Silverdoesn’tworkonPPCMacsandsucksanywayLight?
February 28th, 2008Microsoft’s “Silverlight” is sponsoring SXSW. That’s adorable.
Whenever I go downtown, I feel like an Ex-Con casing the joint
Multicast out with your modem out
February 24th, 2008AT&T’s TV offering is called U-Verse. I just now learned the details of it.
It’s H.264 MPEG-4 video over a multicast IP Fiber Optic network. No one else is doing this. Not even Verizon with FIOS. This sounds super-cool and since detractors say it’s impossible to scale, I say go with it, at&t. I doubt I’ll subscribe to pay tv anytime in the near future, but this is the way to go. Keep on truckin, SBC … I mean AT&T.
I Like Podcasts
December 7th, 2007[Herein I am linking numerous podcasts to their iTunes page. iTunes does a good job with podcasts and everyone seems to use it. If you want something else, it's much easier to google a show's website than if I did this the other way around.]
Since I started walking a dog every day (and he’s an energetic little bastard; four miles barely wears him out) I have been listening to various podcasts on my iPhone. It’s handy to have only one thing in my pocket aside from the doggy bags.
And my handgun, since this is Texas. (kidding!) (or am I?)
I remember working at Apple when iTunes 5 came out. Now, with Podcasts! We all made jokes. What’s a podcast? Only two years later have I learned the error of my ways.
Now that I have some favorite podcasts, I’m tempted to jump the gun and listen as soon as they’re published, instead of waiting for the next long dog walk.
I might listen to CarTalk on Saturday afternoon in the car or washing dishes or doing anything. Holland has a penchant for Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me so we might hear that together on a Sunday night. Before the writers’ strike, Bill Maher showed up sometime on the weekend too. If there’s ever another The Talk Show I might listen to it straight away. And since John Siracusa’s appearance, I like MacBreak Weekly but only for the articles guests. Andy Ihnatko is on frequently. We don’t have a radio in the house and a podcast makes things so much more flexible (hell you can listen to live radio on an iMac anyway). But I might feel obligated to be a member of KUT if only they didn’t play music so much. Maybe if they got more money they could broadcast more stations with talk and music. (btw yeah that’s a radio station with only a 3 letter callsign; I’m not cutting corners)
All this jumping the gun leaves me in a bad situation; when I do walk the dog, all the good Podcasts are already gone. I’m left with old depressing episodes of This American Life that I have avoided because they’re about murdered family members or political corruption (am I right, listeners?). There might be a few leftover Radio Lab episodes about Sleep and Stress that will only stress me out more. That and 3-week old Marketplace episodes, and something called This Week In Law, which is very spirited but I think I forgot the names of the plaintiffs when Tobin lunged at that biker.
After I heard MacBreak Weekly, I was on to Leo Laporte’s thousands of podcasts and those of his ilk. Some of them are an okay diversion and I even listen to Windows Weekly just to see what’s going on over there (answer: not much … Paul Thurott is as dumb as I thought). But I get tired of Leo’s spineless pandering to whatever guests he is hosting, especially if those guests are random Appalachian rednecks. I don’t know which I hate more: Security Now or The Tech Guy. One is some jackass stammering about passwords for an hour, and the other is hill-folk asking for computer help (or now, mostly HDTV help). I actually prefer the Windows questions because the Mac ones are so ignorant in both their inquiry and answer I want to throttle a passing hobo. I have done so only on several occasions.
The Tech Guy ruins the illusion of podcasts since it’s clearly an XM call-in show with way too much airtime. Leo regrets the small amount of callers he can address, but he spends the first 15 minutes of every show musing how cell phones are computers too, these days! Man!
Leo Laporte, master of podcasts, will take every side of a position surprisingly quickly, then see which one gets picked up by another speaker. To an extent, this is remarkable and admirable since it makes him a successful host. To another extent it makes him a whore. His strength is attracting the interesting guests on his shows. He’s even branching out from computers with a MunchCast.
I haven’t gotten to my Potato Chips episode yet so no spoilers!
I like what he does generally, and This Week In Tech is Leo’s cornerstone, but he does become tiresome after a while.
Well, my friends, I have found salvation.
Forget CrankyGeeks, how about The Skeptic’s Guide To The Universe?
This thing is awesome.
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/
I subscribed some time ago on a tip I read. But I have never listened until tonight. To be honest, I got it confused with another podcast that was only 5 minutes per episode. I don’t like short podcasts since the iPhone won’t play them back-to-back.
But The Skeptic’s Guide To The Universe has two things going for it.
The first benefit is it provides all 123 episodes to your Podcast client. Most podcasts advertise only the last several (2-10) episodes to save on bandwidth. If you click “Get All” then it’s a bit daunting to receive 144 hours worth of audio skepticism (after some downloading), but if one is worth listening to, then it’s all worth listening to. Eventually. I assume. Perhaps I should be more skeptical…
The second benefit is this is a genuinely interesting and intelligent, longer (more than 10 minutes), and different sort of podcast than I’m used to. It’s essentially a bunch of very smart and eloquent people debunking the latest bunk. Actually it’s just what I’m used to, but in a different field than computers. And in the esoteric realm of science and math, their powers hold much more sway over me.
I think there are some repeating segments of puzzles and such (reminding me of another recent favorite, NPR’s Sunday Puzzle).
All in all it’s a surprisingly enjoyable listen, and it passes the podcast test where I can’t follow it at all if I’m doing anything aside from navigating an environment or sitting and staring while listening. It demands attention. And with two and a half years of back-episodes just up for the having, I will be sitting and staring for some time to come.
That was a good ending, but I happened to listen to an episode that discussed a Nova documentary on the Dover, PA Evolution vs. Intelligent Design trial. I remember hearing about this on the radio but whatever conclusion there was didn’t make an impact on me. The PBS Nova program about it is a really good show.
Open letter to pirates
November 6th, 2007Ok, my Bit Torrent brothers. Let’s step back and think about what we’re doing.
I don’t understand why a lot of you want to RAR a movie into however many 100MB segments it takes. But when you then tar and gzip the result, you’re really out to brunch. The movie’s compressed to hell anyway; no lossless gymnastics are going to improve that. What are you thinking?
Anyway, keep up the good work.
There’s also so many NBC shows to pirate now they can’t be bought for any price on a Mac.
October 29th, 2007As I constantly complain about running out of disk space, my brother Brian wondered why my girlfriend Holland and I don’t compare notes about how we’re using the computer we share (which I bought 2.5 years ago, the same as the age difference between myself and Brian, as well as the age difference between Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard).
The answer is basically we both run XTorrent constantly and download different things. She downloads movies I’ve never heard of but that I like watching with her. She also downloads idiotic shows like Desperate Housewives, but who am I to say no? (if she watches them when I’m around, I start to get interested in the plot).
I do the same thing in the inverse but I can’t portray myself negatively, can I?
But Holland has gotten quite involved in the old Grenada Sherlock Holmes episodes, as well as catching up on House episodes, and whatever else. I get Daily Shows and Colbert Reports from iTunes since it works like a Podcast and they deserve some recompense.
She’s farther along in Battlestar Galactica than I am, too!
I guess the gist is that this iMac is our Tivo. It’s right next to our TV but its screen is much larger.
So since in Texas we only buy telephone and 6Mbps DSL service (instead of Comcast internet and basic cable that accidentally included HBO back in NJ), well then hard drives are a small price to pay.
(And I’m glad to now subscribe to AT&T née SBC instead of Comcast)
All the regular channels come over the air but I keep forgetting it’s Central time and I’m usually an hour too late.
Wikimapedia
October 15th, 2007You can find some weird stuff in Wikipedia.
How about the only person in history to be the first born on a particular continent?
I didn’t find him on the Unusual Articles page, but that’s another thing that’ll keep you occupied for basically ever.
Oh, Wikipedia
October 9th, 2007Maybe I’m years late on this, but Wikipedia vandalism’s best friend is a DSL router that changes its IP address every time you unplug it from the wall. Sit next to the router.
[UPDATE]
After I drunkenly vandalized the wikipedia page for a movie I just watched and hated, I slept and woke up and felt different about it. Thus, I hope the page for After The Sunset is the same as it ever was. I recommend never ever ever watching that movie. Though it is an idiotic shit of a movie, my comments about the actors’ personal problems and the bizarre changes even to the setting of the film were not called for. They were also not reversed, even after several days, by anyone except me. Oh, Wikipedia.
The goggles, they do nothing
October 8th, 2007I have such bad radio interference in my apartment that I have to put my iPhone in my right pocket rather than the left to let it work with my Bluetooth headset.
(Bluetooth works in the same 2.4Ghz spectrum that does WiFi and every other goddamn thing on the planet)
It only started a few weeks ago, so it must be some neighbor. I’m in an apartment complex full of Apple, Dell, and IBM employees. Every single apartment has its own wireless network. When I walk around outside, my iPhone can see no end of WEP(!) protected networks — many with idiotic names of universities and sexual jokes.
My downstairs neighbors just banged their ceiling to complain about my bass (first time, and I thought I had it rather tame).
I turned the music up since it’s not 10 yet, but what I’d like to do is turn up the RF interference. Anyone got a spare Wild Weasel?
My own network shows up at good strength but it comes and goes. And when it goes, it really goes. I have a brand-new gigabit Airport Extreme base station broadcasting at 100% power with interference robustness. Nine feet from it, my iMac’s internet comes and goes. Mostly goes.
I have tried every network frequency that’s allowed in the United States. Frankly I’d like some tips on how to allow channels up to 14 that are allowed only in Japan. In America they’re reserved for the military. Do I have to go back to Japan?
I do know that something weird is going on around channel 1 so all the neighbors’ routers have migrated up to 6 or 11. (I could post some link but let’s suffice to say that WiFi channels overlap and the only three channels that don’t overlap in the allowed American spectrum are 1, 6, and 11)
I’ve played around with KisMac but it doesn’t produce any obvious information. Most routers are in the high band. Two hang around channel 1, but could a rogue wireless router so destroy the spectrum? I doubt it. Perhaps someone has a rogue baby monitor. Or Plutonium.
For comparison, hardwired is amazing. I didn’t realize I was paying for this. It’s the fastest net connection I’ve ever had. But wireless is worthless. With my MacBook plugged into ethernet, I feel like it’s 1999.
I’m about to hard-wire the iMac. It can barely send an audio stream 7 feet to the speakers.
I’m very upset about this. But what can be done? What is irradiating us?
She watched channel zero
September 28th, 2007After complaining so much about my WiFi problems, I decided to do something about it. I read about it.
The channel on my router was set to automatic and it chose channel 1. But I noticed all the routers in my neighborhood were setting themselves to channels 6 and 11. Maybe my Airport Express was smarter than all the rest, I thought. Maybe I was wrong. Can Apple be wrong?
After nearly a week of bad performance and periodic total disruptions, I learned on Wikipedia (is there another word for learned? Like implied but a little more factual?) …
… I gleaned that FCC regulations allow for high power output on channels 1-6 that are normally reserved for individual use in the US and Canada. I might need to borrow some HAM radio equipment to figure out what’s going on, but this could be why I’ve been having a lousy network for a week. It’s a shame the Airport didn’t figure out what was going on and migrate to the other end of the spectrum along with its Linksys and Netgear brothers.
I manually changed the channel to 8 — a little between 6 and 11 — which apparently no one else had thought to do or been able to. The network meter has consistently been at the top and performance is better. I bragged in a screenshot a few posts ago about downloading at 320kbps but now stuff is coming in at 600kbps. Shows what I know about even what level of service I’m paying for. I still won’t mind having a more powerful base station that can share hard drives on its network once it arrives, but perhaps I have found the issue.
This is such a confounding science.
Sure, I knew that WEP was worthless for encryption. And I feel bad that my parents are using it since the only USB-wifi dongle I could find — two years ago for the TiVo I bought them — only supports WEP encryption. But once that all dies I’m sure we can improve.
(Frankly I’m astonished how long the unattended Mac installations I’ve set up can prosper. My parents have no idea how their [a little bit] complicated network is configured and I haven’t even been there in a while. Meanwhile my Mom’s underfunded High School is still letting her Journalism, English, and Debate students use the lab of cast-off first gen Power Mac G4’s that I set up two years ago with the (even then outdated) Mac OS X 10.3.9. With no maintenance at all, and slightly limited user accounts, they were all still going strong when I had my brother check-up last week. Heck, they’ve been saving the day for kids who don’t even have home computers or what they do have don’t work. Just don’t tell the High School Seniors that the groovy Macs at school were manufactured when they were in elementary school. Much of the maintenance I had planned for my brother’s visit was pointless. Yikes for any IT budget that is more than $0.)
But in my own home I have been using MAC Access Control. I thought that telling a router to only trust a client with a specific address programmed into its hardware was a great way to go. No passwords, no live encrypting and decrypting! Just allowed machines and the rest.
Well this has proven tiresome as three allowed Macs turned into that plus two iPhones and a cat sitter’s Mac and maybe his iPhone too and whatever. Plus the generally knowledgeable folks at the Ars Technica Mac Achaia tell me that MAC address spoofing and sniffing is nearly as easy as cracking a WEP network. Meanwhile WPA2 is hard.
So the Mac Know-It-All accedes to the unpaid real Mac Geniuses.
I will use WPA2. My password is my dog’s name plus a description of some activities he enjoys.
But whatever happened to the days when we could connect to “Linksys” without question? When did “Belkin54g” become a bad word? Is “Netgear” something to shy from? If I live near you, will you connect to “Free Porno 4 U”?
The images in this article were blatantly stolen from the contents of the current Airport Admin Utility made by Apple. Alpha transparency in PNGs embedded in a network router admin app. What a goddamn company.
Introduction to the neighbors
September 27th, 2007Right now my Airport Express network name is “The Little Network That Could”.
Once I get an Airport Extreme with the transmission power cranked up, I think I’ll need a new name. What should I call it?
The neighbors have been getting testy with their network names, so I’ll definitely have an audience.
I was thinking “Free Porno”.
