Disposing of an old Apple Computer, Palm's "any mobile" recycling program, the Blackberry exchange and quality CRTs for the elderly

del.icio.us tags: jfaughnan, gordon, apple, palm, recycling

TUAW has a great article on donating and discarding an old Mac: How to safely dispose of an old Mac. I didn't know Apple would accept an old machine and/or monitor upon purchase of a new machine, so one strategy is to keep the junk in the attic until you buy a new one.

Which reminds me of a post I never finished. Palm may be a vampire leaching off pale customers and forgotten innovation, but they are trying to look less bad by indirect means:

Brighthand: Get Any Mobile Device Recycled for Free

... Palm's recycling program is completely free -- that includes the cost of shipping -- and takes cellphones and handhelds in any condition, from any brand and also any old accessories that go with it.

All consumers have to do is download a pre-paid mailing label from Palm's web site, or pick one up at a Palm retail store. This service is apparently only available in the United States....

The Brighthand article has links to directions for erasing PDA data.

BlackBerry has yet another option. They'll not only recycle your old phone/smartphone, they'll give you "fair market value" credit towards your new BlackBerry:

BlackBerry Trade Up Program

Take your existing wireless device and turn it into a brand new, slim and stylish BlackBerry® smartphone. The BlackBerry Trade Up Program gives you the fair market value of your existing wireless device to use towards the purchase of the BlackBerry smartphone of your choice.

If your cell phone actually works many local groups will take them for 911 calling (women's shelters, etc).

On the other hand, nobody wants pre-XP computer donations. Don't bother, that's a purely recycling project. A good CRT can still find a home, especially for people with visual impairments who suffer from the fixed-pitch LCD problem. I think a group that works with the visually impaired might be interested in those, or look for an elderly computer user.

Ok, so I've done my insignificant part for the environment. Now if I can only figure out a way to get rid of all those plastic baggies ...

When a feature really is a feature: iChat AV's mirror mode

Today I found that the Canon ZR-850 and the SONY DCR-HC96 camcorders (SONY has to be in its cradle), when connected to a MacBook with a firewire cable, will produce fabulous iChat video. I had thought this capability had vanished!

It's just what we need for our workgroup videoconferencing. I tested on printed material, and I had no trouble reading the print on the display ... except ... (emphases mine):

Audio/Video conferencing - XvsXP.com, Mac OS X vs. Windows XP

... iChat AV has a number of niceties. It appropriately flips local video left to right, so your own image will behave just like a mirror. When you plug in an iSight and open the shutter, iChat launches automatically. If you're listening to music in iTunes, it will stop when you accept an audio or video invitation. Any currently playing DVD video will either pause or mute, depending on your DVD Player settings.

iChat supports video-conferencing with up to 4 people (provided you meet the requirements - a minimum of a dual 800 MHz G4 to participate, and a dual 1 GHz G4 to initiate a chat session). Rather than having separate windows for each person, each participant is displayed in one window with their video streams angled to create the impression of sitting around a conference table. There's even a reflection below each video stream - very slick...

UPDATE: I deleted the portion where I then ranted about this mirror image stuff, because posts on Apple's Discussion forum confirmed - the recipient sees the writing correctly.

Also, once we had the results of this test, a search on 'camcorder' 'iChat' and 'conferencing' produced some helpful references. They're mostly familiar to me, I'd just thought there were no compatible camcorders left on the market.

• Derrick Story - video conferencing using iSight 2003/06/27
• EZ Jim 2006

Alt-click to download in Firefox

Alt-Click in Firefox to download the linked item.

Apparently, this is so old and well known it's almost never remarked on. I even vaguely recall when shift-click did this, maybe in Mozilla.

I can't be the only one that finds this a great time saver though ...

Scanning old snapshots: My current workflow

Recently I wrote about using OS X "Image Capture" for photo Scanning. I've gotten some praise for the results, so I figured I'd detail my current scanning workflow.

My goal is fairly quick image acquisition of about 3,000 low quality 3x5 and 4x6 prints. Speed is more important than quality. The very best images, probably less than fifty, will be rescanned using a high quality Nikon Film scanner. After scanning is completed the prints will be discarded but I will keep the negatives in a single large binder.

Scan output is, for now, manged in iPhoto. If Aperture ever allowed us to edit date metadata I'd use Aperture. [foul language censored]

I thought I'd be doing this using a sheet feeder, dropping the prints in and returning hours later. I can't find a decent one for working with prints; the only one I can find is the SnapScan and they've historically not imaged prints. I'm using an old Epson 1660 Photo scanner, but if my secret weapon continues working I'll invest in the Epson V700 -- if I do that I might try bulk film scanning instead.

My secret weapon is the combination of an 8 yo with a Lego habit, OS X "Image Capture", and Aperture post-processing. Ben is willing to work for low wages [1] and Image Capture is simple enough he can go through 20-40 scans while I work on an adjacent machine.

He scans at 400 dpi with no adjustment and the images are output as TIFF. The results at this point are mediocre.

When Ben is done I drop the TIFFs into Aperture and optimize one image: auto-level, sharpening, noise reduction and contrast enhancement with some mild color saturation adjustment. I then apply the set to all images. (I think I can save it as a standard setting but I haven't done that yet. iPhoto 8 can also be used in a similar way, but iPhoto 7 would be very inefficient.)

A few minutes later Aperture is finished. I quickly review the results but usually I'm done with the initial work. I then crop the images fairly extensively. Lastly I export as 98% JPEG and I delete the TIFFs.

The JPEGs are renamed using 'A Better Finder Rename', since Image Capture adds a counter to the string "Scan" I rename "Scan " to YYMMDD_RollNumber_# where # is the counter produced by Image Capture. YYMMDD is based on the date of the roll, and Roll_Number comes from the prints. The roll number binds the roll of JPEGs with the set of prints with the set of negatives. I don' t capture the actual print or negative number, the roll ID is good enough for my purposes.

I then drop the JPEGs into iPhoto and add ratings, date estimates, and comments. I choose one date for a range of prints and add it with a 1 minute separation using iPhoto's batch update. The iPhoto roll information includes the YYMMDD_RollNumber identifier. The five star prints will later be replaced by VueScan negative scans from a Nikon CoolScan V.

The resulting images are impressively better looking, on screen, than the original prints.

[1] Amazingly this is legal for one's own child. I should mention that once he can do this without my help his wages will rise to whatever he can get from the neighbors for their scans. Of course I could start charging him for the scanner...

Update: This article on scanning with Aperture is pretty good. Note that Aperture has a big date problem. You can't revise the acquisition date. True, you can set a date in the IPTC extended image creation date field, but Aperture mostly ignores that field value. I use Aperture for editing, but iPhoto for archiving.

Microsoft's Access 2003 to Access 2007 animated reference guide (Flash)

Via Microsoft's Access blog: a flash app that shows where an Access 2003 command moved to in Access 2007: Interactive: Access 2003 to Access 2007 command reference guide. There's also a link to documentation.

I'm not a fan of the ribbon bar, though I suspect I could come up with a defense for it. It provides zero value to me when using Access 2007, in fact in most ways Access 2007 is either a weak improvement or a regression. The ribbon bar works a lot better in Word, and Excel seems to have mostly ignored it.

I have to give credit though, this is one amazing Flash tutorial. I couldn't figure out where "compact and repair" went to, this tutorial answered my question immediately. On the other hand, it didn't tell me where the dependencies feature went. I think that's supposed to be resolved by the Access 2007 table/query view, but that appears to be broken for now.

Del.icio.us: maybe I should try it again

Recording Artist: Crazy Del.icio.us is one of the best introductions to the Del.icio.us value proposition I've read. I've tried them off and on again, this suggests I should go for another try.

Why we need something better than HFS+: bit errors are cumulative

I hope this analysis is not correct, but if it is then there's no debating that we need an HFS+ replacement. The geeks I read generally favor ZFS+, perhaps with Apple contributing improvements.

Recording Artist: ZFS Hater Redux

Here's a fairly typical Seagate drive with a capacity of ~150GB = ~1.2 x 10¹² bits. The recoverable error rate is listed as 10 bits per 10¹² bits. Let's put those numbers together. That means that if you read the entire surface of the disk, you'll typically get twelve bits back that are wrong and which a retry could have fixed.

Yes, really. Did you catch the implications of that? Silent single-bit errors are happening today. They happen much more often at high-end capacities and utilizations, and we often get lucky because some types of data (video, audio, etc) are resistant to that kind of single-bit error. But today's high end is tomorrow's medium end, and the day after tomorrow's low end. This problem is only going to get worse.

Worse, bit errors are cumulative. If you read and get a bit error, you might wind up writing it back out to disk too. Oops! Now that bit error just went from transient to permanent.

Still think end-to-end data integrity isn't worth it?

I wonder how NTFS compares? Too bad it's not open source :-)!