Extra Pepperoni

Thanks Lyman!

Now I’m letting myself be be sucked into trying GTA (IV).

I have a compulsive personality, I like finishing things, and I enjoy computer games. I have developed a simple set of rules to avoid blowing all my time gaming.

1. I test games written by friends. I only have 3 friends who have written games. Howard wrote Spectre and Gridz, but was distracted running an ISP for a while. Andrew wrote Battle-Girl but we’re no longer in touch. Peter wrote Greebles, but doesn’t currently appear to have any plans for further game development. So I haven’t spent much time on friends’ games in several years, although beta testing gets pretty involved. I also played several Delta Tao games, and might even try Return to Dark Castle.
2. I play coin-op games. The sad thing here is that for years as a kid, I wished I could afford to spend a lot of time playing arcade games, but didn’t have lots of money to blow on it. Now that blowing a roll of quarters isn’t a big deal, I don’t have much interest or time, and don’t live near any arcades.
3. I play Marathon; I played through Marathon 1-3, and Halo 1 (really Marathon 4). Last week I bought an Xbox 360 (my first gaming console ever) to play Halo 2 & 3 — I’m waiting for Lyman’s extra 20gb Xbox hard drive and VGA cable so I can get started with Halo 2. Unfortunately I’m not good at FPS games, so it will probably take me a long time to work my way through Halo 2 and then Halo 3. My intention is to sell the Xbox after Halo 3, assuming it has any resale value at that point.
4. I don’t sweat the small stuff. When Luxor came out, I spent a few hours playing the demo, then deleted it. On the Xbox, I’m playing demos and freebies (which tend to come with 1-3 sample levels — pretty anemic) while I wait for the hard drive so I can play Halo 2. Halo 2 was only released for Xbox, not 360, so it needs to download patches from Xbox Live and store them on a hard drive; the 256mb flash card that came with mine is inadequate.

These rules keep me from sinking my life into video games. Also general lack of time, especially as a parent.

Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone 3G would be “Twice as fast. Half the price”.

Ever since Om Malik’s interview with AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega, people have been noticing and commenting on the fact that this ignores the mandatory 2-year AT&T contract, and in fact iPhone 3Gs will generally cost more, thanks to the higher monthly fees.

Unfortunately, Amy doesn’t want my original $400 iPhone — perhaps a friend who can’t justify the 3G charges will buy it for $100.

The $300 16gb iPhone 3G will be worth the money for me — I spend a significant amount of time each day waiting for pages to load, and still take a Treo 650 & Bluetooth GPS unit on driving trips. But I’m disappointed in Apple for choosing a clearly misleading catchphrase for a product which doesn’t need deceit and customer confusion to sell well.

I don’t use SMS much, but I do sometimes, and I don’t want to worry about the astronomical per-message costs, so I like the $5/month flat rate plan. And I certainly want the $30/month unlimited 3G data plan.

Fortunately, I’m now able to drop back from the 900-minute/month plan I upgraded to, down to the base 450-minute/month plan, which will save $20/month, and nicely offset the additional $15/month for unlimited 3G & 200 SMS.

Now that AppleCare has failed me, and the iPhone isn’t as much of a hardware investment, and I don’t walk outdoors across campus (drops on carpet are much less destructive than on asphalt or concrete outside), I’ve decided not to purchase AppleCare or a case for my new iPhone (my 11-month-old plastic incase protector is falling apart, and kept the iPhone from fitting in any dock). I like the idea of leaving the iPhone charging in its dock overnight, rather than lying on a night table.

So with the new iPhone, I’ll save $70 on a 2-year AppleCare contract and $30 for the case. This is enough to pay for MobileMe service. Hopefully it will be solid, as opposed to the current .Mac service, based on the unreliable iSync.

I wonder how much turn-by-turn GPS with spoken directions will cost on the iPhone. I know TomTom and Garmin are quite interested, and Google Maps can do real-time driving GPS without spoken directions — I don’t know what the iPhone options will be, though.

I have a couple large questions. First, how well will MobileMe work? Second, how much will turn-by-turn GPS with spoken directions cost? Hardware GPS units are in the several-hundred-dollar range, while Google offers free or cheap GPS with directions but no speech. I’m looking forward to seeing what is available using the iPhone SDK.

I’ll have a much faster iPhone (and probably OpenSSH — hooray!), and next time an attractive upgrade rolls around, I won’t have $500 invested in the previous generation.

To sum up, I’ll save $20/m on extra minutes, and pay an additional $15/m on 3G data & SMS. I’ll save $100 on protection, and pay $100/year on MobileMe. If things don’t change over the next 2 years, I’ll end up paying $40 more, which isn’t bad, but also isn’t “Half the price.”

Today I tried to take out an earring, but when I grabbed the front and back, the front fell off. This posed a serious problem, as I couldn’t get a enough of a grip on the remaining post to pull the back off.

I went downstairs, but couldn’t see the post. I tried pulling it back through my ear, but it wouldn’t budge — the front of the post has a wider flat surface, which the earring figure was welded too. This was too big to fit through the hole. Bad news!

Fortunately, I was eventually able to push on the back enough to get the flat surface back out of the hole and out of my ear, where I grabbed it with the pliers from my swiss army knife. Then it was straightforward to pull the back off.

When Amy mentioned to Joyce (of Scarce) that she now has a blog, Joyce was amazed and impressed at how cutting-edge Amy is. There’s definitely a geographical factor here, because at my picnic earlier the same day, we figured out that of the 6 adults and Julia present (all Brooklynites), every single one of us has a blog.

Devjani’s is firewalled. Julia’s Journal runs on hand-crafted HTML rather than blogging software, but that’s because it dates back to mid-2002; I will move it over at some point. Sharon has two. In addition to Extra Pep, I edit Securosis.

• http://www.mscrochety.com/
• http://ceolaf.blogspot.com/
• http://cmss1971.wordpress.com/
• http://typewrittenteacup.blogspot.com/
• http://twhos.blogspot.com/

Being the compulsive sort, it bugged me whenever I missed an episode of a TV show I watched (I used to watch a lot of TV; now not much). Similarly, it bothered me that I didn’t have complete sets of the comics I read — they were both hard to find and expensive, especially since I almost never started at the beginning.

Inspired by Ernie Cline, I’ve recently been watching Airwolf. It hasn’t aged well, and was never great storytelling, but it’s still enjoyable. And it’s nice to see as a coherent whole over weeks, rather than scattered across years with commercial interruptions. I’m in the middle of season 2, and will skip season 4 (I don’t think I ever saw it, fortunately); don’t know about season 3. Perhaps I’ll watch The Fall Guy next!

Nowadays, with the Internet, back issues of comic books are pretty easy to find. I’ve completed a few series that were missing issues, such as Badger crossovers, Dynamo Joe, and Tailgunner Jo. I’d love to collect various other series, but a full run of X-Men would be prohibitive — both in terms of money and time to read them all!

I was pleased to discover Marvel made several of their more popular titles available to GIT, who released them on DVD. Unfortunately, the license was terminated in favor of Marvel’s online service, but some DVDs are still available. James gave me Ghost Rider for my birthday, and despite some aggravations (they photographed the open comic books, so there’s dead space around the corners, and didn’t bother to split left & right pages, so it’s too awkward to read in single-page portrait mode) which make the comic harder to read than it should be, I’m enjoying the old Ghost Rider issues. It’s amazing what a loser Johnny Blaze originally was — he’s an idiot (sloppy writing), a coward, a regretful devil dealer, and not really faster or more skillful than gang members. As time has gone on, and Marvel has super-sized its characters, Ghost Rider and his cycle have gotten faster, stronger, less human, and ironically much more innocent.

At Wheaton, I helped found the Progressive Alliance, a student political club. I don’t remember most of the members (in fact I no longer recall the names of most of my classmates), but Kirsten Cappy was one of the heads — one of two co-presidents, if I recall correctly — and Steve Amster (a good friend to both of us) got me involved.

As the nerdiest Progressive, I ended up laying out The Serious Shit in PageMaker. Articles were of course always late, so I remember having to shorten articles I’d just stretched out to fill space, in order to fit post-deadline content onto the page (issues were one to two pages, letter or legal sized).

The Shit was posted on the bathroom stall doors, where we had a guaranteed audience with time to read. I don’t recall much more about it, although if Jason Snell revives my old 210mb hard drive, I might get some old issues back — unless they’re on my 6 even older 44mb SyQuest cartridges.

The other thing I recall about TPA & TSS is that my mother convinced me that if I listed “Progressive Alliance” as an activity on my resume, people would decide I was a Communist and not hire me. I don’t remember if I took her suggestion and called it “The Humanist Alliance”, or simply left it out entirely. There was never any question of listing The Serious Shit on the resume — I never interviewed for a job where that would have been a plus.

Fortunately, after my first job at Rockefeller University, I had more relevant things to put on my resume, so the Progressive Alliance dilemma quickly became a non-issue.

We got a Razor for Amy and me, so we can scoot with Julia. It’s fun, but apparently for robust kids, as the handlebars are too low for a grownup, but it’s rated up to 180 pounds. The handlebars bug me, though. They have a label which reads:

Caution: this moves when used. Exercise caution & common sense when riding.

Okay, I understand that a liability lawyer made them put that label on the scooter. But anyone who needs to be told that a Razor scooter moves, is going to be unable to exercise common sense when riding.

A while ago I posted a script for driving HandBrakeCLI. But it was lame that I had two not-quite-identical versions of the script — one for iPhone output and another for Apple TV. At a guess, Brian Beardmore only needed one type. Now that we watch movies on the Apple TV and I watch on the iPhone, it was silly to have two different scripts. So I added simple argument processing.

hb.sh v1.0.3

If there first argument is iphone, then hb.sh optimizes for iPhone. If the argument is appletv or there are no arguments, hb.sh optimizes for Apple TV. It’s very easy to tweak or add your own types — just look for myArgs in the script and add or adjust as desired. I run this script on my Linux server, which has lots of disk space and is generally idle.

On my MacBook Pro, I have a couple aliases to facilitate things. I copy DVD folders to ~/tivo/tivo-inspector/input and run one of these. When done, the script opens up ~/tivo/tivo-inspector/. I move the DVD folders out of input and the processed .m4v video out of output; then I drop the .m4v files onto iTunes’ LIBRARY area (so it doesn’t stop whatever it’s currently playing) and check iPhone videos to sync to the iPhone (the Apple TV has plenty of space, so everything syncs to it). Note that these lines may be too wide to display properly in WordPress — just Copy and Paste, and you’ll get the full text.

alias hbatv="ssh -t inspectore time screen bin/hb.sh appletv; open ~/tivo/tivo-inspector"
alias hbip="ssh  -t inspectore time screen bin/hb.sh iphone;  open ~/tivo/tivo-inspector"

Note that inspectore is the name of my Linux server. This would work just as well with HandBrakeCLI on a Mac “server” — or even Windows, if you set it up to accept remote commands (CygWin, anyone?).

Reminder: You must adjust the inputSearchDir and outputDir paths for the running HandBrakeCLI.

pepper@inspector:~$ egrep tivo bin/hb.sh
inputSearchDir="$HOME/tivo-inspector/input"
outputDir="$HOME/tivo-inspector/output"

In the future version I’d like to support for arbitrary HandBrakeCLI arguments on the hb.sh command line, but I first have to see if HandBrakeCLI can handle gracefully conflicting arguments from built-ins and the command line.

For years I’ve been hearing complaints about the Finder, chiefly from John Siracusa and John Gruber. They have mostly gone in one ear and out the other, because of a little secret I have.

See, back in the day of Mac OS X Public Beta (pre-1.0), the Finder was really bad. Dog slow (much worse than now), highly crash-prone, and very limited (compared to both the Mac OS 9 Finder and the Leopard Finder).

When I was still working at The Shooting Gallery, fixing Macs, learning UNIX, and trying to jettison hacked Windows servers (unsuccessfully), the Mac OS X Public Beta was a very big deal. Its Terminal application and command-line environment much more stable than the still-very-beta Finder, so, I used them as much as possible. Over the years, as I have read ongoing complaints about the Finder, I have continued to use Terminal and the command line, and been largely insulated from the Finder’s failings.

I would like to mention three Apple tricks for mixing the GUI and CLI worlds — not that there couldn’t be others I don’t know. One is that you can drag files into Terminal, and it will insert their paths. This is excellent, because instructions can say things like:

Now open your Applications Folder, and the Utilities folder there, and Terminal inside Utilities. Next type “chmod u+x ” (make sure to leave that space at the end), and drag the file you just downloaded into the Terminal window. Then press Return.

I don’t use path insertion often, though, because Tab completion is faster than switching to the Finder, digging up the file, and dragging. Ironically, when I read In the Beginning Was the Command Line, I thought it was absurd that Stephenson claimed typing could be faster than mousing. All those keys to hit! Alas, the CLIs I had used at the time did not have Tab completion, which does in fact make the keyboard faster than the mouse.

So anyway, back to the point of this post: the path from the command line back to the Mac OS X GUI: the open command. Apple has given this one simple command the ability to open files, folders, URLs (web pages, email addresses, etc.), applications (optionally passing them files), etc. This single command allows me to do 90% or more of my file system navigation in the command line (where ssh and friends live) instead of in the Finder.

We love it!

I actually use the bbedit command as frequently.

There’s a third bridge between the CLI and GUI spheres: executable scripts with the .command suffix are launchable as Mac applications, but run as CLI scripts. I like putting these in the Dock, although for my own use I mostly launch scripts directly from the command line. If you find yourself in need of argument processing, check out Fred Sanchez’s DropScript hack useful; it can add argument processing which is not available with the .command technique.

PS-If you want to run AppleScripts from the shell, look into the osascript command.

I use Handbrake to rip DVDs for my iPhone and Apple TV (and previously for my Treo 650, at much lower quality). It’s excellent, but takes a long time, and slows down the whole system while compressing. My PowerBook G4 wasn’t powerful enough to do H.264 compression in reasonable time, so I got into the habit of ripping the DVDs on the Mac with Mac The Ripper, copying them to the server, converting on the server, and copying back down to the iPhone through iTunes on the laptop. Transferring a full DVD via gigabit Ethernet takes under 10 minutes, which is why we have 3 1/2 gigabit Ethernet switches (8-port, a pair of 5-ports, and the 3 ports built into the Time Capsule) in a 3 1/2 person (2 grown-ups, a 5-year-old, and the cat) home.

Since then I’ve upgraded the laptop and replaced the server, so they’re now both 2.4GHz Core Duos, but I still prefer to avoid the load on my personal machine — especially now that we have an Apple TV, which likes large high-quality video files. The MacBook Pro runs HandBrake.app (Mac GUI), while the server runs HandBrakeCLI (Linux).

HandBrakeCLI is designed to convert individual files and is awkward for converting whole DVDs. Fortunately I found MediaForkCLI-batch.sh, a wrapper which is good at converting all the real titles from one or more DVDs; it automatically ignores short titles such as previews, and titles that have already been transcoded. Unfortunately MediaForkCLI-batch.sh is languishing, and hasn’t been updated for HandBrake v0.92, but it was straightforward to update it to the new syntax.

In the process I made some changes and added an alternate version with different settings optimized for our Apple TV. On the Linux box (named inspector), the scripts are ~/bin/appletv.sh & ~/bin/iphone.sh. I put newly ripped files into ~/tivo-inspector/input/ on inspector, and these scripts rip whatever they find there, generating files in ~/tivo-inspector/output/.

On the MacBook Pro, I keep video files in ~/tivo, and ~/tivo/tivo-inspector is a symbolic link to tivo-inspector on inspector, the server — mounted via AFP. This makes it easy to move files back and forth.

For convenience, I have a couple aliases on the MacBook Pro which log into the Linux machine, start a screen session, and run the appropriate script. This means that if I disconnect the laptop, I can later ssh back into the server and use screen -DR to reconnect to my running conversion session. When the conversion is done, the aliases open the remote folder in the Finder. I move the files back up out of input & output, drop them onto iTunes, and then either Sync the Apple TV (which gets copies of my whole iTunes Library), or sync them to the iPhone.

The scripts are appletv.sh & iphone.sh.

If you use these scripts, you should carefully review the encoding settings. In particular, I encode Apple TV audio to AAC stereo, because our Apple TV is connected to a pair of stereo speakers with a subwoofer; they cannot handle Dolby Pro Logic, which is better for most TVs.

You will also have to update paths in the scripts — to the input and output directories, and to HandBrakeCLI itself — to make them work on your own system.

Here are the aliases in sh/bash format; change the equal signs to spaces for csh/tcsh:

alias appletv="ssh -t inspectore time screen bin/appletv.sh; open ~/tivo/tivo-inspector"
alias  iphone="ssh -t inspectore time screen bin/iphone.sh;  open ~/tivo/tivo-inspector"

Our (cheap) 23″ LCD TV’s composite input gives lousy color. On the other hand, we’ve gotten loud buzzing noises a few times from its HDMI input, so we had our Time Warner (Scientific Atlanta) HD DVR connected to the composite inputs, and dealt with the lousy color and poor brightness. We also paid an additional $20.10/month for the second cable connection and DVR (Time Warner charges $9.95/month more for either HD or non-HD DVR than for a non-DVR cable box [HD or non-HD]). Now I wonder if the problem was with the DVR’s HDMI output all along. Oh, well — it no longer matters.

We do still pay $66.19/month for digital cable service upstairs. This lets Julia watch a couple kids’ shows a day, and Annette & Amy check the Weather Channel. Our (pre-paid) TiVo also records the shows we like, so we can watch upstairs, but we generally watch downstairs. Neither of us knows if we’ll watch more upstairs, or pay a few dollars a month to watch downstairs. It’s an experiment.

Since we watch most of our “TV” from (ripped) DVDs, and our Time Warner signal is very unreliable, and their service is lousy, I returned the DVR on Saturday. That $20.10/month should pay for a Netflix upgrade and/or several shows from the iTunes Store (no longer the “iTunes Music Store”, I noticed — I wondered how long that would take, but missed the actual switch).

Good candidates for iTunes ducats — (certain to total less the $241.20/year we’d been paying for the downstairs DVR):

• $10: 16 consecutive episodes (4 weeks) of The Daily Show ($2/ea) — we watch it infrequently these days.
• $20: a season of South Park.
• $26: a Torchwood season.
• Doctor Who isn’t available from iTunes, but we can watch it in VLC or upstairs, on cable.
• free: Battlestar Galactica (on cable, upstairs)
• free: The Sarah Jane Adventures (upstairs)
• free: Robot Chicken (downloaded and watched on a laptop)

The TiVo S2 has a built-in web server, and I use tivodecode to extract MPEG video, but it won’t play in QuickTime Player. They do play in the redoubtable VLC, but it’s not quite as polished. This is not presently annoying enough to justify purchase of Toast, which can convert .TiVo files for QuickTime or iPhone, but I am not sure if DRM would be a problem; they don’t provide any detail.

We haven’t yet purchased anything through (or for) the Apple TV yet — perhaps this week we’ll try it.

Outlook’s default behavior is to sort new messages to the top of mailbox windows. I prefer new messages at the bottom, but have noticed that when I start reading mail, threads with new messages appear at the top. So I tried reading mail the way Outlook wants me to, but it still sorted newer messages within each thread (”Conversation”) to the bottom of the group, and deleting messages still moved down (to an earlier message in this arrangement). Since it doesn’t work right either way, I might as well do it the way I’m used to: newest at bottom (as of the time I first display or last Refresh the mailbox; the newest stuff still floats to the top, which I cannot prevent).

Sometimes when I delete messages, Outlook selects the next message down (which is correct, given that I view messages in ascending date order). Other times it selects the top message in the mailbox, which is only the right thing to do if it’s the last message in the mailbox. This inconsistent behavior may be connected to whether any off-screen messages are selected, but that shouldn’t matter. I shouldn’t have to wonder where the selection will go, or try not to select messages across more than one screenful at a time, or rush through selecting and deleting mail or collapsing threads, for fear of a new message coming in, removing my selection, and selecting, previewing, and (almost) marking one of those messages read, before I had a chance to delete, mark, or collapse it. This means that if client-side filters are active, the user must wait after launching Outlook, until it’s finished filing messages into the current mailbox, as new messages will constantly disrupt the selection until Outlook is finished running client-side filters. Even if Outlook has been running a while, it’s easy to select a few messages for processing, be interrupted by new mail, deal with whatever was previewed and start selecting again, be interrupted again, and have to deal with the second undesired selection/preview before attempting to return to manual selection for managing email. Amazingly frustrating, and a great way to “lose” unread mail.

With a multi-monitor setup, the best way to use Outlook is with the mailbox filling one display and the attached preview pane covering most of another display. Unfortunately, as I select different mailboxes, the preview turns off. Each mailbox has its own preview state, which is important because I generally only read messages (via preview) in my “fresh” search pseudo-mailbox. In other mailboxes, clicking a messages shouldn’t mark it read, so preview is a bad thing everywhere except in “fresh” (and often in “fresh”, as well!); unfortunately, viewing messages in their own windows is prohibitively slow. The very confusing thing is that sometimes Outlook spontaneously turns off the preview and shrinks the mailbox to its size excluding the preview. This leaves the mailbox covering one display but not extending onto the next; it looks maximized, but isn’t actually in the maximized state. When I switch back a mailbox with preview on (”fresh”), it reappears one character wide, rather than covering most of the secondary display as before. Very aggravating — I think the workaround will be that I must use one window for my “fresh” filter (with preview), and another for other mailboxes (no preview). Hopefully I can escape more bites from these two bugs.

In Outlook, it’s impossible to mark a message (un-)read from the message window, or even to determine directly what mailbox it’s in. I find myself searching across all mailboxes by title and refining by date (which I can see in the message window) to find out it message is, so I can mark it unread for later attention. It’s also impossible to open a message in a new window from the reading pane; the workaround is to Shift-Tab back into the mailbox window and then hit Enter to open a new message window from there.

I often want to delete a collapsed thread (”Conversation”). Outlook insists on expanding it first, which wastes time and often results in unread messages appearing and then being deleted — disconcerting, as it gives the impression I’m losing important (unread) mail. Worse, Outlook cannot mark a thread unread without expanding it, which moves the selection into the thread and marks that one or two messages read when deselected (unless the selection lasts a second or less, as I have set Outlook to mark messages read after a second, because I cannot eliminate the delay, and above one second it doesn’t automatically mark short messages which I read quickly as read; I have to go back and mark them read manually later). If I have just read a new message in threaded mode, and want to mark it unread, I have to either hit Control-Q to mark it read or move to another message and back (assuming I’ve had the current message previewed for at least a second), mark it unread (Control-U), then hit left-arrow to collapse the thread.

Worse is when I want to mark a whole thread unread (more common). Then I have to collapse the thread to implicitly select the whole thing (switching to and from the mouse slows me down, and I get too much mail to be inefficient in dealing with it); hit Control-U to mark the whole thread read (implicitly expanding it), then hit left-arrow within a second to collapse it again before Outlook decides I’ve read a message in preview.

When I delete a message, Outlook immediately selects (and previews, in “fresh”) another message. When I’m reading mail, this is generally what I want, so I can deal with the next message. When I’m trying to delete or file mail, it means Outlook automatically starts the process of dealing with another next message, and unless I’m very quick marks it pseudo-read (as soon as I deselect), so I must decide what to do about the new selection. This makes it harder to stop reading mail in the current mailbox, as every time I complete an action, Outlook picks the “next” message and engages me in dealing with it; stopping without losing unread status on a message I haven’t actually read yet requires contortions. When I know I’m about to stop, I tend to deal with a message or thread and then hit Control-up-arrow to jump to the top of the mailbox, which should be the first message I read (so already marked read), but is often a new message that’s come in recently; I then have to decide on and handle that before I can move on to another mailbox or activity.

Normally, when a thread (”Conversation”) is collapsed, Outlook deselects its messages. Sometimes (unpredictably) it still shows the preview for a hidden message, which breaks the Control-Q Control-U left-arrow dance, and I have to instead hit Control-Q Control-U left-arrow up-arrow to get a collapsed unread thread.

F5 (Refresh) doesn’t clear collapsed conversations; this is annoying. On the other hand, sometimes messages disappear immediately upon being marked read, which means I don’t even get a chance to mark them unread; they’re effectively just gone. I have no idea what triggers the second problem; fortunately it’s rare, as it tends to result in losing mail — often mail I was saving for later attention.

Control-Q marks individual messages read, but cannot be used on whole mailboxes (with the selection in the left-side mailbox column). There’s no good reason for this, as marking whole mailboxes read is a common function, and in the pop-up menu, it just doesn’t have the obvious keyboard shortcut.

Outlook cannot select multiple mailboxes at one time, which is ungood; on the other hand, it makes an effort to be helpful — when I select a mailbox, it kinda-sorta move the selection into the message list (which is pretty reliably what the user really wants, since you can’t do much with mailboxes except delete or move them). It’s all a bit confusing.

If I have a message which has been previewed for over a second, I know it’s effectively read (it will be marked as such as soon as I deselect it, unless I drag it into another mailbox first). It would be good if I could use Control-U to tell Outlook not to mark this message read as soon as it gets deselected, but instead I have to mark it read, then mark it unread, and then move away within a second — before the preview timer marks it mostly-read again.

We got an Apple TV this week, and it’s excellent, although I tripped over some serious network problems (more Mac problems than Apple TV problems, actually).

Compared to our TiVo (upstairs) or our Time Warner Scientific Atlanta HD DVR, the Apple TV is surpringly advanced. The SA box keeps losing signal (probably TWC’s wiring at fault, but they keep not fixing it), and is much larger (and noisier) than the Apple TV; basically it’s a piece of junk, but it’s substantially cheaper than another TiVo. We’ll probably get rid of this DVR and our downstairs cable connection in favor of the Apple TV very soon.

Comparing the Apple TV to the TiVo is more interesting, not least because people have been comparing the two companies for years, and keep demanding that Apple build a TiVo killer (both before and after the Apple TV release). Given how badly cable companies stink, it’s hard to believe Apple should embroil themselves in this mess, but they seem to be doing okay with the iPhone, and phone companies aren’t much better than cable companies. People also want Apple TVs to play DVDs, which is an obvious feature, but would be less profitable for Apple than iTunes Store rentals and purchases. But back to the comparisons.

The SA DVR has exactly one advantage over the TiVo (aside from price): its “Ouija board” — when you need to “type” with a very limited keyboard, the TiVo makes it possible but not easy. The SA box improves the experience dimming (and skipping over) invalid letters (which would spell words that don’t match the list of available shows). The Apple TV, interestingly, has an unimpressive on-screen keyboard and a very limited remote (it’s the same one Macs ship with, meaning 6 buttons: 4 directions, play/pause, and menu/back). But it’s easier to use, because the Apple TV doesn’t lag behind user input as much (it doesn’t have to match input against all possible titles, remember), and tactile response is very good; I only made one typo when entering usernames of several friends, and it was easy to correct, even though Delete is an onscreen selection (no Clear key, as on the TiVo remote).

This brings us to another interesting comparison: the SA box has Internet connectivity (I think it’s channel 996 that shows the current IP), but doesn’t use it for anything except the electronic program guide and purchasing pay-per-view (which we don’t do). The TiVo adds TiVo-to-TiVo transfers of shows (we only have one, so haven’t tried it), scheduling via http://www.tivo.com/tco/, an unsupported web server which allows downloading encrypted/watermarked television shows, and the ability to run applications from a server (either at home or across the Internet). Applications allow you to play music or slide shows from a Mac or Windows PC, or slide shows (from your Picasa or Yahoo Pictures account — but not Flickr, even though Yahoo owns Flickr!). Unfortunately, you cannot combine these applications, so it’s impossible to listen to music while watching a slide show on the TiVo. TiVo has apparently dropped support for third-party development.

The Apple TV, on the other hand, does this all much better. Out of the box, it comes with a set of high-quality flower photos, which run as a slide show when idle. Music can be a) played from the Apple TV’s hard drive, b) streamed from iTunes on a Mac or PC (controlled from the Apple TV), or c) streamed from within iTunes in AirTunes+ mode — iTunes sends audio and ID3-style metadata including cover art over the network to the Apple TV. In any of these modes, track information is displayed onscreen, and if the Apple TV is left idle, the it starts showing a slide show (ours is photos of Julia, of course); this doesn’t interfere with music playback at all.

Compared to TiVo’s lousy support for Yahoo Photos (!?!) and Picasa (they want you to create your own account and log into it before downloading any photos), the Apple TV supports Flickr and .Mac photos, as well as the owner’s own via iTunes, of course. There is a clear hierarchy of user experience here: no support on SA/TWC; poor slide shows or mediocre media streaming on TiVo; high-quality music and photos on the Apple TV, pre-loaded with nice photos for a superior out-of-box experience.

One of the few things I regret about the Apple TV is that I bought it from Apple; I didn’t get an educational or corporate discount, so I could have gotten it faster for $15 less from Amazon (via Prime), but when I tried to cancel the order at store.apple.com it had already gone through (less than 5 minutes after pressing Submit). This should be the worst problem I have with the new gadget!

Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The Apple TV would not synchronize content from iTunes; I was able to play music through it (AirTunes), but it mostly refused to show up in iTunes’ DEVICES list. I got a warning about port 3689 possibly being blocked by a firewall, which I initially ignored, knowing I had specifically allowed iTunes to connect through Leopard’s “socket firewall”.

pepper@prowler:~$ grep 3689 /etc/services 
daap            3689/udp    # Digital Audio Access Protocol
daap            3689/tcp    # Digital Audio Access Protocol

The second time I got this message, with iTunes’ Preferences claiming the Apple TV was synching even while it wasn’t fully accessible, I did some searching, and found out that indeed several people needed to open up the socket firewall before Apple TV synching would work. I did this, and lo and behold, our Apple TV now has the proper 12gb of video, 51gb of audio, and 3gb of photos it should. It’s bad that iTunes wasn’t properly whitelisted in the firewall, but it’s much worse that people need to turn off a security feature to make the Apple TV work. Fortunately, after I switched the firewall back to “Set access for specific services and applications” (where it should be), the Apple TV continued to appear and synch properly; bug filed with Apple.

That brings up another bug: we have a Gigabit Ethernet network (3.5 switches — 8-port, a couple 5-port, and the 3-port built into our Time Capsule) and an 802.11n network, but unfortunately the wireless doesn’t work right. At 5GHz, I keep losing my connection; at 2.4GHz it stays up everywhere except the guest room (which has no Ethernet), but speeds throughout the apartment are poor and connectivity is less reliable than our 802.11g Airport Extreme network. Since I haven’t fixed this yet, I much prefer to do large transfers over the wired network.

The Apple TV connects to a running copy of iTunes to download content; in my case, most of the connections (once I got past the firewall issue) were to the AirPort IP address, which prevented them from making progress on the 65gb transfer. I had to disable AirPort to force the Apple TV over to the Ethernet connection, which was much faster; after it was done I re-enabled AirPort, but that’s another bug (also reported, and yes, I do have System Preferences set to prefer Ethernet to AirPort).

I’ve been reading The Register for years. The biggest draw for me is that their idea of what’s interesting matches my own pretty closely, so the relevance is very high, and I don’t know any other sites/publications that provide timely coverage in roughly the same space.

Unfortunately, they’re clowns. They obviously don’t edit, and don’t fix obvious mistakes when pointed out. For a while they had opposing columnists, one claiming Intel was crushing AMD and another claiming AMD was crushing Intel — posting supposedly authoritative articles on the same days. My interpretation was that The Register doesn’t care whether they print stuff that’s flat wrong (obviously at least one of those columnists was, even if they were both personally convinced it was the other guy), so long as it draws traffic. This is one thing if labeled as editorial, but they’re not that sophisticated.

Their articles are confused or simply wrong often enough that a couple friends refuse to read anything they publish. I prefer the current facts enough that I am willing to overlook the absurd editorial.

They use FeedBurner, and downloading their articles over EDGE on the iPhone is slow. To aggravate matters, their CSS is screwed up; I have to wait for the page to download, then it resizes, then it pauses and downloads some more, then it reflows. It can take over a minute to get a readable article. The AV Club is even slower to download and reflow, which is one reason I read it less.

But recently The Register has started doing full-page ads before the articles. This is aggravating on a desktop, but completely unacceptable on an iPhone. I’ve removed their feed from NetNewsWire/NewsGator.

Half because WordPress really needs to stay upgraded, and half in hopes of fixing the Admin-SSL bug which was blocking posting, I upgraded to WordPress 2.5, a compatible beta of Admin-SSL (now under new management), and a few other plug-ins.

Not knowing how well the upgrade would go, I did the safe thing — I installed WP 2.5 separately from the live Extra Pepperoni site, installed and configured all the plugins I use (with my personal patches), created a new MySQL database, and configured everything, including a couple test comments (not as myself). After I got it working, I brought down the old site, moved the new one in place, reconnected it to the old MySQL DB (with all posts and comments), clicked the button to upgrade, and we’re up.

Unfortunately, there’s still a problem with comments. When I log into a new account to comment, I get a link to https://secure.reppep.com/wp-admin/profile.php, which is bogus; it needs to be https://secure.reppep.com/ep/wp-admin/profile.php. If you have an existing account (Tony), you might be able to login through https://secure.reppep.com/ep/wp-admin/ and comment, but it seems that viewing an actual post (which must be non-SSL) still loses its association with the login session, so you can visit the HTTP site as an anonymous user, or use the HTTPS site as your registered user, but the plaintext side has no access to comment, and the encrypted side doesn’t show the posts you would want to comment on. Hopefully BCG will be able to fix the problem in Admin-SSL. He’s already fixed the Preview function.

Also freaky: When I log into EP as a brand-new user (to comment), I get the Dashboard, telling me I (the brand-new user) have 184 posts. I didn’t think Subscriber users saw the Dashboard, but the post count is definitely bogus.

I did the initial installation as a Subversion checkout, which is very cool. Now, though, I have to create my own private WP hacks repos (easy), and figure out how to set up externals to pick up my additions.

A tip: Don’t try to check out the WordPress source over AFP; the permissions weren’t right, and the checkout couldn’t complete; when I did it locally on the Linux server, there was no problem. I hadn’t even noticed I was running “svn co” on the Mac instead of the server, but it was easy to fix once I noticed the cause.

I found a couple pages of Outlook keyboard shortcuts (the online help lists shortcuts too):

• http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/80-keyboard-shortcuts-for-microsoft-outlook/
• http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/PublicWebsite/public_rnib003594.hcsp

Many of these are standard Windows shortcuts, but a few are useful and news to me.

Eudora stopped working on my home MBP recently, so I’m back to Thunderbird, and it strikes me how similar Thunderbird is to Outlook, even extending to some misfeatures (design flaws, not quite bugs), such as over-using the Esc key. Compared to Eudora, pine, and Apple Mail, Thunderbird is clearly much closer to Outlook. A few things are notable improvements, such as being able to mark messages Read and Unread with the M key, instead of Ctl-Q/Ctl-U, or S to flag messages (stored as an IMAP tag; this shows up in Eudora as Label 15). And with a mailbox selected, Ctl-Q doesn’t mark all its unread messages read, which it should.

In both Outlook and Thunderbird, Esc closes message windows; this is inconsistent with all other full windows, which are closed with Command-W, and makes messages feel particularly ephemeral. In Outlook, when I open a received message and hit the Space bar to scroll to the next page (which works in every other email client and browser I know), it instead inserts spaces at the beginning of the received message, which if course is not what I want.

I cannot find a good way to sort threads by date; I’d like every thread (perhaps every thread with new messages) grouped together, with the messages in each thread sorted internally by date, and the threads sorted by date (typically of the first message). In Outlook I can group “Conversations” by Subject: or group by From: line, but new messages keep showing up at the top of the mailbox, instead of the bottom (where they should sort, by date).

I have figured out more what’s wrong with Refresh. First, I have to hit F5 repeatedly to make Outlook clear more and more read messages from unread-only views; second, collapsed conversations are not cleared; I have to expand them out and then hit F5 again. This is particularly annoying because Outlook has such a strong tendency to always keep one message selected and thus read (although it’s not marked read, so I cannot simply mark it unread; I have to mark it read, then mark it unread, and then make sure Outlook doesn’t preview it again), so it’s quite difficult to reorganize a mailbox and get to a “clean” view (only new messages/threads) without losing some messages which Outlook insisted on selecting/previewing/marking read while rearranging.

And a little attention (not “love”) for IE: I still hit Ctl-L to select the URL for copying, and IE7 still fails to do it, bringing up a blank URL entry dialog, instead of selecting the URL in the current window as Safari & Firefox do. I shouldn’t need the mouse to copy the current URL.

Our original TiVo (hacked with web & FTP servers, 100mbps Ethernet, and 120gb hard drive) started showing a scrambled image; this has happened three times in the past, each time requiring drive replacement. The process is sufficiently awkward that when I put in the current 120gb drive, I decided to replace the TiVo entirely next time, rather than the drive — with a MythTV or something else.

After TiVo’s current promo, a TiVo Series 2 Dual Tuner (80gb) cost $80, which is entirely reasonable. I’ve been watching mostly ripped DVDs on the iPhone lately, so I was less worried about the fact that S2 and later TiVos encrypt the media files on disk, and were significantly harder to hack.

After installing the new TiVo, we discovered the problem is actually our Time Warner Cable signal again. They’re supposed to be here this week, and hopefully will be able to fix our problem, although we don’t have much confidence. They scramble the analog signal, thus breaking the new TiVo’s signature feature (dual tuners — the second one supports unencrypted analog cable, if we had it).

As it turns out, the new TiVo is a bit faster and much easier to download from; and onscreen UI is more capable and prettier. Unfortunately, it’s also crowded with junk (unwanted features) we cannot remove, but they’re easy enough to skip over and don’t impact the normal TV-watching experience. I’ve downloaded and watched a bunch of music videos, which is nice since MTV doesn’t show music videos any more.

Oh, and getting MPEGs out of the TiVo seems easier too — tyc was problematic, but tivodecode works, so long as I watch in VLC instead of QuickTime Player (which only shows the first frame, while playing back all the audio).

Amy and I were walking across the Gowanus Canal to see Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, when we came across this amusing Easter residue (on Saturday, so pre-Easter, no less!). I like Peeps, but not that much. Amy dislikes Peeps, but not that much. Her comment, upon hearing I intended to submit this photo to Miss Heather? “It’s not a poop. It’s a peep.”

Despite not being feces or canine, this still seemed right up Heather’s alley.