Category Archives: Call Me a Geek

The things I do and think about computers.

Speaking of iPods

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I’m glad I didn’t sell my old iPod; here’s why.

My new helicopter has an audio-in jack so you can plug in a portable tape player, CD player, or MP3 Player. My old helicopter also had a jack like that, but it was an aftermarket installation and didn’t play in stereo. I know that sounds like I’m being pretty picky, but it also had a tendency to drop out one of the channels on some stereo music so you didn’t hear all the instruments/vocals, even in mono. Better than nothing, I guess, but not nearly as good as real stereo.

The headsets in the helicopter’s front seats are Bose Generation X. They cost a small fortune (which is why I didn’t get four of them) and I don’t think they’re worth what they cost, but they are the best. And they are stereo.

So I have a stereo line-in jack and stereo speakers.

And a very new iPod Photo with over 2,000 songs on it.

It makes sense to use the iPod in the helicopter, right? Well, unfortunately, the iPod Photo doesn’t seem to like the helicopter. I’ll plug it in and get it playing. 5 or 7 or 11 songs later, the iPod freezes up, right in the middle of a song. Dead in the water. Won’t shut off, won’t reset, won’t work at all. The only way to bring it back to life is to plug it in at home and use one of the reset procedures. I’ve wiped it clean and reloaded the songs and music several times. The problem persists.

I think I know the reason for the problem. The iPod seems to be able to sense when something is connected to it. When I plug in that RCA jack, the iPod turns itself on. So something’s coming down the cable to the iPod, saying, “Hey, wake up!” The iPod obliges.

One of the features of the helicopter’s audio system is that it automatically cuts out audio when the radio goes on. Say I’m flying along, listening to Pink Floyd while my communications radio is tuned into the Wickenburg Unicom frequency. When someone else talks on that frequency, Pink Floyd is shut off until he’s done talking. My other helicopter worked this way, too. It’s the way I want it to work: after all, isn’t it more important to hear what’s going on around me than some music?

I always assumed that it cut out the music by just tripping some circuit. I don’t know electronics. For all I know, what I just said might be pure nonsense. The point is, I was pretty sure it didn’t cut out the music by telling the iPod to shut up.

Evidently, however, some kind of signal must be coming down that wire to the iPod. And the iPod is getting confused by it. And when it gets really confused, it just freezes up.

I gave this some thought. I realized that my old, original, 5GB iPod never seemed to know when you plugged something into it. Perhaps it would work without getting confused and freezing up.

So I charged it back up — its battery doesn’t last long off the charger these days — updated the songs, and took it for a flight. And guess what? It worked fine.

I’m glad. On long cross-country flights, it’s nice to have music. And it’s nice to not to have to resuscitate an iPod after every flight.

Clash of the Technologies

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I teach an old computer new tricks.

I have a 20th Anniversary Mac. I bought it about six months after they were released and got a pretty good deal on it. It sits on a table in my living room, a piece of functional art. It runs System 7.6 — if anyone can remember that. The cool thing about this computer — other than the fact that both a floppy disk drive and CD ROM drive are built into the monitor — is that it has a Bose sound system. It also has a stereo receiver and, somehow, my cleaning lady has learned how to tune in Mexican music while she works.

Anyway, I bought an iPod Photo a few months back so I could write about it. I really don’t need an iPod Photo, but once you have something like that, you try to come up with ways to make it useful. I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if I could attach the iPod to the Mac, play music through those Bose speakers, and show photos onscreen?

Remember, the 20th Anniversary Mac is old technology. It dates back to ADB, Serial, and SCSI ports. There wasn’t any USB or Firewire in those days. But it does have an S-Video port and a microphone-in port. So I started experimenting.

The iPod Photo’s dock includes both an S-Video port and an audio line-out port. I didn’t have an S-video cable with the multi-pin connectors on both sides. But I did remember someone saying that an ADB cable’s pins are the same configuration as an S-video cable. So I took an old keyboard cable from the office, brought it home, and used it to connect the Mac to the dock. Then I took a standard RCA-type stereo cable and connected it from the line-out port on the top of the iPod to the Mac. (When I connected that cable from the dock to the Mac, I had no volume control and I still can’t figure out why.)

I fired up the two devices and set up a slide show. The iPod’s music immediately played through the Mac’s Bose speakers. It sounded really good at any volume. But to get the video to show up, I had to fire up an application that comes with the 20th Anniversary Mac. I think it’s called Apple Video Player. It enables me to use the built-in TV tuner (which doesn’t work here on the edge of nowhere) or to take video from an external source. It recognized the iPod Photo’s signal and displayed the images onscreen as a slide show. The only drawback: I had to set monitor resolution to 640 x 480 to get it to work right.

So now, when I have company, I can entertain them with music and a slide show, playing in the background while we chat.

Needless to say, I use the 20th Anniversary Mac a bit more often now.

Macworld Expo, My History

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Recollections on Macworld Expo.

For years, I religiously attended Macworld Expo in San Francisco and Boston (and later New York). In fact, I recently found Macworld Expo programs dating as far back as 1992. (Anyone want to buy these collector’s items? E-mail me.) I even had a few programs from Macworld Toronto, when I was persuaded to speak there in the 1990s.

In the Macintosh heydays — mid 90s, I guess — Macworld Expo was an incredible experience. The halls were jammed with exhibits and people crammed the aisles to get a good look at the latest and greatest. I remember such innovations as the Digital Toaster (I believe that’s what it was called), which used an Atari box for live advanced video effects; Morph, which converted one image to another as an animation; and PageMill, the first WYSIWYG Web authoring tool. Companies like Aldus, Claris, and countless others that no longer exist erected booths that competed for the attention of conference-goers. Certain Mac gurus — like Guy Kawasaki and Kai Krauss — achieved celebrity status and were occasionally mobbed by the Mac faithful.

I was a conference speaker in those days, a member of the Macworld Expo faculty. The speaker room was like a clubhouse, a place where the folks who made their livings with Macs gathered and chatted, exchanged hugs, bragged, and showed off their latest hardware acquisition. The person with the best PowerBook wins, was the theme in those days. I didn’t play, although I do remember showing off a photo of my helicopter one year as an explanation for why I didn’t come with a PowerBook.

And then there were the parties. After the show floor closed, the parties began. The best parties required invitations to get inside, but certain people could gain access to even the most selective parties without a ticket. I remember being part of the Bob Levitus entourage one evening in San Francisco, when we went party hopping from one incredible party to another. Chris Isaac was the entertainment at one party while the Jefferson Starship (or what remained of it) was the entertainment at another. Claris and Apple always had great parties, but the ones at the Exploratorium were incredible, too. Limos bearing MacWEEK or MacUser magnets on their doors criss-crossed the city. I don’t remember drinking much (maybe I drank too much), but I don’t think I needed alcohol to get high. There was excitement in the air and you could get high just breathing it.

Then, in the late 90s, the good ship Apple started to sink. Macworld Expo suffered for it. (It also suffered, in my opinion, from switching management from Peggy Killburn’s group to IDG.) The speaker room filled with strangers, networking and graphic arts gurus I’d never heard of. I stopped speaking at the shows, but still attended, primarily to put in an appearance at the Peachpit booth. The parties were non-events in those dark days. Instead of spending three days at the show, I’d often come by for just a day. I remember one year when I flew in in the morning and flew out that evening. No reason to stick around.

When Steve Jobs took over and Apple started to thrive again, I half expected those Macworld Expo heydays to return. But they didn’t. The booths got ever smaller and some companies — Quark comes to mind — didn’t even show up half the time. The show floor still filled with people — an interesting mix of Apple loyalists sporting user group labeled clothing and high tech graphics geeks — but there was no rush to see a newly introduced piece of hardware or software. The only highlight was Steve Jobs’ keynote address, which he performed to a packed house every single show. I often watched the keynote via Webcast while I worked, playing it in a QuickTime window on one computer while I worked on another. I took notes on what interested me and ignored the rest.

This year, I’m skipping Macworld Expo again. I have work to do on my Tiger book, as well as an eBook I owe Spiderworks. And there’s a QuickBooks book lined up behind those. I’ve already lost too much time getting my new helicopter settled in my hangar and trying to figure out ways to make money with it. (I would have flown it to the bay area, but I have a paying gig in Aguila on Saturday and I was worried that weather would keep me stranded in California.) I hoped to watch the keynote today, but I just learned that Apple isn’t doing a Webcast. So I’ll be in the dark until the keynote is over and Apple magically transforms its Web site to provide information about all the announced products. As you may have guessed, I don’t read Apple rumor Web pages. I’d rather wait and get the real story.

So as Macworld Expo climaxes today, I’ll be in my office, writing about Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, glad that it’s raining outside so I won’t want to fly.

If It Ain’t Broke…

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I relearn something I’ve been telling people for years.

My production Mac, a dual processor G5, started acting up yesterday. It decided, out of the blue, that it would either restart or shut down whenever it felt like it. It seemed particularly fond of doing this right after I’d revised a page of my manuscript but before I’d saved that page to disk. At least that’s how it seemed. It got to the point that I stopped using it. I’d just let it run and start up programs, one-by-one, to see which of them would trigger the problem.

But I think I caused (and then resolved) this problem. I’d been playing with Nicecast (covered elsewhere in these blogs) and had discovered, by looking at the Console log, that some piece of software was unsuccessfully searching for a piece of hardware, in the background, while I worked. It wrote an entry to the log file once per second. That couldn’t be good. It must be using processor power. So I had to make it stop.

I began my witch hunt with a few messages to programming types like Dave Mark (author of a great C book) and the makers of Nicecast. They are obviously better with Google than I am, because they both came up with a Web page that pointed to my problem: a Canon scanner driver. It seems that when you install the driver for the LiDE scanner, two drivers are installed. One driver runs the scanner. The other driver spends all its time looking for a scanner that isn’t attached. Now what rocket scientist at Canon thought that up? So I attempted to delete the drivers, just to see if I could get the log messages to go away.

That’s where I screwed up. I somehow managed to drag a driver from its folder without disabling it. Every time I tried to drag it to the trash, I got a message saying that it couldn’t be dragged to the trash because it was open. I tried restarting my Mac. I tried renaming the file. The damn file couldn’t be deleted. In the old days of Mac computing, you’d occasionally get a folder like that. We called them “folders from hell.” This was a file from hell.

Eventually, I gave up and went back to work. And that’s when the computer started acting up. The first time it shut down, I’d stepped away from my desk to retrieve something from the printer. I thought I’d somehow used the shut down command. I mean, who expects their computer to just shut down by itself? But when it started doing it while I was working, I suspected a problem. It was a windy day and I thought that maybe the wind was causing power problems. Although the computer is attached to a UPS to prevent power problems from shutting it down, I thought the UPS might be dead. They don’t live forever, you know. Of course, nothing else was shutting down and not everything in my office is attached to a UPS.

After fiddling around with the UPS for a while, I started to suspect a hardware problem. Not what I needed. The G5 is less than two years old. None of my other Macs have had serious problems, and I’ve owned at least ten of them since 1989.

Then I started thinking about that file from hell. Perhaps it was triggering something really nasty in my computer, something that would bring everything down. I became determined to get rid of it.

I tried starting the computer with the Mac OS X 10.3 Panther install disc. I used Disk Utility to repair the disk (no problems) and permissions. Of course, there’s no access to the Finder when you start from that disc, so I couldn’t just drag the nasty file to the trash. When I restarted from my hard disk, the file still couldn’t be trashed. So I opened Activity Monitor, found the file’s process, and terminated it. Then I dragged it to the trash, emptied the trash, and restarted.

The computer behaved itself after that. I’d like to think that that was the problem and that I’d solved it.

So let’s review this: I find an error message in my Console log, which I really shouldn’t be looking at in the first place. I act on what I’ve seen and cause a problem that causes spurious restarting. I lose about three hours of work time causing and then resolving the problem. And now I can’t use my scanner until I reinstall the driver(s). The moral of this story: don’t look in the Console log. Or, better yet, the golden rule of computing: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

It’s Too Cool

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I rediscover the cool things I can do with my Mac.

One of the reasons I got into the business of writing about computers is because I thought that the things you could do with computers were very…well, cool.

I got my start with Macs back in 1989 with a Mac II cx. My previous computer had been an Apple //c and the Mac was a huge step up for me. One of the reasons I wanted it was so that I could start a BBS. I needed a hard disk and a bit more processing power than the Apple //c offered. Back in those days, the Mac IIcx was hot. It was one of the first Macs to offer a color monitor option and it ran at whopping 16 MHz. I taught myself everything I needed to know about that machine and had a BBS up and running within a month. I also learned enough to get a per diem job as a computer applications instructor, so I quit my “day job” to pursue a writing career. I like to say that that computer changed my life. It did. If I hadn’t bought it and learned my way around it so quickly, I would never have developed the expertise to change careers.

Anyway, back in those days, shareware was a big thing. There was all kinds of shareware out there and much of it was pretty cool stuff. I distinctly remember the sound editing software I used — I believe it was called SoundEdit — which enabled me to record sounds and edit sound waves. Macs had “sound cards” built in from Day 1, so sound was always part of the Macintosh experience. Everyone had their own custom sound effects and used MacInTalk to get their Macs to read.

I did other cool stuff, too. For a while, I thought I wanted to learn how to program, but I soon realized that it wasn’t worth the bother with so much good shareware and freeware out there. But somewhere along the line, I got pressed for time just trying to make a living. The time between books got shorter and shorter and I developed new interests such as motorcycling and photography, and when we moved out west, horseback riding and flying. Although I still spent the same amount of time sitting in front of my computer, that was mostly work time. I didn’t get to play around as much as I used to. The “cool factor” of the computer seemed to fade away. It was a tool for getting a job done and that job happened to be to write about using this tool. It didn’t help that I somehow became an “expert” on productivity software like Word and Excel. I’d hopped on the Web publishing wagon early on and had a book about PageMill Web authoring software that did very well. But when Adobe killed PageMill, they also killed my book. So the path back toward a cool aspect of computing was removed and I didn’t have time to cut another one.

Things haven’t changed much. I’m sill busy writing books — I think I did six or seven last year — and still interested in other things — primarily flying. But I’ve managed to crack open a door to start writing about cool things again. An eBook I’ve got lined up should be very interesting. And it has me thinking about other topics, other cool things I can do with my computer.

That’s how I stumbled upon Nicecast. Nicecast, published by a company named Rogue Amoeba, is software that enables you to broadcast from your Macintosh onto the Web and it’s very cool. To be honest, I’d seen Nicecast at MacWorld Expo last January and had thought about it as a way for the local radio station to get started in Web broadcasting. KBSZ-AM is a low budget station that isn’t particularly high tech. They have a wonderful studio with a computerized broadcasting setup, but their knowledge of computing is limited and some of their equipment is very old. In fact, Pete’s wife Jo still uses a Mac IIci (the next model after my old IIcx) to do word processing and other stuff! But Pete does surf the Web via modern PC in search of information to include on-air and to keep abreast of what’s going on in the world. Anyway, I’d seen Nicecast at Macworld and had brought back a brochure for Pete. But it didn’t seem like they’d make the hardware investment to get it all up and running. You’d have to sell a lot of ads at $2 each to get started.

A few weeks ago, I discovered a Web site that has live broadcasts from various air traffic control (ATC) locations throughout the world. It’s called LiveATC.net. You click a link for an airport and a small file is downloaded to your computer. A moment later, iTunes launches (if you’re on a Mac; I don’t know what it does on a Windows machine) and the live ATC feed plays through your speakers. You can listen to ground control at JFK directing 474s around the airport or the tower at Boston clearing AirBuses to land. Live. How cool is that?The Home page at LiveATC.net mentioned that they were looking for feeder sites. All you needed was a computer running Windows or Unix, a scanner, some relatively inexpensive software, and a connection from the scanner to the computer. Although I have a Windows PC, I don’t usually turn it on unless I’m writing about Windows software. But my Mac OS X Macintosh runs Unix “under the hood.” Perhaps I could get it to work on my Mac. Wouldn’t that be a hoot! So I e-mailed the Webmaster and told him about my setup. He responded within an hour with a friendly message that told me it could indeed work. Some more e-mail crossed between us and I had a list of possible hardware and software to get the job done. I put the hardware on my Christmas Wish List and started looking into the software.

That’s when I stumbled onto Nicecast again. And this time, I downloaded it to give it a try. I figured that if I could get it to work with my weird network setup, I could get it to work anywhere. I had to reconfigure it to use a different network port than the default 8000 (which was in use by my Web server software) and then had to reconfigure my Airport wireless station to send requests to the new port to that computer (my production machine). Then I began broadcasting directly from my iTunes playlist. About 15 minutes of setup and it works flawlessly. Not bad for $40 worth of software. I shouldn’t have any trouble at all getting it to work with the scanner.

Then I thought about recording things that I could play on my radio station. I went in search of additional software that would enable me to use my PowerBook’s built-in microphone to record voices and sounds. I wound up with two packages that seem to complement each other nicely: Audio Hijack Pro, which is a $32 product by Rogue Amoeba, and Audacity, which is a freeware product distributed by SourceForge.net. Audio Hijack is cool because it can “hijack” other programs and record their sounds. This makes it possible to record a soundtrack from a game or a video presentation, as well as from the Mac’s built-in sound sources. Although you can apply special effects, you can’t edit the sounds. That’s where Audacity comes in. Although it can’t hijack sounds from other programs, it can record from Mac sound sources and it has editing capabilities. In fact, it reminds me a lot of SoundEdit, the shareware program I used years ago on my first Mac.

I played with all this last night. I recorded my bird, Alex, saying some of his usual things

So that’s where I stand now. I have the tools to record and broadcast. But I don’t have the time to set anything up. (What else is new?) But maybe one of these days, you’ll tune into Flying M Radio and be able to hear these blog pages.