Cheap wireless USB adapter: CompUSA

Macintouch Wireless Networking (Part 31): "I purchased the Hawking Wireless-g USB 2 adapter last week from CompUSA, $9.99 after rebates. I was intended to use it in a desktop PC. In PC, it was identified as a Zydas ZD1211 device. I went to the Zydas website and found that they have drivers for Mac OSX 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4. So I downloaded it and installed in my eMac, it works on my eMac with Mac OSX 10.4.."

A diverse set of Airport antennas and range extenders

QuickerTek :: Products

Amazon.com: Electronics: WatchGuard Firebox X Edge X5 - firewall

Amazon.com: Electronics: WatchGuard Firebox X Edge X5 - firewall ( WG40005 )

Macintouch readers like this product:

Watchguard Firebox Edge X5 VPN/Firewall - 10 x - VPN/FirewallThis easy-to-deploy, model-upgradeable, VPN endpoint and firewall security appliance was especially designed for telecommuters with limited networking experience, and offers best-in-class performance, work/home network separation, and intuitive remote management for network administrators in the central office. Firebox X5 is the all-in-one firewall/VPN appliance that will handle all of your telecommuters security needs now and in the future. Small- to mid-sized businesses already protecting their central office networks with Firebox X5, can now extend that commercial-grade security to their remote and telecommuting employees with Firebox X5...

A sheet feed SOHO document scanner for OS X?

Amazon.com: Electronics: Fujitsu ScanSnap fi-5110EOX Sheet-Fed Scanner with Automatic Document Feeder

Document scanning w/ OS X has been difficult. This Macintouch poster suggests a solution:

It would appear that MindWrap's ScanTango would be an excellent solution. It claims to work with Fujitsu Scanners. On the basis of their claims and an earlier posting here by Randy Singer, I am purchasing a Fujitsu fi-5110EOX [$432.99 @ Amazon] from MacConnection and giving it a try.

Black levels - the achilles heel of digital video

DV and DVD Black Levels Part 2

Computer displays are cursed by fights over "gamma". Digital photography suffers from battles and confusion about embedded color profiles. Not surprisingly, digital video has its own achilles heel:

/// The analog inputs of North America NTSC TV's, VCR's and other equipment are designed for a black level of '7.5 IRE' (the 7.5 number is a reference point on a measurement scale for analog video). You may also hear this 7.5 IRE standard referred to as 'pedestal' or 'setup.' If you're in the rest of the world, using PAL equipment or the Japan NTSC standard, your equipment is designed for 0 IRE analog. We do it differently in North America because back in the Jurassic Age of television this 7.5 IRE black level was needed to make TV's work correctly. The rest of the world came up with a less-complicated way to do it.

The problem for DV users in North America is that DV 25 video equipment (named for the 25 megabit per second data rate of this popular video format), whether it is PAL or NTSC has an analog output of 0 IRE. In other words, your DV equipment uses the Japan NTSC standard and if you plug your DV gear into a video monitor or TV designed and calibrated for the North America NTSC system, the black level or levels you see will be wrong.

Image Capture + Rotate per EXIF + iPhoto 5 = Nasty problems

Apple - Discussions - Image Capture + Rotate per EXIF + iPhoto = Bad

From a post of mine on Apple's support forum:

My image intake workflow starts by importing with Graphic Converter, then renaming withi 'A Better Finder Rename' (rename images to a "date_description_image#"), then review and major edits in GC then import into iPhoto.

A recent release bug in GC, however, forced me to use OS X Image Capture. That's bad news with EXIF auto-rotate and iPhoto.

Image Capture has had a bug for several years -- with my Canon camera it duplicates the EXIF orientation tag when it auto-rotates on import. This confuses iPhoto 5.04 -- iPhoto re-rotates portrait images a second time (interestingly the thumb nail is upright) and so the image ends up rotated 180 degrees. I was sure this bug must have been fixed in Tiger. Wrong.

The malrotation is bad enough, but if one includes these double-tagged images in a batch that's mailed, Mail.App hangs until it finally times out with an AppleEvent error ("mail got an error: apple event timed out". It takes about 15 minutes to time out, during which time one watches the spinning pizza of death.

I fixed my Image Capture mangled images using a Graphic Converter feature that was added a while back on my request. This feature fixes corrupt orientating tags and resets them to the current orientation (so first get the image oriented correctly, then run this).

First I told iPhoto to restore all image to original. Then I did something quite risky (I have backups), I quite iPhoto, deleted the Library root .jpg cache files, then used GC to navigate the images I'd imported in their iPhoto directories. I located all the mangled images, reoriented them, and ran the EXIF repair utility. I then fired up iPhoto. (I tried removing the thumbnails, but iPhoto doesn't regenerate these as one would expect, instead it hangs and eventually shows blank images -- I think this is a cause of the broken thumbnails bug -- iPhoto should just regenerate them.) In cases where the thumbnails were mal-oriented I forced a thumbnail rebuild by editing the image then restoring to Original.

After this fix I was able to mail the images without any trouble.

iPhoto is in such bad shape I wonder if Apple shouldn't do rewrite from the ground up -- maybe an app that would only run in Tiger.

iPhoto 5 -- can we encourage the engineering team to travel widely?

For all my cursing of iPhoto 2 through 4, I don't think I ever lost data in a crash. Not so with iPhoto 5. I lost 20 minutes of edits when it locked up with the spinning pizza of death. I think they've changed when the metadata is saved to disk. I can't see a way to force a save other than exiting the app.

I'd like to contribute to a one way ticket to Tierra del Fuego for the entire iPhoto engineering and product management team.

Apparently I'm not the only victim: iPhoto Needs A Save Album Function