Technology

Parental Controls, iPods, iTunes, and you….

/ hsoi

So I find out the hard way that the Parental Controls for iTunes and iPod’s don’t apply to each other.

That is, in the iTunes.app you can set Parental Controls to restrict the content your children have access to. Well, it seems that only applies to accessing the iTunes Store via the iTunes.app. If there’s a device involved, like an iPod, then you must also set the Restrictions on that device. They don’t apply to each other, which makes sense now that I think about it, but it didn’t occur to me when I was first setting things up. I only set stuff on the app thinking it would carry over… and in a way, that would seem logical to do.

But alas.

And we got to learn the hard way.

All is good tho. Something for us all to grow on.

Crippled printer… what to do?

/ hsoi

I own a Canon PIXMA iP4500 printer. It’s been one of the better printers I’ve owned in my lifetime.

Wife was printing some things and was getting new and interesting errors from the printer. I toyed around a bit, looked up the error code, and it seems the print head is kaput. I tried some tips I found online for cleaning it… figured there’d be no harm. No luck.

So I need a new one.

But I can’t get a new one.

I can’t find any for sale anywhere.

Reason? It appears all the earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan have (naturally) destroyed the supply chain. There’s of course no telling when life in Japan will return to “normal”, and thus I could get a replacement part.

It seems I may have to buy a new printer, but… what prevents the same problem there?

Shows how fragile and interconnected we are, doesn’t it?

Purchases

/ hsoi / 29 Comments

Looks like our tube TV is dying and so finally it’ll be time to jump into the world of flat-screens. I pretty much ignored everything in that world because if I wasn’t buying, why pay attention? it would only change faster than I could keep up (and sure enough it has). Of course, it’s still a confusing array of stuff.

Coincidentally, Unc is also looking so I can just take some of the advice given to him. A friend pointed me to a couple of sites: http://www.consumersearch.com/lcd-tv and http://reviews.cnet.com/best-hdtvs/. Happened to go to Costco yesterday for some groceries and detoured through the TV section. I think one of the 40-ish inch models will suffice for our setup. Prices aren’t too horrendous.

Anyone have anything to add? We have Time-Warner Cable and already have one of their HD cable boxes. I don’t have any sort of stereo home theater system, nor do I really want to buy one at this time… just use what the TV provides, and perhaps down the line we can fill in the gaps. We do hook up the Wii and the old PS2, and I’m sure any future consoles will get hooked up there too. Don’t need any built-in stuff like Internet or Wi-Fi or other “gimmicks” like that, that I can tell. The room is fairly well-lit, between sunlight and lamps.

And what else might we need to buy in addition to the TV itself? brackets? stands? cables?

In non-electronic news….

I’m also looking at buying my first 1911 as a birthday present to myself. I honestly have no real desire for a 1911, being quite happy with my plastic guns. But, a 1911 is one of those guns that you just need to have in your collection. Plus, being the 100 year anniversary, I figure this makes a nice time to buy. I’m going to get an STI Spartan because it’s about the best value for the money. STI’s are solid, and it’s a good price and package for a first 1911. I’ll have pics and a “break-in” range report once I get it.

Lion ONLY through the App Store? Mistake.

/ hsoi / 7 Comments

As soon as Apple announced that Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” was only going to be available through their App Store, I knew that’d be a mistake.

Seems I’m not the only one. Read this TidBITS article.

The first things that came to my mind was 1. bandwidth caps, 2. people without bandwidth. I think Apple said it’d be a 4GB download. Holy crap that’s a lot of data. More and more ‘net providers are working to impose bandwidth caps, throttling, and other similar restrictions on how much bandwidth someone can use. I’m not sure exactly how this install will end up rolling, but let’s say I needed to update all the Macs in my house (and I have more than 1)… what sort of bandwidth am I going to have to chew up? And is my ISP going to throttle me? What about how that affects the rest of my monthly bandwidth allotment for things like general web browsing, YouTube, and I’ve even been thinking about getting that NetFlix online service.

Then I think about a lot of my friends in rural areas that just don’t have this sort of bandwidth available to them.

In talking with foo.c, he doesn’t have Snow Leopard. He contacted Apple and they said you will have to update to Snow Leopard first… because you need at least Mac OS X 10.6.6 in order to run the App Store. So now the cost has risen significantly.

If you read the TidBITS article, they raise many more issues and problems this sole means of distribution create.

You know, I think it’s a great idea for Apple to offer Lion through the App Store. I think it’s good to start moving the world in that direction. But come on Apple… you know how long it took for us to move from 680×0 to PowerPC… how long it took to move from Classic Mac to Mac OS X… then the shift from PowerPC to Intel. All of these major shifts took many years and we were always given a transition strategy. It was always evident as soon as the ball started to roll that the writing was on the wall for the “old style”, but that always gave us time to move along. To suddenly end optical discs for the OS? That’s rather abrupt and not in line with every other transition that this platform has undergone.

So, I’m adding my voice to the cries of “WTF?” regarding this requirement. I do think Apple should offer it through the App Store and encourage folks in that direction. But I also think Apple should offer optical discs, and I think it’d be reasonable to offer it at increased cost, say $10 more to cover the costs of the discs, packaging, etc.. As well, something like Lion Server can be offered solely as a download, since it seems you get that as an additional purchase on top of your Lion install… so, buy “consumer”, install it, then you can buy and install Server on top of it via the App Store. I see no problem with that strategy. It all helps to push people to prefer the App Store, but it doesn’t leave those without such ability out in the cold.

Outlook 2011 – resource hog

/ hsoi / 8 Comments

Geez….

My MacBook Pro hasn’t felt this sluggish… well… ever. But I install Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 and start using Outlook and geez…

I’m guessing it’s got some serious memory and resource management issues. I have so much slowdown in part because there seems to be tons of VM swapping going on. The longer the app is running, the worse things get. I’ll use the Activity Monitor and see the amount of memory that Outlook consumes just growing and growing and growing. What’s worse, the WindowServer process also grows huge. So put those two together and the machine just gets consumed. Thinking about it, the nature of the app makes you open and close windows all day long (I’m not using the preview pane / all-in-one-window mechanism… I open each email in its own window… maybe that’s not the codepath used much by the developers), and they are probably leaking windows (amongst other things).

Quit Outlook (which takes numerous minutes, which is crazy) and then not only do I reclaim all the memory from Outlook itself, but I saw my WindowServer process go from taking like 500 MB of real memory down to about 53 MB.

And Outlook is just slow. Slow to open a mail message. Slow to do a major context switch (making Outlook the front process). I’m floored at how sluggish things are.

I really hope that the MacBU is aware of this and working on it. I’ll drop them a line, don’t know what good it will do. But man… instead of seeing any more features, bug fixes, or bringing back Entourage 2008 features that we lost (more of which I’ve found, like I can’t cmd-shift-return to save as a draft)… I’d love for them to just spend time in Instruments, fix leaks, optimize, and so on.

I’m very tempted to move back to Entourage 2008…. but unfortunately I just accepted that Outlook wouldn’t suck and didn’t set myself up to keep things in sync, so I’d lose a bunch of mail. *sigh*

 

There’s an app for that….

/ hsoi

iPoo.

I read about ASIHTTPRequest, which is an Objective-C/Cocoa wrapper around CFNetwork. I looked at their Who Is Using It? page and saw… iPoo.

There’s an app for that, apparently.

Microsoft Office Mac 2011

/ hsoi / 5 Comments

I finally caved in and upgraded to Microsoft Office 2011 for the Mac (Home & Business edition, since I need Outlook). I figure it’s been out long enough now that any major initial issues have been shaken out (it’s version 14.1.0… I rarely do x.0.0 releases any more; I’m a software engineer… I know about bugs).

Yes, I use a Microsoft product. Quite happily too. It’s difficult to escape Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in today’s business world; yes Apple has their own stuff and it’d probably work out fine. But to be honest, for me it’s all about the email client.

Many many years ago the best email client for Mac was Eudora, but there were a lot of competing mail clients out there. Then one day, along came Claris Emailer. Hands down, it was the best email client. From message composition, to filtering, powerful features, just amazing stuff. Off on the side, Microsoft had this “Outlook Express” that was there but really sucked. Well, one day Microsoft basically hired all of the engineers that wrote Emailer, and Microsoft Entourage was born. It was wonderful, but not surprising because you took the best engineers that wrote the best email client and now put tons of money behind them and what else would you expect? Over time, everything else fell by the wayside as it just couldn’t compete with Entourage. But, no question Entourage was getting long in the tooth and showing limitations (as was the rest of Office), especially when it came to things like integrating with Exchange (vital in the corporate world) and heck… even dealing with HTML email. I’ve long toyed with the idea of converting to Apple’s Mail.app, but every time I try I hate it because it’s just not powerful enough. Oh sure, it’s good for most people because it does all the basics you need, and a bit more. But once you work with something as powerful and customizable as Entourage, Mail just feels weak in comparison. So, struggle as I might, I just could never make the switch to Apple Mail.

And finally now, I upgraded to Office 2011 because it was inevitable to have to do, and I felt enough time had passed. Friends that had already upgraded told me how smoothly the upgrade went, how good life was going. So I wanted to, but just wasn’t ready to overcome my inertia. But here we are.

First impressions?

It’s the same, but different. It looks much cleaner, much more modern. I know Microsoft was all about this ribbon thing and well… it’s a little overwhelming, but I think they did an OK job at keeping it reasonable. Things are mostly the same, which is good, just modernized and updated.

I am getting used to Outlook’s default approach, which is left-to-right putting folders on the left, the folder’s messages in the middle, and the message on the right. I’m not sure I’ll stick with that, but geez… the reality is that our screens are more wide than tall, and this approach makes better use of that horizontal real estate. Some of my browsing habits are going to have to change, but I think they may change for the better.

The install, upgrade, and import process was amazingly smooth. Just ran the installer, it walked me through a few questions, and that was that. Launch Outlook, start the import process from my old Entourage database, then went to have dinner. I figured it might take all night, but it was done by the time I came back (I have extensive email archives). Quite impressed with how smoothly things went, but honestly, I’m not surprised. For all of Microsoft’s shitty business practices, they do hire some of the best and brightest engineers. The MacBU has always worked hard to balance the world of Mac vs. the world of Microsoft and has really done a great job with things (wild applause!).

I’ve only really used Outlook at this point because that’s what I mostly care about and use on a daily basis. Over time I’ll use Word and Excel and see how they go. Light poking around with them was pretty positive.

So sure… it’s a Microsoft product. But who cares. I got over that crap years ago. Yes, I think Windows is painful to use, but I’m not using Windows, I’m using a Mac… and I’m using a Mac product, MS Office for Mac 2011. So far it seems to be a well-written Mac application. If it allows me to get my work done without getting in my way, if it’s going to “just work”… well, I can’t ask for more. 🙂

The Art of Video Games

/ hsoi

I think it’s wonderful when non-traditional art mediums get their due. Just because it’s not an oil painting on a canvas doesn’t mean it’s not art. Or as well, the consideration that some mediums are “childrens” and not to be taken seriously, like cartoons or comic books. To me, that just shows you don’t understand the medium.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum is going to be presenting an exhibition on The Art of Video Games.

The Art of Video Games is one of the first exhibitions to explore the forty-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects and the creative use of new technologies. The exhibition will feature some of the most influential artists and designers during five eras of game technology, from early developers such as David Crane and Warren Robinett to contemporary designers like Kellee Santiago and David Jaffe. It also will explore the many influences on game designers, and the pervasive presence video games have in the broader popular culture, with new relationships to video art, film and television, educational practices, and professional skill training.

Forty years? Geez… that makes me feel old. 😉

What’s cool tho? Look at the winning games. It’s hard to argue with their choices. If I’m in the Washington DC area while this is open, I’d love to go see it. Else, I do hope it tours and comes somewhere near me.

Twitter

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

I don’t know what came over me.

I’ve decided to pay a little more attention to Twitter.

I obtained a Twitter account (you ought to be able to figure out it) mostly to ensure the name was reserved. Then I hooked up my postings here to auto-publish to Twitter as well. But mostly I ignored Twitter in terms of keeping up with it, posting to it, whatever.  But something bit me last night.

Upon the suggestion of a friend, I’m trying out Twitterific as a desktop client app. Like all things the Icon Factory does, the interface is beautiful and well-thought out. Obviously a lot of influence from iPad and iOS development. But really, it’s slick and well-done.

We’ll see how it goes. I doubt it’ll be a primary source for me to send information out, but I’ve been spending the morning finding people to follow that might present news or information I care about. We’ll see how this goes.

Moneydance – so far, almost good

/ hsoi

Moneydance has been working out as my financial software. I’m still dealing with those interface quirks (hey Moneydance, you hiring?), but you figure them out and soon enough it just fades into the background.

It seems to be doing the job well enough.

Except… exporting.

This is the first year I have to file for my LLC, so since I tracked those expenses in Quicken I just exported a QIF and sent those to my accountant. Funny… QuickBooks doesn’t grok QIF. You’d think Intuit might recognize its own file format, but I guess not.

Let’s see… what can Moneydance export? Oh… QIF. They can also export in their own format as well as a simple tab-delimited, which is better than nothing and thus can go into Excel, but… that feels so flat. Especially when Moneydance can import OFX and OFC files… why can’t it also export those formats? I’m not sure if QuickBooks can import those either. Bottom line: I’d love a file format that my accountant can grok. 🙂

In the end tho, Moneydance’s reports came to the rescue. I created a detailed income & expense report, printed to PDF, and sent that to my accountant. Hardly ideal, but here we are.

Will have more in-depth talks with my accountant later about how we can come up with a better solution. 🙂