Wed - October 1, 2008

Turn off iTunes Store Links in iTunes 8


After going crazy trying to find out where Apple hid the preference checkbox to turn off the arrows that link to the iTunes Store, I read that they removed the GUI method. Luckily, the Terminal method still holds.

Paste this line into Terminal.app and hit return:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

The next time you fire up iTunes, those annoying arrows should be gone.

Posted at 10:18 AM     Read More  


Wed - July 16, 2008

iPhone Apps


I don't know how all the corporate world/exchange server stuff is doing on the iPhone, but for music and gaming, the update's pretty cool. If you're purchasing music for your library especially, you gotta get an iPhone.

iPhone Music Apps that I find interesting:

1. Pandora for the iphone
For exploring unfamiliar bands you might like, this service is really neat. There's also the regular Pandora website to try, if you're interested. Their licensing agreements with the record companies only allow six skips per "station" per hour, and it feels like it's ramming certain artists down your throat sometimes, so it could be better, but it's still worth exploring.

2. Midomi
This is showing up on other phones too. If you go to a movie theater, Verizon has an extra-long ad for one of their phones with this type of service. It might be Midomi, for all I know. The idea is for you to sing or record a bit of a song on your phone, then this service attempts to figure out what song it is. Great in theory, but... Popular music works pretty well: I tested it on some Gorillaz, Gladys Knight, Fred Astaire. Classical, international searches fail. I tried some Vivaldi piece, and the response was some Mary J. Blige song. Hit or miss. It uses music & lyrics to figure it out. I gave it the intro to Same Old Song & Dance by Aerosmith, before the singing starts, and it nailed it. I gave it "Speak Low" by Billie Holiday, and it failed. I gave it "Body & Soul" off the same album, and it succeeded.

3. AOLRadio
Basically WiFi radio, so it's got the satellite radio feel. It works pretty well. Good method to mark the songs you like too.


With all this great gadgetry and wireless, the main problem now is power consumption. Laptops, phones, ipods.They suck it up! I'm living with the first version of the phone, and I heard it's been improved with the 3G version.

Posted at 12:52 PM     Read More  


Wed - July 18, 2007

Learning Ruby on Rails


Ruby on Rails is pretty cool. Here are some of the resources I'm using to learn it:

To get it up and running on Mac OS X, I found Dan Benjamin's how-to to be very good, for both PPC and Intel Macs:

Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X

Then I used a quick tutorial that is at the Apple Developer site:

Using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OS X

Then here are two books that I like so far:

Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas

Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications by Patrick Lenz

We're ordering some more Ruby/Rails titles, and I'll give more recommendations if I have any. Right now, 'm looking through Rails Recipes by Chad Fowler, but I am disappointed in the recipe for adapting an existing MySQL database, i.e., I still couldn't figure out how to do it ;-), so I'm withholding judgment.

Using TextMate on Mac OS X comes in handy too. There is a way to use it remotely, but I found it to be too slow, unfortunately. We use Bluehost as our hosting provider, and they've got a good help page on setting it up on your Bluehost account:

How to set up Ruby on Rails

Posted at 09:58 AM     Read More  


Wed - July 11, 2007

iPhone Hijinks


I just celebrated my birthday last week, and I got my wife's permission to go nuts and buy an iPhone. It has its faults, but overall, I've got to say that I'm very impressed. I didn't have any problems activating, and I probably get about 6 hours without needing to charge it. I have yet to look at a manual. My kids figured it out in no time. Very cool gadget.

It came in very handy when we went to visit the USS Cod at the Cleveland lakefront. We couldn't figure out where it was, once we got down to the pier between the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Burke Lakefront Airport, so I went online with the iPhone and pulled up the web page with the Cod info. On the hours page, there was a telephone number, and what's smart about that iPhone is that phone numbers on web pages are live links. I clicked on the link, and the iPhone calls the number. I reached the ticket booth of the USS Cod, and he told me where they were, and what's more, he told me that they had free parking! YES!

While touring the submarine, I used my phone to take pictures. They come out rather well for a phone camera. Email is very easy to use too. All my POP accounts work seamlessly.

When I got back home, I read some stories about the iPhone developer conference, and I tried out a few of the mini-apps that have already been devised for the iPhone. The gas app is nice, but I was blown away by the google iPhone Remote. It lets you browse the files on a Mac, use its iSight camera, view the desktop, even remotely control iTunes. It's an alpha release, and it's a work in progress, but wow.

The downside: how iPhone syncs. You can't sync it manually, or browse the file hierarchy. I was ticked off that I can't take some songs from this computer, some I have at work, etc. If you try, it wants to zap the existing files from the iPhone. That's my main complaint for now.

Posted at 11:46 AM     Read More  


Wed - January 10, 2007

iPhone & Apple TV vs. PocketPC & Blackberry


Yesterday's Macworld keynote had some awfully cool stuff. The iPhone looks phenomenal. I'm not surprised the stock surged $7 a share. It's up another $5 this morning. Apple's design and R&D staff are unbeatable.

Which brings me to the tale of the PocketPC. I had to install the driver for a Wireless CF card for a friend's Dell Axim A5 this weekend. What a pain in the ass. YugoPC.

How can a company like Microsoft, that is so incredibly wealthy and huge, put out such a terrible product? It makes me wonder. Do they have anyone try things out before they release them? Focus groups, etc.? Something as simple as deleting a network location is like pulling teeth. At least they could have written up something for their help program. They just do not get it. The Austro-Hungarian Empire of technology. Christ Almighty.

Moving on. I watched a few of the short movies Apple has up demonstrating what the iPhone can do. I'm looking forward to seeing what the possibilities for scripting will be. I definitely want one of those babies. The advanced technology in there. Not just one thing, but a slew of them. Damn! Apple gets it. Nobody else comes close. Apple makes Blackberries look like Speak & Spells.

The Apple TV. Looks and sounds great. Not too pricey either. Too bad it's asking for a hi def TV, and I won't be getting HDTV for another year or so.

Posted at 12:18 PM     Read More  


Tue - August 1, 2006

Intel iMac


I finally set up the iMac with a Windows partition via BootCamp. It works surprisingly well. Holding down the option key during startup allows me to choose which operating system. I think Apple's got a winner here: the best of both worlds.

The downside: welcome to the insecure world of Windows. Right off the bat, I installed Norton Antivirus, the I installed all the Windows updates, then I went out and got SpyBot Search & Destroy. I couldn't believe that SpyBot already found stuff on the machine. I had only been to Microsoft's website & Google to get SpyBot. Insane. I don't think I'm going to do much surfing in Windows.

Another minus: Windows can't see the Mac partition at all, since I formatted the Windows partition as NTFS. Buzz. My iPod (formatted for Mac) is unrecognizable too. I think I'll take the simple way out and use my old iMac as a server, probably by running Samba.

I had one crash while in XP, when I clicked on "Video Camera" in My Computer. XP sees the built-in iSight camera, apparently, but doesn't know how to use it.

A side note: I didn't know that XP had fast user switching, even though we use XP at work. I guess it doesn't fly using Active Directory?

Posted at 09:25 AM     Read More  


Fri - June 16, 2006

Getting a 20-inch Intel iMac & video iPod


Oh, happy day. My son's been in to cartooning and I think he would get a kick out of learning Flash. Plus he's dying for an iPod, so wouldn't you know it, Apple has this promotion going on that gives you a free iPod nano or so much off a video iPod when you purchase a new Mac. Sounds like a deal to me.

So, we took a look at the 17-in. and 20-in. iMac models over at a nearby CompUSA. The 20-inch screen is huge. I think we're going to be mighty impressed. The plan is to install BootCamp and have a Mac OS X partition and an XP partition.

One thing that should be cool is that these iMacs have a built-in iSight. Finally, I'll have someone to video chat with: my family!

I was reading on the web that I will need to decide whether to format the Windows partition as FAT32 or NTFS. I still haven't decided. The former will allow read/write from the Mac partition, the latter allows only read access.

My son's getting a black 30 GB video iPod. I wonder what he's going to put on it. I think we're going to convert a lot of his favorite TV shows for it. Family Guy, Venture Brothers, Bo-Bo Bobobo, whatever the hell it is. Thank God for the DVR.

Posted at 09:53 AM     Read More  


Sun - February 26, 2006

Music Kiosk Moved To Mac Mini


After four years, the CRT on the G3 500 MHz iMac across from the Circ Desk went South. I was using it for one of the music kiosks that run iTunes.

Luckily, we had some money in the computer budget to get a replacement. So I purchased a Mac Mini. We're just going to use some extra PC parts, i.e., keyboard, mouse, & monitor, to complete the package.

I used Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner to get the old setup over to the Mac Mini. I first made two partitions, leaving 10.4.5 on one, then cloning over my 10.2.8 setup to the other partition.

The cloning procedure was a success, but it turns out, as I expected, the audio stuff didn't work. The hardware didn't even exist back in the days of Jaguar. The headphones weren't recognized, and the tracks wouldn't play. What to do? I decided to upgrade the kiosk to 10.4.5. I was worried that many things would be broken, but it wasn't so bad. I just had to go into the command line to rename the Dock and Spotlight, and everything else was fine. Except for the ugly monitor and keyboard, of course.

Posted at 02:37 PM     Read More  


Wed - January 11, 2006

Macworld News


Apple announced their first Intel Macs: the iMac and the MacBook Pro.

Steve Jobs said the Intel iMac is twice as fast as the G5 iMac, and the MacBook Pro is four and a half to five times as fast as the G4 PowerBook. So it looks like the push is on to get all you iPod lovers to buy a Mac too. It will be interesting to see what becomes of the Mac Mini and the PowerMacs.

The iLife suite got updated too. Apparently GarageBand has been revamped to make it easier to produce podcasts. I'll probably get it for the library, and update what we've already got.

There's something about the Steve Jobs Keynote address that creeps me out. It's like watching Bush give a press conference, trying to extract the truth from all the bullshit. When Jobs and Schiller are talking together, the creep factor increases exponentially. Still, I want a MacBook Pro.

BTW, I was on the Apple website trying to check out the specs on my old Blueberry G3 iMac at home. The black background of the webpage with the three shades of grey text...WTF? It looked terrible. It looked better on my Luxo iMac, but still, WTF? Black pages look like shit; it doesn't matter who's doing it. If Apple can't do it right, with all their attention to detail, nobody can. QED.

What the hell was that thing on the iPod? A radio remote. Not interested. I hardly ever listen to radio anymore.

I wish Apple had released a media center gizmo. Supposedly it's in the works.

Posted at 09:14 AM     Read More  


Tue - August 2, 2005

Swapping out a DVD-ROM drive


I bought a replacement drive from Wegener Media for $79; 90 clams with shipping. My youngest son used to shove everything inside it. It was practically his piggy bank. I've opened the iMac case a number of times so the swap wasn't too difficult.

When I rebooted, I got the "?" folder icon, meaning it couldn't find a bootable system folder. WTF? I had my laptop to go surfing with and discovered that since the replacement drive's master/slave settings couldn't be changed, I needed to change the jumper setting on the hard drive. After I did that, I was able to boot, although it started up off a different partition. I set that back to normal, but the DVD-ROM drive didn't want to accept discs. The motor tried to drag a disc in, but would get stopped about half way. I called up Wegener, and the service rep said that sometimes a magnet gets out of whack during shipping. So, I shipped it back via DHL, and am waiting for a replacement.

Posted at 12:53 PM     Read More  


Mon - July 18, 2005

Mr. Fixit


I went back to broadband at home. Verizon DSL. Setup was easy, but my wireless hub must've had a bad card, so I bought a Airport Express. I also tried fixing a keyboard that my son had spilled something on. Ixnay on the ixfay.

With Verizon, the serviceman didn't even have to come in the door. They send out the DSL modem/router beforehand, and it has a setup disc with it. During setup, it used Internet Explorer for the browser, which I thought was rather anachronistic, since I think they require OS X 10.2 or higher.

It looks like Verizon blocks port 80 somehow. I was able to talk to my website using another port. It was the only port that didn't work immediately; SSH, FTP, AFP, all worked at their usual port numbers.

Airport Express is about the size of a bagel. It plugs right into the wall outlet, then I ran the CAT-5 from the DSL modem into it, and that was that. The iMac upstairs, the iMac downstairs, and my iBook all have wireless, but I still have Panther upstairs, and that one, even though it's always connected to the net, has this password thing going on: every time that it logs out, upon logging in again it needs to be reconnected to the wireless network. Strange.

The keyboard thing was interesting. I found a tiny screwdriver at Sears to open up the back, then inside it's all tiny phillips heads. About 12 zillion of them. But once I saw the inner plastic circuit board, I knew it was shot. The liquid had gotten inside it somehow.

Posted at 09:05 AM     Read More  


Fri - June 24, 2005

Thank God I'm using a Mac


One of our reference desk computers running W2K has this ABetterInternet adware on it that is impossible to remove. Even Microsoft's AntiSpyware Beta can't kill it. That's reassuring.

So...why aren't we using macs on the desk? Basically, it's because of the Horizon catalog running only on PC's. We don't do anything else at those desks that's PC specific.

Anyway, back to the bitching. If you go out to the web and look for help, i.e., how do I remove this thing?, you find a number of sites that list what to do: kill processes, unregister DLLs, clean the registry, remove files, etc. A lot of work for someone's careless click on a link or opening of an attachment by mistake. Then to do all that and find out that the adware wasn't removed, that's a treat.

To make a short story shorter, the adware's still on there. What's it gonna take? A clean reinstallation of the OS?

He approaches the pulpit one more time. Folks, do yourself a favor, and drop Windows like the fetid rotting potato that it is. Let your IT staff enjoy the pleasure of removing malware while you get some work done on your Mac.

Over and out.

Posted at 02:16 PM     Read More  


Mon - June 20, 2005

Checking out Car Audio / iPod interfaces


I headed over to Best Buy and Circuit City today to see what my options were for hooking my iPod up in the car.

I used the Sony cassette adapter thing in my old car, but the car I have now only has CD/FM, so I've been using a Griffin iTrip. I'm not very happy with it. The high-range gets distorted and interference is always an issue. I wanted to see what was possible.

At Circuit City, the guys were pretty helpful, and they let me hook up my iPod to a Pioneer iPod converter / 7700 combo. Out the door it would probably run $350 to $400, since the converter is about $120, and the deck is $250 or so. The big plus is that the system keeps the iPod juiced and talks to the iPod with the same connection. It still has two cables though, which I thought looked dorky. The info from the iPod shown on the display wasn't very impressive. The non-scrolling size of the display is only 8 letters wide. The iPod's own interface is a hell of a lot better.

I walked next door to the Best Buy, and looked at their offerings too. Kenwood and Alpine also sell their own iPod converter/interfaces for their decks. The prices on those were around $100. None of the decks had anything going for them. I even looked for basic aux input jacks on the front of any of the decks. Only JVC and some other no name brand had that.

So, where does that leave me? I'm thinking of doing what these guys did:

http://www.mattgilbert.net/carstereoauxinput/

http://ipod.hackaday.com/entry/1234000220046664/

Charging the iPod will still be unsightly. I've got a cigarette lighter gizmo that charges the iPod for the long hauls, but for local trips, I don't need it.

Once again, I'm hoping Apple will look in to this and do it right. I know they've got VW, BMW, Volvo all working with them. They need to school the companies making these decks. Shoddy products, IMHO. Simplify!

Posted at 02:56 PM     Read More  


Wed - May 11, 2005

mod_rewrite on OS X


I have read some things on the web about mod_rewrite that use .htaccess, but I just modify the end of my httpd.conf file.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^TRACE
RewriteRule .* - [F]
RewriteRule ^/ISBNSearchXIpacWithProfileSetToMCD(.+) http://134.241.121.88/ipac20/ipac.jsp?¬
profile=mcd&index=ISBNEX&term=$1 [R,L]
</IfModule>

Posted at 10:45 AM     Read More  


Sat - May 7, 2005

Learning the basics about Java and Cocoa


I'm slowly working through a book about Java that our library just received, Head First Java by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates. It's the second edition.

I'm actually liking it, to my surprise. Objects, classes, etc. All that stuff that scares me. I found it interesting that they mention Tiger, OS X 10.4, right off the bat. It's the only OS that has Java 5 ready to go. I'm still waiting for Tiger, but Panther, OS X 10.3, has 95% of what I need to do the exercises.

I've still got about half of the Building Cocoa Applications book to go through, then I need to find that Cocoa programming book by Aaron Hillegass. There's a second edition out.

I got ticked off by an article in the Boston Globe today. A guy in the article was comparing Apple to the Yankees. What the hell? In my Weltanschauung, Microsoft is the Yankees. The team I love to hate. Apple is the Cleveland Indians or the Chicago Cubs. Underdogs! Boston was probably the epitome of that mystique until they won the Series. Actually Cleveland fits pretty well, especially back in the mid-Nineties when they were going to the Series but never winning it all. People in Boston seemed to hate them more than the Yankees. I couldn't figure it out.

Posted at 05:26 PM     Read More  
Using iTunes for CD booklet replacement
Updated Safari Script & Play Random Track Script
iTunes Scripts for Public Libraries

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