This is what graphics card corruption looks like. Weeeeird.

• Always BCC added to email settings so you can carbon copy yourself
• Battery diplay updates to provide more accurate display of charge
• Passcode lock can have a longer timeout– prevents you having to enter your passcode EVERY time the phone goes into standby mode– instead allows you to picke a time frame to allow the phone to wait before it requires a passcode
• Audio out now works on many popular stereo docks and adaptors

So, back to the regret part…I really only listen to music in my car. Until this update my iPhone just couldn’t take the place of my iPod– it had iPod features, but no audio out to my car’s iPod setup.No matter how many ogled over the iPhone, or how many times I used Google maps–no amount of ‘cool!’ helped me shake the feeling that I’d potentially made a $600 (plus tax) mistake. The pitch had been ‘one device to do everything‘, and here I was still carrying around my 5th Gen iPod Video, AND an iPhone.

Along comes this supposed security update, and BAM, audio out through the dock connector– meaning, I can use it in the car!

I can’t explain how happy I was when this thing worked like I knew it could. It was like getting an iPod all over again (which by the way, can’t be explained, if you have one, you get it– shuffles don’t count…).

In the last 2 days, I’ve had time to really judge this thing as an iPod, and take a look at some of the new features of this ‘best iPod ever.

My favorite example of the iPhone’s improved iPod? Shuffle.

Now before you laugh at me, and call me names, try out this situation: you’re listening to your iPod, on shuffle, and a GREAT song from an even GREATER album comes on. All of a sudden, you need to hear that album. With iPods of yesteryear, you have to Menu Menu Menu your way out, then select Artist, or Album and scroll to the Artist or Album in question.

Now, I would never do this while driving…but, I bet some have and do. It’s a potentially dangerous pesky interface, and a total buzz kill.But with the iPhone? Screw that son, you just shuffle away, and when one of those DEEP TRACKS comes on, you can just hit the track listing for the album, and BAM, you have the entire listing of that album to choose from.

I can’t tell you how great this is. Is it worth 600$? Well, having something work the way you hoped it would, and having a pet peeve eliminated goes a small way toward making me a bit less impetuous– but $600 less? I think that’ll take another few ’security’ updates…

Over the weekend I noticed that my power adaptor was buzzing when charging my laptop. I’d read that there were issues with some adaptors, and that Apple had replaced them, so I called on Saturday.

During my less than 20 minutes on the phone, I spoke with 2 courteous AppleCare reps, and explained my concern to each of them. After advising me to unplug the buzzing adaptor, the AppleCare Specialist requested my address info, and today– less than 2 fully business days later– I’m using my new–NON BUZZING– power adaptor

Then this happened:

For the uninitaed, that’s a Kernel Panic, in short a total system crash. What’s impressive is that it came up during a system install.

Kernal Panics can indicate any number of software or hardware issues, that eventually cause you computer to crash. In the bygone days before protected memory, and multithreaded operating systems, total system crashes were common. This is not the case any more–Apple suport tends to regard Kernel Panics as a strong indicator of a hardware issue.

Aside: In case this happens to you and you call support, Applecare support will normally ask the following common troubleshooting questions:

• Have you installed any 3rd party ram?

No matter what, if you answer “yes” to this question, all other troubleshooting will usually cease until the 3rd party ram is removed.

• Have you run disk utility to repair permissions, and check your disk?
• Is your drive reporting any type of errors (what’s the status of the S.M.A.R.T. reporting)
• Does this happen in any specific apps / 3rd party apps?
• Have you tested this in another profile?
• Is you firmware up to date?
• Have you cleared you PRam, and reset your PMU?
• Have you run the Apple Hardware Test (AHT), have you run it in extended mode, have you run it in looped extended mode?

Back to the story. I bought 3rd party Ram. It was fine, or so I thought. Then I had the following issues:

1. Kernel Panic when using Aperture
2. Kernel Panic when installing OS
3. Video corruption when using OS (and by using, I mean watching a trailer in Quicktime, and running NO other programs Safari and Software update)

And by video corruption, I mean:

and:

So I put back in the Apple ram (512 megs–ughh!) and thought everything would be fine.

Then my machine wouldn’t login to my user account. The AHT said everything was fine–which was not true.

Disk Utility–while booted from the MacBook install disk–reported errors. “Hmm, that’s not normal.” Letting Disk Utility attempt to repair them resulted in failure, and–as is often the case–the drive no longer showed up on the desktop.

Shit.

DiskWarrior is great with stuff like this, and it was able to repair the drive and get it to show up on the desktop. But now, (even though S.M.A.R.T. reporting was showing that my drive was OK) I was having a hard time believing it.

Various files on my desktop weren’t copying to an external drive, Superduper couldn’t sucessfully clone the drive.

To recap:

1. Kernel Panic
2. Video Corruption
3. Data storage issues

So yeah, a few RMA’s later, my MacBook is back up and running. Complete with new ram, a new hard drive and most (if not all) of my data back in place.

Moral of the story? I have no idea. It’s not like I ran right out to buy Apple ram, or that I’m never going to replace my stock hard drive with a newer, larger model.

In fact, it’s because I got new ram, and a new hard drive, that I was able to revert back to the stock ones when the new stuff failed–or maybe it’s because of the new stuff that I had to.

Either way,I don’t really care–after all, mechanical shit breaks. Plan for it.

Tangerine has 3 main functions.

• Scanning – The app will scan your music library (except for iTunes music store purchases–something about the DRM makes this difficult) and keep a record of the BPM, beats per minute, of each song.
• (Really) Smart Playlists - You can use the app to create playlists of tracks falling in a certain beat range
• Syncing – The app will sync your Tangerine playlists to iTunes.

The burning question: Does it really work?

Yes. Yes it does. Usually…

Sometimes it gets the beats a little wrong, sometimes a LOT wrong. But I gotta tell ya’ it’s more right than wrong, and it scans your library WAY faster than just about any other BPM scanning app I’ve seen.

There are 3 perks that I feel put Tangerine above the rest

• It’s pretty – It’s easy on the eyes, and if Apple has taught me anything it’s that looks do matter. Think of it this way, you can be the smartest, nicest, most wonderful person in class, but if you show up every day with 3 day B.O., un-brushed teeth, and greasy hair…none of that matters.
• Playlist visualization – The app makes use of the album art for your tracks (if you have it– and if you have iTunes 7 Apple will let you download it!) and then shrinks or enlarges the art across a time line like a bar graph.  The tall the album cover the faster the BMP, the wider the cover the longer the song.
• Styled playlists – Just like the stair master or treadmill at the Gym, Tangerine can ’style’ your playlist to be gradually building, decending, random, or stepped.  It’s a great way to tailor the playlist and keep things from seeming too perfect.

Give Tangerine a look and decide for yourself.

Two drops, from 4 feet, onto a corner, and the worst thing that happened is that it got dented.

Gee, thanks entertainment industry. Way to fuck with anyone who already bought and HD-TV and was simply waiting for content.

I’ve grabbed the image from IFO to keep from hotlinking their image:

2. Connect to an open wireless network, and look for other computers on this open network

3. Connect to these machines (almost always Windows boxes where users have turned on printer and file sharing) with the user name guest and the password guest.

Then browse your way to free music!

Thanks Microsoft!

• I helped someone get online at Panera (on a PC)
• I helped someone protect thier wireless network (on a linksys/PC)
• I helped someone reboot their wireless base station, and helped them figure out that the password had changed (on a PC)

See a trend there?  I’m just sayin.  It’s amazing PC products aren’t cheaper to offset all the wasted time.

I only just read about it in Macworld today (woah, news from a printed magazine?). A gapless formatted album points to Apple and Artists’ recognition that the iPod’s grand canyon of slience slight pause between songs just ain’t gonna cut it. I’d thought Apple was planning to use the chapter markers frequently used in ‘enhanced’ Podcasts as a solution– and I hope that they do in the end…but I’ll settle for the admission that ‘gaps suck’, for now.

Not to worry, I’m on it! (And by ‘on it!’ I mean I’m waiting to see if there’s an update by the person that makes the theme i just switched to, K2).

Wordpress only upgraded to 2.0 about 10 hours ago, so I guess I can wait a minute or two. What? You wanna fight about it?

Today, when listening to the RIAA (or MPAA or NBC or Apple or whoever else is trying to make a buck off you) everyone talks about content. “Content is valuable, content costs money to produce”. Meanwhile, media companies are slowly making the format and delivery system just as valuable as the content. The content is small potatoes, indirect profit, the format and delivery is direct cash money. Think direct sales. No one really talks about the value of a format, conversations focus on the content instead

So my only question is…where’s the ad supported content/format? Why can’t I get an episode of Lost on the iTunes store with ads for free? Why can’t I get the old content in the new format? You can’t because media companies have figured out how to get paid on both ends- and I’d wager they’d rather the direct business model. Ads still pay for the content, but now media companies get paid for the format too! Example: you can get hidef content over the air, so why do you need fancy ‘digital cable’ to get it? Because you’re slowly being introduced to the idea of format and delivery as value.

This has been going on for years you’ll say, and you’ll be right– it has. But people are becoming more and more accepting of it. More and more people want hidef, and are willing to do whatever, put up with whatever and pay whatever in order to get it. Want to see TV on your iPod? Buy the file in the right format from the iTunes store. What ever happened to the idea of the VCR- you supply the gear and they supply the shows? What ever happened to taping shows? ‘Analog hole’ legislation currently being considered is attempting to make that illegal. Take that TiVo!

It’s fucking free on TV! The media company will say…”But now you can watch it whenever you want, that’s a service worth paying for!”. I could do that with my VCR! Granted it was hard to take that with me when jogging, so hooray for progress.

I’ll give you a second to freak out, and then let that sink in.

If you’re using unencrypted internet access points, (and most are unencrypted) most if not all of the data that’s going in and out of your laptop is sent in ‘plain text’. (When logging into a base station that requires you enter a login and password in order to use it, that’s a sign that the wireless base station encrypts all the data that passes through it. It’s not unbreakable, it’s just to say that it’s usually difficult enough to keep people from bothering.) On an unencrypted network (and with the right software) what you write can be seen as text. If you check your mail, your mail program is sending your login name and password in plain text. Same with many of the log-in’s for web-pages.

Plain text passwords, and data (such as the content of the email etc) wasn’t such a big deal when computers were huge carry on luggage sized boxes that were tethered to an equally large and immobile monitor. Toss in a cable modem, and maybe a router at best…but the whole thing was connected to a private network with no one but you and your family and friends on it.

Coffee houses, libraries, hotels, etc…they all offer free wifi, and many of them don’t encrypt any of the traffic. As soon as you log into a public network– your no longer the only one in the room– what you write is no longer private.

But there’s a solution. You can create a little tunnel of privacy, that will send all your data as gibberish, that no one else can read. You’re sending your data encoded as gibberish, to a safe network where the data can be decoded and sent to it’s true destination (think Little Orphan Annie decoder ring from the Christmas Story Movie). It’s like walking the long way home so the bully doesn’t beat you up and take your lunch money.

The power’s the be decided that the phrase ‘little tunnel of privacy’ was a bit to touchy feely and so they decided on VPN tunnel, short for virtual private network tunnel, instead.

A virtual private network is just that…it’s a non-physical (virtual = no direct cables from one point to the other) private (encrypted=not public) connection (network). You get a connection from one piece of hardware to another, over the internet that is very difficult to snoop on. You may already use one of these if you work from home for a large company. VPN’s help ensure that network traffic between a telecommuter and the home office stays private. The telecommuter either uses special hardware or software to create the VPN tunnel, and then goes about work as though nothing had changed. That’s the beauty of VPN connections– transparency. When using a VPN the telecommuter can use all the network resources of the main office, as though they were actually there. Printers, file servers, etc. Because of the VPN, they have a virtual private link to the office– that allows them to work as though they wer in the cubicle next door.

So back to the coffee house/library/hotel…how does a VPN help in those situations? You’re not trying to access a company server, or print to the company laser printer, but you are now in a public place. You’re sending your own private data (passwords, email addresses, instant messages) and there is no reason that any of this should be public. By purchasing a VPN router, and installing it in your house, you can create a VPN ‘endpoint’ (think of it as the pit stop that I mentioned earlier) that you can log into using VPN software on your laptop.

Once you log in–POOF– all data you send and receive looks like gibberish to anyone on the network in the coffee house. It goes straight back to your house, where it’s safe, is decrypted, and sent out to it’s final destination. Now, anyone at your house could still snoop in on it, so be sure that you know who’s on your network. Encrypt your wireless network, if it isn’t already.

Oh yeah, and you know how in some places they filter out content? Websites of questionable content? Email? Bittorrent?

…it will all work once you have a VPN tunnel back to your network at home.

All that filtering depends on the router knowing what kind of traffic your sending and receiving, what websites your going to, what applications your using. But using a VPN tunnel prevents the coffee house router from having a clue what your doing. All the traffic is really being sent and received by your home network internet connection (your cable modem or DSL) and it’s being forwarded to your computer via the VPN connection– your only using the coffee house network to send and receive the data from home. So a VPN reduces the coffee house network to a middle man…it’s the way you connect back to your network, so that you can do what you want to do…but be where you want to be while doing it.

So in the end, VPN’s are good for connecting to distant networks, and can help you access distant resources (company printers etc), maintain your privacy, AND avoid filtering when using public wifi hotspots.

All this for the low low price of $59.99

Replace your home router with a VPN home router. You will not regret it.

I’m at a loss for words. It’s unbelievable to see that many images in a single day. So many memories… For a moment today, I thought of maybe setting up a completely new website just to go thru them one at a time, one a day. Someday, who knows?

Thru the night tonight, my laptop is going to chug away on over 2800 Nikon Raw (.nef) files, and convert them to Adobe’s DNG (Digital negative format)– and those are just from half of 2004! Then I’ll burn all my images, all 7 years worth, to 10 DVD’s. 10 DVD’s doesn’t seem like that much.

Meantime, I’ll get some shuteye, while my lappy does the heavy lifting for me. Just a few left…2737 to go.

I love it. The link leads to list of system admin truths, each one of them obvious to me now…after a year as a system admin.

From how a user will lie to you, to how screwed you’ll be if you don’t have a good reliable backup system, each one of them underlines some important ideas in cya. (cover yo’ ass).

I was also pleasantly surprised by how many of them I already agree with…

#1 – Users Lie- OHHHHHH yes. This alone is important enough to be 1-5.

#2 – Email is the Lifeblood of Non-Techies – Well, you gotta stay in touch with clients, right?

#3 – Printers Suck – He mentions HP printer network cards crashing out…both of ours at work have…need I say more?

#4 – Cleanliness is Godliness-Yeah, just look at their desktop…if it’s a mess, be wary…

#5 – Backups are Crucial – Duh. So obvious and yet no one actually backs up their shit.

#6 – Switches and Hubs (Usually) Die One Port At A Time – I knew a guy who never used port 1 in linksys routers…said they always went bad. I have no idea if it’s true or not.

#7 – No One Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft – Except an Apple Employee.

#8 – Politeness > Brevity – Watch it with this tho…talk to much, you’re longwinded…not enough, your stuck up. Probably the single most difficult skill to master.

# 9 – Know Your Needs – It’s tough when you always want to play with the new stuff..but new stuff is just that, new. You never want to be a ‘test pilot’.

#10 – The Holy Grail of Tech Support…is the reboot. So true. There are so many things that can go wrong without any outward signs. Apps crash, preferences get messed up, network settings can be effected. Restart, and -poof- they’re all gone.

Read this, it’s a great post…

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