Part 2 of elf's Apple PowerBook G4 Journal
- Week 5: (Mar 18 - 25, 2005)
A Milestone · Soundflower · Emacs · Speech · BubbleGym · Daring Fireball · - Week 6: (Mar 26 - 31)
Tiger Mauls Emacs · Crash No. 2 · iPhoto and iMovie · MPlayerOSX · Windows is Ugly · G5 PowerBooks Announced - Week 7: (Apr 1 - 10)
Terminal.app Woes Revisited · Tiger Mauls Zsh · Zsh OK On Tiger · BubbleGym Revisited · Aquamacs · A New Version of iTerm · Latin-1 Finally Works in Emacs - Week 8: (Apr 11 - 18)
Build Your Own Mac · Tiger on the 29th · iTunes Does Ogg · Screenshot · 10.3.9 is Out! · The Two-Month Look-back ·
A Milestone
12:50AM mathilde[102] w 0:51 up 19 days, 6 secs, 1 user, load averages: 1.19 1.51 1.64 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE WHAT elf console - 27Feb05 18days -
Mailed SystemProfile to Apple
I received a follow-up email to my last bug-report, requesting a
System Profile upload. I did that last night— hopefully, it will help
them track-down these trackpad annoyances.
Temperature Monitor
Downloaded and installed a temperature
monitor though it looks like most sensors do not update in
real-time for my computer model; the temperatures reflect the state
at boot-time.
TV
Television could perform a great service in mass
education, but there's no indication its sponsors have anything like
this on their minds.
—Tallulah Bankhead
I hate television. I hate it as much as
peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
—Orson Welles
I don't own a TV. So I was thinking of getting Eye TV
200 made by Elgato Systems, so I can watch and/or record some
Simpsons, Nova, Britcoms and Star
Trek episodes on
mathilde. Here are two product reviews, one from
PowerbookCentral and the other from
Macworld are promising; the Macworld review notes that Eye TV had
problems waking G4 iBook to start recording.
Update on Windows Rendezvous
<byers>, on #macosx, tried out Rendezvous for
Windows/XP available from Apple.com and reported that it is just
a technology preview that supports printers only, no
file-sharing.
Update on Previewing Images on a CF Card
Further to my bug-report about not being able to preview images in
iPhoto, I noticed that my bug has been classified as having a
workaround in the bug-reporter database, but I don't know where the
workaround is to be found. So I continued searching and I came across
this
article, which mentions, among other "workarounds",
PicturePop.
Soundflower
Downloaded Soundflower, a system extension to route audio between applications.
Update Sun May 08 13:07:37 2005: see below for details on installing and using Soundflower.
Spent most of the weekend watching The Third Man,
The Longest Day, The Incredibles and Raging
Bull.
xrdb
When I make changes to my Xdefaults, and I want them to take
effect, I have to run xrdb -merge .Xdefaults. The problem
is that when xrdb runs, it complains /usr/bin/cpp not
found. Hm. So I have to kill and restart the X server. Looking
at the /etc/X11/xinitrc file, there is an xrdb command invoked
there; so why does that command work?
Emacs
Downloaded and (painlessly) installed Emacs. Spent a lot of time trying to configure the default font. I found Adventures with MacOS X useful in solving my font problem (M-x set-default-font TAB). Here is my .emacs configuration for the default look:
(setq default-frame-alist '((top . 80) (left . 464) (width . 80) (height . 40) (cursor-color . "red") (cursor-type . box) (foreground-color . "lightcyan") (background-color . "midnightblue") (font . "-apple-bitstream vera sans mono-medium-r-normal--14-140-75-75-m-140-mac-roman")))
Update: See additional lisp required
to support Latin-1 in #macs.
Speech
I was quite impressed with the speech capabilites of MacOS. Every application can be registered to speak text— even the recently installed Emacs. OS X is also pretty good at understanding speech. It understands some phrases like "What is the date?" or "What is the time" or a "Knock, Knock" joke; I found that it works better when using the "Esc" key to input speech rather than continuous listening.
Instead of an epigraph, I present the following excerpt from a
book I am currently reading, called “The Language
Instinct” by Steve Pinker:
In the 1970s a team of artificial intelligence researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University headed by Raj Reddy designed a computer called HEARSAY that interpreted spoken commands to move chess pieces. Influenced by the top-down theory of speech perception, they designed their program as a “community” of “expert” subprograms cooperating to give the most likely interpretation of the signal. There were subprograms that specialized in acoustic analysis, in phonology, in the dictionary, in syntax, in rules for the legal moves of chess, even in chess strategy as applied to the game in progress. According to one story, a general from the defense agency that was funding the research came up for a demonstration. As the scientists sweated, he was seated in front of a chess board and a microphone hooked up to the computer. The general cleared his throat. The program printed, “Pawn to King 4”.
BubbleGym
Downloaded BubbleGym, a tilt-controlled game for SMS equipped PowerBooks, written by Peter Berglund. According to a Wired.com article, the author received a congratulatory email from Steve Wozniak.
Update, Sun Mar 27 21:05:26 2005: Deleted the annoying nag-ware demo after playing with it for a minute.
Further Update: see BubbleGym Revisited.
Daring Fireball
Those of you who religiously delete font caches
every time you install a system or security update, feel free to
smirk smugly.
—John Gruber
John Gruber always has
something interesting to say, and sometimes it's Apple related.
His latest blog entry was related to login delays as a side-effect
of corrupt font-cache files.
Tiger mauls Emacs
It has been reported on #emacs that CVS Emacs doesn't build and the Carbon Emacs available for download on apple.com doesn't run on Tiger (for one person, at least); the Carbon version dies with "Fatal error (6)Abort trap" and CVS doesn't compile.
I have now installed and configured ERC 5.02 (Emacs IRC client)
and I now use it instead of ssh'ing to a Solaris box and running
Emacs and ERC in a Terminal. I was hoping to get Emacs to speak the
conversations, but Emacs > Services > Speech > Start Talking
only speaks text which is selected by the mouse.
Crash No. 2
I switched to another user, deleted a folder, logged out, then re-logged-in as myself. Noticed the SPOD (spinning pizza of death) when I moved the pointer to the user-list in the (top-right of the) menu. Waited about 2 minutes and it was still spinning. Hmmm. Ran top to see if anything interesting was happening— CPU was just idling. Closed the lid and noticed the glowing light was dead. Feh. Had to power it back up again.
I set-up my console log to pop-up and pause for 3 seconds
every-time something interesting happens. The only thing it reported
before the crash was PowerStateFoo 0->1. Perhaps I should
have waited a bit longer for the SPOD.
SPOD Spotter's Handbook
We need a “SPOD Spotter's Handbook”—
Approach with caution? Run away? Pretend it's not there, because it
just craves attention? Prepare to reboot? Man your battle-stations?
OnyX
Downloaded OnyX, a free
maintenance, optimization, and personalization utility written by
Joël Barriere.
Ejecting Stuck Media
<Flowerbauer> hmm... i just found out an even comfier way: 'disktool -l' to find the name of the disk then 'disktool -e <diskname>' to eject it
Sat Apr 23 19:56:51 2005: If disktool -l doesn't see the CD device (fsType='cd9660' doesn't show up) then shut down the computer for a few hours (8 hrs works) until it cools down and then turn it back on; the CD-drive should appear <decibelle> had this very problem and this solution worked for her).
Update Fri May 27 10:43:10 2005: As a last
resort, you can try ejecting the media from the OpenFirmware:
boot into the PROM: Cmd-O-F, then type: eject cd, then
type: mac-boot, to continue booting.
DS_Store: OS X was here
If ever you see a .DS_Store file, you can rest assured that OS X
read that directory. They are even on my CF card and I see those
files when using it on my Windows/XP laptop. I presume they are
directory index files with meta information that OS X uses to speed
up searches. I see them as directory pollution. Everyone on #macosx
would prefer a centralized approach— storing them in a single
location rather than scattered about everywhere.
iPhoto and iMovie
Over the weekend, (in between watching La Femme Nikita and Fargo) I played with iPhoto to import a few photos from a DVD full of photos and I also played with iMovie to create a small movie with 5 video clips taken with a digicam.
I managed to figure out iPhoto through some trial and error (and i
look forwarding to getting a photo book printed via iLife), but a few
aspects of iMovie still elude me (if a music clip is longer than the
video, how do i trim it?). So for future reference, I will read
through the iMovie
tutorials and iPhoto tutorials.
iPod Health Warnings
The Register notes the anti-social
effects of the iPod.
SPOD vs. SBOD
Googlefight
settled an argument on #macosx about whether the proper term is
Spinning Pizza of Doom or Spinning Beachball of Death.
MPlayerOSX
The reason I started playing with iMovie was because the Quicktime player cannot play a more than one clip like the Windows Media Player can, and I wanted to concatenate all the clips into a single movie— one thing led to another and I got sidetracked with the iMovie transition effects. Under XP I was used to selecting all the clips I wanted to watch and selecting "Play All" in the Explorer toolbar. Someone suggested I try MPlayerOSX (the OS X port of the famous Linux mplayer program) which I downloaded.
Updated Sun Apr 24 15:26:24 2005: see Video Clips.
Paul Graham Comments on the Mac
All the best hackers I know are gradually
switching to Macs.
—Paul Graham
The essay is called, Return of the Mac.
Update: Thu Apr 07 19:28:47 2005: John Gruber comments on this essay, below.
Crimson Skies!
I miss not being able to play the Microsoft game Crimson
Skies on my PowerBook. I love that game because the planes
are so easy to fly that you can concentrate on having fun rather than
having to concentrate on flying the plane. Unfortunately, there is no
chance that it will ever be ported to OS X. Sigh.
Windows is Ugly
Until one uses and interacts with OS X, one does not realize how truly ugly Windows/XP really is. The icons are just appalling to look at.
Back and Forth
I feared that switching back and forth between OS X at home and Windows/XP at work, because of interface differences, would cause me mental anguish— but that hasn't happened. I can easily use both. The biggest problem is to keep from typing Cmd-q to fill a paragraph in Emacs running in a Terminal. Many times, I've been in the middle of an email and I've quit all the Terminals. ARGH! The problem is that the Vaio has Alt (next to the space-bar) mapped as Meta and on the PowerBook, the Cmd key is exactly where the Alt key is. And to exacerbate matters, Carbon Emacs uses Cmd as Meta.
Update, Thu Mar 31 15:55:44 2005: David pointed to a suggestion that would cure my Cmd-q woes: Terminal > Window Settings > Processes > Prompt before closing window.
Carrying cases
I am currently considering a PowerSleeve 15 or a SportFolio case for mathilde. I have found that price is directly proportional to longevity— cheaper plastics degrade quicker.
iPhoto PhotoBook
Most of my time is currently spent playing with iPhoto (even
managed to crash it once and bug-report was transmitted to Apple) to
create a PhotoBook of my nephew's last birthday party.
G5 PowerBooks Announced
Apple announced the release of G5 Powerbooks to
coincide with Tiger going gold.
Terminal.app Woes Revisited
Lots more complaints on #macosx about Terminal.app being nearly useless. The biggest problem is that 99% of Mac users don't need a CLI to earn their daily bread so there is really no incentive for Apple to improve Terminal.app. However, with more hardcore Unix users defecting to Apple, this may soon change. I will be filing by Terminal.app bugs (display of extended chars, any of alt/fn/cmd as meta-key, faster redisplay) to Apple after the 10.3.9 release.
More Emacs Tweaks
;;; When Emacs is configured to use a gui, File->Open File will pop up ;;; a file selection dialog if `use-dialog-box' is set to t. (setq use-dialog-box t) ;;; Mac OS X: Cmd-up/down for paging (global-set-key [M-down] 'scroll-up) (global-set-key [M-up] 'scroll-down)
iPhoto Feature Request
Sent iPhoto Feedback requesting the ability to play multiple video
clips in sequence using qt player. If I can make a slide-show of
photos, why not video clips, too?
Tiger Mauls Zsh
On March 31st, AppleInsider reported that Tiger OS X 10.4 went gold. In addition to emacs, it seems that zsh also "does not work properly" on Tiger.
Audacity
Watched the entire first season of “Dead Like Me” (excellent show about grim reapers and death, with superb writing) over the weekend and found a nice tune in one of the episodes which I recorded (on the Vaio) and tried editing on mathilde using Audacity. But I wasn't able to modify the file for some reason. Hm. Read the online documentation and now I have to play with Audacity some more. The MP3 track plays fine but I can't edit. Only later, on the train, on the way to work, did it occur to me that perhaps I should convert the MP3 to WAV and try editing it. I have to try it when i get back home, tonight.
Carbon Emacs Tips
The Emacs Wiki has many
tips for Carbon Emacs; something bugging me at the moment is how
to disable the default display of Japanese and enable Latin-1.
Zsh OK On Tiger
A developer on #macosx took exception to my reporting that “Tiger Mauls Zsh” as it works with no problems for him as does Emacs. My argument was that I was merely reporting what someone said and that this Journal is more opinion than fact, and so I was justified in my report.
More Audacity
<Necrosan>, on #macosx reported having no problems with
Audacity and he was running 1.2.0. So after downgrading from 1.2.3,
Audacity now works like a charm.
BubbleGym Revisited
This morning, I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Peter Berglund, BubbleGym's author. He graciously emailed me a free copy of the game which would permit me a more thorough review. I had downloaded his tilt-controlled game earlier.
Gruber vs. Bray
John Gruber comments on Paul Graham's essay about hackers "switching" to OS X and Tim Bray's comments about "unswitching".
"Transparent" Screens
A while back, David had sent
me a link to a Flickr catalog with photos of a nice effect
(not a PhotoShop trick). Now, I'll have to do one with
mathilde, of course.
Aquamacs
I just read a recent
announcement on the Emacs developer mailing list about Aquamacs,
"Carbon Emacs (a CVS build) with a range of packages and
customizations from a number of people that all try to make Emacs
behave more like a normal OS X application".
The Inevitable
Took today off to recover from the temporal-dialation effects of
Daylight Savings Time. Watched The Funeral on CNN and later finished
watching “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead”—
I can't say any more about the movie without giving away the
ending. Apple DVD Player crashed on me as I was hunting for various
DVD Easter Eggs (report sent-off to Apple).
Monkeybread Software
I wanted to grab some frames from a AVI clip and use the
screen-caps in the PhotoBook so I went looking for a screen
grabber. The default screen-grabber doesn't grab video. I found Monkeybread
Software with a plethora of small useful applications.
New Version of iTerm released
I wonder if a certain bug was fixed. Dare I download it and be dissappointed?
Update, Sat Apr 09 20:37:27 2005: No need,
<DrunkenDonut> on #macosx tried it out and it's still
br0ken. Feh!
XDesktopWaves
Eye candy, n: something purely decorative that serves no practical purpose.
I wonder if it
works for X11 under OS X.
Latin-1 finally works in Emacs
Finally able to view Latin-1 in Emacs as the default setup for
Carbon Emacs is customized to support Japanese. Used the tips on the
Emacs Wiki (and got transparency to work too). Here are the relevant
settings (for Bitstream Vera Sans 15 point font):
;;; Set default language (set-language-environment "latin-1") (set-keyboard-coding-system 'mac-roman) (setq mac-transparency-alpha 90) (create-fontset-from-fontset-spec "-apple-bitstream vera sans mono-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-mac, ascii:-apple-bitstream vera sans mono-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-m-*-mac-roman, latin-iso8859-1:-apple-bitstream vera sansmono-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-m-*-mac-roman, mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-apple-bitstream vera sans mono-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-m-*-mac-roman") (set-frame-font "-apple-bitstream vera sans mono-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-mac" 'keep) (add-to-list 'default-frame-alist '(font . "-apple-bitstream vera sans mono-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-*-*-fontset-mac")) ;;;LOOK AND FEEL (if (and window-system (x-display-color-p)) (setq default-frame-alist '((top . 1) (left . 394) (width . 80) (height . 40) (cursor-color . "red") (cursor-type . box) (foreground-color . "lightcyan") (background-color . "midnightblue"))))
Default Browser for Emacs
To open a url, clicked in Emacs, using your default browser, the
following works:
(setq browse-url-browser-function 'browse-url-default-macosx-browser)
Speech Revisited
Playing with the speech engine again, I wondered whether some one
tried recording all (or most of) the words in the English language
and then using it in a look-up database for a speech engine. The
words would have to be atonal, of course, or the variences in pitch
would make listening as annoying as listening to an engine based on
phonemes.
Build Your Own Mac
If the matter of this paper be certain, you have
mighty business in hand.
—“King Lear”, act
iii. sc. v.
Build
your own Mini, iMac, iPod, iPod Shuffle, Mac Classic,
etc.
Tiger on the 29th
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
— William Blake, “The Tiger”
Tiger will be released April 29th, 2005 according to
apple.com. Hmmm... looks like Spotlight includes an application launcher
similar to QuickSilver:
Use Spotlight as a quick application launcher. There's plenty of applications that you use occasionally but don't need cluttering up your Dock all the time. Simply activate Spotlight with Command+Space, type in a few letters, say "Gra" for Grapher, then use the arrow keys to start the app.
Keyboards and Switching Windows
<bigboote> e1f: hey, your jewel case prop idea makes a big difference
On a US keyboard, Cmd-` switches amongst different windows of the same application; e.g. if you have multiple Terminals, you Cmd-TAB to the first Terminal, then Cmd-` to the other Terminals. On a Swiss keyboard however, it's Cmd-< (found by trial and error).
In other news, there are two graduate students here from France
and they had difficulty using the North American QWERTY keyboards;
the French keyboard is AZERTY. One of them requested that instead of
using a workstation in the lab, his PowerBook be given network access
instead.
iTunes Does Ogg
There is a Ogg Vorbis plugin for OS X. Unconfirmed reports indicate that it "trashes" track-numbers when the .ogg is imported into iTunes.
Update: Fri Apr 15 19:03:00 2005: fixed typo in the url.
Screenshot
This is what my typical desktop looks like on any given day. You will find a Firefox session, a Carbon Emacs session running ERC (the Emacs IRC client) and a Terminal window, of course. A copy of iPhoto usually runs in the background while I mull-over the layout of a Photo Book, Stickies for quick and temporary notes and iTunes for ambience. The menu bar has (left to right) Meteorologist showing today's weather forecast, MenuMeters showing disk-activity, network traffic, memory usage, CPU load, modem connect-time and the standard Apple widgets. The background image is underbrush03.jpg (1024x768), one of my artworks.
Transferring Files
Instead of invoking Cyberduck every time I wanted to transfer a
single file to my work account, I wrote a zsh function (called
ul) that wraps scp. I pass it the filename, I
type-in my password and it's done.
ul() { scp $1 elf@zorro:/home/elf/ }
iPhoto Update 5.0.2
An update for iPhoto was released today and I downloaded it and I will be applying it later (<robd> said he applied it with no ill effects).
Also, I haven't applied the last security
update yet. Should I?
Tiger Preview Review
...Tiger is a solid release. It's just not a major
upgrade. And it's certainly not worth $129.
—Paul Thurrott
omg!! Dashboard comes with a Tile Puzzle!!!
Tiger RULES!!!
—Sarcasm on #macosx
There's a review of Tiger on Windows SuperSite. The most surprising comment is, "Contrary to a popular misconception, Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” does not include Apple's vaunted iLife '05 applications--iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes, and Garage Band". Hm. Also, the reviewer doesn't think that Tiger is a major upgrade but that it's mostly Hype. However, if I'm not mistaken, Tiger uses features of FreeBSD 5; so at least in that sense, it is a major upgrade.
Another surprise is that Dashboard Widgets do not share the desktop with other applications-- this reminds me of those DOS TSR programs like Borland Sidekick.
Regardless, I don't see myself moving to Tiger anytime soon&mdash
I have barely scratched the surface of Panther— and I tend to
avoid point-zero releases of any software or hardware.
10.3.9 is Out!
I'll wait until Monday.
OS Upgrade with External Firewire Drive Mounted
Never, ever, perform an OS upgrade with a Firewire drive mounted
because after the upgrade, the drive will not be seen. There is a
Release Note from Apple about this problem. But, let's look at this
preposterous problem a bit further— how much more difficult
would it be for Apple to add a simple check for mounted drives to the
upgrade procedure? How difficult would it be to add a reminder to
unplug fw devices before the upgrade?
Annoying Firefox Horizontal-Scroll Fix
The Panther 10.3.9 thread on Slashdot quotes a macosxhints.com solution:
It's actually an issue with firefox interpreting inadvertent horizontal scrolling (easy to do with iscroll2 or the new [USB] trackpads) as back/forward requests. Here's how to fix this intentionally broken behaviour...
From macosxhints.com: In Firefox, type about:config into the address bar and hit return. This gives you a list of all possible configuration options. The ones we want are those that start with mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey. Make the following changes by double-clicking the appropriate option in the list:
* mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action => 0 * mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines => true
Works like a charm.
Update Fri Dec 09 15:27:41 2005: If you want to re-enable
the horizontal-scrolling, here are the settings (thanks to <xerses>).
The Two-Month Look-back
actually, my powerbook spends more time in bed
with me than my gf
—overheard on #macosx
- Things I miss:
- image resizer PowerToy
- separate page up/down keys
- forward-delete key (Ctrl-d doesn't work in all applications)
- a better space-bar (the one on mathilde is "uneven")
- a decent terminal program (it's a Unix world after all)
- intuitive CD burning
- decent support for Meta-key
- being able to preview CF-card photos before importing
- Crimson Skies (video game)
- System Restore (added Tue Apr 19 16:43:23 2005)
- Cool things:
- illuminated keyboard
- free Unix software dmgs pre-packaged for OS X
- Menumeters and Meteorologist
- QuickSilver
- iPhoto
- iTunes
- Emacs (with AA fonts and transparency)
- speech integration
- sudden motion sensor hacks
- font installation (compared to other Unices)
- well integrated colour-picker
- Things I don't miss (from Windows/XP):
- ugly windows and interface
- modem dropping when copying from CF-card
- No Big Deals:
- single mouse-button (the second button is emulated via Alt-click)
- Exposé (really cool effect, but I have not had much use for it)
Overall, I'm happy. Looking over new features in Tiger, some of my misses are addressed.
Customizing Icons
Played around with customizing some of the icons in the Finder— customizing the trash-can is a bit more complicated. Found a set of nice Matrix icons at the Iconfactory and after some trial-and-error with the customizing instructions (after a Cmd-I on the folder you wish to customize, select the icon in the top-left corner before doing the Cmd-V (pasete)) I managed to change some of the folders in my home-directory. I find that having unique icons for my Images/, Download/ and Projects/ folders make them easier to locate than if they were simply coloured.
Update Fri May 27 20:20:54 2005: Read the workaround for folders in the sidebar not
displaying icons.