It’s reassuring and alarming to know an error like this exists in Microsoft Word. I’d certainly never seen it before. I’m quick to say the document I opened to summon this message wasn’t one I’d composed myself.
Figuring he has enough printers in his apartment, Jimi donated to me his circa 2003 Epson Stylus Photo R300 ink jet printer. I stopped by his apartment after work to pick it up. It’s intimidating in size and weight (14 pounds), and that it takes six individual ink cartridges. A nice feature is you can print photo files directly from a memory card, such as CompactFlash. The printer also has a CD tray that allows you to print directly onto an ink jet-printable CD-R or DVD-R.
My PowerBook power adapter must have died in the last day or so. Last night, right in the middle of ripping “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” by Bonnie Tyler, my computer suddenly alerted me that it was running on reserve battery power, which was strange, because it was plugged in. A quick check determined that although it was indeed plugged into the wall outlet, no power was making it to the Mac, and in that second, the battery died, effectively trapping my Billboard Greatest Hits: 1983 CD inside, which could be a good thing, depending on your point of view.
After work, I took the suspect adapter to Jimi’s and by plugging it into one of his own PowerBooks, he confirmed that the adapter was busted, not my computer, which was a possibility.
A walk over to the CompUSA at Columbus Circle yielded an empty shelf where the adapters should have been, and the floor staff was supremely unhelpful in checking availability. I’ll have to make do with a trip to the Apple Store tomorrow, or, failing that, Tekserve or J&R.
I’ve decided I can live for now without television and the internet, but it’s tough to give up my PowerBook. All my music is on it, it’s serving as my DVD player and lately I’ve been composing blog entries on it, copying them to disc and posting them at work.
November 16, 2005 Update: I bought a new adapter at the Apple Store in SoHo, which had several dozen of them in stock. The PowerBook is back up and running like a charm, to the tune of about $80.
As predicted last week, Apple’s “iPhone” was announced today, and alas, it really is just a cell phone with iTunes on it. Make than an ugly cell phone.
More sexily, Apple rolled out the pencil-thin, color-screened iPod nano which probably embittered all the suckers that snapped up a screenless iPod shuffle. Next up, the iPod flea.
Apple also introed a new version of iTunes, which makes a big step to v5.0, yet manages to contain no fantastic features, like the synch feature I was hoping for. Take note, Steve: the Yahoo! Music Engine can synch—it mirrors tracks from one music library to another, so that, say, you can listen to all of your music on your work computer and your home computer, ripping tracks or making library edits on either, with changes/additions mirrored on both machines.
Finally, the iTunes Music Store made available for sale every Madonna album ever. (Add the non-album tracks from all her singles and I’ll be happy; probably Jimi, too.) I was amused to note that shortly after the addition of her catalog to the Store, her most-downloaded solo track was still “Who’s That Girl,” one of my favorites, but not Madonna’s, as it appears on none of her many greatest hits and compilation albums.
According to a New York Times story this afternoon (“An IPod Cellphone Said to Be Imminent,” by Matt Richtel), Apple’s long-rumored “iPhone” could be introduced next Wednesday.
Roger Entner, a telecommunications analyst with Ovum, a market research firm, said he had been told by an industry executive that the new phone, to be made by Motorola, would be marketed by Cingular Wireless. Mr. Entner said it would include iTunes software, which helps power the iPod.
The software will allow people to transfer songs from a personal computer to the mobile phone, then listen to the songs, presumably through headphones. ‘It’s a deluxe music player now on your cellphone,’ he said of the device.
Apple, Motorola and Cingular declined to confirm or deny the report. But Apple did announce on Monday that it would hold a major news event on Sept. 7 in San Francisco that it indicated was music-related.
That’s funny because this spring, I noted Apple’s whole “missed the boat on multifunctional portable devices” issue by citing the PSP, mp3 phones and a comment from Bill Gates that he didn’t think that “the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run,” adding “if you were to ask me which mobile device will take top place for listening to music, I’d bet on the mobile phone for sure.” Good bet, Bill.
Pray that Apple leant some of its industrial design savvy to Motorola and that this thing won’t be a nightmare to behold and control like most mobile phones. I do hope this device is worthy of a name like iPhone and not just “a phone with iTunes on it.” (And it looks like iPhone won’t be the name anyway, as that name is already taken by a VoIP provider.)
I had the unstoppable urge this morning to upgrade my Mac’s operating system to the newest version, 10.4, otherwise known as Tiger. It was introduced by Apple in April but I wait a spell after major ugrade releases for the company to squash the inevitable bugs with updates. With such fixes, they’re now at version 10.4.2, so I figured I was generally safe.
I took the 1 train down to the CompUSA near the Time Warner Center and bought a copy. I could have saved about $30, mostly in taxes, if I would have ordered from Amazon.com, but as I said, I was a man on a mission.
I spent the past few days backing up vital files on my computer. I’ve noticed the problem I’ve had as hard drives get bigger is that I’ve gotten lazier about keeping my files archived. HDs used to be so small, I had to archive things like mp3s and digital photos frequently, simply for want of hard drive space. But now that I have a 40GB drive (which itself isn’t even considered large anymore), I only back-up my files whenever Apple releases a major OS update and it’s been a year, so that’s a lot of files. It’s also not a good idea, as I’d likely weep if my hard drive crashed and took nearly 20GB of un-backed-up document files with it. But after I put down $20 for a big stack of 50 blank DVDs from Best Buy and set aside some quality time for copying-and-burning, I was good to go.
I noticed Apple seems to have got half-hearted with the whole jungle-cat marketing concept. When the first major OS X update was released, OS 10.2, it was dubbed Jaguar, replete with jungle-print themes on ads, packaging, desktop pictures, and metaphors wherever you looked (“Jaguar pounces!”). OS 10.3 was dubbed Panther and the theme was even less pronounced. With Tiger, it seems to have all but vanished. Even the packaging seems to have reverted to the matte black design with a large, mysterious X, like back when OS 10 was first introduced.
Installation went smoothly. In true Jason fashion, the feature I was most excited about was the complimentary dictionary/thesaurus application. I’d been previously using a third-party version of the American Heritage Dictionary, but it had some shortcomings, like the inability to copy-and-paste text from definitions and non-hyperlinked definition text, two features present in the Oxford American Dictionary version included with the new OS.
Some of the other features look promising, but I need time to fiddle with them and work them into my workflow. The most interesting bits to me are Spotlight, a Google-like search feature, and Dashboard, which is an rejuvenation of the Mac’s classic “desk accessories,” little programs that put a calculator, clock, calendar, weather forecaster and other dinguses on your desktop, and accessible at a click of the mouse.
Today is National Teacher Day, so I thought I'd attempt to remember Mrs. Hartman, who taught me programming and how to use computers.
True to fashion, I don’t remember much about Mrs. Hartman other than she was one of the few and perhaps only non-nun people at my Catholic grade school. She had a gravelly voice from chain smoking and I seem to recall her hair was rather 1950s-bouffanty. Such technology still being a relatively new thing at the time, the computer room, located just off the lobby of the school’s front entrance, was the size of a largish coat closet, which it may very well have been.
Mrs. Hartman taught me Applesoft BASIC on one of the later-model Apple II systems, circa 1984 or 1985. I remember enjoying learning about the Apple II’s amazing graphical capabilities and how I could create crazy patterns using FOR/NEXT loops and the RND() random number generator. In a more orderly fashion, I could plot a counted cross stitch-like pattern on graph paper then translate it into a BASIC program to make it appear onscreen.
We’re talking crazy oldskool graphics. The Apple II’s low-res graphics mode was 40 by 48 pixels with a whopping 16 color choices. You used the GR command to turn on the low-res goodness, COLOR to define the color, then PLOT (to lay down a single chubby pixel) or HLIN and VLIN (to draw a horizontal or vertical line of pixels) to build Lego-like images.
Learning BASIC from Mrs. Hartman was responsible for starting a string of computer milestones in my life: convincing my parents to buy me a Commodore 128, using money saved from my Toledo Blade paper route to buy my own Amiga 2000, taking a PASCAL course in college, buying a series of Macs in my adult life, and culminating in programming this web site.
Back to that fondly remembered Apple II, I also recall playing lots of Oregon Trail and frequently dying of dysentery.
Thanks, Mrs. Hartman, for getting me started on the right foot by using Apple computers. Who knows what evil I would now be perpetrating upon the world had I learned BASIC on a Windows machine.
In light of Sony’s recently introduced PSP (PlayStation Portable) and Nokia’s announcement today that it’s rolling out the Nokia N91 cell phone/mp3 player by year-end, I can’t help but think Apple dropped the ball with its newest “non-traditional” iPod model, the iPod photo.
The PSP, as a rabid nerd near you has likely demonstrated whether you were interested or not, chiefly plays video games, but also displays photos and plays mp3s and proprietary-format movies.
As for the N91, Nokia has had cameras for a short time that played mp3s. But this model is coming dangerously close to the original iPod in terms of storage space—a whopping 4GB. Plus, of course, it’s a cell phone, and for good measure, includes a 2 megapixel digital camera. Why is this smart? It combines three things that consumers have liked to be portable for some time: photography (since, oh, say, 1900 when Kodak introduced the Brownie), the telephone (cellular since 1973) and music (the Sony Walkman debuted in 1979).
These combo items make perfect sense. The iPod photo, on the other hand, plays music, naturally, and, er, displays digital photos. That’s it. (Apple does have a deal with Motorola to play iTunes Music Store mp3s on Motorola phones, but I’m not seeing how that helps Apple sell more iPods.)
What Apple should do it use its kick-ass industrial design team to come up with an iPod-phone or iPod-video game system hybrid. It’d be tough to do using the “clean” design aspect of the iPod (very few controls and a logical interface packed in a small space) when mixing-in something as button-intensive as a phone. Also, I realize Apple would probably need to partner with a company with cell phone or video game manufacturing experience, which doesn’t seem likely, given Apple’s rugged individualism. But hey, why not give it a crack; it certainly couldn’t turn out any worse than the Newton.
Apple makes mp3 players and it makes them very well. But soon, I don’t think that will be enough; consumers are demanding multiple functionality from their portable electronic devices and that demand is increasingly being met by other companies. Get with the future, Apple. Who wants to carry around (and separately power-charge) all these portable electronic gadgets separately when they could get it all-in-one?
May 12, 2005 Update: Although he’s a wee bit biased, particularly given Microsoft’s Samsung partnership, Bill Gates would seem to agree. According to a CNN/Money story published today, he told a German newspaper he doesn’t believe that “the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run,” adding “if you were to ask me which mobile device will take top place for listening to music, I’d bet on the mobile phone for sure.”
During my lunchbreak today, I checked out Tekserve, New York’s 15-year-old nerdvana for Apple loyalists too cool or stubborn to shop at the Apple Store in SoHo. I though it might be a good time to investigate it since it could get knocked upside the head by a rumored new Apple Store in the Flatiron District, located mere blocks away from Tekserve’s location at W. 23rd St. between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.
The architecture is pure Chelsea, with super-high ceilings buttressed by white-painted columns, brick walls, hardwood floors, etc. It’s totally geeked-out with a large bank of classic Compact Macs (those ones from the mid- to late-1980s with the CPU, monitor and floppy drive squashed into a stout, flat-faced, breadbox-sized unit) near the entrance. A shelf near the ceiling is crowded with antique radios, and in the back, they have a trio of working Compact Macs that display the “currently being served” number for the sales, repairs and pick-up/rental departments (you take a ticket when you enter). Cool! Retro signage and classic “Think Different” posters cover the walls. Decor includes a giant fishtank, a vintage working Coke machine, a metal spinner-rack of comic books to read while-U-wait, and lots of Macs on display to fiddle with, including several with impressive peripheral setups, like one hooked up to a full pro audio mixing board. The wait seemed long for any kind of customer service, but the hipster staff was smiley, helpful and genuinely friendly, which you don’t get a lot of in this city.
One reason for my visit was that my trusty PowerShot S30 seems to be busted. The display shuts itself off seconds after the camera is turned on, and more critically, it won’t take any photos. (Had you wondered about the recent lack of photos posted around here? Yeah, I didn’t think so.) One of the camera’s many dents has opened just wide enough to allow access to the camera’s innards and I surmise that some moisture or gunk got in there, fouling things up or shorting something out. At any rate, I half-heartedly perused Tekserve’s digital camera selection, but my heart really wasn’t in it. I did notice, however, that the good news is that I can get so much more (speed, megapixels, features and compactness) in a digital camera for the same price I paid for my PowerShot way back in 2001 or so. But the bad news is that price is still several hundred bucks. Boo. Time to start saving!
Because our apartment is kept at consistently crispy crematorium levels of heat and humidity in the winter, it’s surprisingly difficult to determine how cold it really is outside. Most mornings before work, I launch my browser and go to the weather.com site I’ve bookmarked to view the current forecast. But lately, I’ve found myself wanting to shave the valuable 10 seconds that takes down to maybe 5 seconds or so. So I turned to the web to find a program that would constantly display the current temperature on my computer’s desktop. There’s an abundance of such programs out there, but almost none of them met all of my criteria:
- is free
- is small, simple, stable and compact code
- runs in the background (no icon hogging my Dock, please)
- has an elegant user interface
- shows the current weather in the toolbar
That’s all. But with the many programs I downloaded and tried, it was always something. Either I had to pay for the program or it was unbearably clunky or it had 10 other features that had nothing to do with the weather or—and this was most likely—it didn’t show the weather in the toolbar but in an annoying window hogging my preciously small 12-inch Powerbook screen.
During some intense Googling during lunch at my desk today, I came across Meteorologist. It does exactly what I want and meets all my criteria. If you run Mac OS X, I heartily recommend it. I have mine set as a Startup Item. It loads without comment upon booting my computer, then continually and automatically fetches updates on the weather from Central Park every 15 minutes, displaying it in my toolbar, along with an optional little graphical representation.
(For all y’all non-Mac people, the other thingies depicted below in my toolbar are for other nerdy purposes, like telling me how strong my wireless internet signal is, how soon my battery is going to die, and how many more days before CSI: Miami is on again.)
The program’s real power is unleashed when you click on the weather itself, depicted below in a shrunken-down screenshot.
Boing! Here, you can check details on the current conditions (wind speed, humidity, etc.) and get a forecast for the next several days. You can also add other cities’ weather to appear in these fold-out menus, like, say, Cleveland or Laramie, Wyoming or Dublin. Gravy!
Update, March 7: Now that I’ve tested Meteorologist for a few days, I may need to knock down my appreciation a notch; when my PowerBook wakes from sleep (I rarely turn it off), the current temperature doesn’t automatically refresh, which I think it should do, like the current time does. Hopefully, this change will be made in an new version.
It was a long time coming, but I recently made my first purchases from the iTunes Music Store. Beck is releasing his new album at the end of next month, and to whet fans’ appetites, he is selling remixes of four of the album’s songs exclusively on the iTMS. (To be fair, he released ‘em on vinyl too, but who’s got time for that?)
Normally, remixes I can do without. But after listening to the 30-second samples on the iTMS, I had to have them. The two that are remixed by a group named Paza sound as if the instrumental tracks from the originals have been stripped out and replaced by muzak created on a Commodore 64 computer. (If you have iTunes installed on your computer, you too can listen in.) Bleeps, blurps, sawtooth waves and percussion crafted from sharply modulated bursts of white noise: the synthesized sounds of my youth. Sweet!
Yet my purchases were not made without hesitation because, although I think the iTMS is well-executed and a fine way of boosting Apple’s standing in the PC world, a few things were holding me back:
- When you buy music online, you get compressed tracks. In other words, they’re not CD quality. If you want to burn them to a CD or convert them to another digital format, you aren’t able to do so without a substantial loss in audio quality.
- When I pay for music like CDs, I appreciate having a physical object in my possession. Not only the CD itself, but typically an informative booklet with production and recording credits, source of samples (if any), lyrics (sometimes), along with nice design and photos.
- I’m not so keen on Apple’s DRM (digital rights management), which restricts you from playing iTMS music on certain devices and certain other computers. While I appreciate the sentiment that they don’t want you pirating music, I also don’t like my purchases saddled like that. Fortunately, some enterprising individuals, not without some legal wrangling with Apple, have found a way around these RIAA-inspired shenanigans.
In the end, it came down to the fact that I still don’t plan on buying a lot of iTMS music, and anyway, the tracks are only 99 cents each. If you’re buying a whole album, that’s not typically a good deal, but for a few tracks not available in any other format usable by me, I could make an exception.