I've not seen this mentioned anywhere. Time to remedy that.
We have a collection of about 8 iPhone/iPod USB cables. The older ones locked onto devices. The newer ones have friction locks.
All of the old ones are in great shape.
Two of the three newer ones are damaged. The cables separate from the connectors at both ends.
Clearly, something went wrong. Looks like a manufacturing defect.
I wonder if it's fixed with newer cables.
My version of iMovie exports (09), by default, .m4v. (emphases mine)
The M4V file format is a video file format developed by Apple and is very close to MP4 format. The differences are the optional Apple's DRM copyright protection, and the treatment of AC3 (Dolby Digital) audio which is not standardized for MP4 container.
Google's Picasa service doesn't support .m4v ...
Video Upload Requirements : Video - Picasa Help:
... Uploadable Video File Types .3gp, .avi, .asf, .mov, .wmv, .mpg, .mp4, .m2t, .mmv, .m2ts ...
Neither does YouTube ...
Supported YouTube file formats - YouTube Help
WebM files - Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codecs
.MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files - Typically supporting h264, mpeg4 video codecs, and AAC audio codec
.AVI - Many cameras output this format - typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM
.MPEGPS - Typically supporting MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio
.WMV
.FLV - Adobe-FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio
Heavens, but I do hate video data standard issues.
It's the patents, it's the DRM, and above all, it's Apple. Data formats and DRM are at the core of Apple's great flaw -- a deep addiction to data lock [1].
[1] Pro video customers of Apple's Final Cut Pro are learning all about what Apple's data lock means.
Update 7/5/11: Two wikipedia articles on Apple's ProRes 422 and ProRes 4444 and these additional articles help capture the full horror of the 2011 state of video codecs -- and the complexity of the video editing workflow. There is nothing analogous to JPEG or even JPEG 2000. See also ...
I've been looking for a general purpose personal OS X website creation tool for years, ever since FrontPage effectively expired @2000. iWeb was a feeble contender but it died a year ago.
Yes, this is a terrible market.
My most recent trial was Karelia's Sandvox; I tested an earlier version in 2006.
Sandvox looked like a contender. It's been around for years and is being actively updated. It has a trial version.
It failed under 10.6.7. It had several weaknesses and one fatal error. The weaknesses were that it uses a proprietary database store (no native HTML edit) and that when I searched help and the web for "embed video" and MobileMe I found nothing.
The fatal error was that it crashed when uploading a page with several embedded videos to MobileMe. I got a classic "quit unexpectedly" dialog.
There's not much going on in this corner of the tech world. Anyone have something that works?
File this one under ominous -- Google Reader can't handle Google Plus feeds.
You can see this with Andy Hertzfeld's "public circle":
https://plus.google.com/u/0/117840649766034848455/posts
Google Reader can't find the feed. I thought the https was the problem, GR can't do authenticated feeds. So I tried Safari.
Safari does treat the "circle" as a feed, but the post list it shows doesn't match what we see in the web UI.
My web searches didn't turn up anything on this, which is kind of interesting too. It's not subtle!
OmniDiskSweeper is a free utility from the superb OMNI group. I run it periodically. Today it showed me:
I freed up a GB or so in minor cleanup, but then I had to decide what to do with Volumes. I'm used to Volumes holding Unix aliases, not folders.
Volumes held two folders named after my Time Capsule backups. One held 227 GB, the other a mere 41GB. They were both created within one day of one another in Jan 2011. The smaller one is a copy of a portion of my drive, the bigger one was the entire drive.
Google couldn't explain these findings, but I found this one reference that sounded interesting ...
Another tip is to look in your /Volumes directory. I once found 100's of megabytes there. It seemed to be a mirror of what had been on a firewire drive that had been unplugged before ejecting. Some program had tried to write to '/Volumes/FireWire/data/'. However since the firewire drive had been removed suddenly, it just created a directory called FireWire/data and wrote it there...
Except I didn't find 100s of MBs, I found 100s of GBs. I am pretty sure Time Machine put them there, and I wonder if it had to do with Time Capsule being offline.
After due consideration I deleted these 600,000+ files. I do, after all, have redundant offsite backups in addition to Time Machine.
[1] You can view it in Terminal, but it's easiest to use the Finder's "Go to Folder" feature and just enter "Volumes".
See also:
Update 6/25/11: Through an Apple Support Group discussions I learned that this isn't terribly rare, and that it's particularly seen with disk cloning software -- probably because of the volume of data they manage. It smells like a deep OS bug -- the OS loses the connection to the "virtual" target in /Volumes and starts writing to the local disk. I wonder if this is more common in 10.6. I am surprised I didn't find more about this on Google, perhaps this post will help. Through the discussion thread I learned of these posts ...
I've suggested that Onyx add a check for these files in its cleanup process.
[See the update. I don't think it's safe to use a 10.5.8 machine with AirPort Wifi and Epson HL-2140 printer drivers as a print server.]
Back in the days of Quarterdeck Extended Memory Manager and DOS Carousel/DesqView/Sidekick debugging was simple. Our one machine crashed many times an hour, and there were only a few things to relentless tweak in the hopes of getting a bit of work done. Hardware problems were extremely rare; my original Panasonic 8086 was vastly overengineered [1].
Despite vastly more security threats, life for a modern Mac household is much improved. We currently run 3 OS X machines (two 10.6, one 10.5) and five iPhones for five users. My life as network admin is mostly focused on porn control (which is a lot like fighting with QEMM really).
Software has come a very long way. Hardware is less robust than it once was, but Apple gear isn't as bad as it could be. Overall we're ahead.
When problems hit though, they can be really tough. This is the story of one of those problems. Like my Troubleshooting MacBook wake from sleep problems of 12/2010 I think I've got it under control, but I'll probably never know the precise cause. I think that's because, barring obvious hardware failure [2] and malware infection [3] most modern tech problems are multifactorial. Multiple software bugs interact with occasionally flaky hardware to produce bad outcomes; curing the problem often means fixing several contributors and thus reducing, but not eliminating, crashes.
In other words, modern computer reliability has quite a bit in common with murder rates in Manhattan and diseases in humans [4]. Chaotic and multifactorial causes and fixes.
Today's example involves our old G5 iMac, (introduced 2004, got mine @2005). These were among the last G5 machines Apple made, and like all the G5 line they were plagued by heat problems. And more heat problems. Heavens, but the G5 chip sucked. [5]
This machine has been pretty stable, though noisy, but yesterday it hung on the login screen. I did the usual first OS X troubleshooting step -- I did a power-cycle restart holding the shift key. This forces cache cleanup and a directory structure integrity check. That seemed to work, but soon I was seeing blue screen on logout, particularly with my son's parental control managed account -- and blue screens on login -- just before I'd expect to see the user select screen on this multi-user machine.
There was no obvious software explanation, so in today's world the next step is to test hardware. I booted the (Mac Classic OS!) hardware test disk for the G5 and ran it in loop mode. Surprisingly the machine passed. This would have been a good time to inspect the G5's notoriously shortlived capacitors, but in fact I only did that the next day. The capacitors were fine, and I vacuumed the machine [6].
At that point I could have started rooting around with Verbose login and Console looking for blue screen errors but this is an old machine with a lot of software cruft. Since the hardware looked good I did a 10.5 archive and install [7] and let it run overnight.
This morning it booted up nicely -- right into a foul 10.5.1 bug with Admin account passwords [8]. I was amazed, I never thought to see that one again. After I did the tortuous unix command line fix [9] password reset I updated to 10.5.8 and rebooted into a clean Admin account that logged out to a blue screen. About then I realized the problem hadn't gone away and I had to do real troubleshooting.
I'll skip the tedious details. Instead I'll enumerate what I think the contributing factors were, then I'll describe what worked.
My best guess is that it was not malware related, but involved several of these items;
This is what I did to get things working, beyond the archive and install (if I could have I would have switched to wired connections to our router):
It's now working. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a hardware problem in the G5 and the problem returns, but it is clearly much improved. I think any hardware problem is more likely in the Time Capsule.
With Click To Flash, Spotlight disabled, and no Time Capsule backup this machine is quieter than it's ever been. I'll wait a while before I reenable backup [11] and I think Spotlight is a goner (love it on 10.6 though).
If I had to put my money on a single fix, I would wonder about the fixed IP and perhaps redoing Location settings (removing would have been better).
Update: I can't say it's cured, but it's clearly far better. No more blue screen today. The only device driver I've installed is for the printer, there's no native support in 10.5. It's also astoundingly quiet. It hasn't been this quiet in memory, the fans barely run. Coincidentally I just now came across mention of Tiger (10.4) kernel panics with newer AirPort base stations. I wonder if there's a relationship ...
Update 6/18: It came back. I was stunned. I can't imagine hardware errors behaving this way. My son had used the computer, but we monitor him closely. All he'd done was print ...
and print ...
and ....
He likes to print. We hardly ever print. Sometimes he was printing from a 10.6 laptop.
The only driver I'd installed yesterday was the Epson 10.5 printer drivers. They're older of course, and the OS has been patched since they were current.
I tried several things, but this, dramatically, worked when multiple other things (PRAM reset, SMU reset, hold shift to start in safe mode, etc) didn't. I swear this was an occult geek ninja move.
The machine started up normally. I then turned off print sharing and deleted the Epson printer driver.
Wow.
Update 6/27: I reinstalled print drivers but made a 10.6 machine my print server. No further problems. I posted on this to Apple Discussions ... Leopard login blue screen fixed by...: Apple Support Communities
- fn -
[1] After years of use, during a marathon debugging session managing DOS interrupt conflicts, I pulled a board with the machine running. It shorted out only half the bus, the machine continued to work for years. Panasonic must have lost money on each of these monsters. They left the market when the US Congress, rightly fearing the disemboweling of the US computer industry by superior competitors, used plausible threats of protectionist intervention to save the US hardware and software industry from Japanese competitors. Nobody remembers this.
[2] Hardware failure can be very hard to spot. I had a series of issues with my 27" iMac that were vexing, but not bad enough to really investigate. Finally my Kensington USB hub got flaky enough to be replaced. With the new hub the seemingly unrelated system issues vanished. Wireless routers are famous for failing in flaky and hard to diagnose ways.
[3] Not yet a real issue for our Macs, but it's clearly coming. I suspect that's why Apple is delaying their hot new MacBook Air so it ships with Lion. They want to move us to signed code platforms within the year, so they need to kill 10.6.
[4] How many physicians think humans get only one viral infection at a time? I've believed for years that a lot of "viral syndromes" are the result of multiple simultaneous viral infections. I bet that meme makes it the med schools in my lifetime.
[5] Remember the liquid cooled G5 towers? Apple was desperate. Miracle they survived the Intel transition. That's when we learned how good Apple was.
[6] I used to blow dust out with compressed air. That was fun! Then I killed a Mac Mini optical drive in a dust cloud. Now I carefully vacuum using a mini-shop vac. The machine looks archaic now -- huge capacitors, everything enormous. Especially compared to working on the Mini, much less an old iPhone.
[7] No longer available in 10.6, which I think does the equivalent on every install.
[8] In the old days you could trade up from the equivalent of 10.5.1 to 10.5.6 at Apple stores. No more. Disappointing.
[9] Yes, password reset is easy to do on any account. You can also just mount drives in firewire target disk mode. Passwords exist for other reasons, not to secure the drive. For physical security you need encrypted images.
[10] The generation I have are notorious for power supply failures with extended flakiness prior to total collapse.
[11] There's very little data stored on this machine. It may not be worth backing up.
See also:
A series of mostly 2004 and 2005 posts about the heat and fan problems that plagued iMac G5 buyers, though the rev 2 machine I bought had fewer of the capacitor and firewire and fan issues. These posts predate Twitter and Google Reader Share, back then my posts were more tweetish.
I recently enjoyed this 2010 article on using OS X PDF services to send websites and docs to iBooks (Mac OS X Hints). All Mac geeks should give it a read, and the excellent comments as well.
Reading the hint made me take another look at the options on the handy PDF menu found at the bottom left of every print dialog. The list includes Save PDF to iPhoto, which is a bit odd since iPhoto won't import PDFs. (I have a memory that it once did, but Google disagrees). If you drop a PDF into iPhoto, you get a not supported dialog.
So I gave it a try. The results are interesting - iPhoto gets a JPEG for every page of the PDF. It's even documented ..
Mac OS X: About the Send PDF to iPhoto feature
... This feature uses an Automator workflow to create a PDF printout, and then convert that PDF to a JPEG. The JPEG is then sent to iPhoto. This workflow is installed by Mac OS X and is stored in /Library/PDF Services/...
It's an obscure but handy feature. Alas, Automator never lived up to its 10.4 promises, it's languished ever since, despite the best efforts of Nyhthawk Production's curious site ... Mac OS X Automation (curious because it's not an Apple site, but Automator links to it).
