Using an HDTV as a low vision monitor - initial test

We have a 21" CRT. We known nothing about television.

On the other hand, my mother likes television and she has lost much of her vision due to macular degeneration. She has difficulty reading the text on a large CRT set to 1024.x768. (LCDs display poorly at non-maximal resolution, and at maximal resolution the font sizes are far too small for her).

Modern HD TVs run at 30" screen at screen resolutions usually seen on 20" computer monitors. So a 30" HD TV might produce a more readable display.

To test this theory I took my MacBook to Best Buy and tried several displays using the mini-DVI to VGA adapter. The results were pretty bad; clearly VGA won't work. (For one thing it drives the display at 60 Hz when it needs 120.)

I didn't have an HDMI to DVI Adapter Cable so I couldn't test HDMI input results. I'm hoping they'll be much better. I'll update this post with future results.

Update 4/5/10: I found a 2006 Coding Horror post on using an HD TV as a monitor. I'd read it some time ago but, of course, had forgotten it. That old post was pretty positive, but I don't hear of people actually doing it now.

iPhone Voice Memos.app - the missing manual

It took me fifty years to learn to tie my shoes. So it's not surprising that it took me months to figure out how to use the "simple" iPhone Voice Memos app.

I doubt many users could have as much trouble as I with an app that seems to have only two buttons, but if you're one of the chosen this is for you.

To begin with, I need to explain the wrong way to use the app. The wrong way is to tap the red button to start, then tap it again to stop. Wrong. Than puts you in pause mode, and to quit recording you might next tap the right side black icon, then go to another screen, then tap the Done icon and so on.

Here's the right way to use the app without an Apple headset. Headset instructions follow.

1. On startup you tap the red button to record. (Ok, I got that far.) You need to hold the microphone reasonably close to your mouth, the app isn't designed to be used for recording lectures and the like -- just for voice memos.

2. Ok, here's the trick. While recording the red button has changed from a circle to two parallel vertical red bars. It's a pause button. What you might miss, because your eye has been pulled to the red button, is that the odd "grill" button (3 black horizontal bars) has also changed. It's now a black square.

3. When you're done, don't tap on the red pause button. Tap on the right black button. Yes, the one that used to be 3 bars but now, if you're paying better attention than I, you will see is a black square.

Tap the black square and you're done.

3. What happens if you tap the red button? You go into Pause mode.

Pause mode looks just like start mode, except for the big red top banner that stays on whatever you do on the phone. In Pause mode the black button is 3 horizontal bars. Now if you tap on the (multimodal, nefarious) black button you go to review mode.

4. In review mode the app will start playing back your last recording. You can click Done to stop and quit or you can play or delete your saved recordings (swipe to delete).

At the point you can see that if your intent is to record and stop, then hitting the red button while recording is a mistake. It puts you in pause mode, and exiting from pause mode involves several precision taps. If you're dictating while driving, this is dangerous. If you fall into the pause trap, your best option is to tap the red button again to return to record mode, then tap the black button to exit.

The Voice Memos.app behaves differently if you're wearing an Apple headset. From a previous post of mine  ...

Gordon's Tech: iPhone Voice Memos.app - the secret feature

I wasn't that impressed with Voice Memos.app when if first appeared with OS 3. I joined the chorus complaining about the audio levels -- or lack thereof. It only works if you talk directly into the phone or headset mike. The record button should be huge, instead the UI is given over to a pointless graphic. It takes too many taps to close a recording. And so on.

There was, I thought, only one good feature of Voice Memos.app. It's fast. iTalk Lite had great features, but it was too damned slow to launch and record (I'd have paid for the pro version if it were five times faster).

That was before I discovered the secret feature.

If you're wearing Apple's earset and you have Voice Memos running, one click of the microphone switch starts recording, a second click stops and saves.

So if I'm driving with my right earset in, I can click dictate and click again. No distraction, no multi-taps, no delays. This is a great feature. Now I love Voice Memos.

So, where the #$$!$ is this documented? My Google searching can't find mention of this feature. Heck, I can't find any documentation on Voice Memos.app...

... PS. There is Apple documentation on some of the microphone switch's features. You can use it, for example, to decline an incoming call (hold 2 seconds) or to switch and hold (click once) or switch and kill (hold 2 seconds). No mention of Voice Memos.app though.

Little Snitch exposes network killing MobileMe behavior

My mothers modem lights were flickering madly -- but I couldn't see why. All was quiet.

It wasn't just the lights -- the network performance sucked. Sometimes things would rush down, but at other times they'd just hang. Crazy.

Naturally I blamed Videotron. Nice people, but last time we had a problem they had to replace her router twice. As usual I got an agreeable support person. Everything tested out for him, but I couldn't run the Videotron speed test - it took ages to load. He wanted to test further, but I thanked him and told him I'd check things out internally.

You see, I'd lied to him about not having a router installed. Yeah, that's bad. I felt guilty because once he'd confirmed their network was ok I had a hunch where the problem was.

I turned my suspicions to the other machines on the WLAN, including my MacBook. Sure enough, when I shut the MacBook the modem lights slowed down and the Videotron speed test showed 1mbps downlink and 128K uplink - just what Mom pays for.

So what the heck was the MacBook doing? It's not an XP machine, so I wasn't worried about malware. I don't like installing low level apps that require uninstallers, but I needed to know what was going on. So I installed the $30 Little Snitch 2 utility in demo mode

...Little Snitch has a free, built-in demo mode that provides the same protection and functionality as the full version. The demo runs for three hours, and it can be restarted as often as you like...

It's geeky, but, in short, LittleSnitch worked. The culprit? MobileMe iDisk file sync. If you have a local cached version of your iDisk share OS X Sync is very demanding about synchronizing with the remote MobileMe iDisk. I wouldn't notice this at home, but at my mother's OS X Sync was saturating the 128 kpbs uplink trying to sync a 28 MB file. The only clue to what's going on is a spinning icon seen if you view a Finder window sidebar. Turning off MobileMe sync doesn't stop this. You can only stop it by clicking on the spinning icon or by turning off local disk caching altogether.

So I was wrong, I did have malware. Apple malware.
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

The Mac Mini drive clunk (knock) problem

I'm visiting my mother, so I'm reminded that every few seconds her Mac Mini makes a gentle "clunk" sound. It as though it's knocking for my attention.

Emily wouldn't care or even notice it, and I don't think my mother can hear it, but "people like me" hate noises like that.

When I first noticed a year ago, I figured her drive was failing - though Disk Utility SMART status showed all was well. After a year though, it seems like something else: "hard drive clunk mac mini.

If you turn the volume way up you can hear the sound on YouTube (my mother's mini has the same Futitsu drive). It's not just Fujitsu though, there are utilities to prevent clunking written for Seagate drives. It appears to be an OS/Firmware bug that recurs over the years with different OS drive combinations. I don't recall it in 10.4, so I suspect it was introduced in 10.5 and may be gone in 10.6 (I upgraded my mother to 10.5 about the time I noticed the noise).

Some of the better discussions include ...

• Apple - Support - Discussions - Hard drive "clunk": From 2005. The clunk behavior probably shortens drive lifespan. No fix.
• Mac Mini drive click [Archive] - The macosxhints Forums: Recommends smartreporter for diagnostics
• ClunKiller - Kill your Hard Drive *Clunk* noises! and Is your Hard Drive making *Clunk* noises?
• XdN » Clicking Hard Drives and Possibly Shortened Hard Drive Life (not clear this is a clunk problem though - PC Only)
• Set Automatic Acoustic Management level on hard drives - Mac OS X Hints (open firmware hacking -- too risky for me)
• Advanced hard drive power management via AppleScript - Mac OS X Hints - obsolete, but an interesting reference

There don't appear to be any easy fixes, and since my mother can't hear it I think I'll leave it be. Most of the complaints are a few years old, so I suspect newer drives don't clunk. I also wonder if it's fixed with 10.6, though drive clunking seems to be a cross-platform problem.

I'll update this post if I learn of a better fix.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Subsite filtering - harder than it looks

In general the kids earn supervised computer time, but we have a "learning workstation" that's open access and less supervised. Demand is limited however; the Learning account is restricted to "educational sites". Educational as defined by Dad. The permitted sites are not terribly exciting.

One of the better sites is National Geographic Video. In fact almost all of the Nat Geo site is great -- except for the games. Of course that's also the part of the site that gets the ad revenue, so Nat Geo isn't keen to turn it off.

Naturally the kids just want to play the games. OpenDNS, OS X Parental Controls and the wee firewall built into one of our routers will let me block domains, but not specific URL patterns. So if I block Nat Geo games, I block everything.

Google's not helping me with this one. It doesn't help that the Parental Control software marketplace for OS X is moribund, probably done in by OS X Parental Controls and Steve Jobs presumed personal antipathy to parental controls. I'm also not finding any "home filtering firewall" articles, but that might be a Google problem.

I am also beginning to suspect that selective subsite filtering is technically very hard - or impossible.

I thought I'd try a proxy server with built-in filter controls, but those things are harder to find than the last time I used one about 15 years ago.

So I'm stuck for the moment. I'll update this post if I learn more. Of course eventually the kids will learn the workarounds, but by then they'll either be net solo or I'll have bigger things to deal with.

See also

• Gordon's Notes: Parental controls - not an Apple thing
• Gordon's Tech: Parental Controls - Remote Access and other tips
• Gordon's Tech: Parental Controls - The wikipedia problem solved
• Gordon's Tech: OS X parental controls still broken in 10.5.7 (this bug now fixed I think)
• Gordon's Tech: OS X 10.5: Apple engineers need more children
• Be the Best You can Be: OS X 10.5: time limited computer access
• Gordon's Tech: Can't select Jabber or Google Talk for iChat? Here's one reason.
• Gordon's Notes: The software Apple can't do
• Gordon's Tech: LEGO Digital Designer is pure evil on OS X

Update 3/4/2010: OS X includes Apache server; this post makes it sound relatively easy to use it as a proxy server and use ProxyBlock to control access. Unfortunately it's not clear whether you can control access to a subdomain; I suspect not.

Where did my Access 2007 object descriptions go? SP2 killed them.

Sometimes I have to use Access 2007. It’s always painful, but one of the worst agony comes because there are no object descriptions anymore. It’s hard enough to manage Access entities with object descriptions, but with Access 2007 all of my Access 2003 table and query descriptions are gone.

It’s weird because I swear I used to see them buried away in Access 2007 when I used it a year or two ago. Not in a useful place mind you, but at least they existed.

Turns out Office SP2 killed ‘em off:

After you apply 2007 Office system Service Pack 2, the description of an object does not appear in the Navigation Pane in Access 2007. This problem occurs when the Navigation Pane is viewed by Details.

There’s an August 2009 hotfix for this and sundry other Access 2007 bugs, unlike some hotfixes it is downloadable. I assume it will be included in Office 2007 SP3 when that comes out.

Wicked bug.

MobileMe vs. DropBox

I've been tempted by DropBox, but I signed up for MobileMe (Family!) so I could sync my OS X Address Book with my iPhone via MobileMe. (If you use Exchange Server with the current iPhone you can't do direct sync to a desktop -- I hope that will change with iPhoneOS 4.

Today I ran into a MobileMe file sync problem. The most current version of a file was "stuck" on my MacBook. I couldn't get it to sync to the server. I got a cryptic sync error message, but nothing else.

Eventually MobileMe put up the dialog I was expecting, asking me to resolve a sync conflict.

I'm not impressed. I haven't asked much of MobileMe, but it's already failed me.

I'm going to give DropBox a try -- and keep looking for some other way to manage my address book. I'm hoping I'll be able to drop MobileMe after this year is up.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: MobileMe: Perspective of a crusty Palm veteran (2008)
• Gordon's Tech: The MobileMe Massacre begins (2010)