Better late than never to post today. . .

• Anyone download Google Chrome yet?  I’m curious, but I’m a devoted Mac user without Parallels running.  Looks cool. The web browser is due for a paradigm shift, as much as I love Firefox and all its wonderful plug-ins.

• How Chrome came to be: First article.  Second article.

• Some classic 80s music videos, including “Sledgehammer” and “Take On Me.”

• iPhone document scanner set-up.  Pretty cool.

• Have you seen the first Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates commercial?  It’s awful.  Pointless.  Lacking in the humor department.  Bad.

• XKCD: Contentment at Protest

We’re having another round of rumors of iTunes offering a subscription service.  This round of rumors is based on one e-mail’s hypothetical postulation of how it might work and how it might be a cool option for them.  There’s no word of mouth from inside Apple happening here.  There’s no leaked memo.  There’s no overseas production receipts.  (Not that there would be.)  There’s no hidden variable inside an SDK or an API.

Nothing.

But people are speculating on it, whipping themselves up into a furor that can only end when said product is not revealed in September, and they blast Apple for not following through on a product Apple never promised in the first place.

It’s a vicious cycle.  Sometimes, some Apple fanboys make me nuts.

You know who else make me nuts?  Technology pundits who talk about how great a gadget or a piece of software will be for when you’re flying.  How often does the average person fly, you think? Technology pundits must be doing it all the time, whether they’re giving a speech, or attending a conference, or a product unveiling, or meeting with an advertiser.  That lifestyle directly impacts their recommendations.  Sadly, it’s a lifestyle most of us don’t lead.  So many tech pundits are full of hot air to the average consumer.  Sadly, many consumers don’t take this to heart.

Let’s hear about products that are good for people who work 40 - 50 hours a week, have precious little free time at home, and can’t afford to spend $500 on the gadget of the week.  Let’s talk about gadgets that WILL change our lives, not incremental upgrades of products we’ve already decided we don’t need.

Let’s hear about a product that’s good for those of us who can’t spend all day on a Mac — those of us who are stuck on a locked-down PC all day, with extremely limited web options.  I don’t  need to hear about how you synch your half dozen Macs with your iPhone and your iPod Touch, all without leaving the comfort of your house and open wi-fi connection.  Cloud computing is meaningless when the cloud is as inaccessible to you as your home computer.

Let’s get back to that music subscription model that the pundits all seem to think is The Future.  I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I’m sick and tired of paying monthly fees for everything.  I’ve got enough of those bills coming in every month, thanks.  I’ll pay as I go for my music.  I agree — $100 doesn’t seem like much for a year’s worth of music.  But right now, I don’t pay anything to listen to music.  I already paid for it months or years ago.  I buy the few albums a year I might want, but I don’t honestly think I’ve spent $100 on music downloads and CDs in the last year, or 18 months.  Sure, I’d like to sample some new music, but I don’t need to.  I don’t have the time.  And I’m not paying for the pleasure.  I’ll follow the couple dozen bands and musicians I like as they release new stuff.  I’ll be happy with my six albums a year, tops, and that’ll leave me with plenty of time to listen to podcasts for free.

Those podcasts, in many cases, feature technology pundits who fly around the world and own seven Macs and listen to ten audible books a month.

I kid you not: I went back to listening to the latest Mac Break Weekly after writing this (admitted) rant, only to have Andy Ihnatko recommending a piece of software because it’s a great way to store your Travelocity information when you hop a plane to go somewhere.  I should start a website like IDoNotFlyThatMuchThanks.com to track the constant need of tech pundits to recommend or not recommend things mostly based on how well they fare on airplane trips.

Thoughts of this week’s Cuil.com fiasco sent me into a nostalgic haze. .  .

Remember when –
– USENET was king, and why would you want to splinter off conversations to a million little websites?

– AltaVista was king?

– AltaVista was destroyed in an attempt to create another portal?

– Alltheweb.com challenged the young Google on the basis of speed?

– floppy discs were, at most, 1.4 megabytes?  And that would hold all your Word documents for years?

– When you could cut a notched on the other side of the 5.25″ floppy disc and then write to its backside?  Instant double capacity!

– WordPerfect and Word were both in their 5.x releases?  Good word processing times right there.

– People might have actually linked to Lycos?

– Zip drives were the future, with their huge 100MB cartridges that would backup your whole hard drive for $10 a pop?

• This past weekend, at the end of the women’s Olympic try-outs, they lined up all the gymnasts on stage in front of thousands of people, and cheered them on.  Most stood there with their bouquet of roses and smiled.  One at the end was too busy on her Blackberry texting someone to notice that her country was trying to honor her.

• The teenager cashier at the supermarket I did my food shopping at this weekend, actually stopped scanning items for a minute to pull her cell phone out of the drawer and answer a text message.  I think I was staring at her with my jaw dropped while she casually made me wait, then went back to scanning things.

I know I’m an old man, but let’s start charging a dollar per text message — whatever it takes to cure the land of this evil scourge.

Let’s face it: The most exciting part about Gates and Ballmer previewing Windows 7 this week (screen shots) is the inevitable Feature Drop countdown.  Remember all the cool things about Windows Vista that never made the final release? We can restart that cycle now with Windows 7.

Oh, look, it’s already begun!

Commodore 64 still loved after all these years - CNN.com

Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people’s hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.

“There was something magical about the C64,” says Andreas Wallstrom of Stockholm, Sweden. […]
Often overshadowed by the Apple II and Atari 800, the Commodore 64 rose to great heights in the 1980s. From 1982-1993, 17 million C64s were sold. The Guinness Book of World Records lists the Commodore 64 as the best-selling single computer model.

::sigh:: They don’t make them like they used to. Mine lasted me through high school and wasn’t replaced until I started college in 1994. Those things were workhorses!

Related Various and Sundry Stories:

• C64: GEOS (14 Feb 2004)
• C=64 - with pics! (10 Sept 2003)
• The Rise and Fall of Commodore (20 Nov 2006)
• Commodore to Get 30-in-1 TV Game (01 May 2005)

Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer’s BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.

The funny thing is, this is SERIOUS. Not a gag. It comes straight from Microsoft’s own site.

I guess printing an error message to the screen was too hard. . .

Update: An anonymous commenter below pointed out that this is not strictly a Windows problem, and would happen on a Linux box, too. My humble apologies to Microsoft.  It’s still a funny bug report, though. =)

I have what I guess would be called an iPod Video. It’s a 30 gig jobber that plays video. I’m sure it’s a solid two generations out of touch by now, but there are some things about it that drive me nuts:

• This is probably a feature by some standards, but not by me. When I’m in the Music->Podcasts directory and chance across a video podcast, I would like to watch the video with that click. I don’t want to listen to the audio-only. Logically, I can understand it. If I’m in the “Music” directory, I should expect to hear only audio. But from a purely pragmatic end-user experience, a podcast is a podcast. If I click on a podcast and it’s of the video variety, I want to SEE something. I don’t want to have to click back 3 levels of menus, then back down through Videos->Video Podcasts to get to see the thing I should have been able to see 5 or more clicks ago.
• I don’t think I ever want to listen to just the audio on a video podcast, so this feature makes even less sense.
• Pause/fast-forward/rewind works oddly during video podcasts. It doesn’t allow me to rewind sometimes. I can circle my thumb around the scroll wheel a few times to rewind by a couple of minutes, but the second I let go the video starts playing stubbornly from where it started. Sometimes, I can click on the center of the wheel after scrolling back a little to “stick the landing,” but that’s iffy.
• When I’m in the last minute of a five minute podcast, if I pause it for too long, it autocompletes the video and pushes me out to the Video Podcast menu. When I hit PLAY again, it starts at the beginning of the podcast.
• Video playback is a slow-starter. Not a major problem, but an annoyance I should mention while I’m listing them all.
• Finally, when I listen to an audio podcast, I’d appreciate seeing the right cover art for it. It’s completely random, but there are times when the wrong podcast’s cover art shows up on screen while a completely unrelated podcast plays.

I’ve been listening to an awful lot of photography podcasts in the last couple of months. More than any sane man should do.

The one thing that I always find fun is hearing opinions from a year ago — or even six months ago — that have completely changed in the present. The best example I can give of this is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. When it first came out as a public beta a year ago, people complained that it was slow, that it was a hobbled version of Photoshop, that it didn’t really fit in, and what can it do that Aperture can’t?

Of course, this was only the beta. By the time the product was released this past spring — and the subsequent major .1 revision followed shortly — I’m sure it was a different program. Ask any Lightroom book author. They all had to rewrite their books two and three times between the first beta and the final release.

I don’t point this out to laugh at those who were wrong or who didn’t have a clue. They were honest and forthright in their opinion. Subsequent marketing and fine-tuning of the product helped to reshape opinion. Perhaps due to its connections to the industry-standard Photoshop (it was added to the official product title at release), it’s been adopted by a large number of photographers, both pro and amateur. One recent survey has it at greater popularity to Aperture now.

One has to wonder what Apple is doing about an Aperture 2.0 right now. Lightroom is the first serious contender in that space for Apple, and Aperture is looking old and creaky. It needs an update. I suspect we’ll see one in the months ahead and I suspect it’ll require Leopard’s built-in graphics handling whizbang features to work.

Lightroom has single-handedly change my attitude and perspective on photography. It’s Photoshop for the rest of us, and may even prove to be the open door into Photoshop, an otherwise large and scary program that I just don’t comprehend. (I can do Illustrator. Photoshop baffles me.)

Rambling, rambling, rambling.

Happy NaBloWriMo!

It’s been three weeks since the Harmony 880 Universal Remote dropped at my doorstep, purchased with the funds from all the Amazon shopping you fine folks did through this website over the summer. Thanks again. Now, as promised, my thoughts on using the thing:

It’s been in daily use at VandS World Headquarters for long enough now that I can’t live without it anymore. Being able to switch between the TiVo and DVR boxes (as well as a DVD player and the Wii) is the biggest advantage of the remote. I don’t need four remotes sitting out on the coffee table anymore. The Harmony remote sits docked in its wonderful recharger when not in use on an end table next to the couch, and keeps the battery continuously fully charged.

The hardest part has been learning the new key layout. I could run the old remotes without looking at them for most functions. Their keypad layouts were all distinctive, and the keys well marked and separated. The Harmony remote, obviously, has the same organization of buttons for each device, though their functionality differs a bit from device to device. The backlit screen does a great job with the keys unique to the device I’m trying to control, but they require a good looking at to find the proper button to push. The buttons are small, but each has its own “bump” for your finger to latch onto.

The buttons, themselves, are nice. They CLICK. They’re not rubber chiclets like on the lesser versions of the same remote. They make a satisfying click when you push them, but your hand can also slide across them easily enough. There’s a little nipple in the middle of the keypad that helps you center your finger, if you think you’re good enough to push buttons without looking. I don’t recommend that all that much. My fat fingers occasionally still miss the PLAY button and hit the PAUSE button underneath. It doesn’t happen that often, but it is a point I have to bring up. They cram a lot of keys onto this one remote, so the size shrinks up considerably. The four major keys above the numeric keypad are slightly larger and bring you to the MENU, EXIT, GUIDE, or INFO. Volume and Channel changing buttons are above that and slightly larger, though narrower. Still, it’s anther satisfying click when you push them. You KNOW you hit the button.

The preprogrammed special keys on the display screen have their ups and downs. There can be multiple screens worth of options here, but I find myself using the first screen almost exclusively. The TiVo’s 30 second skip button is one big exception to this. The button to control the aspect ratio on the TV (”Zoom,” “Wide Zoom,” “Normal,” etc.) shows up in the same position across all screens. That’s all preprogrammed in for me. While I’m sure there are likely ways to move that around if I wanted to, it hasn’t been a big problem. So I let it go. The order of the options seems decent enough.

The remote saves a lot of fumbling around and a lot of space. It’s a powerful thing that I know will stick with me through future home electronic purchases, and does everything it promises. What more could you ask for? The biggest hang up has just been in getting my hands used to the feel of a new remote. You don’t realize how accustomed your mind and hands are to specific divergent remote layouts until you remove them all and replace them with something new. That’s an adjustment, but it’s getting easier with time.

I wouldn’t trade this remote in for anything. It’s a necessary addition to any serious home theater or home entertainment set-up.

Now, go click on the Amazon MP3 store banner above and buy yourself an album or two. I have a camera to buy next. . . ;-)

Related Links:

• Wherein Augie Begs Your Indulgence and Support (10 July 2007)
• Changing My Mind on the Harmony (23 July 2007)
• More on the Remote (09 Aug 2007)
• Here Comes The Harmony! (28 Sept 2007)
• Harmony 880 Unboxing (01 Oct 2007)
• Remote Set Up (04 Oct 2007)
• Harmony Remote - Fixing Issues (04 Oct 2007)

You kids today.

You think the internet has always just been there.

You think IM on a phone is a standard option.

You think video has always been a download away.
And you haven’t a clue what ^H^H^H^H^H^H means, anyway.

I pity you.

Microsoft aims patent guns at Red Hat - vnunet.com

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has warned users of Red Hat Linux that they will have to pay Microsoft for its intellectual property.”People who use Red Hat, at least with respect to our intellectual property, in a sense have an obligation to compensate us,” Ballmer said last week at a company event in London discussing online services in the UK.

You’d think after the SCO disaster, this wouldn’t be a road Ballmer would want to walk too far down. It would really put Microsoft on an even keel with the likes of SCO and the RIAA.

Idiots.

It turns out that not everything was working perfectly.

The TiVo lacked functionality beyond using the “MENU” button as a TiVo button replacement, and then using the arrows and hitting the “OK” button.

I plugged the remote back into the computer, loaded up the Remote software, and went straight to the settings for the TiVo. It was easy enough to tell the software what buttons were missing. After that, I was able to point the original TiVo remote at the back of the Harmony 880 and push the TiVo buttons as the software asked for it. It sensed the commands I was pushing, and learned them instantly.

I was also able to fix a few other things along the way. I could rename the Actions. Instead of “Watch a PVR,” for example, I could click the “HDTV” option. (I always watch TV through the cable PVR box.) Instead of “Play Game,” I could click on “Nintendo Wii.”

I was also able to reorder the Actions, so that the most popular “HDTV” option was at the top. Then, I was able to select favorite channels. Clicking on the “Media” button displayed those options on the screen. I was even able to associate images with each channel. A quick Google search gave me the NBC logo for channel 704 — the HD NBC station. The FOX logo was associated to 705, ABC logo 707, etc. Those are the easy to remember ones. I’ll have to get to the favored cable networks next. The end result isn’t the slickest thing in the world as the logos are squished down to fit the available screen space, but it’s a bold and easy way to get to the channels I use the most.

As always, more to come in the days ahead. . .

rsizr - intelligent image resizing

You may remember my linking to a story in August about a new way to resize images by eliminating duplicate adjacent pixels. It allowed you to keep all the items of major interest in a picture while shrinking it down.

You can now give it a spin. Go to that website, and feed it a picture of yours and watch it do its magic. It’s amazing. It’s not right for all situations, mind you, but it’s certainly a lot of fun to watch. There’s even a GIMP plug-in for it now.

I had been told that the remote might not work on the first go around and that it might take some patience to get it going. I’m glad people warned me of that because the whole process felt a lot smoother than it otherwise might have. (Expect the worst and something easy will seem like grade school addition.) There was only one minor bump in the whole thing, and it was minor. We’ll get to that in a moment.

At the start, Harmony supplies a little worksheet for you to write down the brand and model numbers of all the equipment you want to program in. For me, that’s the TV, the cable box/DVR, the TiVo, the upscaling DVD player, and the Wii. Pulling the model numbers off of those was easy enough. (Brand: Nintendo. Model: Wii) I plugged the remote into the USB port with the cable that came with it, and installed the program that came with it to program the sucker. It downloaded a few updates, asked to reboot the machine, and then went straight to work. The installation program is a Flash interface thing. You need to get used to pressing buttons that don’t “feel” any different when they’re pressed, to the point where you have no clue if it worked or not. (Contrast that to the clicking sound you get when you push a button in a website, or the way the button changes colors or loses its drop shadow to indicate it was depressed for a second.) It’s a minor thing, but it did lead me to click “Next” a couple times too many along the way.

Navigating through a series of Drop Down and Text boxes was easy enough. Click on the TV icon, drop down to Sony, key in the model number, and click submit. The TV gave me one problem in that there were three possible choices that were variants on the same TV. I chose the first one, and it’s what I’m using to this day. It does everything that needs doing on this TV.

Repeat for cable box, DVR, etc. The Nintendo Wii prompts a reminder that the remote control can’t be used as a Wiimote, since it’s not a Bluetooth device. It does, however, turn on the TV and set the TV’s input to the proper selection.

You will need to know which device is plugged into which input on the back of the TV. I copied that down from the menu screen of the TV, so it wasn’t a problem.

After that, you’re asked to create “Actions,” which is the nice way of saying what keypresses will cause what things to turn on/off. One at a time, I set each up to turn on along with the TV, and let the TV look for that thing’s input. In other words, turn on the DVD player and the TV, and look for the DVD wire inputted into the TV. (You even have the option of ejecting the disc tray on power up, if you wish.) Simple. If I switch to the DVR button, the DVD will be shut down and the DVR will be powered on with the TV pointing there, too.

Then, the remote urges you to try those actions to check that everything powers on and is tuned to the right thing. If so, click on the OK option button next to that part of the screen. Click click click. Work work work.

In one case — I think it was the TiVO — the unit didn’t turn on. The remote asked me some simple yes/no questions and adjusted itself perfectly. (”Is the TiVo on?” No. “Is it on now?” Yes. “OK, all set.”)

From start to finish, it probably took me all of a half hour. If I had to do it again, I could probably halve the time. I could have gone back in and tried the other TV settings, but why try to fix what already works?

I set up the feature in the Settings menu to turn the remote on automatically when I pick it up. It has a tilt sensor doohicky inside so that it can sense when it’s being picked up. The backlight and screen turn on to make it easier to choose an action. Very handy.

Also, you can add wallpaper and change the background image on the screen. I haven’t done either yet, but I’m looking forward to adding family pictures to the slideshow. Then, as the remote is charging, it’ll cycle through some pics of the nieces and nephew. I think my wife will like that feature. Heh heh

NEXT WEEK: General Usage. I want a few days to spend with this before I review it. So far, though, so good. Everything’s working.