Thursday, August 12, 2004

AirPort Express: Toslink converter

Wireless Networking (Part 25): "If your stereo has a Toslink optical input and you already have a conventional Toslink optical cable, Radio Shack part 15-1584 is an adapter that fits on one end of a Toslink cable to adapt it to the 3.5 mm mini optical jack on the Airport Express. Price is only $3 to $5"

Reports are that the analog output is poor quality, so optical is much preferred.

X1.com -- search files and outlook -- a review

X1 instantly searches files & email. For Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Netscape Mail.

I took another look at this since Fallows wrote of it recently in the NYT. It's a product of Bill Gross, a Caltech undergrad classmate of mine. He made his initial fortune on a Lotus Notes module (long forgotten).

It's not quite ready for primetime. Some odd bugs and behaviors. Sent my CPU usage through the roof. Every time I hit the letter 'e' when searching in the file tag it jumped to the email search tag!!

Now it's quieting down after I tweaked the options:

1. Turned off all outlook/email/contacts indexing. Lookout works great for Outlook, and X1 doesn't search notes or tasks (meaning it's not useful for me).

2. Removed all the quick key entries for email. That stopped the 'e' problem, so now I can search for terms containing the exotic letter 'e'.

3. Restricted indexing to a subset of directories and to files under 2MB. In some directories limited indexing to file and folder name. If nothing else X1 may be fast way to locate directories and files.

4. X1 ONLY does stem searching. It doesn't do substring searching. This is a reasonable compromise for document indexing, but for finding folders/directories substring searching is feasible and necessary. So it's not as good for navigating directories as WCD (for example).

5. I need more control over what NOT to index, preferably using regex to define directory paths and files to exclude. X1 is indexing all of the FrontPage index files.

Given the above it might be useable. I have a LOT of content to index.

Debugging OS X: kernel panic log

Mac OS X Panther (10.3.5): "David Dunham
R B Cook wrote [Aug. 11]: '...he gets kernel panics approx. every 20 minutes, ... This is the best 'crash transcript' he could relay to me over the phone...'

I don't have any help with the kernel panics (I've upgraded two machines to 10.3.5 so far), but he'll probably find a file 'panic.log' in /Library/Logs, which he could e-mail, instead of trying to read off the screen...

You should send kernel panics to Apple. You might not have access to bugreporter.apple.com, but I'll bet pasting it in to www.apple.com/macosx/feedback would be a slower alternative."

USGS National Map Viewer

National Map Viewer Wow. I rarely come across a new site that's so interesting. Requires a modern Java client, on OS X needs the very latest update.

OmniWeb 5 and interesting features

MacInTouch Home Page: "The Omni Group released OmniWeb 5.0, a major update to its Mac OS X web browser. The new version includes tabs, workspaces (saved collections of windows), saved browsing sessions, site-specific preferences, RSS newsreading, enhanced bookmark management (with filtered views and history), keyword shortcuts, ad blocking, bookmark synchronization using WebDAV servers, page marking (for quick returns), HTML source editing, spell checking, and more. OmniWeb is $29.95 for Mac OS X 10.2 and up."

There are some neat features on this list, especially for users who don't want to, or can't, upgrade to Tiger. Once Tiger comes out both OmniWeb and Firefox will become more competitive with Safari -- since Safari upgrades will be tied to Tiger.