac OS X code that was behind Firefox 2 in order to benefit from modern Apple technologies and fix long-standing bugs. Once you try it I think you’ll agree that the results are astounding. I’d like to explain what exactly we did in this rewrite, how Firefox 3 for Mac OS X is different “under the hood.”…

So much better than FF 2!

My iPhone demands: How is Apple doing?

Almost a year ago I posted my iPhone demands.

Here's a status report (bold)

Gordon's Notes: iPhone: my demands

Non-negotiable:

1. Copy, Cut, Paste. (No)
   
2. Search. (Contacts only)
   
3. Tasks at least comparable to the 1994 PalmPilot tasks. (No)
4. Synchronization with Outlook at least comparable to the modern Palm OS (in other words, flawed, but useable). A 256 character limit on contact comments is not acceptable. (No, not yet)
   
5. Run FileMaker Remote. (No)
6. Synchronize notes. (No)
7. Multi select and process for email (Yes)
8. Apple needs to fix the "international problem". It's ridiculously easy to run up a $1000 phone bill unintentionally when outside the US. (Partial)
   
9. Let the iPhone bridge a computer to its net connection. (No)

Wishes, not demands:

1. A real calculator. (Yes)
2. Flatten the recessed headphone socket. (Yes)
3. Site-selective synchronization - so can sync at both work and home, but not send home data to a work machine. (No)
4. Support for a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. (No)
5. Video out - so I can use a larger display. (No)
6. Encrypted data stores. (No)
7. Third party app support (Yes)
8. Flash support, but not from Adobe. (No)
9. GPS (Yes)
10. Custom ring and alert tones (Yes)
11. Allow file storage on the iPhone. (No)

Current score:

• essential: 2/9
• nice: 5/9

BTW, 3G wasn't on my list -- high performance web access didn't even make my "nice" rating.

The only saving grace is the SDK and the Apple Store platform. I expect 3rd party developers will give me most of what I want. I'm buying iPhone 2.0, so I'll find out soon enough. Palm is dead one way or another, so I will have to work differently.

Still, pretty lousy score!

MobileMe syncs with Outlook

There's no way on gaia's green earth that MobileMe syncs seamlessly with Outlook ...

Apple - MobileMe - Features - MobileMe on your PC

... On a PC, MobileMe works seamlessly with the applications you use every day. You can use Outlook, Outlook Express, and Windows Contacts on XP or Vista. MobileMe automatically pushes your email, contacts, and calendars — and even your Safari or Internet Explorer bookmarks — to your other computers, iPhone, and iPod touch.
...

No way.

Still, interesting.

Notice the absence of $%!$%!%# Task synchronization. No Notes either.

I'm looking for info on gCal syn.

An offbeat Apple keynote prediction

Well, not so much a prediction as an entertaining thought for WWDC.

Amazon's Kindle is at least marginally successful, though most of the people I like to read seem to think it's not an enormous success. It has, however, made a lot of people very nervous about Amazon's power over publishing.

So I think Barnes and Noble, the big publishers, and Google might be willing to get together around a response to Amazon. Book publishers are very slow to move on anything, so they'd have to be passive-aggressive partners at best. The energy would have to come from B&N and Google.

Apple has an interest in an always connected touchscreen slate device that will do video display and conferencing, does audio and has a data-revenue stream associated with it.

So Apple will do a touchscreen slate device with a subsidized price, AT&T 3G data services, a required subscription model including the dotMac successor, and books through the (to be rebranded) iTunes store in partnership with Google and Barnes and Noble.

You read it here first ...

Burn CDs without the invisible .DS_Store (dot) files

This has been bugging me for years. I think I've finally figured it out.

The interesting bit, really, is why this problem is so mysterious. In think the mystery comes about because only old-timers wonder about this, for most people I suspect things just work (on CD anyway).

Long time OS X users remember when CDs were littered with .DS_Store and other OS X "dot" files holding file metadata. Some versions of OS X create these even when there's no extended attributes, resource fork, or other metadata for a particular file.

It's not just CDs. Thumb drives (USB mass storage media) got them too.

They're annoying as all get out. Media players that can manage AAC or MP3 files get confused by the dot files. At best they have to be skipped over.

So how do you get rid of 'em?

Well, in 10.0-10.2 you had to run use unix commands: macosxhints.com - Burn CDs without the invisible .DS_Store files.

In 10.2 or so the OS changed to burning hybrid CDs, a mixture of plain old Joliet and HFS+:

The .DS_Store (and many other mac-only metadata) files will be stripped from the crossplatform ISO/Joilet images. These files will still show up for the HFS side of hybrid images, so mac users will get them but other users on other platforms won't."

Some media devices still have trouble with hybrid CDs. I don't know about 10.5, but in 10.4 I don't think you can control this.

If you want to burn the simplest MP3 or AAC CDs for external devices, you need to specify PC Joliet as the Disc Type. In Disco ($20) and Burnz ($10) this is an option.

When you do this the PC view will not show any metadata or dot files.

Inexplicably, neither product explains why you'd want to do this. I guess they assume everyone understands that "PC Joliet" means no funky OS X metadata dot files.

Right.

Disco, by the way, has a problem in 10.4.11. When you insert a CD the finder blocks Disco's burn. No dialog is displayed, but nothing happens. I have to close all Finder windows to get it to work. I think there must be better options, I'm looking around.

Oh, and this is still a problem with thumb drives, at least in 10.4.

Update 6/9/08: I was really annoyed with Disco.app -- at one point it wouldn't burn no matter what windows I closed. Burnz didn't give me a simple enough control over what format I burned. Now I'm trying the free OSS app Burn.