Archive for September, 2009
Walk in the Woods (part II)
Here are some shots my son took on our walk. Some pretty cool stuff actually. He even took the time to edit them in iPhoto and add some contrast, toning and more. I think he liked the results.
Eventually we might be able to read the news online…
Using a (likely) 300 baud sonically coupled modem, people could read the news from a few newspapers from their TRaSh-80’s via a BBS type system I am guessing. It took a few hours to download an entire newpaper and it was only text back then.
Today I have a 20 million baud connection and I am guessing my CPU is 20 million times faster as well. But the best part is that the CPU I am talking about is the one I first viewed the video on….my iPhone!
Too funny.
1 commentA Lazy Walk in the Woods
I took the kids and Rylan over to Great Falls last week. My idea was to give each kid a camera and see if they took some fun shots. I was also trying to get Jake to start playing around with his “new” laptop (my old one). He is pretty good with computers but mostly uses them for YouTube and other video/TV watching.
So we went down with the dog and everyone and did some shooting. Everyone had a straight 50 or 55mm lens on an DSLR to keep things simple. (no lens tricks) I plan to post some of Jake and Anna’s shots as soon as they finalize what they like. But for now, here are a few of mine.
Update: As promised, here are some that Jake took.
No commentsHow to clean an Apple Mighty Mouse (the one with the trackball)
Whether you have a corded or wireless version, sometimes the trackball will get gummed up with oil/dirt. Since the mouse does not come apart very easily and the parts inside the trackball are very tiny anyway, taking it apart is not a very good option. The best approach I learned today (at the Apple store in Reston) is to simply take a piece of paper and turn the mouse upside down and roll the trackball around on the paper. The oils and some of the dirt come off on the “rough” paper. My experience using this method restored my track ball to 100%.
This may also be a good approach to cleaning blackberry trackballs. They are very similar mechanisms inside.
Two Features I like in OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
The latest OS install brings very little in the way of new features. I am not complaining, it just is what it is. But there are a couple of little nuggets that I have found which I believe are new and which are very nice to see.
1) In 10.5 when you had a folder open, there was a nice search bar at the top. When you typed something to search for, the search would revert to searching the entire Mac instead of the folder you were in. You then had to click on the folder again in the list to search the folder you had been in. Annoying. Now there is a preference in the Finder preferences to fix that and have the search just search that folder. This is very handy for searching system folders and library folders which Spotlight does not automatically provide results for….trying to find that hidden preference file that you want to blow away for troubleshooting, etc.
2) You can now add a file server (Apple Share, etc) to your Login Items under System Preferences/Accounts. This will automatically open up that file share when you login! There were ways to do this under 10.5, but I believe this is now new and very easy under 10.6. Perhaps I am wrong and it existed before…but it is new to me :-)
Make it three features….
3) In an Open/Save dialog box, you can press APPLE (command) + SHIFT + “.” (period) and you can toggle seeing hidden files (those with a prefixed dot/period). This is great for editing unix .profiles, .htaccess files and more. No more having to use the terminal and vi or toggling the hidden file preference in the file for everything. Smart.
A Few Issues with Exchange 2007, Mac OS X 10.6, iCal, Mail.app, Address Book and Delegates
1) It’s not perfect.
2) It’s better than Entourage in many ways.
3a) Address Book (Contacts) seem to sync really well. The updates work both ways (Mac, PC, and I assume Blackberry). But Groups are NOT respected if you use them in Outlook. This is not a huge issue for most people, but I do have a client who uses these groups to segregate his contacts into what is approaching a relational database of sorts!
3b) Everything else also seems to work fairly well for syncing – Calendar, Mail, and more. Overall it is a good experience and mostly for the better compared to the dreaded Entourage.
5a) Delegate access to Calendar and Tasks can not be set-up from the Mac side. Well it can to some extent, but at least for me working with a Rackspace hosted EX07 environment, delegate set-up barely works for READ ONLY access. If I do read only, someone can get view my calendar and task info from their Mac. But if I try to set a higher permission for a delegate (e.g., read/write), I get an error “Unknown Error from Exchange Server. CalExchangeErrorDomain 239.” Is this a Rackspace issue or an Apple issue? Who knows. I have tickets with each to find a solution.
5b) So I can’t set-up a delegate on a Mac, but I know I can on the Windows side in Outlook. If the delegate permission is set-up in Windows, then other people on a Mac can subscribe to the delegatee’s Calendar and Tasks from their native Mac Apps (iCal and Mail). BUT there are some glaring omissions…there are no options to subscribe to their address book/contacts, mail or anything else! There is simply no option. Apple reps sort of confirmed this is a lack of feature and I got the sense it is coming in the near future.
6) One strangeness to report in addition to the bugs. When you use the Mac apps to access your personal mailbox, contacts, calendar, tasks, etc, there is a strange thing with Tasks/Todo. The Tasks show up under Todo in Mail.app. But iCal is the program actually doing the syncing. So you have to open iCal to get the tasks up to date in Mail’s Todo list! And if you want to instantly refresh the Todo list, right clicking on the todo list in Mail and selecting “Synchonize” will NOT do it. You must currently open iCal and/or hit refresh (command-R).I think I understand why Todo items (tasks) are sync’d through iCal. But what I can’t understand is why the Synchronize command is broken in Mail.app. Nor can I understand why in iCal if a Todo item has a DUE DATE assigned, why it never shows up in the actualy iCal Calendar somewhere (the due date would make sense).
Oh, and the To Do items (tasks) are available in iCal although they do not show by default. You have to tell it to show your To Do list in iCal which is under the VIEW menu.
UPDATE…
Even worse, evidently there are sync issues way beyond the small issues I listed above. We have been seeing tasks and other info more or less corrupted by Apple 10.6 Snow Leopard users that are delegates on other people’s accounts. Basically when you are a delegate and have not signed in for a while as a delegate to that person you are a delegate of, old data can be sync’d into the account you are a delegate for even though that data was removed/deleted long ago by the account owner! This happened twice with TASK data. I suggest staying away from Apple’s implementation of Exchange 2007 for a long while (until they fix their shit).
