04.19.08
Einstein on ModBook
Drooling, sputtering… Einstein on ModBook… WANT!
02.03.08
A fresh iPhone each morning
I’ve got a couple of short podcasts that I’m subscribed to that are daily. Merriam Webster’s Word of the Day and Scientific American’s 60 Second Science are short little podcasts that are an interesting way to start my daily commute.
However, it’s bugged me that when I drop my iPhone into it’s cradle at night when I get home, it syncs up the podcasts at that time. This is anywhere from 6 to 11pm. However, the next day’s podcasts are not available until after midnight. In order to get the Word of the Day on the Day of the Word, I’ve been resorting to picking up my iPhone out of the cradle each morning as I’m rushing out the door and dropping it back in and then waiting for it to sync. Sometimes this is just a few seconds, but if one of my other longer podcasts subscriptions had an overnight update, it can take a few minutes.
It’s a small matter for modern living, but I figured there ought to be a better way. iTunes doesn’t have a native way of telling an iPod or iPhone to refresh at a certain time. There’s two times when the sync will start: If you hit the Sync button in iTunes and when iTunes first connects with the iPhone.
The sync button method is a no-go for me, because it A) requires me to do something and B) in order to do it, I need to have the screen turned on and the mouse ready to click.
But when I say “when iTunes first connects with the iPhone”, there are a multitude of ways that this could happen. It could be the time when I plug the iPhone in while iTunes is running. It could be when I restart the Mac and iTunes automatically launches and finds the iPhone connected. Or it could be whenever iTunes gets launched. All that needs to happen is for iTunes and iPhone to become disconnected and reconnected.
So what are my options? I could have the Mac on an outlet with a timer on it and force the Mac to power down and then start it back up again. I could set the Energy Saver preference pane to schedule a shutdown and startup of the Mac. I could build a contraption out of Legos that would lift the iPhone out of it’s cradle and then slam it back down again. I could have a similar contraption that pulls the USB cable out of the Mac and plugs it back in. I could put the USB hub on a timer at its power connection.
But far more simply, I could use AppleScript to tell iTunes to quit and then tell iTunes to run. The key is getting the said script to run at the appropriate time. The easiest way of doing that is to schedule an event in iCal and using the alarm function to trigger the script. So here we go…
1) In your Applications folder look for the AppleScript folder and then open the Script Editor.
2) Type the following lines:
tell app “iTunes” to quit
delay 30
tell app “iTunes” to run
3) Click the Compile button and you’ll see the code get nice and formatted, color coded even.
4) If you want to test it, click the Run button. iTunes will quit if it’s already running and then 30 seconds later it will re-launch.
5) Save the script and call it something obvious like “iPhone Refresh”. I saved it to the Documents folder, but you can save it anywhere. You don’t need to set any other options in the Save dialog box. The defaults are fine.
6) Open up iCal and double click on the time of day when you’d like the script to run. I set it up to run at 6am.
7) Set script to repeat daily.
Set the alarm to “Run script”.
9) Below the Run Script setting click and select “Other…” and then find the script file you just saved.
10) Set the “Minutes before” to zero.
That’s it. I found lots of other ways to specifically choose the “Sync iPhone name” menu item, but they were 5 to 10 times the amount of code and with no further advantages. My method will refresh any and all iPhones or iPods connected to the machine, it will disconnect anyone that is ’sharing’ the iTunes library, and it will help stave off any memory leaks that iTunes might develop. These are unintended consequences, but in my situation, they’re all good ones.
01.05.08
Just for the record
Until I recently rebooted in order to load up some OS updates, my PowerBook’s uptime reached a new high of 132 days, 17 hours. That is all.
01.02.08
16:9 Test Card / Test Pattern
Over the last few days, i worked on getting our living room television to display properly from the Mac Mini. The adventure (as boring as it was is documented on my site as: Test Pattern for Wide-screen Displays:
Getting the right aspect ratio to your home theater display.
So a couple years after getting a 27″ LCD display, I finally got fed up with the poor scaling options the display had. There aren’t many options for widescreen source material until we switch to digital cable, so most of the TV we watch is standard definition (SD). If you watch SD, 4:3 video on any display for a few weeks or a month you’ll end up burning-in the center of the screen, leaving the wide left and right margins darker with a very definite demarcation line when you finally start watching widescreen (16:9) content.
Read the full article: 16:9 Test Card / Test Pattern
12.14.07
CatNip for Mac OS X
CatNip is a program which, while running, detects “cat-like typing” and locks the keyboard, usually in under a half second. Optionally, CatNip will fade your desktop and display a warning message to your cat (which is of dubious value, since if your cat can read, your cat can probably type, too).
For some reason, this has become an important part of my software toolbox…
11.19.07
Newton as art
From Pixelgirlshop Presents Fine Art & Handmade Goods:
Mini version of the painting of the Newton Apple Cynthia received as a gift from a very special nerd. Limited edition prints mounted on wood, signed and handpainted with stellar bronze paint by the artist herself. Looks awesome hanging on any tech-savvy person’s wall!
09.16.07
HDTV on the Mac in Portland
So I got the $100 rebate from Apple for my iPhone and added that to a small monetary gift I got recently to purchase the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid which I had on my wish list for a while. The device receives HDTV signals and passes them to a Mac and works pretty well.
The one piece missing from the package is an antenna. A simple $20 antenna gets a good solid signal. Given the location of our TV, facing west out through our westward-facing windows out to the West Hills where the TV broadcast antennas are at, we could have gone with the even cheaper $10 model. Remember, in most cities, HDTV broadcasts use the UHF band, and any UHF antenna can be use. (There’s no need to get an HD-specific antenna so don’t over spend in this arena.)
The biggest problem with our setup is that the Mac Mini only has the base 512MB of RAM. Until an upgrade, a few of the highest quality channels stutter. KGW seems to be pushing out a full 1080p signal, which I think is overwhelming the RAM buffer. Whereas the KOIN and KATU feeds are at 720p and the Mini keeps up with them pretty well.
The reason I’m most interested in Over The Air (OTA) HDTV is that our analog cable signal gets horrible crosstalk and ghosting. With a lack of insulated coaxial wiring, local channels are bad to really bad. Now we can see them really in clear, sharp high quality. Next to getting Digital Cable, this is the best way to get these channels.
07.16.07
iThoughts on Phones
“J stood in line for the Friday release and bought us each one. I am suffering from buyer’s remorse and sticker shock…mine is still in the box on my desk. I’m contemplating returning it even though I think it’s super cool. There are just so many things that I can think of to buy with the $600! Talk me into it,” -M
Well, for an old-skool Apple Fanboy like myself, there was a built-in draw to the device, but even beyond that, this goes much further into the realm of ‘tech from the future’ than any device that I’ve had the dubious pleasure of using. Palms, WinCE/PocketPC, Psions, Nokias, Sony Ericsson… You name it, I’ve probably used it and read about it and wondered “wow, if only…” about it.
The iPhone is perfect for me: I do a lot of mail checking and use the web for reference-checking. I’ve got a decent library of music (now with covers) so it’s nice to have a slice of that around. The Phone works just fine, though the $60/month is a bit nerve wracking. Also, I’m in a metro area with really decent coverage by AT&T’s cell service, and though Edge connections are slow, the WiFi makes up for it in the 90% of the time I’m at a place that I’ve set up WiFi: Home and Work.
Let’s put it this way: It’s the first cell phone worth criticizing, to paraphrase Alan Kay on the Macintosh.
Another thought: Apple’s iPhone commercials simply show the phone being used and demoed. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more realistic presentation of a product in television advertising.
07.01.07
Recent Purchases
Coolest purchase of the last few days? ThinkGeek :: Planisphere Watch: The Planisphere Watch displays the constellations visible in the Northern Hemisphere. Simply align the date and time (displayed on the edge of the bezel) and you can view the major constellations visible that evening.
It’s great! I’ve been looking for a new watch to ahve as an alternate to the solid blue Fossil watch that I’ve had for a few years. The band on the Planisphere is really sucky, (mine’s different than what they show at ThinkGeek) but I’m thinking I might be able to replace it with relative ease.
The dial’s glow-in-the-dark face was an unexpected surprise, and obviously quite a good idea for such a device. I can’t wait to get out of the city some night to use it fully.
This is the kind of watch that’s more than just a time piece. I really like something that’s a little unique and if that uniqueness lends itself to something useful, then all the better.
This isn’t quite TokyoFlash but it’s still got the little extra that I like.
Oh and I also got a new phone this weekend. It’s not bad either.
06.29.07
Change from the iNside
I just saw this on Boing Boing where Working Assets is asking for an iPhone boycott because of AT&T’s practices.
I just want to point out that when Apple launched the iTunes Store and got in bed with all of the RIAA labels, it was Apple who changed (so far) EMI, not the other way around. Will AT&T go green, or suddenly become a non-profit? Of course not, but I can’t think of too many companies that would be a better influence, based on their recent history, as Apple.
