Small discoveries in tech

Fragments of things ...

• Some corporations have stopped paying for remote employee business phones. Employees are signing up for Google Voice. They get much better service for "free", and they now own their business number. When they leave they take it with them. These corporations are outsourcing a business function to Google. There will be unintended consequences.
• In 10.6 QuickTime Player will trim video fragments. This is old news, but new to me. I hadn't noticed. It's a big help. Now I can take the 300MB videos Emily and the kids make and trim them in seconds to a fragment I can file in iPhoto. This is the kind of high speed video editing I can manage. AVI inputs are saved as QuickTime movie. One bug -- no date/time metadata! I need a utility that will change the file creation and modification time stamps to match the true video acquisition date. Metadata standards for video are a mess.
• Yesterday I wanted to conference in a remote speaker to a lecture. In under 10 minutes I plugged external speakers into a WiFi connected laptop and called his cell from Gmail's Talk/Phone capability. He gave the 10 minute presentation from his airplane seat. Everyone could hear him easily. It was all a bit supernatural.
• The latest version of iTunes does quite a good job simultaneously synchronizing multiple iOS devices. That's an improvement. It still has some problems when users accounts switch however.
• Google Voice quality to Canada nose dived a few weeks ago, but is very good now. The improvement corresponded with switching from using the dial-up method to establishing a connection using GV Mobile+ on my iPhone. Could be coincidence, but the call setup is different. This service has saved me about $2,500 -- and cost AT&T that much. I'm now seeing non-geeks using Google Voice. I wonder when this will impact AT&T.
• Apple killed the 5.25" floppy, the 3.25" diskette, the serial and parallel cable, and the CD (data and music). Now Apple is killing the DVD and the hard drive. I wonder if they're going to try to kill the unborn USB 3. Ruthless.
• The power, value, and significance of Apple's FairPlay DRM is grossly underestimated. In technology as in politics some of the most important discussions are completely invisible. In my 50s I am more intrigued by what is not said than what is said.
• Blogger's rich text editor paragraph/line spacing problems are getting worse, but maybe that's a sign of progress. At this point I'll take any straw.
• FaceTime for OS X is a big deal. The big fight now is whether a future carrier will allow it over a 4G network (WiFi only now). Sprint?
• Microsoft, Dell and HP are walking dead. That's shocking. Is Intel next?
• The MacBook Air 11", iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch all provide overlapping value. The iOS devices have much better Exchange/ActiveSync synchronization services, the Air runs other software I prefer. I have an iPhone and I'm a geek, so the Air is under serious consideration.
• OS X management of mounted drives on a WiFi network sucks.
• First family trip with each kid one iPhone equivalent. I don't like it -- much better to have the kids watch one DVD. More on this in another post I think.

FaceTime for Mac - just about perfect

The artistic sociopath alternates cruel sadism with lovely gifts.

That's Apple.

The gift this time is FaceTime for Mac. It's just about perfect. Best of all, unlike the long dead iChat app it replaces, it's not tied to an OS release - it works for 10.6 and beyond. I dare to hope Apple is decoupling app functionality from OS release, but that's because I've got Stockholm Syndrome.

Seriously, OS coupling made iChat worthless. If Apple doesn't want to repeat that mistake, they have to maintain FaceTime outside of OS cycles.

On the other hand, there's not that much to maintain. It's pretty good as is. I'd like to see bigger buttons, but it's the kind of simple UI an elderly person with good vision can work with. (Apple is paying attention to demographics.)

During initial setup you can use your MobileMe account [1] or start a new apple account. You then associate it with ANY email address you own. After initial setup you can assign multiple addresses; they're simply unique identifiers that Apple assigns to your Facetime account identifier. You can choose one of these to be your callback email.

I love that "that you can also start a call from Mac OS X via URLs like facetime://appleid or facetime://email@address or facetime://phone#".

I tried this by embedding this protocol into a Google sites page. !It worked!

This means I can create a web page for my mother with a large clickable link target. That's far more useable for her than Google Video Chat or OS X iChat.

That's cool.

[1] Please do not make my MobileMe renewal mistake!

How to replace a $150 MobileMe family renewal with an $83 MobileMe renewal

A new Mobileme Family Pack costs $83 on Amazon.com. I thought my renewal through Apple would cost $99. Wrong, it cost $150; $99 for me and $50 for the family pack "extension".

That's wicked.

It turns out I could have renewed by buying the $83 family pack.

I'm going to see if I can get a refund. Don't make my mistake!

Update 10/20/10: I had a very satisfactory response through Apple's Express Lane. I have 45 days after payment to cancel for a full refund. If I then reactivate with a family pack key I get all the family accounts and data back -- Apple keeps it for a time (forever?).

So I'll order the renewal package from Amazon. When I have they key ready I'll cancel for the full refund, then immediately renew using the Amazon family pack key.

Update 10/28/10: This worked, with only a few surprises. Here's how to do it.

1. Before you cancel, make sure you have every family members user name and password at hand.
2. Cancel the account for a full refund (within 30 days).
3. login again with the account owner un/pw. You get a note that the account has expired. Enter the MobileMe key you got from Amazon.
4. You will see your account, but nothing about family members!
5. Now add each family member back, one at at time. When the dialog comes up it will ask you if you want a new account or to migrate an existing account for a regular member. I chose the 2nd option. Enter the un/pw of the family member. It takes about 30 seconds for the accept button to appear if you've entered correctly. Errors get an immediate response.

As best as I can tell no data was lost. I could see all the synchronized contacts I expected to see.

iPhoto 11 and Aperture 3 - more bad news

Somewhere on the boring, insipid, new iPhoto 11 page is a link to an iPhoto to Aperture page with gems like ...

... While iPhoto is designed to work with one library at a time, Aperture lets you set up as many libraries as you want and switch between them instantly. And you can export a project — and all the related photos — as a new library. That makes it easy to do things like take a slideshow from your work computer to your home computer to finish it. Since the slideshow is a separate file, you can work with it directly — no need to import it into one of your home libraries. When you bring it back to your work computer, all the edits you made sync automatically...

I gave up two years ago on multi-library support in iPhoto, support that would let me edit my photos while I travel and then merge them into my home library. The iPhoto 11 non-event, this conversion page, and Apple's $50 price point for iLife should crush anyone's residual hope for a better version of iPhoto.

So why am I not happy to buy Aperture 3? I have Aperture 2. The upgrade price is reasonable.

Because (shocking!!) .... Apple lies.

The iPhoto to Aperture 3 conversion is not seamless. Large amounts of metadata, such as album and event comments, image tags, and book definitions and the like are lost. Apple doesn't tell you this. That's because Apple is made up of Satan-worshiping sadists...

Suspicious Safari crashes - is it 1Password?

Safari 5.0.2 is being unusually crashy lately...

Date/Time: 2010-10-17 07:49:57.755 -0500
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.6.4 (10F569)
Report Version: 6

Interval Since Last Report: 239013 sec
Crashes Since Last Report: 40
Per-App Interval Since Last Report: 527842 sec
Per-App Crashes Since Last Report: 2
Anonymous UUID: 91CBE8C3-5174-44E4-89DA-EDE076DCAA1E

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000079

I don't run any extensions, but I do have 1Password installed and I have the proprietary Fujitsu ScanSnap Manager driver on my system.

Based on this report I'm suspicious of 1Password. I'll try the enable/disable Safari support trick mentioned there.  I use 1Password, but grudgingly. I don't like hacky extensions, it really needs to use the official (but new) Safari extension framework.

Of course it could always be #$!@$@!$ Flash.

Troubleshooting an OS X iOS device recognition problem

There's a bug in OS X 10.6 ("or later") that can make an iOS device unrecognizable: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3540.

I'm sure a fix is coming. The tech note is worth tracking though because of the sequenced steps in the recommended fix. It's basically a full iTunes uninstall ...

1. delete com.apple.usbmuxd.plist~orig
2. delete iTunes
3. delete AppleMobileDevice.kext
4. delete MobileDevice.framework
5. reinstall iTUnes

Might come in handy for future obscure sync related bugs.

Downloading a shared Picasa web album in OS X

Despite Google's data freedom record, they've done a mediocre job freeing Picasa web albums. I know of only two ways to download an entire album.

You can use the Picasa Web Albums uploader tool to download albums that you own. I think this tool works with non-Intel machines.

If you have an Intel machine you can use Picasa for OS X to download albums you own - and, more importantly, shared albums from other people.

I've done the latter. It works - but it's a pain. Read the documentation: Downloading Albums and Photos. Here are a few additional notes to help out:

1. When you install Picasa it starts indexing your drive. Go to Tools:Folder Manager and mark every folder as exempt. It will stop indexing.
2. Don't bother looking for the option to download from an album URL. It's not there. Yes, this is very weird.
3. Go to the shared album and look for the 'Download' menu item. Click on it. You may see that 'Download to Picasa' is unavailable -- grayed out. That's because you need to quit Safari and restart after Picasa is installed (and perhaps running). Now you should be able to see this option. Click it.

Picasa stored my images in Pictures\Downloaded Albums. I dumped them from their into iPhoto then deleted them.