chuma.org

Author: chuma

  • I still hate iTunes.

    Unsurprisingly, I’m not alone in my hatred of iTunes. A handful of people have commented on my previous post back in June in a similar vein. Well the hatin’ just keeps on comin’.

    My wife just converted over to Anapod Explorer after grappling with iTunes. As soon as she said “I just want to drag and drop!” I knew what had to be done. After a frenetic license-purchasing and quick training session, she’s happy as a clam.

    But lo! Apple manages to piss me off even more! If you haven’t been living under a rock you’ll know that the next incremental updates to the iPod line are out, including firmware updates for older models. In the past, Apple has distributed the firmware updates as a separate application known as the iPod Updater. But not any more – now you have to install iTunes 7 to get the latest firmware (for my 5G, that’s version 1.2). The separate updater is gone. Not only that, but I looked and looked and disassembled and the firmware isn’t even included in the download itself. The software must download the firmware from Apple after the fact. ARGH.

    I will get this iPod updated without iTunes, somehow…

    Update Well I got it upgraded, but I had to install iTunes 7. But then I uninstalled it immediately. I torched my old iTunes library data files first, then installed iT7. It crashed the first two or three times I tried to start it (real /quality/ there, Apple) but once it came up I took a deep breath and plugged in my iPod. It detected BUT I guess it didn’t remember anything about my iPod, so it asked me if I wanted to sync it with iTunes (aka DELETE EVERYTHING OFF MY IPOD) so I said NO, then it told me there was a firmware update. Did the update no problem and as soon as my iPod started rebooting (with the little progress bar) I shutdown iTunes and uninstalled it. Then I used iPodWizard to dump the 5G v1.2 firmware off my iPod to a file.

  • Seriously, I’m still around

    That spring I was talking about on my K550DTN printer, the one that came dislodged? It actually got jammed and I had to bend it beyond repair to remove it. HP sent me a new lower tray gratis, but they haven’t updated the design.

  • nope, not dead, still here

    We went to Cedar Point, Ohio for the weekend of my birthday and had a fun getaway. I rode all the coasters at the park, especially on Sunday when it was shockingly not very busy at all. I walked onto most coasters with no wait, and boy, what a selection they have. Top Thrill Dragster was the most thrilling 20 seconds of my life I think. We had a good time together but some of the coasters were too extreme for Sandy, for good reason: they run much faster than your “standard” roller coaster and so you pull more G’s. But it was still nice to get away and go someplace different, even if it was just south of the border.

    We got a new printer at home after my Apple Personal LaserWriter NTR finally gave up the ghost with a misaligned scanning laser (I think). A moment of silence please.

    Well, we replaced it with (gasp!) an inkjet printer. I’ve always been the first one to point out the high cost of inkjet printing and have resisted spending a lot of money on one, but this time around I was convinced. We bought an HP OfficeJet Pro K550dtn, aka “HP Alphabet Soup” as I like to call it. It has some good things going for it:

    • Four separate ink cartridges, including the ability to use a high-capacity black cartridge – something I miss from the days of my Canon BJ-4000. They load easily in the front too.
    • Two separate print heads – yes, the heads are separate from the cartridges, so the ink is cheaper, and the heads should last quite a while. Stupidly the black head is combined with yellow, and cyan with magenta. Considering the black will likely wear out first…
    • It actually has a lower cost per page on black and colour than a colour laser.
    • I got it on a frickin’ deal at Best Buy: paid $315, and am getting $70 rebate from HP.

    It even comes in three flavours: basic with one tray and USB, the dtn with wired networking, duplexer, and second tray, and the dtwn with wired+802.11g, duplexer, second tray, and USB Host support. The built-in print server is obviously geared towards a corporate environment, as it automatically keeps track of users’ printing including # of pages, and even microlitres of ink used (in each colour, of course!)

    It’s not stellar for photo printing but it knocks the socks off my craptastic Lexmark Z33. And the paper trays are very fragile. I had to reseat a spring that sits in the bottom of the tray 2 area this morning and HP was of no help. Still, that spring will probably get dislodged again unless I remember to put the trays back very, very slowly. You can’t just slam them home like I used to on my Apple, or any of the HPs I’ve used before.

    Still, I hope it will stand the test of time as my NTR did.

  • Dear fellow commuters:

    Please divide yourselves into two groups:

    1. Those of you who are able to walk in a straight line, at a steady pace, and don’t drag those bloody wheeled suitcases, please keep left.
    2. The rest of you who insist on:
    • walking like a drunk
    • walking extremely slowly in the middle of the path, often while reading, talking on a cell phone, or thumbing your Crackberry
    • standing in the middle of the PATH talking to your friends while thousands of people route around you
    • stopping dead at the top or bottom of staircases, escalators, or doorways

    Please, for your own sake, STAY OUT OF EVERYONE ELSES FUCKING WAY!

    This has been a public service announcement from me.

  • Turn left, young man

    On Saturday we went to the weekly stock car races at Mosport and I brought Calum along to take some photos of cars going in a circle really really fast. Amateur oval racing, that is. His photo gallery is here and there are some nice shots there.

  • The Poor Man’s TeleZapper – or, the selective TeleZapper

    Perhaps you’ve heard of a unique device called the TeleZapper. It’s a simple device which is designed to automatically disconnect and delete your number from their call list. But how? Well, have you ever called a wrong number and heard those funny three tones before the recorded message? Those tones are there to indicate to phone equipment that the number is not connected. Phone equipment like, say, a telemarketing company’s automatic phone dialer.

    The theory is that if you play these tones right after picking up the phone, the telemarketer’s computer will hear them, think that the number is disconnected, and delete it from their list. In theory. In practice they’re not obligated to do so, but it’s still a fairly good idea.

    Well over here at the house I have a home server, and that server has a modem that will automatically read and decode Caller ID information. Well, what do you think we could do with that power? If we have a database of “evil numbers”, we can check it against the incoming number and if it is “evil”, have the modem pick up the phone and then disconnect. It was pretty easy to hack into my Caller ID system. I would like to be able to play the tones instead, but the modem doesn’t support voice commands so this is the next best thing.

    Bottom line: now I won’t have to pickup any more annoying phone calls from those telemarketers that simply won’t leave me alone.

  • iPod Windows software that actually works

    I uninstalled iTunes. I feel much better now. And I found two indispensible pieces of software for my iPod that actually work properly, and the way I expect the iPod to work:

    • Anapod Explorer – integrates any iPod directly into Windows like any other mobile device – that is, it appears as a device under My Computer, just like my scanner does. Lets you easily browse what’s on the iPod, supports all the features of the 5th gen: videos, playlists, album art, contacts, calendars and music of course. Hell, it even lets you query the iPod using SQL! If this supported subscribing to calendars it would make my life complete.
    • Free iPod Video Converter – after finding all kinds of other crappy MP4 conversion software, I saw this mentioned on afterdawn.com. It really is this simple: it’s free, and it converts anything. I only wish that it handled corrupt video source a bit better. I converted about 200 of my music videos and it choked on a few during conversion even though it thought they were OK when I added them to the batch. Still, excellent results and it’s about a million times faster than the QuickTime MP4 encoder.

  • Oh yeah, I have more to bitch about

    Various AV port pinouts -

    Above is a diagram of various 1/8″ AV port pinouts. My Pepper has a “standard” camcorder port, and I have a standard cable. Works great. But does Apple use the same pinout, no! Of course not! They have to switch the shit all around.

    Whoops! Jon pointed out that my cable will still work – I just have to swap the connections around on the other end. Video becomes Left, Left becomes Right, and Right becomes Video.

  • I hate iTunes.

    Well, it turned out to be an early, iPod-laden anniversary. Sandy got me an iPod 60GB and I got her a 4GB Nano. So now we’re officially part of the cult followers er, group.

    Of course, no iPod is complete without that freakin’ weird looking (from this Linux/Windows user’s perspective) music manager, iTunes. Appleganda says “iPod and iTunes work together! You will be assimilated! Buy overpriced music tracks from our store!” Neither of us have had a good experience with iTunes from the get-go. I’ve tried it in the past but always found it WAY too slow. Plus we’ve already manually and meticulously organized our total of 45GB of MP3 (and that’s a lowball count – I have over 100 CDs to re-rip).

    For both of us…

    • iTunes is simply not intuitive, period. It gets dumped on you and that’s it. Apple is not gaining any Mac converts by dumping this on Windows users.
    • There are no tooltips, period, anywhere. I have to either guess at what the dozen-odd random icons scattered around the UI are, or read the entire help file from front to back.

    From my perspective…

    • iTunes crashes on my PC all the time. No I’m not blaming Windows for that, because nothing else screws up so often.
    • It’s slow, so BLOODY SLOW at converting videos to iPod format – and then I just found out that most of the videos that I converted came out with no sound.
    • Did I mention that it crashed my PC while trying to convert videos like three or four times now? I finally had to get another video conversion program. A 3 minute music video that iTunes would take an hour on converted in 5 minutes.
    • It sucks for editing ID3 tags. I wish I could install KID3, the KDE ID3 tag editor on Windows. (Oh SNAP – turns out there’s a Windows version!)
    • iTunes tries to be Mac-like but breaks standard Windows behaviour. I can’t Ctrl-Shift click to select multiple groups. There aren’t very many context menus period.
    • How the HELL do I tell it that my videos are music videos, and not movies? It’s not right-click.
    • Most of the context menus that are there, don’t do anything that I want to do.
    • It doesn’t understand vCard files that contain more than one card.

  • In summary…

    Last week and this week have been incredibly busy at work for me. Crazy-go-nuts busy, sometimes. I was on call for a week, and boy is that fun – NOT. Having my TV or sleep schedules interrupted by a little beeping tablet of plastic (a pager) is not my idea of a good time.

    Jordan’s been in Japan for the last month and it sounds like she’s been loving it – so much so that she’s staying an extra five days. Many stories of shops named “FREEBASE” and “Bruce Pee” have been received, and enjoyed.

    Our stereos have been dominated by the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album for the last few weeks. As in full-on, nothing else in the stereo domination. The album has given me the utmost respect for guitarist John Frusciante.