Nano: the screen does have a problem

Via Digg and ars technica:

Vendor issue blamed for Apple nano screen problems

Breaking news at this late hour brings some clarity to cracked LCD issues experienced by some early adopters of the iPod nano. Apple will, as of today, be accepting returns of iPod nanos whose LCD screens have experienced the spontaneous cracking problem. According to The Wall Street Journal, which quotes Phil Schiller, Apple's VP of world-wide-product marketing, a vendor issue was at the core of the problem.

The Nano is as scratchable as any iPod, and smudges show more on the black iPod. It's also pocketable -- so far more abused. The display must have a protective clear cover applied (Radio Shack carries these for a few dollars).

There is, however, a real problem with the LCD spontaneously cracking. Apple will now cover this under warrantee. It sounds like it will be fixed, but it may delay shipping.

Cool OSX Apps: excellent review site

Cool OSX Apps is an "Andrew suggestion", a tip from a friend of mine known for his geeky good taste. It's quite excellent; in the ten posts I looked at I saw 3 apps I'd like to try out.

MaxEmail & GMail = a great way to pass voice messages around

MaxEmail is marketed as a service for sending (PDF, Word, etc) and receiving (PDF, TIFF) faxes. It works quite well for that, but it has one other feature. The fax number is also a voice mail number. Voice messages are digitized and emailed; they can also be read on MaxEmail.

I love the voice mail facility -- as a substitute for the old fashioned tape/digital recorder. When I think of something I need to do, and I can't enter it into my Palm, I hit the quick dial for my MaxEmail number. When I get a connection, I hit 1 on the phone pad and I leave my message (hitting 1 bypasses the longish greeting message). It shows up in my work and home email, including my Gmail account (in Gmail the message is tagged by one of my filters). I listen to it and take action. Every voice message, of course, is attached to a time stamped email.

My wife uses the same service to send me messages. She's mobile and often do child wrangling, so I can process her messages from my desk and often act on them. Unlike standard voice mail these messages don't interrupt meetings, and I can even manage them when I'm on conference calls.

Far superior than any dictaphone or handheld recorder or phone based voice note service or PDA recorder. I think Maxemail should market this more than they do.

Update 9/29/05. One other twist. If you use iTunes to handle WAV files, then when you open the file it is copied into the iTunes library. There you can listen to it. If you want to keep it, you retitle it, add metadata, etc. iTunes is a very handy way to manage these sound fragments. Of course this library can sync to one's iPod -- handy way to catch up on prior thoughts. (Shades of the future where we'll be able to search metadata indexed AV streams of our everyday life, great stuff for old tired brains ...)

Good OS X Spotlight management summary (macintouch)

Spotlight is far better than the five different drive indexing software packages I've tested on my XP boxes. It is, however, still one or two revs away from really working. (Apparently, this is a harder technical challenge than one might think.)

This Macintouch reader report is a concise summary on how to manage Spotlight -- until it's fixed. One other tidbit. I was having a problem with OS X always mounting my iPod -- even though I'd set auto-mount off. Spotlight was the culprit. I dragged the iPod disk icon to Spotlight and OS X stopped mounting it. (PS. Interesting UI glitch. If you try to drag the icon off the Finder bar it simply vanishes. This is a "feature" -- it allows one to cull images displayed on the Finder bar. It's not all that intuitive as to how one restores them! Use the finder preferences to remove all instances of the icon class (ex. all network drives) then save prefs then add all back in.)

Mac OS X 10.4.2 (Part 31)Jeff Mincey

Regarding Spotlight and its supposed incomplete indexing of drive volumes, there is a procedure one can follow which will force Spotlight to re-index a volume and thus spare the user from having to open and close each individual Microsoft Word document he (she) wants indexed.

Chris Breen offers this: 'Open the Spotlight system preference, click the Privacy tab, click the plus button, and add the volume you want to reindex. Wait five minutes, select the volume in the privacy area, and click the minus button to remove it. Spotlight will index the volume again from the ground up.'

Chris goes on to say... 'Before reindexing the drive, repair permissions. Also, if the drive has just recently been indexed, give it another day or so before reindexing. It‚s possible that Spotlight hasn‚t completely finished indexing the drive even though you‚re allowed to use it.'

Once an entire volume is indexed for Spotlight, then individual new files or files newly revised and saved, will be indexed on a case by case basis thereafter. One can also perform this operation (and others) from the command line, as this tip (from Mac OS X Hints) illustrates:

To turn off indexing;

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/hard_drive_name

To remove the index;

sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/hard_drive_name

Physically remove the .Spotlight directories from the root of each drive.

cd /
sudo rm -fr .Spotlight-V100

To turn it back on;

sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/hard_drive_name

ThinkSecret reports 10.4.3 has over 500 fixes. I'm expecting Spotlight will get much better in a few weeks. It is overly aggressive about deciding what it's going to index.

Troubleshooting reference: managing glitches in OS X version updates

This Apple kb article is about a specific issue, but I suspect some of the techniques are generalizeable. Via Macintouch:

Mac OS X 10.4.2: Issues after Archive and Install of 10.4 followed by reapplication of 10.4.2

Firefox 1.5beta on OS X: Crisp!

Firefox 1.5 beta One is out for OS X:Mozilla Firefox Project (Development Information).

It's impressive. I tried Camino 1.0a yesterday, but it had too much type lag on a slower machine to be useful. In contrast, Firefox 1.5 is very snappy. It feels much faster than 1.0 on my old G3 iBook and it's even faster than Safari.

Camino's aesthetics weren't the best either. Fonts and buttons were a bit off. Firefox looks at least as good as Camino (neither can rival Safari though).

I think Firefox 1.5 will be quite astounding.

A clever product: cellboost disposable battery for iPod

I'd forgotten my firewire cable, and my 3G iPod was running down. I was facing an undefended airplane trip!

Panic set in, but I caught site of this at an airport store -- for $10. It worked perfectly. It doesn't lock onto the iPod so you can't wave your Pod around -- the battery will go flying. It worked well in my headphone case.

They claim 8 hours of life. Based on the size and heft I suspect it's a LiOn battery internally. I think they have a very good shelf life, so one of these will probably see you through a few separate crises. I'm carrying one in my luggage from now on!