The worst commercial web site on the net?

The Lowe Alpine web page won't render correctly in either Safari 3 or Firefox 2.

I've never seen that before.

There's a contact link, but it's broken.

I think we've got a winner.

Blackberry Pearl voice memo hack

Emily's Pearl can record -- but only for a costly "media message". Otherwise, you can't record a voice memo.

Happily, there's a workaround. Create an SMS, but save it as draft. Access it via the messages application. Click the link for more details.

My iMac screen - dark band at the top of the display

Bad news! My July 2005 20" iMac now has a dark irregular band across the top of the display - thickest on the right side. It's most conspicuous against the login screen, or the blue background used on startup:



Superficially it looks like dirt on the display, but it's inside. I suspect some sort of LCD delamination or glue defect, perhaps related to the all the heat problems the G5 iMacs were known for. At 2.5 years this machine is out of warranty -- including my credit card extended warranty.

I can't find much about this on the net, so it's probably bad luck. We have a good Apple repair facility in Minneapolis (first Tech), I could try hauling the machine out there if I get the energy.

Update: Sounds like this.

Update 6/17/11: Three years later the band is about twice as wide. This is a kid and movie machine now, and we don't notice it much.

iPhoto 7.1.2 doesn't fix video export bug

iPhoto 7.1.2 was released tonight.

I checked to see if Apple had fixed the movie export bug.

Nope.

If you export a Movie (video) as "Current" iPhoto exports a thumbnail JPEG with an .AVI extension.

Nasty bug, in some circumstances it may result in the permanent loss of important memories.

Update 3/1/2008: It's not fixed in 7.1.3 either. I finally got fed up and filed a real Apple developer bug report:

5775826 iPhoto: default video export produces defective file 100% of the time.

Update 3/4/08: My bug was flagged as duplicate of Bug ID# 5613626. So at least it's known and documented as a bug that's being currently worked on.

Update 5/19/09: iLife '09 still has the same bloody bug!! See also a thread on this bug. Apple's refusal to fix such egregious data destroying bugs smells of Kafka.

Update 7/12/09: No fix. It occurs to me that this bug is a good HR test. Describe the nature and origin of the behavior to the candidate. Explain that the app is behaving "correctly". It's exporting the file that lives in the "current" folder. Ask them what priority they give to changing this behavior. If they say something like "That's crazy. It needs to be fixed immediately." hire them. If they say "it's working correctly" run like the wind.

Bike light breakthrough? The Ixon IQ.

I used to be a real rider. One day I hope I'll be back, maybe sooner than later.

From those days I have an old NiteRider light. It cost a fortune in 1999 and came with a massive NiMH battery that's now toast. Of course it used a proprietary connector (data lock isn't really a new idea) so I'd have to buy a replacement from NiteRider -- if one exists.

So I paid attention to the bike light that saved the world, a post introducing the German IXON IQ LED light. This excellent description tells us it uses conventional or rechargeable AA batteries -- no more "battery lock" issues. The imported device (German plugs) is about $100 US - a bargain for a serious bicycle light.

... Full power setting (14 40 [see comments!] lux) gives a 6 hour run time. Low power gives about 13 hours. Run times are for fully charged NiMH batteries. Full power is adequate as a standalone headlight for most cyclists in most situations up to about 20mph. Two Ixons at full power should be more than enough for any situation except perhaps a very fast downhill, say well over 25mph. Low power is more than adequate for low speed riding, up to perhaps 10 mph on dark roads or bike paths. For urban cycling with overhead street lights, the low power setting is perfect. These are my estimates based on my own experience using this light. Everyone's night vision is different!....

Note that NiMH battery power output drops precipitously in cold weather, these numbers don't apply to MN winters. Front wheel dynamo systems weren't big when I was in the market, but I suspect they're the answer for a MN winter rider.

Nokia 6555 plays iTunes AAC. Does everything do this now?

It wouldn't have occurred to me to try this, but I'd already discovered that Emily's BlackBerry Pearl plays non-FairPlay iTunes AAC encoded tunes.

When I learned I could mass storage mount and charge my Nokia 6555b with a mini-USB cable and a (well made) Motorola mini-USB to micro-USB adapter the next test was to drop a podcast, an MP3 song and an AAC song into the mounted music folder. I then opened the music player, selected artists, and from the options menu chose "update library".

The All Songs list showed all three files [1] and they all played.

What's with music players and AAC? I don't remember anyone mentioning that players that were once entirely MP3 now all support AAC as well.

Unfortunately our HOSA headset adapters work only slightly better on this phone than on Emily's BlackBerry. If I don't press the 3.5mm terminal entirely in I get good stereo sound on my Bose QC IIs, but unbalanced stereo sound on a pair of Apple earbuds. If I do entirely engage the 3.5 mm connector I get mono sound. I'm tempted to try the Bose mobile communications kit.

The sad news is that the fairly crude music player doesn't support bookmarks, so it's not an adequate podcast player.

Even so, this is interesting enough to make me go ahead and buy another Sandisk 2GB media card, especially because I'm able to get my headphones to mostly work.

--

[1] It also showed the "." (dot) prefixed files that OS X creates on FAT formatted media, an annoying quirk of OS X that cannot be readily managed. There are ways to remove these, but I ignored them for this experiment.

User group one: Winzip ignores NTFS attributes stored in alternate data stream

Occasionally I come across an issue nobody but me cares about.

Ok, more than occasionally.

These are "user group one" issues -- as in a user group with one member. (Thank you Andrew.)

I, for example, am the only person in the known universe who uses NTFS file attributes. I tweak my Explorer views to show the comment field in list view, for example. I even show the Title field! [1]

Being the only person who does this, I'm the only person to discover that WinZip 10 doesn't store these attributes. I'm guessing XP stores them in the NTFS alternate data stream [2] and WinZip ignores the ADS attributes [3]. I found this out when I unzipped some work and lost my metadata.

This is all very annoying.

To the user group of one.

[1] Not only does this introduce functionality that came with PC Magazine's DOS based dirnotes.com application in 1985, it also allows me to provide documentation on file shares about what certain data sets are good for. In addition Sharepoint honors these attributes (which Office apps reflect back into their internal attribute store), so I don't have to re-enter them when I upload files to my Sharepoint Libraries.

[2] Windows NT server had a very robust Macintosh file share service, it stored MacOS Classic resource forks in the NTFS alternate data stream. Later, some aftermarket solutions (DAVE) did the same thing. Worked great.

[3] I have a vague recollection that XP's copy command may ignore them too, and many backup products miss 'em.