Retrophisch

Some day…

There must have been a lot of holes

An Upstart Challenges the Big Web Browsers:

Browsers have always been viewed as crucial on-ramps to the Web. Nevertheless, after vanquishing Netscape, the first commercial browser developer, Microsoft waited five years before releasing the sixth version of Internet Explorer in 2006. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer group, says the company was focused on plugging security holes during that time.

[Emphasis added. —R]

Two immature little kids

Thomas Brand:

“Engadget & Gizmodo are just two immature little kids attempting to reap the benefits of a journalistic profession neither truly understands.”

I couldn’t agree more. And yet I still subscribe to their RSS feeds…

Macworld Keynote impressions

So the big news in the tech world yesterday was what Steve Jobs talked about during his keynote address at Macworld Expo in San Francisco. The annual technology conference geared toward the Mac OS, and all things Apple, Inc., is often used for the announcement of new products from my favorite fruit company. Yesterday was no exception. Here are some of my thoughts on what was announced:

Time Capsule

If I hadn’t bought an Airport Extreme Base Station last year, to replace a router that died, I’d be buying a new 1 TB—yes, that’s a T, for terabyte—Time Capsule right now. Merging an Airport Extreme Base Station with a “server-grade” hard drive, the Time Capsule allows for wireless backups from all of your Leopard-based Macs via Time Machine. Jobs called it a “back-up applicance”.

Backing up your data is very important, and too few people do it, realizing the value of doing so only when it’s too late. Time Capsule is a dead-simple way, for most people, to ensure their Macs are getting backed up. Plug in and power on the Time Capsule, open up Time Machine on your Mac and point it to the Capsule, and you’re done.

Time Capsule comes in two sizes, the 500 GB version for $299, and the aforementioned 1 TB version for $499. That’s an amazing bargain, a terabyte of storage and a full wired/wireless router for five hundred smackers. As I said, if we didn’t already have the AEBS router, my credit card would have already seen one of these charged to it.

iPhone Update

Today was the 200th day the iPhone had been available for purchase, and Apple’s sold 4 million of them, an average of 20,000 iPhones sold per day. This means that in terms of United States smartphone market share, Apple has nearly 20% of the national smartphone market.

The rumors of a 1.1.3 update to the iPhone proved to be true. The home screen can now be customized, and the Maps application—the underrated killer feature of the iPhone in my humble opinion—is now even more super-powered. The new Location feature in Maps is great. Combining data from Google and Skyhook Wireless, your iPhone can now, without GPS on board, triangulate your position within a couple of blocks. It pulled up my location at home with no problem.

You can, finally, send a SMS message to more than one person, something my lowly Motorola v557 was capable of two years ago. The WebClips functionality is pretty neat; you can create a WebClip from any web page or portion of a web page and pop it on to your home screen, so it’s easy to just go to Google, or The New York Times, or whatever web page you wish, with one touch.

I’ve had quite some fun this afternoon playing with all of this new stuff, and it’s almost like getting a new iPhone for free. All in all, it makes the iPhone an even better communication device.

iTunes Movie Rentals

In addition to buying movies through the iTunes Store, you can now rent them as well. Library movies (viz: older titles) are $2.99, and new releases are $3.99. From the time you click “Rent Movie” in the iTunes Store and it downloads, you have 30 days to watch the movie. From the time you click “Play” on the movie, you have 24 hours to watch it. You can also transfer the movie to another device, such as your iPod or iPhone, and watch it there as well, before your 24 hours or 30 days, depending on where you are when you perform the transfer, are up.

The thirty days requirement is pretty decent, but I find the 24 hours one to be a little restrictive. It should be at least 48 hours, and 72 would be better, with 96 being the ideal.

Going hand-in-hand with the new rental service is an updated Apple TV, or as Jobs put it, “Apple TV Take 2”. Whereas the original Apple TV pretty much required you to have a computer to sync it up with, the new version acts as a stand-alone box. You can rent movies from the iTunes Store in HD through the Apple TV, for only $1 more than the standard resolutions. So library titles go to $3.99 and new releases are $4.99, and no trip to the mailbox or corner Blockbuster is required.

I’m still not convinced that we have a real use for this in our house, given our movie viewing habits. For now, Netflix will continue to suffice, but I’ll be keeping my eyes on the Apple TV, and I’m sure I’ll try out the new rentals even without the new box.

MacBook Air

This had all the buzz, and was the announcement I was most looking forward to. I was ready to pounce on ordering Apple’s new subnotebook, provided it met my personal expectations.

Apple has created the world’s thinnest notebook computer. At its thickest point, the MacBook Air is 0.76 of an inch, and it weighs only three pounds. It comes with a full-size keyboard, a 13.3-inch LED backlit display, and a 1.6 or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Two gigabytes of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, 802.11n wireless networking, Bluetooth, and a built-in iSight camera. A pricey option is to ditch the standard hard drive for a 64 GB solid state drive (viz: no moving parts), and when I say pricey, I do mean pricey: $999 on top of the base $1,799 cost.

You won’t find much in the way of ports on it, either: MagSafe power port, a single USB port, headphone jack, and a micro-DVI port which requires adapters to hook up to external displays. That’s it. The trackpad is larger than on previous MacBook versions, and features multitouch, so you can perform some of those pinch, zoom, and rotate gestures you may have seen with the iPhone.

The downsides to this incredible piece of tech? For me, the hard drive size is the first. I put a 160 GB drive in my four year-old 12-inch PowerBook last year, and have gotten quite used to the extra room it gave me. I’d hate to step back down by half. Only two gigabytes of RAM? And no way to upgrade it? My two year-old iMac is maxed out at 2 GB, and some times I bump against that particular ceiling. I’d really prefer a machine that can handle up to four. The battery is also not replaceable by the user. This might be okay on an iPod or iPhone, but in a full-size computing system devoted to the ultimate road warriors?

Ultimately, I decided this was not the next notebook computer for me. It’s a really awesome system, and if someone were to buy one for me, I wouldn’t hesitate to take it, but that’s not happening. I think I’ll be better served ultimately by a MacBook Pro, and with seven and a half months since the latest edition of those came out, they’re due for a refresh, even a “silent” one like we saw with the Mac Pros last week.

Summation

In the end, it was what I would call a typical Steve Jobs Macworld Expo keynote address. There were the requisite ooohs and aaaahs, Apple’s making some evolutionary gains in all facets of its business, and there was a great new product introduced that has the entire tech world talking. It wasn’t a blow-me-away sort of keynote, as was last year’s with the announcement of the iPhone, but then they can’t all be like that. Still better than anything Bill does on stage.

For the waffle-loving geek who has everything

Ladies and gentlemen, do you ever find yourself worrying over what to buy the geek in your life for their birthday, or your anniversary, or Christmas? Wonder no more. Just pick up the waffle iron that makes keyboard waffles.

Oh, yes, you read that right. Keyboard waffles.

[Via Lee via IM.]

38 Pitches

Red Sox ace Curt Schilling is blogging.

(And for all the geeks, he’s using WordPress.)

Time to switch to Yahoo! Mail?

TechCrunch is reporting that Yahoo! has announced unlimited storage for all email accounts, beginning May 2007. Gosh, just in time to be ready for all those new iPhone users…

[Via Michael Arrington on Twitter.]

The newbie’s guide to Twitter

It’s been difficult trying to explain Twitter to some of my friends and family. (My wife just doesn’t get it.)

Thanks to Twitter’s “unpaid evangelist”, Robert Scoble, I came across Rafe Needleman’s great intro to the Twitterverse. Read, join, add me as a friend.

Don’t Ban Incandescents

From the 02.26.07 edition of Red Herring magazine:

California’s proposed incandescent bulb ban (see “Could California Ban the Bulb?” RedHerring.com, February 1, 2007) is ridiculous! Fluorescent bulbs may last longer (not in my house) but you have to include the cost of the ballast and the starter in both energy to produce and additional expense of the fixture. When these and the additional cost of installation are included in the equation, plus fixture replacement costs due to poor reliability, the cost of fluorescent lighting is vastly more expensive than incandescent lighting. Incandescent lighting is also better for the health of our eyes and sanity as that endless flicker fatigues the eyes and drives people nuts!

Fluorescent bulbs are also considered hazardous waste. The energy costs to clean up or keep the environment clean are not worth the few bucks saved at the meter. This ban is not a good idea. Neither is Title 24, which bans incandescent sockets in new-home construction. People just change out the fluorescent fixtures to incandescent after the house has been inspected. Then the fixtures just end up in the dump. I for one will just buy my bulbs out of state and stock up.

The best way to reduce energy waste is to educate people and business to not waste it. Turn the lights off when not in use!

—Roger Smith, Bishop, California

With the mass, recent push for everyone to switch to fluorescent bulbs, I thought a contrarian point of view might be good for discussion.

Rex Defeatus Maximus

Well, the Rex Grossman Chicago fans have grown to fear and Colts fans have grown to love was the Rex Grossman that showed up for the Super Bowl™. And the Colts’ defense Colts fans hoped would show up did. Take away that the opening kickoff run back, and you have a blowout, ladies and gentlemen.

Had some fun geeking out on the technology used to show the American Professional Football National Championship™. (See NFL? Two can play the trademark game. Disclaimer: I graciously allow the use of this trademark by any and all persons in the United States and abroad except the National Football League™.)

Our church, like many others, decided to have a Party Which Shall Not Be Named™ to view the American Professional Football National Championship™ game. The kicker was this: said game would start whilst many members, notably the myriad teenagers who would be the prime audience for viewing of said game, were still in attendance of the 5 PM worship service. So, technology to the rescue.

Enter a church member’s TiVo, slaved to his Slingbox. This same fellow’s ThinkPad, with the appropriate Slingbox interface software, resides in the Dungeon, where the above-referenced game was going to be shown. The ThinkPad is hooked up to the Dungeon’s projector unit, resized to a viewing area of 55 inches to comply with NFL regulations. Voila! Kickoff for us was at 6:15 PM CST, and we didn’t have to endure Prince at halftime. (Much to the displeasure of some of the yoots in attendance; it was about a 50-50 split in the vote.)

It was a lot of fun listening to the cheers and jeers of the crowd for the commercials. For instance, the commercial featuring K-Fraud, er, Kevin Federline, was roundly jeered, until the end, when K-Fraud, er, Mr. Federline, is shown working as a fast food fry guy. The jeers quickly turned to cheers. Such is the opinion of most yoots, it would seem, of the former Mr. Britney Spears. (And sorry, Toyota, I can maybe buy that your new Tundra can haul that big load up that steep of a grade from a dead stop, but there’s no freaking way I’m buying it not sliding down the other side when the brakes are applied, anti-lock or not. Your commercial met with wide disapproval from our polled viewers.) Budweiser didn’t get any props from our yoots; apparently they don’t care how “old school” Jay-Z is, August Busch IV, you don’t show up Don Shula.

As a copyright holder myself, I wholeheartedly agree with Brent: the NFL was perfectly within their right to enforce their trademark against the church in Indiana. They just look like royal jerks for doing so.

The 55-inch restriction is a joke; if I had 300 of my closest friends over to my home where they, at no charge whatsoever, could consume beverages and food I purchased and cooked while they watched the Super Bowl™ on my 60-inch plasma (yeah, I wish), what’s the difference between that and the viewing at Fall Creek Baptist Church? (Trademark infringement and the church’s proposition to raise money for a mission trip aside.) That’s still 297 (or however you want to divvy up the households) Nielsen ratings the NFL and CBS aren’t going to get because these people are at my house, where the two are only getting a Nielsen rating of one. (And this is one they’re not even getting, because to have your home counted in the Nielsens, you have to sign your life away to get a little Big Brother Nielsen box.)

I’m not sure why the NFL chose this year to flex its muscle as it did against Fall Creek Baptist Church. I’m sure the NFL has been aware of churches and other non-profit institutions holding Parties Which Shall Not Be Named™ in the past. The American Professional Football National Championship™ has been around for too long, and Super Bowl™ Sunday (is that a trademarked phrase, too, NFL?) has become so ingrained in the American consciousness that I would be quite surprised if no one in the NFL hierarchy was aware of this practice. Again, they just look like royal jerks this go-around.

I, for one, had an enjoyable Super Bowl™ viewing this evening, even if we were limited to 55 inches when we could have gone to 72 or more. It was fun seeing and hearing the reactions of the teenagers, and watching my little phisch tear around the Dungeon while hocked up on watered-down—intentionally so—orange soda and cookies. I didn’t have to endure an obnoxious and overly lavish half-time show featuring a has-been artist. I got to hang out and joke around with Brent, and to a lesser degree, Nathan and Steve. I ate way too much pizza and way too many cookies.

I got to see Tony Dungy get the Super Bowl shot he deserved, and he led his team to victory. I’m happy that Peyton Manning will not become the next Dan Marino. I was glad former LSU Tiger Joseph Addai had a solid game, even if the rookie didn’t score a touchdown. No matter who’s playing, I’m looking forward to the Party Which Shall Not Be Named™ next year.

Well, there’s something you don’t see every day

Raise your hand if you’ve ever seen an entire church moving down the road. Put your hands down; I don’t mean the whole congregation cruising caravan-style. I’m talking about the entire church building.

Well, thanks to the technological miracles of time-lapse photography and YouTube, now you can say you have:

A wave of the phin to Dethroner, and I have to agree with Joel that the video’s soundtrack totally makes it.

Traveling through stats ain’t like dusting crops, boy!

Kudos to the gang at Feedburner for the gratuitous usage of Star Wars references in their Hackathon post. My favorite:

Traveling through stats ain’t like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through an aggregator or bounce too close to a subscriber and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?

Isn’t technology sometimes pretty awesome?

I’d say 4D ultrasound has to be the coolest in pre-birth baby tech. I would have loved to have seen our little phisch this way. Maybe with the next one.

Twittering just got easier with Tweet

Scott McNulty noted Tweet in his Twitter feed as well as on TUAW. I downloaded Ted Leung’s Growl-modified version of Coda Hale’s script. Coda has good installation and usage instructions in the original Tweet script, which you can use if you don’t care about Growl support.

Tweet combines the power of AppleScript with that of Quicksilver (you are using Quicksilver, aren’t you?) to make posting to your Twitter account easier and faster than ever. Sorry, Windows users, but all of this, except the Twitter service itself, is Mac-only.

Tell me again why I should upgrade

Walt Mossberg reviews Windows Vista for the Wall Street Journal:

Nearly all of the major, visible new features in Vista are already available in Apple’s operating system, called Mac OS X, which came out in 2001 and received its last major upgrade in 2005. And Apple is about to leap ahead again with a new version of OS X, called Leopard, due this spring.

There are some big downsides to this new version of Windows. To get the full benefits of Vista, especially the new look and user interface, which is called Aero, you will need a hefty new computer, or a hefty one that you purchased fairly recently. The vast majority of existing Windows PCs won’t be able to use all of Vista’s features without major hardware upgrades. They will be able to run only a stripped-down version, and even then may run very slowly.

In fact, in my tests, some elements of Vista could be maddeningly slow even on new, well-configured computers.

Something tells me that the only Vista-running PC we’ll see in our home will either be my wife’s company-provided laptop, when their IT department decides the latest version of Windows is “safe” enough with which to conduct business, or if I decide to throw Vista on my Intel-powered iMac. The latter would, at most, be for web site testing, and pure kicks.

I’m pretty much done with Windows PCs at this point. The Mac does everything I want, does it better, does it more intuitively and elegantly, and the Mac is safer. Sure, you can argue this locks me in to a single company, Apple, but then Windows users are pretty much locked in to a single company, too, aren’t they? Oh, you can buy your PC from Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, or build it yourself, but you still have to go to Microsoft for the operating system.

(Linux zealots are not invited to this discussion, so pipe down already. Besides, most of you are fawning over Ubuntu nowadays, which still locks you in to a single distribution/company for that particular flavor of the OS. Or you like SUSE, or Debian, or Red Hat, for whatever your reasons may be. And most people don’t feel like hunting down drivers for their Sony notebook just so it can properly display all available resolutions or connect wirelessly to the Internet, things you still have to do with Linux variants.)

For the record, in his review, Mossberg does acknowledge that as far as Windows itself goes, Vista is the best version yet. Which isn’t surprising, since each version since the original has been successively better, with the exception of Windows ME (what a disaster that beast was).

When the desktop PC I built my wife two years ago outlives its usefulness, it will get replaced with either a hand-me-down iMac, or a Mac mini. It’s one thing to do Windows tech support for a living, but when it comes to home computing, that’s something I’d rather not have to worry about.

It’s Twitterrific!

I confess I’ve been sucked in to the world of Twitter. It’s kind of addictive, watching what folks like John Gruber, the Iconfactory boys, Maury McCown, and even Darth Vader, are up to.

I’d love to know if my friends have accounts, so I can add you as a friend to mine, and please feel free to add me as a friend to yours. Ping me via IM, drop me an e-mail, or leave a comment.

One cool thing Twitter did last week was they created a Macworld account. By adding this account as a friend, you could follow the postings of those at Macworld Expo as Steve announced the latest and greatest tech from our favorite fruit company. There were so many messages coming in to Twitter through AOL Instant Messenger that Twitter exceeded its allowable AIM traffic, and that service was unavailable for about a day. (To clarify, you couldn’t post to Twitter via AIM; Twitter and AIM were each unaffected.)

You can post to Twitter via your Twitter page, by instant message (Jabber or AIM), or by text message from your mobile phone. (Text message charges from your mobile provider apply, but there’s no charge from Twitter.) If you’re a Mac user, you can also use Maury McCown’s TwitterPost, or the just-released-today Twitterrific from those aforementioned boys at the Iconfactory. Both apps are freeware.

So the question remains, what are you doing?

Doomed by the dish

So it’s the biggest college football weekend of the year.

And I’m missing all of it.

I am not doing so willingly.

Friday, we had some thunderstorms in the area. Nothing too bad, though the rain was intense at times, and we had a few lightning strikes here and there. But it’s rained much worse, and we’ve had lightning last longer.

Our DirecTV satellite dish system became inoperable at some point Friday afternoon. Two days later, still nothing. It would seem, after all the troubleshooting I’ve done, that the problem is the dish is out of alignment.

My bride thinks the disalignment began with the severe cold snap we got last month, which brought in some ice, and we lost the satellite signal for about a day. She thinks, and I can’t find any fault in her logic, the weight from whatever ice collected on the dish was enough to begin the process, and wind since has steadily moved it more until it’s just off enough that we’re getting nothing.

Except last night.

At midnight.

When we were turning in, and I just kicked on the satellite receiver for the heck of it.

This morning, nada. Nothing. Reset all three receivers. Zip. Zero. On startup, the receivers never get beyond 0% in receiving the satellite signal. I’ve checked cables on all the receivers. I checked the cables in the OnQ box upstairs. My friend Drew suggested I disconnect one of the satellite lines from the multiplexer in the OnQ box and hook it directly in to one of the receivers, to rule out the multiplexer as the problem.

So I lugged my JVC 13-inch television, and the attached receiver, from the study, upstairs to the OnQ box, and plugged it in directly. Still nothing.

So, having ruled out everything else, it has to be the dish itself.

This is what was determined yesterday afternoon, when, after 24 hours of no signal, I called DirecTV technical support. (Note: If you have to do this, never waste time with the first-line customer service reps. All of the ones I’ve spoken with have been pleasant, but they’ve got limited knowledge, and your best bet is to ask them to connect you to “second-tier tech support”, where more knowledgeable folks reside.) The tech rep I spoke with, after I explained to her everything I had done to that point, said it sounded like everything had been ruled out but the dish itself. So she scheduled a technician to come out to the house to get up on the roof to realign the dish.

Thursday.

Thursday.

Just in case you didn’t catch that, the tech is coming on Thursday.

Thursday, January 4th. After which there is only one bowl game of any significance, the BCS Championship Game.

So if I get to watch any of the big bowl games tomorrow, it will only be due to Brent’s generosity in inviting me over to his place. I’ll get to watch the bowl game I care about the most, LSU vs Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl, over at Drew’s. (Which isn’t bad, since we all went to LSU, Drew and I were in ROTC together, and it’s always fun to watch the games with fellow alumni.) Still…Thursday?

Apparently the technicians don’t work on Sunday, and I can’t begrudge them a day off during the week. They’re not working on what is likely the second-biggest football day of the year (after Super Bowl Sunday, of course), since it’s New Year’s Day, and I can’t begrudge them having that day off, either. Likewise, no techs are being scheduled on Tuesday the 2d, as that’s the National Day of Mourning for President Ford. I can’t begrudge them that, either. And since Wednesday is the first day available after three straight days of unavailability, it’s booked solid when I called on Saturday afternoon. So I’m left with Thursday.

And while I can’t begrudge the techs the above three days off, I’m still left with the feeling that this all stinks. The timing absolutely sucks. At no point did anyone from DirecTV say, “Gee, you’ve been a customer of ours for nearly a decade. Let’s see how soon we can get someone out there.” Which would of course have made me deliriously happy, but we can’t always get what we want, which is someone out right now to fix the problem.

Because the problem is about twenty feet up, on the roof of our second-story home with a steep, pitched roof, and I have no ladder taller than eight feet. And while I don’t fear heights, the prospect of getting on the steep, pitched roof while it’s as windy as it is today—provided I had a ladder taller than eight feet—isn’t very appealing.

I know what those of you who know me are probably thinking: Why don’t you have Verizon’s FiOS TV, anyway? You have the fiber optic for Internet and phone, why not for television, too?

A good question, certainly, and the answer is this: because earlier this year, midway through January and before FiOS TV was available, my bride placed an order with DirecTV for two of their new satellite receiver/DVR units, and this locked us in to a new, two-year contract with DirecTV. Even though we were long out of our original contract. That’s why we don’t have FiOS TV. (And please don’t think I blame my wife in any way. The receivers these new ones replaced were old, and sucked, and we wanted DVR capability in the study and bedroom.)

I’m seriously considering looking into what it would cost us to break that last year with DirecTV. I’ve been looking at TiVo units direct from TiVo, because, despite the company’s problems, their product is still the best DVR available, and all others pale in comparison. There may be a hefty cost for a switch now, but I’m wondering if it would be worth it to never again have to worry about being doomed by a unaligned dish.

OSC gets a dig in on Bill and Ballmer

From Orson Scott Card’s Empire:

“I’m not surprised,” said Cole. “What do you think it takes to build one of those? Two million? Six?”
“Real costs or Pentagon costs?” asked Reuben.
“Microsoft costs.”
“These are not a Microsoft product,” said Reuben.
“Developed in secret, though.”
“Yeah, but they don’t lock up.”

XP or Vista?

So I purchased a copy of Parallels Desktop a few months back, when they were offering it at a reduced price while still in beta. I haven’t gotten around to installing it since, mostly because I didn’t have a legit copy of Windows to go with it, and I’m not much interested in dinking around with any Linux variants.

Lately, I’ve been intrigued at the prospect of running Windows from a virtual environment on my Intel iMac, mostly for web browser testing. (My sites don’t look nearly as nice in Internet Explorer as they do in, well, pretty much every other browser.) And long ago I promised I’d help out with some of our church’s web stuff, and they use FrontPage (yes, I know—ick!).

The question then is, do I get the latest version of Windows XP, or do I jump in to the exploratory waters of Windows Vista? Let me know what you think.

Today’s Gmail spam

Today’s Gmail phishing (as opposing to phisching, which is the attempt to hook a phisch) spam is more humorous than most. A lot of phishing emails one receives are for non-location-specific entities: Citi, Bank of America, eBay, PayPal, etc. This one is highly location-specific: Hawaii.

I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex.

It amused me.

Briefly.

Are you a Windows user?

Windows has no users…

Warning: adult language on page linked above.

[Via the Fontosaurus.]

And Sony wonders why they’re losing to Samsung and Apple

We have a Sony DirecTV/Tivo unit my mother-in-law gave as a Christmas gift to us several years ago. In techno-age, it’s ready to retire and move to Florida, but it still does the job, and the TiVo interface is still light-years ahead of DirecTV’s own DVR receivers, of which we have two.

Some of the buttons on the Sony remote have stopped working, however, and it’s finally gotten to the point where we need a new remote. A trip to Sony’s web site reveals they no longer sell the remote (shocker, I know), but there is an online form with which you can inquire as to parts. So I fill it out, noting we have the DirecTV receiver/TiVo DVR combo unit, as well as putting in the only part numbers I’m able to find any where on the remote itself.

This was a month ago.

Today, I receive a reply from Sony. Therein, I’m told:

I think you might have model SVR2000. If this is it, the remote is rmtv303 (147603612) which is nla. Please go on www.yahoo.com and type in either the part number of the model number of the remote and do a search. There still should be internet distribuors that carry it.

Fine and dandy, this was along the lines of what I was expecting. Except the genius got the model number wrong, and the part number for the remote wrong. I only discovered this after doing exactly what is suggested above, running a Yahoo search. On one page which listed several remotes, I discovered another part number for a Sony TiVo remote, and it turned out to be the correct one.

For the record, the SVR2000 is the Sony TiVo DVR; it is not the DirecTV receiver/TiVo combo. That is model SAT-T60. The remote part number for the SAT-T60 is RM-Y809. I found a new one for $55, with a 30-day, money-back guarantee (yay, Yahoo!). This is future reference for myself, as well as help for anyone else who may find themselves in a similar situation.

I just think it shows very bad form for a Sony employee to, (a) take a month to respond, and (b) when finally responding, providing the wrong information. I was very explicit in noting that we had the DirecTV receiver/TiVo combo, and not the TiVo-only SVR2000.

Sony has rested on its laurels, and formerly well-deserved reputation, for too long, and it continues to result in products no one are buying, and poor customer service after the fact.

Miscellany

• Thanks to the folks at Xerox, with help from Layer 8 Group, you can send a postcard, with original artwork by a child, to a member of the armed forces serving abroad: Let’s Say Thanks. I sent one, how about you?
  
  [Via Susan via e-mail.]

• About.com has some good advice in its Back to School section concerning backpack selection for students. The first tip they offer, to get a bag with two straps instead of just one, to help balance the load across the body better, is why I’m a dedicated backpack guy.

• My new addiction is Armagetron Advanced, an open source 3D game of the lightcycle contest from Tron.

Miscellany

Michael has announced that C-Command now has forums for all of its products.

I helped him do some testing with the forum boards—which means we spent about ten minutes on it—and if you’re a SpamSieve or DropDMG user, I hope to see you around the virtual water cooler.

Messy networks.

Dear God in Heaven.

[Via Firewheel Design.]

Just when I thought there was never going to be anything interesting on Yahoo’s corporate blog, they have races with toy babies triggered by the licking of lollipops.

Stuff a calendar into your Backpack

So the calendar feature for Backpack launched today. I like how easy it is to add items to the calendar, and I realize this is a 1.0 release (Note to Google: it’s not a beta.), but I’m greatly disappointed it didn’t roll out with repeating events as part of the feature set. I was looking forward to using iCal solely as the desktop conduit between an online calendar I can access anywhere, and my mobile devices with which I would like to sync calendar events.

Sure, I can do that with Google Calendar, but I’m already in Backpack so much, and I like 37signals’ implementation and interface better. Besides repeating events, other features I’d like to see added in a future update, ranked in order of personal importance:

• Events added to Backpack’s Calendar do not show the scheduled time within the calendar. Mark Gallagher notes this in the announcement’s comments, because to see an event’s time, you have to click on the event, instead of just being able to glance at the calendar and seeing all of the times in context.

• The ability to toggle the time on the reminder. For some events, I need more than 30 minutes notice, my parents’ anniversary, for instance, which I need a few days notice so I can buy a card and put it in the mail to them. Yes, I know I can use Backpack’s Reminders feature for this, but it would be more productive to have this built in to the Calendar side of the house. It seems like overkill, and double work, for me to enter the event of my parents’ anniversary in to the calendar, then have to switch over and enter a separate reminder to buy a card days in advance.
  
  Commenter “D” notes: “Quick hack to get repeating events: enter them as reminders and then subscribe to your reminder feed within calendar.” This is working well for me, so far, but then you’ll get in to the situation of all of your reminders being in a single calendar, when you would like to have reminders in different calendars: Personal, Work, Pet, and so on.
  
  In the Backpack Calendar forums, 37signals’ own Jason Friedman notes that they weren’t happy with the repeating events implementation, and decided not to include it the 1.0 release. So at least for now, the best way to get this function is D’s suggestion, but it’s nice to know it is being worked on, and we can expect it in the future. I hope this upcoming implementation allows for the setting of a time other than thirty minutes before.

• Single, all-day events should be displayed in the same way as multiple-day events. This was a suggestion by Ryan Christensen in the announcement’s comments. This would distinguish the all-day event, like my aforementioned parents’ anniversary, from a time-specific event, like “Give the dog his heartworm pill at noon”.

• To-do list implementation for the calendar. Again, from the comments to the announcement, Jeff Croft asks about this, specifically that supported by the iCalendar format. Probably ninety-five percent of what I personally use Backpack for is some sort of to-do list. For short-term stuff, I would love to see this implemented in the Calendar, but have lived without it this far. I would much rather see 37signals devote developer time to repeating events and print styles, something they still need for Backpack’s regular pages.

All in all, the Calendar function in Backpack is simple and elegant, and on par with what I would expect from 37signals. It took them two and a half months to arrive at this point; I hope the next two and a half months result in usability improvements which put the Backpack Calendar over the top.

Server migration

We’re moving servers, thanks to the efforts of Jim, our sysadmin extraordinaire, so this site and its related entities will be unavailable for a while, beginning around 8 PM CST this evening. This includes e-mail, so if you try to send anything to my e-mail address at this domain after 8 PM, you may want to wait until tomorrow.

Miscellany

If only I had room in any of my bathrooms for one of these.

Just when you think there might be some hope in this world that the tide of sexual immorality would take a turn for the better, something like the Shame On You Kit pops up. How about never putting yourself in the situation to have to have a “Shame On You Kit”?

As a satisfied customer, I highly recommend KnowledgeNews, which today had a bit on the differences between viruses and bacteria. I loved this analogy:

Imagine it this way. If just one of the 10 to 100 trillion cells in your body were the size of a baseball park, the average bacterium would be the size of the pitcher’s mound. The average virus would be the size of the baseball.

Miscellany

The federal government is apparently looking at creating a national SMS alert system.

[Via MobileTracker.]

Congratulations to Kyle MacDonald, who, one year and fourteen trades later, bartered a red paper clip for a house.

Making sure you tipped the right amount after the fact doesn’t do your server much good, does it?

Miscellany

John points to a 94x magnification of Velcro being pulled apart. Wicked cool.

You can also see Scotch tape being ripped, more Velcro, still more Velcro, and Equisetum strobilus, all worth a look.

How much do I love Default Folder? Its functionality should be built in to OS X.

(I was just using it quite a bit today, lots of saving in different locales, etc., and I thought a shout-out was in order.)

After months of waiting, I found it. Part of a pint was consumed this evening. It was yummy. Retrophisch™ Recommended!

Tivoli’s latest iPod accessory

It’s a shame that at the time I reviewed the Tivoli Audio iSongBook, there wasn’t the black version. Such is life.

Now, Tivoli has the unusually-named iYiYi coming in the fall. Billed as a digital home entertainment system, the iYiYi doesn’t look to have many more features than the iSongBook, but it does have a deeper casing. This means it’s not as portable as the iSongBook, but will likely sound better, since the iYiYi will be capable of delivering deeper, fuller bass sounds, one of the areas in which I found the iSongBook lacking.

[Wave of the phin to Uncrate.]

Adium 1.0b1

I note with amusement my pal Damien’s post on TUAW regarding the release of the 1.0b1 version of Adium, in which he writes, “Please note that this is still in beta, though I was using it last night without any significant problems presenting themselves.”

I realize TUAW’s audience includes many non-geek types, who are happily using iChat, and haven’t yet discovered Adium, but it still brought a grin to my face to see a somewhat boilerplate beta-warning line for software that, while technically still in development, has been very stable—for me, at least—over the past year I’ve been using it. This is the first version I’ve seen with the 1.0 moniker attached to it in any form.

If you don’t use the voice and video chat features of iChat much, you should check out Adium (new beta). It supports multiple chat protocols (AIM, Yahoo, MSN Messenger, Jabber (Gtalk), ICQ, IRC, and more…), has a logging feature I have found most useful in finding URIs or other bits of info I forgot to note elsewhere, and is open source, so there’s no proprietary lock-in, if that’s something you’re concerned about.

Another Firefox benefit

Blake Ross gives yet another reason to consider Firefox over Internet Explorer:

People ask me, “Well, gee, if IE7 is starting to catch up to Firefox, and if they’ve got their hand back in development right now, and eventually they might actually catch up to Firefox in terms of features, what’s the benefit of using Firefox? Why are you guys still around if you say that your only goal is just to make the Web a better place?”

My answer to that is, how much can you really trust a company that five years ago completely left you abandoned? If they do, in fact, succeed in taking back some of the market share that Firefox has gotten back from them, who’s to say that they’re not going to disappear again? My issue is not so much at a product level, it’s at a company level. How do you trust a company that left everyone out in the cold for five years?

Miscellany

Photojojo has a review of the Lensbaby 2.0, a $149 retro novelty lens for digital SLRs.

From the “Things That Make You Go ‘Huh?’” Department, Tom gives us Mr. Martin Heidegger. After reading Heidegger’s quote, I have the mental equivalent of wanting to get a bad taste out of my mouth…

In line with my smart-aleck nature, there are more good t-shirts I want, but I would need to perform a serious shirt purge first.

Lee is going to hate me for sharing this…

Just downloaded the 214 MB Mac OS X 10.4.7 Intel Combo updater at a rate of 1.6 MB per second. That’s a big B. As in megabytes.

Fiber optic rocks.

Miscellany

I love the build names for Ubuntu Linux: “Breezy Badger”, “Dapper Drake”. Are they all alliteral?

[Via Paul.]

Though I don’t do nearly enough of either, I love hiking and camping, and could see myself as a flashpacker.

Stephen H. Wildstrom has the latest idiotic move by the recording industry, which is suing XM Satellite Radio over its Inno portable receiver/recorder. Even though there’s no way to get the XM-specific music files off the Inno (yet), and despite the millions and millions of dollars in royalties XM already pays the music industry, the Inno is obviously a threat to the future of music as we know it and it must be stopped.

In other news, consumers welcomed more artists as the latter left the major music labels…

Entrepreneurs should check out the WSJ’s StartupJournal.

Reason #37 to Avoid Internet Explorer

Per Paul Stamatio, as if you needed thirty-six other reasons.

Killing .Mac, part 1

I renewed my .Mac subscription last year, though I did so with reservations. That was the last time I will renew, and come October, I will be .Mac-less for the first time since the service was the original, free iTools. With every feature “update”, I am finding less and less value in the service for myself. I am not alone in my feelings, and Khoi Vinh sums up a lot of how I feel. Your own mileage may vary.

I thought I would begin the process of replacing the features I use with .Mac, keeping in mind the sum total of the replacements not exceed .Mac’s annual price tag of $99.95. Steven Frank offers alternatives, and I will likely touch on many of those as well.

Anti-Virus
To begin the replacement process, I started with virus protection. When McAfee began to have issues with Virex 7.5, before and after the introduction of Mac OS X Tiger, I went looking for another anti-virus solution. Granted, we have yet to have a serious virus infection of the OS X community, but it never hurts to be prepared.

I now use ClamXav to fend off the nasties. The only downside to ClamXav is a lack of protection from Visual Basic-based macro viruses, which infect Microsoft Office documents. Personally, though I own Office, I use its components rarely, so this isn’t a showstopper for me. If the applications of Office are some of your mainstays, however, you might want to investigate Norton AntiVirus or VirusBarrier.

It should be noted that Apple no longer includes any anti-virus package with .Mac, so even if I were to pay for NAV or VirusBarrier, it wouldn’t be counted against the $99.95 cost of .Mac.

E-mail
Besides the former use of Virex, another feature I’m using with .Mac is the @mac.com e-mail address. At the last revision of the .Mac feature set, Apple increased the default storage limit to one gigabyte. This is shared space; it is utilized by your .Mac e-mail, as well as any files you upload to your account.

Contrast this with Google’s Gmail, which gives you, currently, 2.7 GB of space, and counting. (Google slowly increases the storage amount each day.) My Gmail account has become my main e-mail account, with my account on my own domain coming in second. The Gmail web interface is much faster, for me at least, than the .Mac web interface, though with both accounts I use the POP protocol to route the mail to my local e-mail client.

So for now, I’ve replaced the anti-virus software Apple no longer offers, and I’ve replaced the e-mail service with one that offers more storage and a faster user interface, both at no cost. More on my personal quest to rid myself of .Mac in a future post.

Jajah

Guy mentions the web telephony service Jajah, which looks interesting, especially when compared to Skype. Unlike the latter, Jajah doesn’t require you to download any software, and you use your own phone.

This is just about as dead-simple telephony as you can get. You enter your phone number, then the number you’re calling, then hit the Call button. Your phone rings, you answer, then it rings the number you’re calling. That’s it.

So, like Skype, you can call internationally really cheap. Unlike Skype, you can dial Guadalajara, then chat on your mobile with the golf pro who took three strokes off your game, all while you drive to your local course.

Personally, I’ve never had much use for Skype. I haven’t called internationally in ten years, easy. Calls within the borders of the U.S. are covered adequately by my mobile phone plan. And if I were calling internationally, I may not want to be tied to the computer when doing so. Should I have the need, I can certainly see myself favoring Jajah.

We were content to kick your BLEEP, but now you’ve made us mad

I love how my friends are able to succinctly sum up current events.

Miscellany

O’Reilly has a web site devoted to Lightroom.

[Via John.]

Though I do not speak, read, or write either, I still think it very cool that Gmail now supports Arabic and Hebrew.

The World eBook Fair is a month away.

[Via AWAD.]

Miscellany

Leave it to a bunch of Brits to play football with automobiles. In this case, a small fleet of Toyota’s Aygos. There was plenty of rubbin’ going on, and as we all know, “Rubbin’s racin’.”

[Via