Burn: The best optical disk burn solution for OS X.

I love Burn.

I've tried tried other commercial alternatives, particularly trying to get rid of the invisible .DS_Store and other dot files OS X can put on CDs.

They flopped. I was back to using the built-in burning tool, but it doesn't let me readily enforce the lowest common denominator (PC Juliet) standard, and I'm not sure it fully excludes the treacherous dot files.

Today though, my OS X gave me the ridiculous 0x8002006D error message during a burn. That means something is wrong. Helpful.

I fired up Burn for the first time. Simple. Lets me set PC Joliet easily. Shows dot files so I can remove them. It also showed the error, but said my CD burner couldn't calibrate. That's really helpful, it suggests a hardware problem. I blew in some compressed air and used a different CD and it completed the burn.

Great app. Open source and free. If they provide something other than PayPal for donations I'll send money.

As for the burner -- well, this is a G5 iMac. Those machines should never have been made. Fantastic heat problems, especially with the buggy hardware control software Apple used for the first year or two of the G5 iMac life. I suspect the DVD is another victim of too much heat for too long -- this machine is heading for the scrap heap at age 2.7 years. Not happy.

I'll try more CD cleaning methods of course. The compressed air jet was a quickie.

Update 6/15/08: Rich T says Simply Burns is also very well done.

Another Google product bites the dust. That's good.

This is probably the third or fourth Google app I've used that's been quietly discontinued or effectively abandoned.

Google Browser Sync To Be Discontinued

...Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that synchronizes your bookmarks, web history, browser sessions and passwords across multiple computers by temporarily saving them to Google's servers. Unfortunately, this was the project of a small team at Google and it's no longer maintained...

I was think yesterday that Google Browser Sync was due to be abandoned. I'm getting psychic.

I'm glad they're at least officially shutting it down.

Google has been great at starting things, lousy at finishing them. They need to cut way back on new initiatives until they decide what they're going to be serious about, then fund maintenance properly. They also have to start recruiting people who like doing software fit, finish, and maintenance, and layoff hiring inventive types for a year or two.

For example -- either fix Google Calendar Outlook sync or abandon it.

I think all Google customers have a long list of apps that need attention (BlogThis!?). One cheer for a sign that Google knows they have a problem.

Cisco VPN Client for 10.5.3

Cisco VPN Client 4.9.01.0100 works for 10.4 and later, including 10.5.

It can be hard to find Cisco VPN client downloads, Andrew got this one for me.

Update: I couldn't get the image to download fully, and now it's offline. Comments tell us Cisco's distribution policy has not change, this was an unauthorized image and it's probably been removed.
I was able to download an image through my university account. It took 3 tries, I kept finding older versions on various U servers. The official site (UMN authentication required) had the version I needed: Cisco VPN Client 4.9.01.0100

I think for most people that's the best way to get an updated VPN Client -- find someone with access to an university account and ask them to get the client. Just be sure they know what the latest version is! I suspect many universities have multiple distribution sites.

Outlook 2003 treachery: revising recurrences wipes appointment data

I’m a hard core Outlook user.

I’m not proud of this. I wish Ecco Professional had survived, or even Agenda.

Still, it has some brilliant moments – especially when Outlook 2003 is combined with Windows Search (formerly Windows Desktop Search).

But.

Against good design, like the custom views (too bad the sort category view bug took ten years to fix!), must be set the the real nasties. Like one I just fully understood today.

If you change the pattern of a recurring appointment, you wipe all prior exceptions. That’s fine, but the “exceptions” are any appointment that has attachments, agenda items, category tags, etc.

Want to go back and look at a past agenda? Forget it.

Maybe you’ve attached attributes to appointments and keywords so the appointment record can serve as a lookup and index to printed notes?

Gone. Vaporized. All of it.

This is just plain evil.

Reduce SMS texting spam to cell phones

Cell phone spam costs recipients money – thanks to the insane charges carriers apply to text messages.

Pogues has some great tips - How to Block Cellphone Spam. The best at the moment is to change your SMS ID to an alias, spammers don’t bother to guess those and probably can’t process them with available software.

Clearly we’ll need better solutions though …

How to decide software is worth testing

I'm not that happy with Google's free web album plug-in for iPhoto, so I figured I'd try a commercial alternative.

If it passed a simple test.

The test?

It had to be easy to find the uninstall directions:

iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums F.A.Q. - Products | ubermind

How can I remove this plug-in from my system?
iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums can be removed by deleting the plug-in file located at:

~/Library/Application Support/iPhoto/Plugins/
iPhotoToPicasaWebAlbums.iPhotoExporter

(~ represents your home directory.)"

Not too hard, so I'll try it out.

This is a very good screening test for all OS X software ...

Update: 6/11/08

Testing concluded, software rejected because:

1. Licensing is by license server. So I can't backup my license, if their server goes down I can't recover it, etc. That's an immediately fatal flaw.
2. It's very, very, very slow to browse a large collection of albums. Something is broken, scrolling was awful.
3. It doesn't add much to Google's free uploader. In particular, there's no option to combine titles and comments to fit Picasa's single title field.
   

iPhoto '08: Grayscale images with color profiles appear black and inverted

I scanned old photos as 16 bit gray scale with Epson Scan on my V700.

The looked fine in Preview, but in iPhoto '08 (most recent) they had black previews and oddly inverted and faint views.

This has been a probelm since version 5.0.4: iPhoto 5.0.4 or later: Grayscale images appear inverted.

The scanner inserts a color profile, and they're not color images. iPhoto gets confused.

Preview doesn't.

One would think that over 3 versions Apple would have come up with better iPhoto behavior.

I removed the color profiles using the suggested AppleScript (see link) -- one at a time.

That worked. I'm sure there's a faster solution.

Very annoying, and it's only thanks to Google that it wasn't very aggravating.