The shocking news about our new Digital-TV converter

I'm stunned.

It actually worked with our old rabbit ear antenna.

I was sure it wouldn't. I've been mentally composing and revising a blog post about political white lies and the analog to digital TV conversion. The dirty little secret, I was convinced, was that the subsidized Digital-TV converters would require a costly and fiddly outdoor antenna. That's what the directions for our $60 Digital Stream DTX9900 (RadioShack) said -- outdoor antenna.

So I plugged in my primeval $8.00 rabbit ears, expecting to get nothing at all. Instead I found we have two or three times the number of TV channels we used to have. (Ok, we'll never watch 90% of them -- but they exist. We just need a sports show for when my son earns TV time.)

Yes, I have to tweak the antenna for one or two of those channels, but I've needed considerably more gyrations to get a fuzzy analog signal. Our tiny little 12" TV now has a (relatively) stunning high quality image.

To add bemusement to astonishment, this is the first non-trivial device I've bought from Radio Shack that actually worked.

The rabbit ear has the flat connector prongs, so I have an RF plug adapter at the end of the rabbit ears. The RF adapter brings the digital antenna signal into the DTX9900, then a RCA component adapter carries the analog signal to our (half-broken) VHS/DVD player. From there another component connector goes to the TV.

The TV is set to get signal from video (it's just modern enough to have that option), the VHS/DVD deck gets its signal from 'L1' (the input from the DTX9900). So the tuner in the VHS deck is no longer in use, channel control is through the DTX9900 remote. The digital remote also provides some kind of program listing, the time of day, information on shows, and a volume control.

Note that you really don't want to lose or break the remote. Without the remote you can turn on the device and move up or down the channel list -- that's all.

Rare bird: a useful widget

I've not found widgets all that useful. For one thing, they're slow to open. I can get weather faster from a browser shortcut than from a widget.

Timers, though -- they make good widgets. This one is particularly good: Widget Watch: Minutes 2.0.1 - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Neuberg on OmniFocus

Matt Neuberg brings a career of writing and contemplating information management to a deeply thoughtful analysis of the OmniGroup's OmniFocus Getting Things Done application.

The OmiGroup is drinking heavily tonight.

It's not that Matt dislikes OmniFocus, it's rather that he exposed lots of significant design issues. His conclusion ...

... If OmniFocus were a public beta, I'd be unhesitating: "Go for it!" I'd cry ... But OmniFocus isn't a beta, and its price seems out of proportion to the state of its development.

Ouch! I've been hoping the OmniGroup would implement a great iPhone OmniFocus client with sync support (assuming Apple allows it) to desktop OmniFocus. Matt's review sets that hope back a bit.

The good news is that he had lots of serious suggestions. The next version of OmniFocus might be a great improvement.

(PS. Matt, before there was In Control there was GrandView - the preeminent app combining columns and outlines. I think in the early days of dBase Borland's Reflex had some similar tricks, but I don't see that mentioned in a delightfully old review -- those were the days.)

Interesting OS X observation from Firefox development

OS X has memory issues, and APIs that don't do anything ...

Firefox 3 Memory Usage pavlov.net:

... On Mac, If you look at Activity Monitor it will look like we’re using more memory than we actually are. Mac OS X has a similar, but different, problem to Windows XP. After extensive testing and confirmation from Apple employees we realized that there was no way for an allocator to give unused pages of memory back while keeping the address range reserved.. (You can unmap them and remap them, but that causes some race conditions and isn’t as performant.) There are APIs that claim to do it (both madvise() and msync()) but they don’t actually do anything. It does appear that pages mapped in that haven’t been written to won’t be accounted for in memory stats, but you’ve written to them they’re going to show as taking up space until you unmap them. Since allocators will reuse space, you generally won’t have that many pages mapped in that haven’t been written to. Our application can and will reuse the free pages, so you should see Firefox hit a peak number and generally not grow a lot higher than that....

My sense is that OS X does a lot to test the patience of application developers.

I've been using Firefox 3 beta 5 on OS X, and I feel that it's faster and much less likely to peg my CPU.

WiTopia personalVPN - need custom DNS configuration

I've been paying for the Witopia personalVPN service ...

Gordon's Tech: WiTopia personalVPN 

...PPTP VPN: This is built into OS X, though in 10.4 it works through the peculiar 'Internet Connect' application rather than the network preferences (where I looked for it). Easy to use, requires no additional software. This style of VPN is disdained by experts for some security issues, but of course it only has to be better than nothing -- which is what everyone else at the Hotspot is using. It's the old 'park next to the better bicycle' theory...

Problem is, it really slows down my browsing. Long delays for every transaction. I'll send them a note and see if they have any ideas, but I'm inclined to disable renewal of the service and try another vendor ...

Update 5/1/08: Both Witopia and a helpful commenter tell me that it's essential to use the Witopia DNS servers to get good performance. I think that's the problem, so I'll change and test. If it fixes the problem I'll amend my post title to "Use the DNS servers!". (The recommendation is down in the Witopia FAQ, I'll look over their site again but I think they could do with a bit of rework on setup documentation.)


Update 5/31/08: When I was running 10.4.11 I didn't see a way to specify a DNS address for the PPTP connection alone, and I didn't want to change my usual DNS address. With 10.5.3 it's fairly obvious how to change the DNS address for the PPTP connection alone (advanced button).

I added the DNS address from the Witopia FAQ: 38.119.98.220 Performance seems quicker, but, oddly enough, the Witopia Wiki won't open. Other sites seem fine, so perhaps the wiki is coincidentally offline. I'll test this out for a while.

Why was my OS X mouse behaving so badly?

It had been bugging me for a while, but now I was going over the edge.

OS X 10.4.11 wasn't responding to my mouse clicks. I was double, triple and quadruple clicking where one should have done.

What had gone wrong? Some recent update? Something stealing the mouse clicks?

I keep my system very plain, so I decided to check into a new mouse driver. It had been a while since I'd updated my Microsoft IntelliPoint driver -- years, come to think of it.

I installed the new IntelliPoint and IntelliType Pro driver from Apple's site. The reboot took a long time, the mouse install seemed to require some major rebuilding.

The new driver had loads of new options, but my mouse clicks were still being missed. Now, however, the driver told me my battery was low.

New batteries, but the problem remained. The driver had one more diagnostic though ... my signal was oddly weak.

Yes! The small wireless receiver (this is pre-Bluetooth) had fallen off my desk, and was now buried between the back wall and the back of the desk. Restoring the receiver restored the signal -- and my mouse clicks.

Of course the real problem was that I'd lost my receiver, but it was odd that I didn't get the battery and signal warnings until I installed the new driver. My IntelliMouse driver was ancient, probably inherited from a 10.3 build. I wonder if some recent update didn't knock out the battery warnings it used to give; Apple can't possibly test against ancient drivers.

Really, these computer systems are a wee bit complex.

I do like the new mouse options however, especially Microsoft's acceleration support. I feel as though I got a new mouse out of the deal.

Google Docs: still no working clipboard

I've been using Google Docs for ages, and there's been no progress in providing any kind of reasonable clipboard functionality with any OS X browser. We're told to use ctrl-c to work with the system clipboard instead of using the native Google Docs clipboard. Of course that shortcut works for Firefox on OS X, but not Safari.

Honestly, Google Apps is still a semi-useful toy compared to a desktop application. Progress is very slow.